Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Decoding Economic Ideology

Molière’s 1670 play, The Bourgeois Gentleman, presented before the court of Louis XIV, mocked a foolish, social‑climbing merchant. In his effort to remake himself, the merchant takes lessons to help him pass as an aristocrat. In a basic lesson on language, he is both surprised and delighted to learn he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. Almost three and a half centuries later, much of the world finds itself speaking a different language ‑‑ economics ‑‑ also without full awareness.

more at
http://michaelperelman.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/decoding.pdf

4 comments:

  1. It is typical for abstracts to actually summarize the key argument of the essay, not the colorful introduction.

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  2. Michael,
    Heads up. The Read more... link doesn't go any where. Is something more missing?

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  3. Sorry about the broken link. It is not fixed.

    Can, I hoped that the "colorful" introduction will would work better than a typical introduction. I may have been wrong.

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  4. i think these comments relate to what sandwichman is onto recently which is not new, and even has a whole academic industry (conferneces, tenure, journals, associations...) devoted to it, apparently : think progress!!! sustainable growth!!!

    i.e. you can act quantitatively (do some accounting) in the weberian 'rationalization' tradition, and get right to the point, eg in an abstract---except the point (GDP up) may leave out some qualitative characters;

    or, you can have the teary eyed ritual of Confucianism-Kumbaya 'lets have a dinner which i cooked myself today, and it took me all day (i hear billie joe mcallister jumped off the tallahoochie bridge today---so WHY aint you appreciating my homecooked meal, b-tch? ('ode to billie joe' song)) and then once the qualititative introduction has set the stage with all its subjective appreciation, b-tch, we can then discuss any failings of capitalism (via twitter or international conferences, since we retrieved billie joe's wallet and his gold teeth ) eg from keene's debtwatch....---mommy, the probelm ith the meal is you invested in the wrong thing---i only eat organic vegans (eg wild deers).



    diffrent rationalities, strokes for diffrent folks.

    each has their up and downsides---and these evolve. the older generation likes to 'i have a dream' speech replay; the younger ones have reacted i think and follow Ice-T who says next time i hear that sh-t you gonna get blown away.

    (i guess my own tradition is moderate---you plan the meal and ritual starting from some reasonably rational complexity class of algorithms, write it up in a succint fashion (which is why math notation exists), submeit it as a theorem-proof style 150 page paper to econometrica, and then move on to actual implementation of the model. excercize left for the reader. (good for health...)

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