ON THIS ONE I AM WITH OBAMA

On this one, I am with Obama. The deal cut by the President with the Republicans is enough to make one sick. Extending the unjustified tax cuts for the super rich is appalling, and my in-box is filled each day with messages from left-liberal political groups urging me to do this or that to help block the deal. [Full disclosure: I also have somehow gotten onto the Republican national Committee's database, and I receive endless postal appeals and robo-phone call "surveys" designed to get me to say whether I prefer Palin or Huckabee or Romney. I am ashamed to be on their list, but I have chosen to leave myself on it because it costs them something to contact me, and every little bit helps.]

NEVERTHELESS: I think it is preferable to a political standoff in which all the Bush tax cuts would end. Let me spend a little time explaining myself, before you remove the link to this blog from your list of favorites and conclude that Wolff has gone over to the dark side [or alternatively, has simply gone senile -- always a threat at my age.]

Since I am a strong believer in making politics personal, I shall begin with some facts about myself. I was awarded tenure at Columbia University in 1964. For the next forty-four years, until my retirement in 2008 from the University of Massachusetts, I had an assured salary that rose steadily, either because of cost of living increases or because of genuine raises, from the $11,000 I received from Columbia in '64 as a tenured Associate Professor to roughly $180,000 that I was earning at the end of my career, thanks to an eleven month administrative salary. [By the way, the CPI calculator tells me that the 2008 equivalent of my 1964 salary is $76,400, so my real salary more than doubled over my long period of tenure -- not bad for an atheistical anarchistic Marxist on the public payroll.] Like countless others in my social and economic class, I have been completely protected from the vagaries of inflation, recession, job layoffs, outsourcing, and the rest. National politics has been, for me, a deadly earnest spectator sport, roughly on a par, emotionally, with college basketball here in Chapel Hill. One of the reasons that I have trouble remembering which years have been boom years and which recession years in America is that I have experienced no noticeable alteration in my personal circumstances as a consequence of the one or the other. There were a series of terrible budget crises at UMass during my thirty-seven years there, but although they resulted at one point in the phones being removed from our faculty offices, and though there was never money for travel or research, the simple fact is that I coasted along happily as though I had an independent income.

Now, with these personal reminiscences on the page, let me turn to the deal that Obama struck with the Republicans. Bad stuff first: The handout to the super rich will continue for two more years. In light of what I have said on this blog in recent months, I am going to take it as given how I feel about that. So what did Obama get in return? Well, all the attention is on the extension of the tax cuts for those referred to as "middle class," which, since it includes households with net taxable annual income of less than a quarter of a million, means, by my way of thinking, a great many rich people as well as "struggling middle class families." This is, all by itself, a good thing for the economy, since taking all of that money out of the economy in the form of higher taxes would have an anti-stimulus effect. But Obama got two other things as well. He got an extension of unemployment benefits for two million out of work Americans for another thirteen months. These people are hurting, and those benefits are desperately needed to put food on the table and clothes of peoples backs. All of it, we can assume, will be spent right away, providing a maximum amount of stimulation to the faltering economy.

And -- in many ways the biggest gain of all -- Obama got a one year reduction in the FICA or social security tax levied on the paychecks of working Americans. Let us please remember that for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, many of whom pay no income taxes, the payroll tax is a huge regressive bite into their meager incomes. If I understand what I have read, that tax will be cut roughly a third or a bit less, for a period of a year.

These people have been completely forgotten in all the political talk about "the middle class." To have secured some benefit, however short-lived, for them is in my eyes a political triumph.

Now, how will this play out politically? I do not think there is any doubt that it will help the Republicans, who will be perceived as having faced down the President. The appalling Mitch McConnell will gloat. John Boehner, the George Hamilton of politics, will preen himself and probably weep. We on the left will gnash our teeth and take antacids to counteract the bile in our stomachs. But millions of poor and middle income Americans will get a break when they need it.

Worn down teeth and a bilious stomach seem to me a small price to pay for forty-five years of secure comfort.

So, on this one, I am with Obama.

SOME COMMENTS ON THE BOOKS

Herewith a few comments on the books I recommended dealing with the modern mathematical reinterpretation of Marx's economic theories. The comments make it clear that there are many other more recent works that I have failed to keep up with. All additions and comments gratefully accepted.

