Austerity as an Idea

He’s a fantastic speaker. He can explain complex economic ideas like nobody. Can’t wait to get my hands on this book. Thx.

It’s odd that people so often quote Keynes in this context. Doesn’t the way his ideas were received tell against his view? The people who sabotaged the efforts of Lorie Tarshis to promote Keynes’s ideas did so because they thought they were dangerous even where they were correct.

In my admittedly limited experience of dealing with powerful people, they don’t evaluate a new idea in terms of whether it is true or false. They ask themselves, is this the sort of thing we want the Minister (or the Governor or the Board) to be looking at?

Everyone from the center left to the center right believed that weakly regulated markets worked as advertised, right up to the moment when they didn’t. It is equally true in the aftermath, as boosters of neoliberalism have moved with remarkable alacrity from one set of bad ideas to another.

I’d like to think that ideas are important. I do think ideas, and the quality of ideas — critical method, etc. — are important. But, it is difficult to gaze upon neoliberalism, in its trivial errors and willful blindness, and see anything but rank corruption as its point of origin.

Are we really to take neoliberalism seriously, as a set of ideas? Or, is the concession that fashion rulz also a concession that while ideas matter, these ideas are crap? Or, are we now to take fashion seriously? I’m confused.

‘This… stuff’? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select… I don’t know… that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent… wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.

I think Iraq is a good example of when ideas do matter, the interest based explanations for the war are much less convincing. Some thing can fail, fail miserably, and continue but that doesn’t negate the importance of ideas in driving the policy (at least initially)

But which idea was supposed to have driven the Iraq policy, rf? They changed with bewildering rapidity. And now that we know more of the history involved, we know that Cheney and co were determined, before 9/11, to use the first excuse that came up for attacking Iraq. I’m sure that Cheney had some kind of idea in his head, but since it was never publicly articulated, is it really an “idea” that can influence others at a distance rather than an interest?

@ rf

Oil is unconvincing?

It seems to me that the Iraq War is an example of how interests, dragged low by authoritarian secrecy and greed and sociopathic leadership can filter ideas down to a tangled web of incompetence and impotence and lies, so dense and self-defeating that it almost calls into question, whether some rational appreciation of interests could have been involved at the motivating origin.

There’s definitely a reflexive relationship between ideas and the institutional structure of power, that goes beyond the mere apologetic rationalizations and propaganda of power-in-action. I, personally, find it difficult to attribute much leverage or power in the intellectual turns in that reflexive loop-de-loop. But, maybe, there’s something to the thesis that the corruption of ideas by power tends to make power, impotent.

I note the extreme example of the claims for absolute monarchy at the beginning of the modern era. The apologetics of Hobbes for the Stuarts became the foundation of political science; the Enlightenment philosophes fermented the French Revolution, serving and celebrating the rationalizing potential of “enlightened” despots building their states. It worked out as well as it did (allowing that it was a bloody mess all around) because Charles I and Louis XVI were made ineffectual dolts, by absolute power, despite the profusion of ideas they were offered. In their way, Cheney, Bush, Rove and, yes, Obama, Bernanke, Olli Rehn — take your pick — are stumbling around, because corruption makes them so stupid (or selects them for stubborn stupidity of a seemingly “useful” sort).

I think that austerity is deeply rooted in our Indo-European heritage. In the US, anyway, we may have become more hedonistic, but a Puritan austerity still beckons. There is still a connection between debt and guilt, as well. Perhaps austerity has greater appeal in India, the land of the fakirs. There tapas (austerity) and yajna (sacrifice) are significant religious ideals. And the god, Shiva, is a god of creative destruction. Perhaps many economists are secretly priests of Shiva. ;)

Bruce
I’m not saying oil was irrelevant, it was probably more important to specific actors, but I don’t think it was primarily about oil. You have to deal with the fact that US oil companies haven’t don’t particularly well after the invasion, and indeed geopolitical rivals have. (That could be due to incompetence, or less emphasis on oil in the US FP establishment in the mid 00s as they became more aware of domestic energy reserves, but I don’t think that holds up) It doesn’t even make sense as being about oil in the same way that Gulf 1 did (not wanting a rival to control a significant amount of regional oil production. And indeed the Iraqi regime as it stands, is not particularly favourable towards the US)

Austerity as it’s implemented in specific countries might serve class interests in those countries, but as a policy emanating from the EU core it serves national interests. For sure

As an example, why have US policy makers reacted so differently to their own countrys banking and debt problems than they did to the same problems in Latin America and East Asia?

Billiken @ 13: austerity is deeply rooted in our Indo-European heritage

If not our genes.

Political rhetoric is designed to be more hypnotic than cognitively persuasive. The stupidity of neoliberalism is really playing an handmaiden role (majorly sexist metaphor!) in debasing critical cognition, as preparation for reaching the limbic system, the lizard brain, with the really dumb stuff, that is emotionally resonant as long as no one thinks.

Or, shorter and more temperate, I look at who benefits and who loses from these ‘ideas’, and note a curious consistency I don’t assume that they really believe in them.

Somebody linked to this (it’s open in another window, and I can’t remember where I clicked) http://slackwire.blogspot.com/2012/06/pain-is-agenda-method-in-ecbs-madness.html

“Pain Is the Agenda: The Method in the ECB’s Madness “

In a partial defense of Filbert, which really reinforces what Rich Puchalsky wrote, the opening gambit in Bush Administration rhetorical rationalizations for their Iraq policy was to resurrect the rhetorical frameworks of Wilsonian internationalism, particularly as executed during and after WWII. There really were “ideas” there, back in the day, but they were reduced and corrupted in the small minds of the Project for a New American Century, which acted like an incompetent chef clarifying rancid butter.

GWB giving his ultimatums to Saddam, the talk of mushroom clouds, the Secretary of State lying to the Security Council about “weapons of mass destruction” — it was meant to recall earlier, historical drama, with its emotional associations. And, in their way, I think some of them actually believed some of their own b.s., though they betrayed their lightly held “good intentions” with a lack of follow-thru. I’m sure somebody sincerely thought the Occupation and Reconstruction could and would transform Iraq, before most of them got busy skimming the billions.

This is how history comes to repeat its most earnest tragic struggles as later farce.

There really isn’t any contradiction between Filbert and Rich’s position as far as I can see. You can identify the specific ways a policy was conceptualised while also acknowledging the social, cultural, class etc aspects that shaped the environment/policy maker

It’s not a contradiction really, I dont think, to argue that something was going to be done about Iraq one way or the other (and a large ground invasion would be my unsupported counterfactual) and to acknowledge the specific way it did actually happen..it would have happened differently under Gore, with slightly different justifications/outcomes..but I’ve confused myself slightly so maybe it is a contradiction..in fact it probably is

The thing I keep stumbling over, and am confused by, in something like the analysis Henry @24 presents, is that the neoliberal ideas are so stupid. The power of neoliberalism appears to be in its extreme resistance to critical thinking. The degeneracy of economics as a research programme, the regress in basic competence in economics — these are important drivers. And, I agree with Rodrik that it is important in politics to have ideas about how the world works, because politics becomes policy. But, these ideas, feature for evolutionary fitness to the political environment, their stupidity.

There’s a lot of attention given to the self-destructive potential of austerity, but I can almost understand how someone could be sincerely of the opinion that government should “get out of the way”. Almost. But, the determination of macroeconomists to overlook the necessity of banking and financial regulation just leaves me stupefied. Even after the fact, economists purport to be unable to see a trillion dollar housing bubble, let alone question its wisdom, or responsibility of regulators. Really, there are people, who think letting massive frauds go unpunished, the financial industry essentially unregulated, while flooding the world with liquidity — anyone thinks this is going to end well?

Leftists are as a rule reluctant to imagine that right-wing reactionaries have within them the slightest shred of humanity. While right-wing reactionaries’ resulting hurt feelings may concern them little, should this assumption lead them into error then that would be harder to discount.

For example when the city of Teruel fell to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War orthodox military assumptions would have led to the conclusion that Franco’s next move would come anywhere but there. But Teruel, ideally suited for defense and exactly where his enemy had already concentrated its forces, was precisely where Franco next attacked.

The strategically incorrect battle on ground of his enemy’s choosing made perfect sense in his mind. He viewed the war as a moral struggle and a purification of the country by blood, and Teruel was a natural expression of this. The assumption that he was a leader driven by calculations of tangible gain would simply have obscured this truth.

Similarly, but on a much greater scale, Stalin refused to accept the implication of the vast amount of intelligence accumulating during the early summer of 1941 indicating an imminent German invasion of the Soviet Union. He simply couldn’t believe Hitler would do such a thing while already in a war with enemies as far afield as Vancouver and Sydney.

It was entirely characteristic of Hitler to later blame Germany itself when he was catastrophically defeated. This wasn’t a change of heart somehow. In fact it was a manifestation of a consistent feature of his thinking going back to 1941 and long before: the idea that the war — the fighting itself, abstracted from any material objective — would be a moral struggle in which German superiority would not only be demonstrated but enriched. Soviet victory altered the war’s moral significance not at all and Hitler went to his death knowing that instead it would be the USSR that would rule the world for a thousand years.

To consider these only as strategic mistakes is to miss the point. To the dictators, the assessment of profit and loss was not in either case determined solely or even largely by material calculations.

But these are merely illustrative examples. War and dictatorship each vastly simplify matters and render obvious factors that are universal though usually less malignant features of human affairs: love, hate, pride, jealousy, esteem, and moral merit to name but a few.

