http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000029/002930eo.pdf

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001631/163170e.pdf

Given that many of the critics have a very good record of prediction, this looks like another railroading exercise.

Worth mentioning as well that Mr Finklestein is part of a large number of “serious people” from George Osbourne down to (apparently) yourself who seem unwilling to level with themselves that their model of how the economy works is wrong, especially for the long term. See Jonathan Portes latest if you need more evidence.

It sounds very grown up to talk about “no pain, no gain” but in fact it’s simply a platitude. If the pain isn’t a result of the right activities, it will in fact lead to no gain.

thank you for your last post, I don’t think we are going to agree.

Being imperfect humans are incapable of acquiring or expressing perfect, all encompassing knowledge.

It is unfortunate that many of the early pioneers of the scientific method and the Enlightenment acquired their education from institutions that were deeply committed to the belief that humans could acquire and express perfect knowledge.

The emergence and development of the scientific method is a continuing acknowledgement of the empirical fact that they can’t.

Two words in the quote you extracted from my last post are key, they are ‘objective’ and ‘verifiable’.

Philosophy and its offspring Religion, Politics and the Law may occasionally avail themselves of the services of Science but they have never fully accepted self criticism based on objectivity or external verifiability – if, indeed, they have ever accepted them at all.

Wittgenstein (probable wrong spelling) was extremely hostile to the notion that the methods of Science were of any use in solving philosophical problems, while one of his mentors (Bertrand Russell) was part of a movement that sought to apply developments in formal logic and mathematics to the dissection and understanding of philosophical propositions.

Economics belongs to Science, but its methods and insights have been have put to perverted uses by politicians just as with Physics and Chemistry to produce sarin gas and the atomic bomb.

You write “The Enlightenment rested on the belief that human powers of reason could access objective, verifiable explanations of the world about us and that we would be better for it.”

I feel that it is this core belief that troubles me

I feel that it is safer to take the skeptical attitude of Carl Popper regarding any belief structure

One of many quotes might be “The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition by having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them.”

It is this lack of the quality of self criticism that I find in the attitudes of “Hayekian” economics which leads me to presume that it is an ideology rather than an empirical science.

But then science is an imperfect self questioning ideology

hmmmmm…..

I have to pick up on your take on Economics (interesting use of capitalisation by the way).

My position on this is that Economics is a science that describes relationships and processes relating to how value passes through a society, between groups and individuals.

No one can really argue that it is not a ‘work in progress’.

Now, as for the idealogy part, this is something that has been ‘bolted on’ or ‘wrapped around’ Economics.

For the most part the movements that have sought to harness Economics to their cause have done so by attempting to control what processes and relationships will be allowed to exist within a given economy.

I think it is reasonable to suggest that these efforts rested on presumptions about human nature, individual human worth and/or the scale of the resources needed to make these presumptions come to being.

All too often these presumptions have proved to be either too optimistic, too pessimistic or just plain disingenuous manipulation.

The Enlightenment rested on the belief that human powers of reason could access objective, verifiable explanations of the world about us and that we would be better for it.

This is very far from claiming that any individual or group could posses any degree of ‘perfect knowledge’.

We need also to distinguish between ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’. The first is an internal thing, the latter is an external thing.

Many of the problems in modern societies are rooted in pandering to disruptive individual and group rationality that doesn’t synch with wider (objective) tests of what is rerasonable.

Over to you……