Babes in Economics Land

Late last month, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a criticism of Ivanka Trump, who had said she was against the idea of a guaranteed minimum wage because "I don't think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. ... People want to work for what they get. So, I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want."Ocasio-Cortez responded, "A living wage isn't a gift, it's a right. Workers are often paid far less than the value they create."

This random proclamation will undoubtedly be translated by her fans and critics as a restatement of Marx's Labor Theory of Value which states that the profits of production were taken from the worker who provided the product's value and given to others, capitalists, which raised the product's cost out of the very worker-creator's grasp and created a separation, an alienation, between the worker and his work. It is a pillar, perhaps the pillar, of Marxism.

As with all of these revolutionary utopias, there are obvious problems. What about the capital expenses, the land, the engineering costs? It goes on and on. What about the shortstop or the painter, how is his value calculated?

The insight came from Carl Menger, who eventually created the Austrian School, and others who argued that value was subjective. Rather than the labor input that created it, value of a good emerges from human perceptions of its usefulness for the particular ends that people had at a particular point in time. Value is not something objective and transcendent. It is a function of the role that an object plays as a means toward the ends that are part of human purposes and plans.

So Marx was turned on his head: The value of inputs like labor were determined by the value of the outputs they helped to produce. Labor gets rewarded according to its ability to produce things that others value.

Probably beyond AOC's survey course. But you can always smooth over the rough edges with a little violence.

Conflict

The election is barely over and the Left immediately runs into the traffic. Why is this? What is this animosity that the Left always displays in every conclave, every meeting, every event? Why does the Right so often seem to be overwhelmed, barely hanging on, before the Left's outraged and ceaseless challenges? Even now, with an astonishing election over for a just few days and everyone barely able to catch their breath, the Left is growling on the TV and in the street.

There are many characteristics the Left has--sincere belief in un-provable things, a main one--but the significant distinction of the Left is its heritage of the belief in progress in conflict. Ever since Hegel, the Left has seen the present and the future as a product of an unseen thread of history made flesh by conflict. The present and the future is the result of the defeat of the tired and completed icons of the past. But, while that defeat is inevitable, it is always incomplete. And, as the purges, violence, executions, mass murders, burnings attest, this is a death march, a constant flint-eyed execution of the present to create the future. The dialectic is more than a method, it is a state of being. The present is a crucible. Conflict is all.

And with conflict as the mid-wife, compromise is a true waste of time.

Nagel and Materialism

Materialism is all the rage. The world is flooded with new takes on history and psychology interpreted through the materialistic filter. This does not come from philosophy, although it is doubtful that dialectic materialism vampire will ever die, it comes from science. It seeps in to all things academic. Art is chaos theory. Fiction, serious fiction, acts like it will never be the same. Jerry Coyne wrote, “The view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics must be true unless you’re religious.” (He is including here the so-called soft sciences of psychology and the like.)

Certainly science is presenting us with some serious problems. Time and space are tumbled and spilled like a broken kaleidoscope. In fiction this has created a world notable for its lack of depth, its arbitrariness and its juxtaposition. This often makes for difficult reading as the reader's life is not reflected in this view. The reader may be a random victim, may have life beyond his control but he is locked into certain structures and strictures. He does experience a timeline. He will be older tomorrow. He will have responsibilities, regardless of how Kafkaesque. And despite of the goofiness of life, he wants to live. The novelist's world may be an accurate reflection of current physics, it may not accurately reflect the life of the reader.

There are two curiosities here. The first is uncertainty: It cuts both ways so there should be some option for an alternative. The second is wonder. If string theory is an accurate description of the world, how can that ever be understood? When the astronomer says that the black hole NGC1365 has the mass of 2 million suns with the energy that is given off by a billion stars burning for a billion years, who would dare develop a concept to contain that?

Materialism has not become more clarifying and some are getting uncomfortable. Heisenberg-like, some uncertainty has appeared. Thomas Nagel, in his new book Mind and Cosmos writes, “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012. But Nagel is no fool. Nor is he a theist.

An interesting suggestion has emerged to reconcile all the problems that materialism has revealed in our age of the uncertainty principle: Faith.

Doppelganger 2

Again, on Mr. Obama at the National Defense University. He seemed to define his doppelganger presidency a bit more clearly--at least as a technique if not a philosophy. He spoke against drones as if someone else was launching them, Gitmo as if some other country controlled it. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on the Web site Lawfare: “To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has — but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.”

But his most interesting pronouncement came on his assessment of the War on Terror that someone is waging. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Mr. Obama said in the speech at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.” One could spend all day analyzing this goofy section but the zenith of its goofiness is the implication that war is some sort of affliction, like smoking or fasting or chicken pox, that is subject to natural or philosophical laws. To the contrary, war is an insane agreement involving at least two groups that promises to kill, maim and destroy as many of the enemy's people as possible. The very idea that this is somehow under some civilized and civilizing political or natural law should be offensive to all thinking people. The naive notion that wars "end" by some force other than the destruction of one of the participants should not be publicly uttered by someone in national office.

But this idea has some history, if you will. Historicism, Doppelganger 1 and Reductionism, Doppelganger 2. The  historicist positions claims that there is an inevitable and deterministic pattern to history and, importantly--especially in this context, denies individual responsibility of each one of us to make our own free contributions to the evolution of society. Reductionism is the belief that all phenomena are reducible to smaller components, in Obama's situation groups and economics, which determine behavior, again diminishing the influence and value of the individual and his efforts.

What does the man in the most powerful position in the world think? That the war is in the fourth quarter and someone else controls the clock.

The Church of Materialism

“If there were a philosophical Vatican,” Simon Blackburn declared in the New Statesman, “the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.”

The Book? Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel. The rub? Nagel, an avowed atheist and a professor of philosophy and of law at New York University with terrific standing in the scientific community, suggests that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and offers thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained by, its material dimensions. While “there is really no reason to assume that the only alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one,” he writes, “this may not be comforting enough” for the materialist establishment, which may find it impossible to tolerate also “any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and non-accidental part.”

"Comforting enough?" The establishment has gone nuts.  "The shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker." (Pinker)  "A bad book like this, by philosopher with a good name, gives philosophers in general a bad name." (Alwin)  "..will certainly lend comfort (and sell a lot of copies) to the religious enemies of Darwinism." ----the financial motive dismissal (Dupres)  "No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.."---no kidding (Leiter and Weisberg)


In The New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr concedes that it is not at all obvious how consciousness could have originated out of matter. He then cites Colin McGinn’s suggestion that our “cognitive limitations” may prevent us from grasping the evolution of mind from matter: “even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.” Soooooo.....we should accept materialistic explanation on ....what? You guessed it: Faith! A solution as old as man to the God problem now must be applied to the materialism problem.

There is a lot of wonderfully ironic stuff here as you go through the responses to this book. The reviews are painful cries of tortured men. And there is no answer evident. But it is enlightening to see supposed "outside the box" thinkers congeal into a regiment and walk in lockstep as soon as possible. And heaven--or materialism--help you if you transgress the dogma.