Concentrating on the motives and actions of enemies also relieves the argument of a second burden: that of proving ideas are of any actual use. If it remains necessary to consider the realm of ideas in order to understand others’ political choices even when it is assumed the ideas themselves, or even ideas as such, are of no value then it is clear that no practical politics can ignore them.

It is not an achievable aim to show via observation that the ideas of intellectuals are of merit. Materialists, including notably in this context public choice theorists, have therefore tended to disregard them. Examples from Mao to Jesus illustrate why this is misguided. Time and again such figures have transformed the world even though their resources were not a millionth of their adversaries’.

“It’s not a contradiction really, I dont think, to argue that something was going to be done about Iraq one way or the other (and a large ground invasion would be my unsupported counterfactual) and to acknowledge the specific way it did actually happen..it would have happened differently under Gore, with slightly different justifications/outcomes..but I’ve confused myself slightly so maybe it is a contradiction..in fact it probably is”

The contradictions were (a) we didn’t need to do anything, (b) to the extent that actual WMD’s were a threat, Hans Blix was taking care of them, (c) Spending several months telling Saddam that we were going to kill him for real this time would have given him months to give any actual weapons to Al Qaida, (d) the Bush administration quite systematically made anti-preparations, so to speak assuming a 100% best case outcome – in war! with no contingency for actually doing the alleged job.

And that’s just a start.

When Rodrik is critical of interest-based explanations, he is clearly pushing back against a set of arguments as follows.

No, I don’t think that’s right. He clearly means “interests” in the sense of organized political groupings. That’s why he qualifies it as “special interests,” and why Keynes, in the passage he quotes, refers to “vested interests.” I certainly don’t care for the Capitalized Fairy Tale any more than you do, but Rodrik is not attacking it. You’re reading that into him. He’s attacking the different (correct and important) idea that policy outcomes are shaped by organized political actors.

As for the rest of 24, I basically agree with the position you’re aiming for, but I think you’re bending the stick the wrong way to get there. You need more Marx, not less. :-).

Anyway without getting into ‘Gores war’, I do think something ‘had’ to be done..in that policy wasnt going to change towards Iraq to the extent needed to avoid war

I know the questions of causality and the relationship of ideas and interests are almost limitlessly complex. But on the whole, I’m with Bruce, Barry, Rich, and JW and against Henry, rf, Adrian, and Rodrik (Keynes too) in this debate. Neoliberal economics is impervious to criticism: the weeding out of unconvinced graduate students from economics departments, the increasing reliance of universities on private donors, the hyperfunding and publicizing of bad economic ideas (through think tanks etc), and the concentration of media ownership in the hands of large corporations and right-wing moguls are the reasons for neoliberalism’s survival. It’s good for business, and business is in the driver’s seat.

Likewise, the resurgence of conservatism in the last three decades is often attributed to a conservative intellectual revival. Nonsense. Conservatism has exactly one good idea: be careful; go slowly; think about unintended consequences. That’s it. The New Right has prospered because business never accepted the New Deal and finally figured out in the 1970s how to roll it back: buy the media; privatize higher education; coordinate strategy through the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce; bring Southern and Midwestern evangelicals into local and national politics; bribe legislators and their staff members with the prospect of lucrative post-political employment; gerrymander and keep Democratic constituencies from registering to vote; and hire armies of public relations flaks and lobbyists. A huge investment, but it’s paid off royally. Ideas have had very little to do with it. The intellectual poverty of conservatism is clear in Irving Kristol, and more than clear in William Kristol.

And to be honest, I do prefer to study for instance the changing rate of profit since the 70s or the organic composition of capital rather than Mont Pelerin vs the New Left or other Social Democratic explanations of Leftist decline. It is complicated, but from a global perspective, the evidence for ideology leading economics is very unsatisfactory.

And it is a dialectic, and capital can change the base, or adapt to changing material conditions, in order to adjust the superstructure more easily as the other way around. As an example, monetarist policy and 401ks led the ideology rather followed. The oil shocks and baby booms were more important than Lewis Powell. De-industrialization needs overseas opportunities.

Even the Right has to work in conditions not of their making.

I think the basic idea of austerity has a lot to do with cultures from places with harsh climates and limited resources where, genuinely, severe discipline is required just to survive. It is easy to believe that a depression is in some sense similar to a bad season; a thing one must economize (note the word) to survive. The observations that one is not living in such a place and that the limits are far different than we imagine are not easy to assimilate.

Mao Cheng Ji@48: People and societies build their lives around ideas, though. It is not all rationalization; some ideas truly define societies and individuals.

Of course, there’s the position that interests are ideas of a particular kind. But at this point that would probably just muddy the waters.

Rather than Mao or Jesus, an example maybe more relevant to the present day is Martin Luther. This is because the origins of the Protestant reformation were not the typical causes of conflict: a declining resource base, international tensions, or whatever.

The consequent wars of religion had exactly opposite causes: increased prosperity and international cultural exchange. Prosperity implied the broader spread of education and international cultural exchange then dispersed non-Latin bibles all over Europe. This destroyed the monopoly power of the Catholic church to interpret scripture.

Pursuit of self-interest (greater prosperity and the material means to defend against enemies) therefore implied the dismantling of the structure of power holding everything together, and there wasn’t a damn thing that anyone could do to stop it. If you were a Count or a Duke of the era then bread and circuses weren’t the solution, they were the problem.

I was tempted to sign off with the quip “and nobody made any money”, but this wouldn’t be correct. Henry VIII for example exhibited the moral flexibility needed to thrive in the new environment. But his profit, or the general truth that interests are important in any political situation, doesn’t alter the fact that at that time a narrow focus on material considerations would have been an error of the greatest magnitude.

“you can observe that austerity is going strong even once the idea of the Confidence Fairy went away, and that the Iraq War kept going strong once its supposedly motivating ideas died.”

I don’t get this objection. Why would a policy suddenly stop (whether Iraq, or austerity) just because the ideas that drove it have been diminished? The ideas don’t have to sustain it, just provide the initial impetus surely? I mean Al Qaeda continue regardless!

I didn’t write “unchanging across the ages”. I wrote: “one idea in particular — austerity — which has existed in one basic identifiable form (albeit with mutations)”. If that’s not his argument then his title (and lecture) is very deceiving. All I’m trying to do is figure out what he’s trying to say. Your review suggests the basic argument is that “ideas are important”. Well okay, but why/how is *this* idea important? Or, as a first step, what is this idea even about?

It seems like the working definition of “austerity” is something like “any action taken to slow the growth of sovereign debt prior to the return of full employment”. I’m not saying that definition is absurd on its face; I just think it’s qualitatively different from what it used to mean (from the interwar years to the Washington Consensus): that a country must maintain high interest rates and devalue internally, in order to run a primary surplus, when its external debt burden becomes too great to service.

As for “political economy”, those words are in Blyth’s professional title. McCloskey I know would consider herself a political economist, and if Acemoglu & Robinson are poli econ then so is Fukuyama. Graeber is arguable, I admit, but he’s more political economy than Lucas, an applied mathematician, or Rogoff, an atheoretical empiricist. My point is that if Rodrik and his peers have spent their whole careers ignoring what other social scientists are doing that’s their problem. (I know that hasn’t been Rodrik’s attitude, but he’s acting like it is.) So I’m not buying Rodrik’s argument on this point, because to do so would involve denying my own existence: “political economy” is not owned by economists. I’d appreciate it if Rodrik would point out the folks who have been doing for decades what he wants economists to start doing now. There’s precedent for it: Kindleberger tried in his 1986 AEA Presidential Address.

Ideas, interests, power — and we haven’t even mentioned psychology, except obliquely. The frustrating nature of attempts to tease out the threads of these intertwined motivations, and to attribute hegemony to one or the other of them, seems to lie in the fact that any conclusions one can reasonably draw — general conclusions, at any rate — are most likely doomed to end either in chicken-and-egg problems, or in infinite regressions of one kind or another. Was Keynes right? Was Marx? Neither of them? Both of them? It seems to me that these are as much philosophical as empirical questions.

Or shorter me (and maybe this clarifies our disagreement to make it more useful), while you want more Marx, I want Marx with a stiff shot of Weber.

In which case, since what’s actually on the bartop is a bottle of 200-proof Weber, you should want what I want. :-)

@JWM There are parallel discussions going on. In some of them, influenced by public choice theory or vulgar Marxism, the dominance of interests is taken for granted, while in others, as you say, it is ignored.

In the case of austerity, the idea has an appeal that goes well beyond the interests that actually benefit from it.

In some of them, influenced by public choice theory or vulgar Marxism, the dominance of interests is taken for granted, while in others, as you say, it is ignored.

Which discussions are those? Honestly, I don’t see any vulgar Marxism out there at all. (Which is too bad — as the late Bob Fitch used to say, vulgar Marxism explains 90 percent of what happens in the world.) But I will make the concession that discussions in terms of national interests are fairly widespread.

Actually forget that question, it was stupid. I had a think about it..

Henry @41:

“…What it is is a statement that powerful actors’ understanding of their self interest is going to be shaped by their ideas about how the world works. ”

And the ideas of powerful actors about how the world works are formed by their experiences of how the world works about them. in their local environment, in which they are successful. Because these ideas worked in their (limited) experience, these ideas are impervious to refutation. However, these ideas are limited in application, and (typically) do not apply to the larger world beyond their experience. Yet the powerful try to extend these ideas, their ways of thinking, to the larger world. The results diverge from their intention, both in space, and in time.