1. Piero Sraffa, PRODUCTION OF COMMODITIES BY MEANS OF COMMODITIES This is an extraordinary work, totally different from CAPITAL in tone and style, but fully as compelling and distinctive. Sraffa writes as though he were a monk who, after forty years of meditation on the scriptures, now begins softly, without haste, to speak. The first sentence of the little book is: "Let us consider an extremely simple society which produces just enough to maintain itself." As I remarked, the math is dead simple, but Sraffa, like many theorists, omits intermediate steps quite often, with the result that it sometimes took me hours to read a page, reconstructing the steps and refusing to move on until I understood exactly how each step followed from the one before. Reading the book was an intellectual [and dare I say it, spiritual] experience for me quite like any other.

2. Michio Morishima, MARX'S ECONOMICS I found this a difficult book to work through, and you might want to move on to some of the others, but it played an important role in the development of the movement.

3. Luigi Pasinetti, GROWTH AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION and LECTURES ON THE THEORY OF PRODUCTION. I found Pasinetti very helpful. His writing is quite accessible, albeit rigorous. He is especially good at making the connections between Marx and his predecessors -- most notably Ricardo and the Physiocrats. He even includes an appendix in which he presents the elements of linear algebra.

4. Andras Brody, PROPORTIONS, PRICES, AND PLANNING. I found this a fascinating book for two reasons: First of all, Brody was writing in Hungary, during a time when the government was engaging in economic planning, so, unlike all of the other authors, he is actually concerned with the application of the theory to practice; and Second, in total contrast to all the other authors, Brody worries about whether the units in an equation are compatible. This may seem like a rather minor matter, but I found it quite helpful and refreshing.

5. Abraham-Frois and Berrebi, THEORY OF VALUE, PRICES AND ACCUMULATION. A difficult but important book, that includes a very helpful discussion of joint production, a problem in linear production models on which a lot of ink has been spilled. One of the curious and interesting things in the book is an extremely arcane analysis of a special case in which one of Marx's central propositions holds true. Roughly speaking, the story is this: In explaining why prices deviate from labor values in the general case in which there is not equal organic composition of capital in all industries [the case analyzed in Volume One of CAPITAL], Marx argues that the identity of profit and surplus value is maintained in the economy as a whole. It turns out that this is not true generally, but is true, remarkably enough, just in case the economy is embarked on a von Neumann balanced growth path. [This involves there being no luxury consumption, all profits being plowed back into capital expansion -- "Accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the Prophets to the capitalists" as Marx says in one wonderful passage.] It had been thought that this was the necessary as well as the sufficient condition for Marx's claim to be true, but Abraham-Frois and Berrebi show that there is a very obscure situation, having to do with the maximal eigenvalues of the unit input matrix, in which Marx's claim also holds. For the specialist!

6. Ian Steedman, MARX AFTER SRAFFA. This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It is, if I may put it this way, a furiously angry work of mathematics! Steedman is [was?] a British communist who was fed up with his traditionalist colleagues in the Party who insisted on holding to the old bedtime stories about surplus value and all, even after Sraffa had shown that one needed a new, cleaned up version of the critique of capitalism. He plays out all manner of supposed ridiculous conclusions one can draw from the old Marxist story, such as the fact that with joint production, some labor values turn out to be negative. He surely must have been a young man when he wrote this book, and he just cannot contain his scorn for those who hew to the old ways without knowing any math. It is a great read, and lots of fun. By the way, I think he is essentially wrong, but that is a long, long story.

7. John Roemer, ANALYTICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MARXIAN ECONOMIC THEORY. This is a simply terrific book, difficult in its math parts, but absolutely clear in its exposition. One of Roemer's many important insights [which he urged against me in a comment on a paper I wrote and published] is that exploitation is possible even in the absence of a labor market, by way of structures of debt that effectively enslave and exploit workers or peasants. If you are going to read only one book on this list, and are willing to do the work, this might be the best choice.

