Gregor.us

You might like 'Hare Brain Tortoise Mind' by Guy Claxton.
Ref economics paradigms, how is the systems economics e.g. Benhecker's 'the Origin of Wealth' perceived now? Seemed very sensible and different to me.

aha. Now I know what u meant by your epiphany tweet. You are a prose stylist, a kind of poet, and a good writer. The best prose writers are poets and all that. I enjoy reading you and watching you think.

However, it pains me to hear poor sods from cog psych try to reinvent what Aristotle called simply thinking about thinking with truly awkward neologisms and poor, well nigh bankrupt metaphors. These poor lads need an epiphany as much as any slave of Samuelson dogma. I feel like poor Stephen Daedulus in the peripatetic phase of that yammering old high classical modernist classic by that forgotten old writer. You know what I mean. I know you do. As Stephen says with perfect and comic tautological phrasing, "thinking is thinking about thinking." 'nugh said.

And the better part of good writing, speaking, and thinking is the joke of it, the fluency of it., the whimsy in rigor. That is the point of it. I see that in your work, and it is room to breathe. The fresh air of science and poetry, of thinking in the large.

I suspect that you are and I fully support you in allying yourself with these gentlemen because they are a part of the times we live in. But old Hayek is smiling wryly, as these are the late, late victims of a "scientism" that has so overtaken them that they have no purchase on metaphor, let alone poetry. The way this lad uses the word "machine" without the slightest trace of irony speaks volumes. He appears as yet another literalist. His language, the very words he uses and the way he uses them are bad poetry. Dogmatic scientism and physics envy has hobbled Economics, but this is not the thorn that will remove the thorn.
This kid needs a bop on the head or an epiphany to jar him.

The epiphany that I was thinking of, wickedly funny enough to be worthy of your poetry of oil, is the coming of the wise men from the east. May they bring poetry. May we never use the word machine without a sense of how that metaphor has been built up by the labor of ages. Ah, labor and value. Now those are words for a poet.

Thanks again.

Cheers. I don't mind seeing everything recycled and offered either transparently as something recycled or if it's fobbed off as something new. Since I do come from a Poetry background, it's rare to see a poet demonstrate as much understanding, for example, of the mechanics of Sound as John Milton demonstrated. And then if someone does demonstrate as much understanding, then they are immediately compared to Milton. Also, as no doubt you are aware or perhaps have done yourself, you can draw the family tree of the various poets, and see from whom each one took/stole for their own purposes.

I grant that everyone glorifies their discipline, and that "it's all been done before." But, you know, I'm probably not going to begrudge the physicists just because the Atomists pre-date them.

But sure, I hear ya.

All I ask is to pick up the paper someday and see your average academic economist giving better consideration to the totality of the situation. I truly had no idea how narrowly defined they'd made themselves.

G

Aha. I knew you were a poet and I guessed that you knew that one about poets making the best prose writers;more recycled coinage that Nietzsche fobbed from some Ancient.

I take your point exactly, and I wholly support it. That we should be monsters of recycling, the Optimus Primes of scientisms. We should eat up all this toxic sludge of literalism until we are as blue in the face as the money printers of neologisms, of the new coins of the realm. That we might digest the sciences and become fluent in them and make use of them.

I was trying to say that I pointedly take the way you frame your postings and blog writing and your twitter argot. It shows a fluency that is the ringing true of understanding. And it provokes understanding with the way you frame things. It is all in the framing. The Passagen-Werk.

I almost see the essence of your poetry of oil as "the only that is true in the markets and in war are the bluffs and the exaggerations." That is the way I take all your talk about reflation, about the money printing, in the form of jest or exaggeration. I could hem and haw and hedge and say that surely you must be joking with all this talk of a world currency or of the sovereign debt crisis of those great pioneers of credit, those sons of Albion. But I rather enjoy the provocation.

Keep it up. I am trying to do some recycling myself. back to the junkyard for me.