It’s local, linear, vs global, non-linear thinking. You have to think local to amass power. But to exercise power on the global stage, this kind of thinking is no longer appropriate.

GWB et al. were capable of manipulating the American electorate, but the likely results of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were beyond their conception. However, this distant failure does not convince the neocons of their error. Neither do the failures of austerity convince the austerians of their error. To them, these are failures of practice, not of theory. The cure, to them, is to practice harder, to do more of the same, rather than reject a theory which they know to be correct.

It is, of course, unfortunate, that the powerful are so limited in their thinking, and thus pursue a course which will harm all of us, the powerful as well. Society faces numerous pressing problems, and business as usual, pursuing linear solutions to non-linear problems, probably will not solve them.

@43

“The New Right has prospered because ”

Geo,

How has the right prospered?

Despite a massive campaign backed by the Walton family, the “death tax” is now locked in at 40%.

And the capital gains tax just jumped 58%.

The idea that interests or ideas are endogenous is ambiguous because it seems that ideas evolve each one separately by its inner logic; instead it seems to me that the history of ideas is very dialectic, with usually two groups proposing two opposed ideas, every time updating their own idea to counter opponent ‘s innovation.
In this situation it seems that the two opposing groups are somehow predetermined by some exogenous circumstance .
Go, dialectic materialism !

Anarcissie: “To be sure, the words have different connotations, but interests are first perceived and processed as ideas — even very simple ones like a desire for power, indeed, even a desire for ice cream.”

It’s confused by t he fact that “interests” is also being used as a kind of term of art — as in “organized political interests”. But yes — if people want ice cream because they have been given the idea of ice cream, you approach a level at which “ideas” are taking over what we normally regard as culture. That’s the stage at which “ideas create your interpretation of what your interests should be” becomes almost tautologically true. People get their notions about their class interest from somewhere — is it from the writings of some intellectual? Or is it from offhand comments from their parents when they’re 5 years old, and from how they interact with other kids at school? If both of those count as “ideas”, then yes everything is strongly influenced by ideas.

My own opinion is that influence is much more based on human universals that don’t come up to the level of “ideas” or “interests” than most people seem to think. For instance, how do you make a prominent global warming denialist? You don’t take someone who already has some kind of intellectual capital and convince them. Because there’s really no way you can, if it comes down to science. No, you invite them to socialize at your right wing think tank. Listen sympathetically to their stories. Give them food and attentive company and align your enemies — those people who are trying to oppress your industry — with whoever they don’t like. They go to a couple of conferences, have a good time, and then very quickly they begin to join a whole world view in which global warming is obviously a nonproven theory that would have destructive consequences if people spent money trying to avoid it. And it’s not because they’ve been convinced by an idea — although they will learn and parrot all of the rationalizations quickly enough — it’s because they like hanging out with their new friends and it gives them a new sense of meaning.

“to the conservative (though not necessarily neoliberal) aversion to seeing human affairs in terms of abstractions?”

Huh? I never had reason to suspect that conservatives have this aversion.

Some conservatives depict “progressives” as eggheads who don’t understand reality and live in a world of sterile abstractions, but this is just a retorical choice (mine ideas are “natural”, while yours are “ideologies”) that often even progressives indulge in.

Except in that case the interest is shaping the idea..so maybe you’re not

“but really, does this count as an idea?”

Maybe I’m clutching at straws a bit.
But you are complicating it, moving away from class/labour dichotomies or easily defined material interests and acknowledging (to some extent) that ideas are important, even to powerful interests. (Why else would you be wasting your time trying to sell global warming denialism to someone?) So if it’s important for that objective, trying to undermine the case for global warming, then the opposite is also important, trying to sell the case for global warming. YMMV on this, but I think you seem to be closer to it than not

I believe that people have interests, both personal ones and in the “organized political interests” sense, and clearly I believe that there are organized attempts at political influence in favor of particular interests. I just don’t think that the ideas involved are very important. The interest comes first, and the ideas are made up out of whole cloth to support it, and are basically disposable.

Even the interests aren’t as abstract as people who study ideas seem to think. The whole set of tactics used by the fossil fuel industries against global warming science came out of the tobacco industry. So you could say that there was a tobacco industry interest that started it all. But what that really was was a few rich people who happened to own tobacco companies who saw the emerging science about the hazards of smoking and thought something like “I want to be rich, I have to do something about this”. The opposition of science to the greed of a few selfish rich people isn’t the clash of ideas, or even a clash of interests.

Getting back to my cryptic mention of Holbo earlier, he once wrote a series of blog posts that involved what I paraphrase as “If someone is making a series of irritable mental gestures, do you have to treat those as ideas?” And I think the answer is no. There may be ideas involved in the science around anthropogenic global climate change — the ideas on which we base science itself, the particular ideas involved in current research topics on climate, etc. But there are none on the other side. There are only a series of feeble rationalizations and in-group against out-group gestures which come down straight to the id, as I wrote above. If people want to construct that as the influence of right-wing ideas, they are the ones doing the constructing — they are giving something coherence which doesn’t actually have it, because they study ideas and therefore what they study must be an idea.

It’s not a clash of science vs anti-science in the case of austerity or resistance to aggressive war, at least not in quite the same way. But the basic principle is the same. You can observe that the pro-austerity people are not dismayed when their ideas fail, and either quickly pick up new ones to justify the same policy, or shrug and don’t bother with a new one once their policy is entrenched. Therefore, ideas aren’t important to them, and never were. Why should you treat their justifications as being more important than they do?

Conservatism, at least in political economics, would mean adhering to the New Deal.

If we’re talking about the ideas and practices of the Right, then it seems to me they are anything but conservative. It seems pretty daring to want to junk an apparently working arrangement of fifty years’ standing (as it was in the 1980s).

Rejecting abstraction would mean abandoning political theory altogether, and would itself be a kind of abstraction (‘abstraction is bad, so don’t do it.’) I don’t think either Right or Left can be accused of neglecting theory, however. It’s like the problem with philosophy. We know words can be used to befuddle people, but once someone starts practicing this vice, others will adopt similar techniques if only in self-defense. Hence, although ‘philosophy is the disease for which it is supposed to be the cure’, we’re stuck with it. And so also with political theory.

A current lack of popular, commanding theories could be explained by the failure of the presently well-known ones to ‘work’ (that is, to serve the material, moral or aesthetic interests of important persons). But I am sure there are plenty of others waiting their turn, stage left and stage right, kept out of sight for the moment by the facts of power.

“A thought once uttered is a lie.” Including this one, of course.

What Marx and engels said.

Omega Centauri: “My impression of the folks around Merkel is that they are influenced by “public-deficits=>hyperinflation=>Hitler”.”

Which, please note, is simply not true. This leaves out the Great Depression, which took the Nazis from a minor party to close enough to seize power.

The idea that the Weimar hyperinflation caused the rise of Naziism is to my mind not an innocent mistake; the right doesn’t really mind a depression leading to a rightward shift in politics.

@84,

Geo,

Sure, the Republicans have had a few electoral victories in the past 20 years or so.

But it’s been a bad couple of decades for conservative ideas.

“Death taxes,” “Preventative” War, “Christian” morals, etc.

I suppose there are two issues at play here. There is the specific dispute between competing discourses within political economy on the relative importance of ideas v. interests in shaping economic policy. Then there is the broader question of what ‘interests’ are, anyway.

I don’t have the ability to speak directly to the first, but I might have something to add the second, which, I hope, illuminates if only a little the issues underlying the first. So here I go into the philosophical weeds.

Interests are ideas (well I’d say they are narratives of value-but that’s my set of ideas about ideas). What else could they possibly be? Do they constitute a natural force independent of human thought? Have interests, like gravity, always ‘been there?’

The salient issue is whether one can reduce all ideas to interests, and further reduce all interests to class ideologies. Certainly our post modern condition makes it difficult to disentangle ideas from values, but let us bracket that problem, and focus on the narrative that claims ideas are class interest in drag.

Such a narrative turns on the claim (the idea!) that what is necessary to physical human life (labour) is the source of all human values. It elevates the necessary (and, historically speaking, largely despised) to the status of the good. It begins with Locke’s defense of the limitless acquisition of private property, culminates in Marx with the abolition of private property in the name of limitless public abundance. The two strands of thought represent very different interests, but they share the same underlying idea.

In both discourses the idea (labour as the source of all values) becomes sedimented as ‘fact.’ But this fact implies a specific set of ideas about the world. To wipe the slate clean for Locke’s tabula rasa requires an act of willful imagination. Every actual human consciousness is always already imbricated in a pattern of meaning: not only is the slate always inscribed, but the ‘objective’ world is always already a narrative of the world. Wiping away this narrative tradition to begin again on the basis of labour-as-source-of-value is itself a rhetorical or narrative trope. Marx takes up this trope and uses it in his own way.

Because both Marx and Locke rely on the sedimented idea of labour-as-source-of-value, but represent this ‘fact’ according to their different interests, I can say that interests form a subset of ideas. And because they share a common interest in the sedimented fact of labour-as-source-of-value, I can also say that class interests form a subset of the subset ‘interest.’ For where does this common interest in labour-as-source-of-value come from, if not from some source other than (their clearly antithetical) class interest?

So I suppose the moral of the story, and it’s rather tenuous relation to the issue raised in the OP, is to support the notion that exogenous ideas (often sedimented as ‘facts’) can and do have a rather significant importance in the articulation and expression of interests.