8. Walsh and Gram, CLASICAL AND NEOCLASSICAL THEORIES OF GENERAL EQUILIBIUM I don't really recommend that you read this, but I include it for two reasons. First of all, when I started reading all this literature, I became very excited about it. At the time, I was very close to Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis, and the other radicals in the UMass econ department. It seemed to me that the success of this alternative approach to economics would require a way of teaching it at the intro level as perspicuous and elegant as that created by Samuelson and others with their familiar little supply and demand curves. I knew I could not do it, but I hoped against hope that Sam would try, since he was [and is] the smartest of the radicals. But he and Herb got interested in Game Theory [which I thought was a mistake] and went in another direction. Anyway, Walsh and Gram attempt a geometric representation of the linear programming models underlying the classical and Marxian approach, so I read their book with great anticipation [but eventual disappointment]. The other reason is a funny story. I had met John Kenneth Galbraith in the senior common room of Winthrop House at Harvard, although of course he did not remember that. Anyway, I was on a plane returning from a talk in Ohio, and in those days the American Airlines jets were configured so that in the first two rows, six people sat, three and three, facing one another across a table. I sat down in one of the seats, and catty-corner across from me was none other than Galbraith, crammed into the seat [he was 6'7"]. I had the Walsh and Gram with me on the table, reading it, and at one point Galbraith reached a long arm across the table and took the book to look at it, without so much as a word. I told him what it was about, and he looked at it and handed it back. He was at that point traveling and campaigning for Teddy Kennedy, who was making an unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was the next to the last time I met Galbraith.

MARX'S ECONOMICS IN MODERN DRESS

Noumena asked about books on the modern mathematical reinterpretation of Marx's economics, in addition to Morishima, and Robert Vienneau was spot on with his mention of Sraffa and Roemer. Let me attempt a more systematic answer.

Marx's economic theories are a critique of, and also a continuation of, the classic tradition of political economy in which the two great names before Marx are Smith and Ricardo. It was Marx's great misfortune that in the decade after he published volume one of CAPITAL, a theoretical revolution took place in mainstream economic theory, usually referred to as the marginalist revolution, led by three theorists working simultaneously and independently of one another: Jevons, Menger, and Walras. The result was to change fundamentally the nature of the questions asked by economists, and to sweep into the dustbin of history not only Marx but also Mill, Ricardo, Smith, and the rest of the classical school. Marx's disciples continued to write and talk as he had done, making them look, over the years, more and more quirky, cranky, sectarian, and, dare I say it, marginal. Eventually, Paul Samuelson could get away with describing Marx as a "minor post-Ricardian autodidact." [I have always thought that for Samuelson, the author of the most successful college economics text ever written, the autodidact part was what particularly ticked him off.]

This was pretty much the state of play until 1960, when Piero Sraffa, an Italian economist living and working in Cambridge, England, published a little book not quite one hundred pages long, called PRODUCTION OF COMMODITIES BY MEANS OF COMMODITIES. Sraffa was the editor of the magisterial multi-volume edition of the works of David Ricardo, and his work might easily be viewed as a resurrection and justification of Ricardian theory, but lest one have any doubt about where Sraffa's sympathies lay, we should recall that it was he who brought the paper, ink, and pen to Antonio Gramsci with which Gramsci wrote his PRISON NOTEBOOKS. Although Sraffa makes use only of the most elementary mathematical operations, and writes in a spare, monastic style, his work really builds on the linear programming work of Wassily Leontieff.

In the thirty years or so after Sraffa's little book appeared, an extraordinary world-wide theoretical discussion arose among well-trained theoretical economists who were sympathetic to the classical and Marxian programme, and were disenchanted with the General Equilibrium models then all the rage. This was no small mathematical quibble. What was at issue was nothing less than what economics ought to be talking about. The classical school asked two great questions: How does the annual social product get divided up among the three classes in society [landowners, entrepreneurs, workers]? And, What are the conditions for stable continuous economic growth? These questions focused attention on class conflict and class division, which Smith and Ricardo, as well as Marx, thought was central to capitalism. They also focused on issues of growth versus stagnation. The neo-classical school asked totally different questions: What is the rational way to allocate scarce resources with alternative uses? How does subjective desire or preference determine market price? It was, of course, possible for them to ask about distribution and growth, but since those questions did not lie at the heart of their theories, their answers were ad hoc and rather unsatisfactory ["each factor in production is paid its marginal product" etc.]

Marx said many things in his economic writings, of course, but central to them were a series of theoretical claims, about the relationship between exploitation and profits, about the inner contradictions of a capitalist economy, about the falling rate of profit, and so forth. Following Sraffa, the new mathematical Marxists, as I may call them, undertook to translate Marx's theoretical claims into modern dress, using essentially linear algebra rather than differential calculus. This involved making a different set of simplifying assumptions than those underlying neo-classical theory. [So, for example, in the neo-classical marginalist models, it is assumed that there is a contunuously infinite number of alternative production techniques combining inputs in varying quantities. The mathemtatical Marxists make the opposite simplfying assumption that at any one time, there is a single dominant production technique, that can be represented by a vector of quantities of inputs per unit output. The mathematical result is that instead of twice differentiating a continuous production function, you invert a matrix of input coefficiants.]

