On Markets

Watching an interesting documentary on economics, which pits Keyensian interventionism against von Hyeck and free markets, it strikes me that this tension, which stretched throughout the 20th century, derives from two views of markets: to the free marketeers, markets are forces of nature, not to be controlled, but to be accepted. To the Keyensians, they are a big machine, to be tuned and fiddled with. From where I stand, they are neither. They both miss the fact that markets are us! The issue of how we control them, how we constrain them, these are questions of self-definition. We therefore need to resolve this collectively, and ideology (either) simply will not do!

 

Another farmer….

The Pink Monkey project is underway. Hans Rosling is on board.

 

Madeline

There will be more books written about the media coverage of the Madeline Mc Cann case than will be written about the case itself.

 

Use of the personal pronoun

…might be taken as an index of the health of the Filter Functions of the ACC.  If the ‘I’ mediates between competing social influences, and biological needs, then a healthy self might be signalled by an ease in the use of the term ‘I’.  Switching allegiance between teams and the personal.  That seems plausible.  And then you realize that Johnny switched to the third person.  And that’s a common manifestation.  Again, we can reason our way into these psychotic patterns.

 

Methodological issue

I seem to have argued my way to a point, were every time I use a personal pronoun, I do not know what it means.  This is a legacy problem.  Perhaps we can overcome it.  But it won’t do to try to ring-fence ‘I’ or ‘you’.  One of the biggest pressures on preserving these fictive selves is the issue of moral responsibility.   We insist that adhere to the ‘individual’, and we are bad at recognizing collective responsibility, though we seem to have gotten a bit better at that lately.