96: 4 implies some of this, but as I read through the thread it feels a little abstract, individualistic, and disembodied, and I felt an urge to mention history and geography. Ideas and interests are grounded in place and time.

David Harvey, Lefebvre etc

@JWM As it happens, and right on topic here’s a link to Tyler Cowen arguing that the advocates of monetary contraction in the eurozone represent the class interest of unionized/inside workers in the Netherlands and Germany. The Economist (!) points out that this bears no relationship to reality, and mentions the kinship of this kind of public choice argument to vulgar Marxism

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/03/different-framings-when-people-agree.html
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/03/economics-and-ideology?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/rightforthewrongreasons

Seconding Bruce.

Adding on to Peter Dornan – by now, it’s clear that right-wing neoliberal economic policies (to the extent that is under discussion) are bad for not just some of the people in the developed world, but probably a very large majority. Basically, they end up being ‘distribute wealth and freedom upwards, risk, cost and constraints downward’.

Policies like that need some really sweet sugar before people will accept them.
Many of the ‘ideas’ are just that – sugar to hide what’s coming, what’s happening, and the pain of the damage. And when not hiding, they are to distract and point people in the wrong direction.

“Maybe, in your alternative reality, where Obama is not evil, but here, in the singular reality, which is the actual universe, conservative ideas have been triumphant.”

I generally agree with Bruce Wilder’s summation in that comment, but his first sentence is off. It’s not conservative *ideas* that have been triumphant, but conservative *policies*. That’s a really important distinction for this thread. The wealthy families with an interest in reducing inheritance taxes are apparently happy to let the idea of Death Taxes die as long as their inheritance taxes are actually reduced. And even though Obama may have won election in part by scorning ideas like Preventative War, something like Responsibility To Protect can be promptly minted to do the same thing.

Timberman @ 86

I wouldn’t say abstractions are static. An abstraction is not a photograph, and even if it is a picture, the essence of its construction is not the mapped correspondence in image to a moment in time. The essence of abstraction is compression. Our puny little brains feature this weirdly teeny tiny cache of short-term memory in consciousness through, which every thought and intention and plan and analysis must pass. To arrive at any kind of sophisticated understanding or theory, or even to construct a sense of continuing identity from memories, we have to use compression “algorithms” to squeeze information (data and analysis) though the channel of the cache, where its difficult to squeeze much more than the seven to ten digits of a phone number.

As it turns out, humans can perform remarkable feats of compression, just as Intel Inside processors can, with a JPG or ZIP file. It can be very, very powerful stuff. Some artists in Florence figured out that by ordering the size and apparent overlap of two-dimensional images in a painting in a certain mathematically ordered way, which viewers could be taught to interpret, they could present, and their audience could “see” three-dimensions, where their were only two. And, that changed the kind and power of the narratives that could be depicted in paintings, and the Renaissance in art began. Voila! Perspective!

E = mc² is an extremely powerful idea. The physics of that is in the compression algorithms — how a human can “unpack” that idea into, say, an atom bomb or the standard model. Darwin’s evolution through selection of inherited variation by environmental fitness is another highly compressed idea; how that gets unpacked in the course of puzzling out explanations for myriad phenomena of the living world is modern biology.

Economics consists of taking some fairly elaborate ideas about how the world works, in the form of models, working through a series of those models, and then packing up that knowledge in a tiny, now familiar little nutshells. Economist’s love Marshall’s Cross: supply and demand sloping left and right and crossing in the middle at the optimal(!) price. Got to love it!

Wal-Mart executives love their abstractions, too. Statistics on yesterday’s sales, last year’s sales, same-store sales year-over-year, hours worked, units sold, units in inventory, etc. etc.

Abstractions are everywhere in modern life. Numbers. Letters. Traffic signals and signs. Any reasonably complex behavior has to be scripted and compressed to get thru that tiny little cache of short-term memory we call consciousness. Not even “thru”, because once we’ve managed to learn something, like riding a bicycle, it just goes on a fast track thru the unconscious mind, and the conscious mind provides just enough rationalization to put that knowledge to work in intentional travel, and, of course, to panic in emergencies.

The vast majority of what we talk about as “ideas” are rationalizations, ex post facto stories we tell about the past, whether a mere moment ago, or years or decades or centuries past our personal experience. For some in this thread, acknowledging ideas as rationalizations seems to de-legitimize ideas. All I can say about that is, get over it. But, here’s the thing, the stories we tell about the past, even though the reality of the past may be fixed and unchanging, these stories are dynamic. Because they are, necessarily, highly compressed. Poetically, I could say that all that is left of the past are the shadows, but even the shadows are gone, really; all that is left is decaying detritus and footprints waiting on the beach for the waves to come. We have very little data about the past, even the past of our own personal experience, let alone the American Civil War or Julius Caesar conquering Gaul, and even that small amount of data has to be compressed into a political slogan, or a sentence or two, which, in turn, can be unpacked into a paragraph, an essay of a few pages, a scholarly tome — whatever — and taught, and critically assessed and revised. Historians are engaged in endless revisionism; it’s what they do: constantly re-imagining the past, testing their way of summarizing and unpacking that story against a reasoned appreciation of the very limited data left in the dustbin.

Because abstractions are compressions, and the really important part is how they are imaginatively unpacked, they are inherently dynamic. Computer science and information theory talks about, and compares the “lossiness” of various compression algorithms. Do you lose information and does the information you lose really matter?

Economics, the academic activity, is mostly a similar set of arguments about what can reasonably distilled from the elaborate and detailed study of various models, and whether a particular way of packing and unpacking that information is lossy in an important way.

Ideas can be very, very powerful, when they can pack a lot of analytic power or account for a lot of detailed information, and allow our pea-sized consciousness to make a choice, or initiate the appropriate scripted behavior. The revisionism of retrospective rationalization, is dynamic. We can and do keep changing the story of the past, and that changes the future. He, who controls the past, controls the future, if you like.

Seeking a more elegant compression method, expanding the scope of a generalization, these kinds of “internal” logic to ideational distillation can be socially corrosive, when they revise the stories that give meaning to our lives and collective experience. I alluded in an earlier comment to the case of Hobbes, who self-consciously tried to be the Thucydides of the English Civil War, imparting a disenchanted explanation to the remembering of events driven by competing enchantments, and, in so doing, helped the English to strip enchantment from their politics, and usher in a modern, pragmatic, secular politics (and the Enlightenment). He offered the Stuarts the poison pill of a neatly compressed, rationalized apology for divine-right monarchical absolutism, which stripped away completely the divine-right part.

JQ: “In the case of austerity, the idea has an appeal that goes well beyond the interests that actually benefit from it.”

To reply: It is a fairly well established fact that absolute happiness is not what people care about; rather, relative happiness rules the day. Hence, the increased spending power of a well-paid worker is still felt as a loss by the “job creator” whose power over the workforce is thus diminished. And vice versa.

Moreover, there are two ways that interests can lead VSP to spout arguments for . There is the broad class interest (which I think is what you’re talking about). But there is also the particular career interests of a given individual, in a world where countless institutions are predicated on the (already incoherent) notion that spending is out of control and taxes must be cut.

It seems pretty daring to want to junk an apparently working arrangement of fifty years’ standing (as it was in the 1980s).

ISTM that this just goes back to ideas growing out of interests, because you and I say it’s working, and the Koch brothers reply, “Working for whom?”

Having decided it’s against their interests, they then must come up with an idea to argue against it, or pay someone to do so. But the idea is the tool, it is not the work. This explains why it can so readily be modified or abandoned.

Having said this I’m now going to flip around — sort of — and acknowledge that it’s perfectly possible for people to be mistaken about their own interests; if poor whites in the US understood their own interests better the Republican Party would be finished. So in a sense, you could say that it’s ideas all the way down; ideas about interests drive ideas about policies. The actual interests don’t show up except in the weak tendency for wrong ideas to eventually get rejected. Eventually can be an awful long time though.

the usual components of the transmission of ideas — that someone propounds an intellectual position, and that you are convinced by them — are missing

I doubt that this is actually “the usual” method of transmission of ideas. (Although it may depend on the idea.) Religion, for example, is most often transmitted by “my family and other people around me were doing it”, hardly ever by intellectual argument; but custom and bandwagons are enough to let religions not only endure for centuries, but also convince people to kill and die in the name of God.

P.s. Which I think may be more or less what B. Wilder is saying in (some of) 108.

Bruce Wilder @ 105

In some ways, I like your metaphor better than mine, but the characteristic of abstraction-as-compression that makes it like a photograph is that the compressed symbol of what is in fact a complex set of experiences more often than not loses its original moorings, and thus no longer stands for something else, but rather becomes something in itself, something quite different from what we believed it to be when we first created and took possession of it. One might even say — in fact now and again somebody or other has said — that it takes possession of us.

Over time our heads get filled with these things, and it takes a good bit of unpacking indeed to see just how they’re connected with our movements on the dance floor. Lots of work for both dramatists and philosophers, although none of it is likely to be as well compensated as the jobs handed out to the dismal scientists and shills supposedly in charge of the choreography.

There’s a very interesting tension between the cybernetic metaphor and the ‘imaginative unpacking’ of compressed data in your post. You are saying on the one hand that abstractions work by separating thought into perception and reflection: the body perceives, the intellect processes, and as your cybernetic metaphor suggests, the goal is lossless transmission. Algorithms aren’t creative.

