Comments on: A Grand Pursuit

By: michael roberts

michael roberts — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 06:35:39 +0000

It was the holidays and there were some interesting passages on social conditions in 19th century Britain and the responses of various mainstream economists to that. But yes some time wasted.
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By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 05:50:17 +0000

Michael, I have to say I’m quite perplexed as to why, exactly, you might have even considered wasting a moment’s time on such execrable nonsense as this. While Keynes may very well have failed to actually read Volume One of Capital, it would appear that Nasar’s Lexile count would be inadequate to the task of reading the CliffsNotes for The Manifesto of the Communist Party:

http://coreyrobin.com/2012/08/14/the-vulgarity-of-sylvia-nasars-beautiful-mind/

By: bob montgomery

bob montgomery — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:21:55 +0000

Re Nash’s theory and his repudiation of it as a function of his own illness

“Adam Curtis (Century of the Self) has a new documentary, The Trap, which examines game theory and the Prisoners Dilemma as the strategic underpinning of the Cold War, based on the belief that humans are alone, act in their own self interest, and make rational choices – and will always betray. A Rand study showed the opposite, that humans cooperate and make the choice not to betray, but no matter – the analysts simply believed they had chosen unfit subjects but the model was correct. The theory came from work of John Nash, a paranoid schizophrenic deeply suspicious of everyone around him. He later repudiated his own theories as part of his illness. Curtis believes that this mathematical model of society, run on data and based on an exaggerated notion of human selfishness, (and the economic theories of von Hayek) has created a ‘cage’ for the Western world”. From Suzi Weissman (http://suziweissman.com/?q=node/205)

By: bob montgomery

bob montgomery — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:52:12 +0000

Sylvia Nasar wrote the book, “A Beautiful Mind” about the brilliant but schizophrenic mathematician, John Nash (I believe). A very telling lacuna her in Nash bio is her uncritical praise for Nash’s “Game Theory.” John Nash himself has repudiated the work for which he won the Nobel prize on the grounds that he employed an unexamined notion of human rationality as driven by self-interest and possessive cupidity. I think Nash’s repudiation is on Youtube & it appears in the BBC series, “The Trap.” So it seems she may be predisposed to dismiss any thinker critical of capitalism as, at best, wrong headed.

By: michael roberts

michael roberts — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:10:12 +0000

Ezra

Yes, I’m sure you are right, knowing who they were.

By: Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:29:39 +0000

“Keynes was an upper class snob with all the class prejudices, despite associating with (upper-class) Bohemian artists and poets.” Despite? Or: in the manner of the Bohemian poets he associated with ?

By: Will

Will — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:46:43 +0000

Nasar’s book sounds even more useless than most works in this genre. Nobody can have a good understanding of the pre-marginalist era without looking at Petty and Quesnay — to say nothing of Smith and Ricardo! And one cannot get a sense of where mainstream economics stands if one ends with Samuelson: we’d need Friedman, Lucas, et al in there to make sense of most economists’ blather. A competent account would also need to say something about the American, German, Post Keynesian, and Institutionalist schools. Since Nasar is clearly concerned with entertaining biographies, she might also have treated Henry George. Alas, dismal all the way down.

By: Edgar

Edgar — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:03:10 +0000

Classic! My dad worked worked in afactory his entire life and was quite taken with Marx’s theory.

Surely the whole point about Marx is that labour productivity explodes, but at the relative expense of workers and with serious imbalances and inefficiencies.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:44:01 +0000

Well Keynes can’t be faulted for lack of honesty. He also didn’t need to read Marx – Keynes needed only to have been influenced by the Fabians, who accorded with his own social and cultural milieu. .

By: Daniel de França

Daniel de França — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 11:52:33 +0000

” Marxism was really the product of a combination of ‘Jewish and Russian natures’.”

That really shows how he never touched not only Das Kapital, but never read anything remotely marxist. It seems he shares traits of the vulgar economists cited by Marx who acted on behalf of the bourgeois discourse.

But it seems that you have a lot of things on his website concerning keynes, so, maybe the picture provided by Nasar is also a bit distorted.