On the other hand, you talk about how the dynamic (imaginative) quality of unpacking compressions is ‘really important’ (something with which I completely agree). Which leads me to question the idea that abstractions are the only way of compressing information. Images (visual or verbal) require an act of imaginative re-creation: the ‘unpacking’ of the image suggests an infinity of responses instead of compelling a single, ‘lossless’ one. So while your image of the past as footprints washed by the rising tide suggests a fear of loss, the creative unpacking of the ‘debris’ suggests a constant renewal: not that same dull round of things, but neither a complete rupture with tradition. Rationalizations? Sometimes, yes. But visionary imaginings (à la Hobbes) as well.

The higher you get up the food chain, the less confusion there is about the basic interest of gaining power. It’s the middle management of firms who are prone to fads in management theory, the second rank of politicians who take seriously the latest wonk-porn bestseller or the bought-and-paid-for product of the Harvard economics dept.

It’s been clear (I thought) from the start that, for example, the Cameron govt was using ‘austerity’ as a convenient pretext to (1) dismantle the welfare state under the guise of cuts which don’t actually save much money even; (2) further disempower workers and consumers lest they hamper the ‘wealth creators’, rather than being particularly interested in reducing the deficit; and that given this, a continued multi-dip recession is a feature rather than a bug. (A very close analogue of JWM’s comments about the ECB, linked somewhere above.)

I think one needs to distinguish between producers and consumers of ideology (or between various degrees of ingenuousness about it) to try and get anywhere with this conversation – of course some from the producer class can start believing its own bullshit, and that’s for the most part a good thing for said class (there aren’t enough high-functioning psychos capable of sustaining constant, conscious lying through their teeth) though in some cases it can give rise to a certain amount of ‘blowback’ which may have to be dealt with – e.g. McCarthy.

The real key is to almost convince oneself of the truth of whatever convenient theory is being espoused while maintaining a little mental compartment that retains contact with reality. At the limit this is unnecessary, where basic ideas such as ‘we have God on our side’ or ‘we know better than women’ or ‘what’s good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country’ are concerned: these can be believed wholeheartedly without too much danger of making a false move (as evaluated from the pre-Kool-aid standpoint).

That’s because they are normative and have little impact on beliefs relevant to technical matters. Some kind of fact/value distinction or specturm needs to be observed here – especially since at the general level, this conversation seems to be premised on ‘interests’ as taking the role of ‘desires’ and ‘ideas’ that of ‘beliefs’ in a ‘Humean’ account of reason. On a basic belief-desire model, there are of course instrumental desires (for means), which are derived from ‘ultimate’ desires (for ends) in conjunction with beliefs. One possibility is that a means may be fixated on and confused for an end, even after the belief that underwrites it is found inaccurate.

(I get the impression the discussion is actually far more specific – ‘interests’ being more like the aims of ‘interest groups’ and ‘ideas’ being straightforwardly factual beliefs. Note that interests are neither exogenous nor endogenous where interest groups such as pressure groups or lobbying organisations are concerned – the interests are the raison d’etre of the group in question. For present purposes this means they can be treated as exogenous.)

Where neoliberal ideology is concerned, the ‘producers’ or top-level ideologues such as the media, business and finance moguls who attend (e.g.) Builderberg meetings are in no danger of getting carried away with market rhetoric (e.g. trying to promote competition); they understand, probably in most cases quite consciously, that the rhetoric is actually a wrapper for an interest in maintaining something like the status quo, only with reduced consumer and worker power.

Even those a bit further down the chain who promote business interests under the rubric of teh market clearly behave in such a way thaht they can’t be regarded as (per impossibile) both understanding the neoliberal position and taking seriously as an ‘idea’ – it’s a cypher. The pseudo-economists, think-tank wankers, and opinionisers who churn out propaganda in support are certainly behaving exactly like disgusting scumbags; but they are not responsible for pulling the wool over the eyes of those who employ or reward them; just (almost) everyone else.

And this was Thomas Oatley’s response with links to Phil Arena’s etc

http://ipeatunc.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/paradoxically-you-had-me-at-hello.html

As an addendum, according to #70 above, Blyth lays out explicitly which ideas influenced policy.. “expansionary austerity. He specifically says that not all/any cuts are austerity, just those which are intended to spur short-run growth by changing expectations: Alesina’s model.”
So all those ‘cultural’, (German fear of hyperinflation, pain after the party), ideological, cognitive factors etc mentioned above are the background that influenced how receptive people would be towards the policy of austerity.. and that doesn’t demand you ignore institutional, political, geopolitical, material based etc explanations .. it’s one part of a rich tapestry..although a part, I guess, that gives ideas primacy
So Blyth’s argument (I guess) lives or dies on how important we think ‘Alesina’s model’ model was in influencing policy

Two points…

The first is that claims about the malleability of ideology in the hands of the powerful should be made with care. Like all arguments about “the masses”, when taken to extremes such claims are even worse than endorsements of aristocracy. They amount to the claim that aristocracy is the only possible form of government regardless of what the laws or the ruling ideology may state.

Second below…

[[Okay, this is dense and I suppose wonkish. It nonetheless presupposes no specialist knowledge (apart from the first few paras — some may choose to skip down to the italics). I hope at least one or two people will grind through it because I it demonstrates what it is about the OP that makes it unusual as well as potentially threatening to a powerful and damaging but barely acknowledged vested interest.]]

Economics works via models of the world some of which, such as the macroeconomic models employed by governments and central banks, have broad implications for law and administration. They may even best be considered as major autonomous centres of power. The methods and underlying assumptions on which they’re founded is therefore a critical concern as whoever specifies these essentially gets to paint the world in chosen ideological colours.

If a given model assumes economic rationality then in that model there really is no such thing as society, and neither is there any politics, culture or history. This assumption strongly supports the idea that each gets what he or she deserves, and imbues all conclusions with a strongly neoliberal tint.

Similarly, if a model assumes efficient markets then amongst other things all returns on investment are earned via deferred gratification and the acceptance of risk. Efficient markets are fair and simply by assuming markets are indeed efficient it’s possible to generate further information suggesting that this is indeed true: that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Nobody ever learns anything because everybody knows everything already, and there are no periods of manic optimism or pessimism.

Such assertions radically simplify the calculation and measurement requirements for the construction of economic models. The resulting mathematical frameworks may then be based econometric data alone, and their creators can directly or indirectly claim objective distance from their works.

The models may be non-linear or linear, meaning they may characterise systems with memory or lacking it.

For a linear (no-memory) system to mimic the behaviour of real-world economies it would need to model the human mind but this is not an achievable objective. Therefore, in linear models an economy that has just suffered a crippling market crash, say, will behave identically to another that hasn’t so long as the econometric data are identical. This is obviously unrealistic.

Non-linear systems mimic human memory by essentially having the past reach into the present. That’s to say that two economies having instantaneously identical econometric data may evolve differently depending on their differing histories. The problem with this is that it’s clearly magical: no scientist will admit to really believing that the past somehow sends informational rays into the present. The extra elements embodying memory, let’s call them the non-linear variables, are moreover purely statistical artefacts. Not are no real-world analogues known, they’re not even hypothesised.

Non-linear models are only ever used in the physical sciences as short-cuts to simplify what are understood more fundamentally as linear systems, but in economics no fundamental linear system is imaginable because bridging the gap between the configuration of matter and energy in persons’ brains and their economic behaviour is not realistic.

Such trifling objections are apparently insufficient to prevent governments and central banks basing many vital decisions on models such as these. Like the competence of the self-selecting and perpetuating caste who minister to them, they are immune to any amount evidential refutation.

This leaves us right back with the linear systems which airbrush away all the potential for mania and despair we’re now all painfully aware can cause chaos.

But there’s a way out of this, and the issues in the OP are the gateway. People already possess a method for divining the thoughts and intentions of others that’s been refined over hundreds of millions of years: it’s called intuition. Intuition is an unsettling idea for any scientist, but actually it’s impossible to live a normal existence without making innumerable guesses about others’ intentions and feelings.

Without intuition any sociological insight is impossible. This is a literal truth so pervasive and yet so unbearable we’ve somehow contrived to forget it. We imagine our ideas about Catholicism or Marxism, or fashions for hairstyles or clothing, or their propagation through society or their psychological, sociological or economic effects can be rendered objective so long as sufficient determination is expended on the task but this simply is not true. These things are ultimately abstractions lacking any method of biological encoding or cognitive meaning consistent from individual to individual. No method exists of reaching into the human mind to render physically comprehensible the organic chaos that underpins abstractions invented in the first place for the very purpose of simplifying the incalculable complexity of reality.

Intuition is not shareable and cannot be 100% reliable but it’s a matter of historic fact that individuals are alive today who applied their intuitions about human psychology to economics and econometric data and who sought to warn the world of the impending disaster in lucid and simple terms for years prior to 2008.

George Soros and Nouriel Roubini are two famous examples, but there were numerous others. These people employed abstract reasoning to fill in the gap between what can be measured and what cannot, but this denied them the opportunity to bolster their credibility with the meaningless mathematical rituals the modellers employ. It also threatens the immense power held by the very people who failed to understand their warnings because it undermines the models’ false objectivity that elevates their conclusions to an undeserved special status, excludes others with insights potentially equally or more valuable and invests in them exclusive rights to perpetuate their membership and to fill jobs like those of Mario Draghi or Ben Bernanke.

Since 2008, central banks and the rest have attempted to amend their models, but they remain oblivious to one fact best illustrated by anecdote. Let’s say I leave my house one morning and scan the driveway for ice. I may miss a patch and fall anyway, or I may spot and avoid it. If I fall, it’s entirely reasonable to return to the front door, look again, and conduct a sort of investigation into how an accident happened in spite of my vigilance. This sort of sensible inquiry is what the central bankers imagine they’ve conducted in recent years.

If on the other hand you are waiting at my front door when I emerge and you tell me “watch out, there’s ice right there”, and I fall anyway then this kind of post-mortem is pointless. In this scenario, what I would require is psychological evaluation and support. Re-evaluating my ice-scanning procedures would be useless. This is the actual state confronting the modellers: they were alerted to disaster but refused to believe it. Yet somehow they’re undisturbed by the fact that they used their meritless mathematical rituals and arcane power to drown out the voices of those who really understood what was happening. It’s a scandal of pseudoscience to rival phrenology, social Darwinism and Lysenkoism.

Ah, the cock-up theory of history.

Moving on. The links rf provides @ 118-9, and the interposed ‘Phil Arena’ piece (btw, ‘vomitoria’ did exist but were exits for stadium spectators and nothing to do with puke). the most noticeable thing to me about these was that they were set in a world in which the only people who matter are the ‘vested interests’, policy makers, policy analysts/advisors and academics, and the discussion is about various lines of communication between these groups – conceived of as having static membership – exerting varying degrees of influence. A subsidiary point is that the influence of ‘vested interests’ on the academics and policy analysts was not discussed.

Rodrik’s piece, for example, considers political (or ‘parapolitical’) theories about the influence of vested interests on the state, finds that if those theories are entirely true then ordinary political-economic theory can have no influence, and concludes that it’s best not to focus on the parapolitical. Note that the possibility of acting on the parapolitical theories so as to rectify the situation doesn’t get a look in – after all, none of the important constituencies will want to act on them – nemo custodiet custodes ipsos. (Cue loud throat clearing from the populace.)

(BTW, of course Rodrik is alluding to Public Choice models, which are specifically designed to denigrate the role of state action in favour of free markets – which as we know are free from rent ‘seeking’, collusion and all that.)

So the only issue under discussion is haggling about how much elbow room the iron laws of Vested Interests allow: Rodrik think we can at least enlighten the VIs a bit, in the hope that we can at least prevent ill-effects that are due to their making mistakes (it’s not clear why he should suppose that enabling the villains of the piece to avoid fucking up should be considered a good idea).

‘Arena’, to be fair, does mention a ‘wider audience’ – dismissively, in passing, but his main point is that somehow good policy (not parapolicy) advice stands some chance of influencing politicians (and I agree, as he suggests Rodrik does, that there is some elbow room here, and not an all-encompassing, omnipotent conspiracy (which is close to being a contradiction in conception in any case).

I found Oatley’s peice rather baffling in places, but it clearly shares the assumptions of the other two.

—-

I should end there, but having gone to the trouble of figuring them out, can’t resist pointing out the problems I diagnosed in Oatley’s piece, even though they are largely beside the point as far as I’m concerned. So, to ‘Fisk’ (sorry, Robert) the tail end of it:

First, the issue isn’t whether political economists think ideas matter . The issue is whether ideas are independent of the processes we model and thus can be manipulated by outsiders to any greater extent than the actions of the people whose behavior Rodrik hoped to change but now realizes are responsive to vested interests.

This might seem to be contemplating the idea that academics might be influenced by the VIs, but I don;t think it is really:

Rodrik seems to believe that ideas can be manipulated by outsiders to produce better outcomes. Hence, he seems to believe that ideas are outside of the political economy processes that otherwise shapes behavior and outcomes. One might wonder if Rodrik is about to repeat the quest that he has just abandoned.

Yep, here academics are ‘outsiders’. O has, though, slipped into overgeneralising and talking of ‘ideas’ as if this were a useful analytic category – this doesnlt really matter much here, but is a distinctly unuseful move. More importantly, he writes of ‘poliotical economy processes’ as if there were only one level of same, where in fact there are two.

Second, the issue isn’t whether human agency can bring about change or not. The issue is whether we can derive useful policy advice from a (general equilibrium) empirical model that accurately captures how the interactions among incentivized agents produce policy outcomes. Rodrik’s point, and he is absolutely correct, is that we cannot. Such a model can produce redundant advice (do what you have an incentive to do and are thus already doing) or it can offer advice that the agents whose behavior we have modeled have no incentive to accept (do something that you have no incentive to do). Hence, the better we are at explaining policy choices as a function of political incentives, the less our models can generate useful policy advice. Even in models based solely on human agency.

Unless we address ourselves to some outside force which might be able to alter the incentives, either by chainging the incentivising forces or selecting personnel whose ‘preferences’, and thus incentives, are different.

Third, the issue isn’t whether scholarly inquiry has an “impact on the world.” The issue is whether positive political economy generates knowledge that can be applied usefully to promote policy change. Rodrik argues, and reasonably so, that the answer is no. – but there are two different points here: one is that higher-order, ‘parapolitical’ theories are necessarily inert since they are either redundant or guaranteed to be ineffective by theor own lights. The other is that – given the truth of those ‘parapolitical’ theories, then lower-order political-economic theories are bound to be ignored. The latter can be assimilated to the former if the academics are among those controlled by the VIs; but I don;t think O does this. In which case, it doesn’t follow that technical political-economy findings must be ineffective at all; just that they will be used for the VI’s ends and not (uintentioanlly) to further the general welfare, public good etc.

O’s apparent failure to distinguish between these two levels means, FWIW, that his conclusion is incorrect:

In short, Rodrik makes two points. One, positive political economy is useless for policy advice. Two, we can affect policy advice by changing how people conceptualize their identities and interests. For my money, this position defined by these two points is utterly incoherent.

—-

BTW, Lawrence Stewart @95 – Locke famously did not provide a ‘defence of the limitless acquisition of private property’. There was a non-spoliation/non-waste proviso, and even given money to provide a ‘store of value’ – on which he took a distinctly Graebnerian view, regarding the institution of money as involving a social contract – there was the ‘enough and as good’ proviso which has been variously interpreted, but certainly places limits on acquisition.

@127 ” Locke famously did not provide a ‘defence of the limitless acquisition of private property’. ”

That’s a fair cop. Would you give me Smith?

Lawrence S – less confidently, I’d say not; surely not explicitly. I don’t think he covered that kind of territory, really. Depending what kinds of ‘limitation’ are to be ruled out (express and implied? de facto and de jure?) for something approaching the full fruitcake openly presented I think you’d need to look to Austria, really, or a certified loon like Rand.

Which is not, of course, to say various useful savants haven’t written things very helpful to those wanting to resist any limits being put on (their own) appropriation.

AK – you would still need to counter your political adversaries’ narrative of events

I agree and don’t think I’ve said anything to the contrary. Exposing the power relations underlying the failure to heed warnings etc. ought to make it easier to challenge the undeserved special status of these peoples’ claims and (apparent) presuppositions.

I meant to explicitly query that since I thought it could go either way – apologies to PA should they be required. The aside about vomitoria was in response to something (can’t recall what) that I read on or via CT – PA’s name genuinely did remind me of it.

As I read him, though he does make one remark which might suggest such a superstitious attitude to belief, I don’t think he does do that sidestep. He suggests that the public choice stuff is necessarily ineffective if correct; that doesn’t mean the same applies to ordinary political economy. Maybe I’ve applied a bit too much charity in reconstructing the argument, but that’s how I read it – basically, governors are not in a position to govern themselves so providing them with information whose only application is to governing governers is pointless.

Sorry to inject a bit of pedantry into this excellent discussion (which I have not quite finished reading), but this:

The problem with this is that it’s clearly magical: no scientist will admit to really believing that the past somehow sends informational rays into the present. The extra elements embodying memory, let’s call them the non-linear variables, are moreover purely statistical artefacts. Not are no real-world analogues known, they’re not even hypothesised.

Non-linear models are only ever used in the physical sciences as short-cuts to simplify what are understood more fundamentally as linear systems

is, I am sorry, woefully inaccurate. Really, really wrong. In fact, nonlinear behavior is quite the norm in many fields of physics (to say nothing of other fields as well); the one most people are probably best familiar with is the hysteresis of magnetic systems, but there are countless others. Not only is “the past… send[ing] informational rays into the present” a bad characterization, but in fact those rays are “sent” all the time (for sufficiently lenient definitions of “sent”). Physics is full of path-dependent systems, which are not at all “statistical artifacts” (whatever that means).

I think economics as a discipline would do well to note the path-dependency often encountered in physical systems (after all, economists are often derided for having “physics envy” so one might think they’d be more, not less receptive to that point), but it’s really unnecessary to butcher basic science in making this point.

I really have no idea what any of the above is supposed to mean. I’m not sure you do either.

*Now I made…

A climbdown of some grandeur is apparent.

The reason I ask for an fundamentally path-dependent physical law is pretty straightforward: if such a law existed, by definition it would exhibit intertemporal non-locality.

But there are no such laws. And that fact alone is sufficient to conclude that, modeled on the basis of their fundamentals as currently understood, all physical systems evolve based on their current state and no other factors.

Let’s see what it says here:

“There is an interesting analogy between the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity involving apparent non-linearity.”

Note “apparent”.

“Both theories may be considered to be based on a purely linear foundation, represented by the Schrödinger wave equation for quantum mechanics and the flat Minkowski spacetime metric for general relativity. For quantum mechanics we then traditionally imagine something like a “collapse of the wave function” when a measurement takes place, and this operation introduces non-linearity to the theory.”

“Both theories may be considered to be based on a purely linear foundation” — QED, really. But anyway…

Note that A) wave function collapse is a hypothesis rather than an observation, and B) it introduces mathematical non-linearity but not path-dependence into quantum mechanics, unless you count the in this case trivial assertion that the event of wave function collapse is itself path dependence.

Regardless of when an observation is conducted and the wave function is held to have collapsed, the system still evolves thereafter dependent on its then current state and on no other factors — and any instant(s) may be chosen to conduct observations.

Instantaneous evolution is thus always linear, and path dependence can always be circumvented. And quantum mechanics is entirely sufficient on its own to explain apparent hysteresis in ferromagnetic materials without recourse to the concept of system memory so long as it’s modeled as a closed system.

“Analogously in general relativity we imagine “curvature” of the observational spacetime manifold in accord with the non-linear Einstein field equations.

“In the case of quantum mechanics there are alternative interpretations that do not explicitly involve a collapse of the wave-function, and that assume instead that the overall wave function always continues to evolve in accord with the purely linear Schrödinger equation. These are sometimes called “no-collapse” interpretations. According to some variants of this approach, we are asked to imagine a “branching” of the wave function into multiple alternate histories, leading to the so-called “many worlds” or “many histories” interpretations of quantum mechanics. Of course, it’s necessary for these theories to somehow account for the apparent collapse and non-linearity in the course of events. In other words, they must explain why we seem to observe only a single world with a single history. For this purpose, the idea of “decoherence” is sometimes invoked.”

Let’s forget non-linearity as an abstract mathematical concept — it’s path dependence we’re interested in. So, is the evolution of a system contingent on the current state only or is information about its history also needed?

The quoted text indicates that quantum reality is open to interpretations both including and excluding non-linearity. However this gives a misleading impression for the purposes of this argument. Any system evolves on the basis of its current state, and none are inescapably path dependent. That other history-dependent descriptions are possible is interesting but irrelevant — the point is that the current state is sufficent information to account for all that can be accounted for without any action at an intertemporal distance.

The author then goes on to describe a purely linear treatment of general relativity.

“Much less well-known is a somewhat analogous approach to general relativity, which we might call the “no-curvature interpretation”. This also involves “branching” into multiple layers while maintaining purely linear local evolution of each layer.”

The author continues with a detailed description. But I’ve neither any real understanding of this nor interest in it. The point is that so long as it’s characterisable in a linear way it can’t logically exhibit irreducible path-dependence.

All I care about is that, understood at a fundamental level, physical systems evolve on the basis of their current state and nothing else. “Non-linear” is used (correctly, if vaguely) by physicists all the time to refer to path dependence and you had no problem ascertaining that path dependence was what was in fact referred to, but path-dependence is *never* a required element of any model.

But let’s just apply a little common sense to the situation. Take the ferromagnetism example: it consists of fundamental particles governed by all the usual rules, but a quantum model of the crystal would be considered precise for all normal purposes. Where is the memory in this system? It can only reside in the system’s fundamental constituents and none of those embodies memory in its characterisation, or can do, and none requires a non-linear characterisation. The apparent non-linearity is an emergent characteristic, as the linked book illustrates.

The system is however vastly more manageable via a (path-dependent, obviously) hysteresis model. The utility of the hysteresis model lies in abstracting innumerable alterations in the state of the ferromagnetic body from cycle to cycle.

The reason I ask for an fundamentally path-dependent physical law is pretty straightforward: if such a law existed, by definition it would exhibit intertemporal non-locality.

Ok, fine, but even taking this to be the case, why does it matter? It would certainly be scientifically interesting, sure, but seems to me to be besides the point. You’re analogizing economic and physical systems; thus, the fact that we can find non-linear systems that exhibit path dependence should be sufficient for whatever uses you wish to put it to with regard to economic systems as well. After all, these are system-level properties, as you yourself have acknowledged.

But there are no such laws. And that fact alone is sufficient to conclude that, modeled on the basis of their fundamentals as currently understood, all physical systems evolve based on their current state and no other factors.

No! That’s clearly not true! You’re just committing a very bad fallacy of composition. Let’s review: even if the “laws” (and parenthetically I note that it’s not terribly well-specified what counts as a “law” here, but it doesn’t matter too much for now) themselves are perfectly linear, once you compose a number of linear elements into a full-blown system, you can and do get nonlinear behavior. Ergo: physical systems do not evolve, on large timescales, based just on their current state. Or to put it in other words, microscopic reversibility is not equivalent to macroscopic reversibility: the dye never unmixes from the water. You may pejoratively refer to these things as “statistical artifacts” but I don’t know why you would do so, or what relevance it has. The second law of thermodynamics is in fact as much a “law” as Maxwell’s equations.

Let’s see what it says here:

“There is an interesting analogy between the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity involving apparent non-linearity.”

Note “apparent”.

Yes, in the words of the author. Hardly definitive.

“Both theories may be considered to be based on a purely linear foundation, represented by the Schrödinger wave equation for quantum mechanics and the flat Minkowski spacetime metric for general relativity. For quantum mechanics we then traditionally imagine something like a “collapse of the wave function” when a measurement takes place, and this operation introduces non-linearity to the theory.”

“Both theories may be considered to be based on a purely linear foundation” — QED, really. But anyway…

Not QED at all (pun intended?). There’s a really important sentence that you left out: “Of course, it’s necessary for these theories to somehow account for the apparent collapse and non-linearity in the course of events.” So none of this saves you actually, because you still have to translate it back into the world of measurements and so on.

From my reading of that page, what the author is proposing is a common trick in physics. Namely, you can’t solve a problem in some primal space, so you transform into a dual space where the problem is tractable, solve there, and then transform back. The most straightforward example is the Fourier transform between time and frequency, but it occurs to me that the many-worlds interpretation and the author’s proposed “no-curvature general relativity” (for which, by the way, I couldn’t find a cite anywhere, leading me to suspect that this isn’t exactly a popular theory) are the same way. You don’t like the non-linearity of “standard” GR so you do a transformation into another space where you’ve eliminated that problem. But of course there is no free lunch; what you win in killing non-linear terms, you lose by having to consider these “multiple slices.” I have no idea if this actually works or not, in this case; I’m not a good enough topologist to tell. But even if it does work, it buys you nothing because you still have to come back to the original world and display the result of a calculation.

Note that A) wave function collapse is a hypothesis rather than an observation, and B) it introduces mathematical non-linearity but not path-dependence into quantum mechanics, unless you count the in this case trivial assertion that the event of wave function collapse is itself path dependence.

Well, it’s all hypothesis in some sense. I remain agnostic about what the “true” interpretation of QM is; so far, I haven’t seen anything that would have prompted me to commit to anything more than Bohr’s “shut up and calculate” program. In other words, insofar as “wave function collapse” is even a thing, I view it as a sort of useful metaphor. It’s just kind of a stand-in for “measurement” where “measurement” is mathematically “projection of a state onto an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian.” I freely admit that I am not an expert in foundational QM; that’s quite a distance from what I did in grad school. But it’s still a huge stretch to go from the various interpretations of QM to claiming that non-linearity doesn’t exist in physics or is some kind of fantasy.

Regardless of when an observation is conducted and the wave function is held to have collapsed, the system still evolves thereafter dependent on its then current state and on no other factors — and any instant(s) may be chosen to conduct observations.

Instantaneous evolution is thus always linear, and path dependence can always be circumvented. And quantum mechanics is entirely sufficient on its own to explain apparent hysteresis in ferromagnetic materials without recourse to the concept of system memory so long as it’s modeled as a closed system.

Ok, but you’re still just noting that microscopic reversibility is not the same as macroscopic reversibility. As for the last part of that, I don’t understand what “quantum mechanics… on its own” is supposed to be. As opposed to what? Hysteresis is the response of a ferromagnetic system to an applied field, that’s all. You get that response by writing down the exchange Hamiltonian and adding a term representing the interaction with the applied field. So there’s quantum mechanics. What you find is that once you parametrize your problem with respect to time, you get those hysteretic, i.e. path-dependent effects.

Let’s forget non-linearity as an abstract mathematical concept — it’s path dependence we’re interested in. So, is the evolution of a system contingent on the current state only or is information about its history also needed?

The answer to that question depends on the timescale involved. At very small timescales, you only need the last state. But at large timescales, you need the whole history.

The quoted text indicates that quantum reality is open to interpretations both including and excluding non-linearity. However this gives a misleading impression for the purposes of this argument. Any system evolves on the basis of its current state, and none are inescapably path dependent. That other history-dependent descriptions are possible is interesting but irrelevant — the point is that the current state is sufficent information to account for all that can be accounted for without any action at an intertemporal distance.

What does “inescapably” mean in this context? If I’m right about the maneuver attempted by the author of the above post, and if I’m also right about the analogy between dual-space transformations and various interpretations of QM, then you might “escape” path-dependence, but only if you’re prepared to give up something else, much like you can’t get the results of QM and a local hidden variable theory at the same time. Something has to give. Equally pressing is the problem of coming back from your dual space into the primal space you started with.

The problem with relying on the next microstate to be obtained even deterministically from the previous one is that it doesn’t scale. This is why non-linear systems go chaotic. No matter how good your computational equipment, sooner or later trajectories which differ by even the tiniest amount of noise may diverge exponentially, so following a single trajectory through such a space is pretty pointless. But that doesn’t mean you can’t say something about the long-term trends of the system.

The author then goes on to describe a purely linear treatment of general relativity.

“Much less well-known is a somewhat analogous approach to general relativity, which we might call the “no-curvature interpretation”. This also involves “branching” into multiple layers while maintaining purely linear local evolution of each layer.”

As I said before, I read this as a common trick (not used pejoratively here) from physics. You buy linearity at the cost of layers. Fine, let’s say it works. So what?

The author continues with a detailed description. But I’ve neither any real understanding of this nor interest in it. The point is that so long as it’s characterisable in a linear way it can’t logically exhibit irreducible path-dependence.

The problem is in the word “irreducible.” You’ve made a trade is what you’ve really done. Maybe it’s a good trade to make for computational reasons, but that’s all it is. That’s why the “logically” part doesn’t follow from what you’ve said; at best, you can say that you could reformulate the question in a non-linear fashion but at the expense of some other variable. That doesn’t mean that either linearity or non-linearity are “fundamental,” it means that you have to give in order to receive.

Let’s put it another way. Forgetting about larger questions concerning time, is time or frequency “more fundamental” in signal analysis? After all, you can transform at will between the two domains with a Fourier transform. So just as easily, I could say that signals are characterizable without regard to time. Have I thereby eliminated time or rendered it less fundamental because I’m able to work in a dual space that doesn’t use it? Of course not; I’ve merely made the same sort of trade.

All I care about is that, understood at a fundamental level, physical systems evolve on the basis of their current state and nothing else. “Non-linear” is used (correctly, if vaguely) by physicists all the time to refer to path dependence and you had no problem ascertaining that path dependence was what was in fact referred to, but path-dependence is *never* a required element of any model.

The problem is that your “not required” works only in a particular space. It’s quite clearly required if you want to do GR the “standard” way. Or to put it another way: what’s required is some mechanism that gets you the same results. If you work in the “primal” space, then you’re stuck with non-linearity. If you work in some other dual space where you’ve ditched non-linearity, then you’re stuck with some other feature that had better reproduce all those results when you come back to the primal. That doesn’t mean either of the two spaces is “fundamental” in any real sense.

But let’s just apply a little common sense to the situation. Take the ferromagnetism example: it consists of fundamental particles governed by all the usual rules, but a quantum model of the crystal would be considered precise for all normal purposes. Where is the memory in this system? It can only reside in the system’s fundamental constituents and none of those embodies memory in its characterisation, or can do, and none requires a non-linear characterisation. The apparent non-linearity is an emergent characteristic, as the linked book illustrates.

Yes, but again, so what? The memory is an aspect of microscopic behavior, this we know already and it was never in doubt. That very block above just says: you can take a bunch of simple elements and combine them into a complex system whose properties are not themselves properties of any individual elements within the system. Which is what I’ve been saying.

The system is however vastly more manageable via a (path-dependent, obviously) hysteresis model. The utility of the hysteresis model lies in abstracting innumerable alterations in the state of the ferromagnetic body from cycle to cycle.

Of course we make approximations for the purposes of tractability. I still don’t see path-dependence as some horrible kludge imposed from above on otherwise innocent models. It’s just the outcome of what happens when you write down equations that scale to the system level, in certain systems. Why is this supposed to be weird?

What I don’t get most of all is what this is all supposed to get us with respect to economics. If relatively simple systems like magnets can exhibit path-dependent effects (which, I continue to maintain, are real, for all that they are macroscopic properties of a system), how much more so human minds or societies? It’s pretty obvious that our lives are path dependent; we do the things we do, in no small portion, because we are influenced by the past and what that past has made us (case in point: had I not gone to grad school in physics, I might not be here typing up overly long technical comments on Crooked Timber). All of this seems to have started from a kind of weird statement you made way up at comment #125, where you called non-linearities a sort of magic. I took the entire surrounding post to be a commentary on the failure of economic models to deal with that sort of path-dependence properly, and all I really wanted to do was to note that non-linearity is not a magical kludge, that scientists do take it seriously, and that path-dependence in physics is a real thing. Insofar as economics wants to be like physics (not saying that’s actually desirable, although many economists seem to think so), then it should take path-dependence more seriously than it does.

This discussion is completely lost. The current state IS the memory of what has happened, or is your bank account recreated every minute? So long as movements in one direction are easier than movements in another direction, random permutations in the path significantly determine the future path. Or is the earth just a cloud of dust?

Basically all that path dependence means IN THIS CONTEXT is that the if we are forcasting the world 10 years ahead then knowing the current state lets us make a better estimate than if we only know the state 10 years ago – so history matters! This is at odds with the mean reverting properties of equilibrium models which are popular in economics.

BTW, this kind of issue in physics goes back at least to the Eleatic paradoxes – see. e.g. ARE THERE REALLY INSTANTANEOUS VELOCITIES?. Presumably AK would say either that point velocities do really exist as part of the inventory of states at a given time, or that such properties are not ontologically fundamental, and that at a quantum level this issue doesn’t arise (I don’t know enough about QM to see how this could be the case).

For ‘path-dependence’ in economics, Axtell in The Complexity of Exchange points out, in essence, that the classical Walrasian equilibrium is quite radically unrealistic, requiring in effect a perfect central planner for its implementation.

When the free market is subjected to the same modest degree of realism that its proponents use to rubbish the idea of central planning, a different picture emerges. In this slightly less unrealistic model, Pareto-optimality (or P-efficiency), which gets treated as an equilibrium state (and is, in a sense), is shown to be path-dependent in the sense (IIU&RC) that a given distributed (i.e. less unrealistic) system may reach ‘Pareto-optimality’ by any of a number of routes, and that the underlying states of the system on which ‘Pareto-optimality’ supervenes can (and in fact generally will) differ. I think a term like ‘Pareto-exhaustion’ might be more apt to describe this property, which doesn’t encode much information about the underlying allocation at all.

There is nothing very mysterious about this – I’d always thought it obvious that Pareto-optima are in reality local and generally incommensurable (by a Pareto standard); and that Pareto-optimality is thus not really a useful or interesting property, nor one with much claim to a place in the ontology of the ‘market’.

I’m not sure that Axtell, whose focus is not really quite the same as mine, entirely appreciates this, since at one point (have checked, it’s p6) he compares pareto-optimality as instantiated in Walrasian equilibria (which IIUC are deterministic and thus unique) with Pareto optimality as achieved by a realistic – distributed – process of market trade in which the hidden free lunch of the Walrasian planner is unavailable, and states:

if computation is costly then when two equally efficient (i.e., Pareto optimal) market mechanisms having significantly different computational complexity are competing, the one ultimately selected will be the least costly one, i.e., the one requiring the least number of computations

The statement that if two distributions both share the ‘Pareto-optimality’ property, that means they are equally ‘efficient’ is really not justifiable, because here ‘efficient’ is being used in an ordinary sense, not in the highly specialised, unintuitive Pareto sense. Note that Axtell states: While Walrasian exchange has no effect on the wealth of individual agents—that is, Walras’ law holds—in distributed exchange environments some agents gain wealth while others lose it.

Do you really mean that if I place a 78 of Heartaches by the Number by 1950s easy listening star Guy Mitchell on the gramophone player it actually retrieves the great man’s voice from the depths of time? Or that, when I look at his image on the mantlepiece, instead of looking at a photograph I’m instead gazing directly upon his angelic face? I’d always considered these simply as encoded information no more connected to the events they record than entries in an accountant’s ledger are to the transactions to which they refer.

Human memory has subjective and objective facets, but is otherwise identical in principle. The subjective features are private to each individual: they aren’t shareable and (for the purposes of this conversation, fortunately) science has nothing to say about them. Reasoning not based on observation, such as induction, enables contingent conclusions to be drawn about the subjective elements but the answers they provide are naturally themselves subjective.

The objective features of brain function are more straightforward and can be observed via EEG traces, CAT or NMR scans and so on. By observing the effects of brain injuries or illnesses, of ECT, of various drugs, or of electrical stimulation of the cortex, it’s possible to see the objective effects of destroying or interrupting either the encoded information or of the means of reconstruction.

Absolute objectivity can be retained by observing alterations in subsequent behaviour and correlating these with the specific brain impact, subject to assumptions not normally controversial about causation which iteratively gain statistical weight.

Alternatively, the resultant information may be synthesised with the inductive reasoning already mentioned to draw more general conclusions contingent only on everyday assumptions about equivalence of basic psychological experiences. But this really isn’t necessary because to refuse solipsistically to believe in the subjective recollections of someone affected by brain trauma requires a refusal to believe they ever had recollections in the first place.

None of these observations suggest there’s any difference in principle between memory and those relics of Mitchell that are so dear to my heart. There isn’t the slightest reason to assume anything other than the obvious: that the record, the photograph and the objective aspects of memory each involve encodings recorded once and preserved informationally down to the present day. If the information is lost once it is lost forever. On the other hand, the means of reconstruction may be interrupted any number of times and yet successfully resumed later.

When Johnny is drunk and can’t find his way home, no doctor will agree that he has lost some mystical connection to the past any more than she would celebrate its retrieval when he sobers up. I don’t think anyone has believed otherwise since Descartes’ time.

The memory is not in any collective dynamics. It’s in an encoding. But I take it you either don’t contend, or no longer contend, that human memory requires a non-linear explanation.

So-far you’ve provided one (1) system you claimed to be non-linear, namely magnetic hysteresis, only to drop it when it was demonstrated to be linear when described more fundamentally. Are you at any point going to introduce a second into the conversation? Will I need to ask many more times?