Speaking very broadly and generally [and revealing my own prejudices], these theoreticians demonstrated that Marx had a full-blown mathematically quite respectable theory that was in fact correct about a good many things, wrong about some others [the falling rate of profit had to go -- thanks to a theorem by Okishio, later re-proved more simply by Bowles]. I myself made a small contribution to this literature [in a paper, online now, I believe, called "A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Labor Theory of Value"], although John Roemer, bless him, noted that a year before I published. a very similar result had been proved by an Spanish economist writing in Spanish. [sigh. This never happens in philosophy.]

So, here is a short list of some of the best books in this large and excciting literature. I have actually read all of these, believe it or not. It cost me a good deal of effort, but was well worth it.

Morishima, MARX'S ECONOMICS, 1973
Luigi Pasinetti, GROWTH AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION, 1974
Andras Brody, PROPORTIONS, PRICES AND PLANNING 1974
Abraham-Frois and Berrebi, THEORY OF VALUE, PRICES AND ACCUMULATION 1976
Luigi Pasinetti, LECTURES ON THE THEORY OF PRODUCTION 1977
Ian Steedman, MARX AFTER SRAFFA, 1977
Walsh and Gram, CLASSICAL AND NEOCLASSICAL THEORIES OF GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM
Luigi Pasinetti, STRUCTURAL CHANGE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH 1981
John Roemer, ANALYTICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MARXIAN ECONOMIC THEORY 1981
Stephen Marglin, GROWTH, DISTRIBUTION, AND PRICES 1984

If anyone is interested, I can say a bit about what each of these has to offer, but sufficient unto the day.

REPLY TO COMMENTATORS -- TWO

Let me now turn to a variety of comments on my CREDO. First of all, GTChristie has it exactly right. I am pleased that at least one person understood what I was doing. The images of the lone rider and the barn raising were not intended as arguments. They were designed to capture two competing spirits or orientations toward the world in which we live. Murfmensch, akapital, and Angus all said things I agree with or found helpful. By the way, for anyone interested, twenty years ago I wrote a lengthy critique of Nozick's ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA that was published in the Arizona Law Review. It is apparently available online [isn't everything?]

Let me, instead, say something about markets and the nature of an evolving capitalism. [Once again, I have written much of this, in a paper entitled THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM, which is also online somewhere.] Markets have been with us for thousands of years, and will always be with us [need I, as a philosopher, remind us that the Agora where Socrates walked and talked was the central marketplace of Athens?] It is not markets I have a beef with, it is capitalism.

But rather than talk about the problem with capitalism, let me talk about the way in which capitalism is developing. I will here be trying to articulate what Marx called "the laws of motion of capitalist economy." In early capitalism, each firm is small, both in size and in relation to the total market for its inputs and outputs. It is what economists call a price taker at both ends. That is to say, the entrepreneur [who typically runs the company he owns] is forced to pay whatever the going market price is for his inputs, including labor [it is usually a man at this stage, by the way] and to sell his output at whatever the going market price is for cloth or shoes or pins or carriages.

This state of affairs may thrill the Ayn Rand disciples in the world, like Alan Greenspan and Rand Paul [if I may make a literary allusion, Ayn Rand is the Smerdyakov to Milton Friedman's Ivan -- see THE BROTHERS KARAMZAOV], but it does not thrill the entrepreneurs at all. They hate being slaves to the market. It makes their planning difficult and cuts their profits. So, like rational capitalists, they take whatever steps they can to rectify the situation. They increase the scale of their operations, they merge with other firms, all so that they can command a larger share of their input markets [including labor] and dominate their output market. They do this not out of a secret love for socialism [product of their Ivy League or Oxford/Cambridge educations], but because they correctly believe that it is the way to maximize their profits.

Firms also undertake to produce for themselves some of their inputs, as a way of controlling the costs. In short, the firms engage in horizontal and vertical integration. As firms get larger and larger, producing many of the intermediate products required for their production processes, they become unhooked from the tyranny of market forces. A large retailer like Sears actually dictates to its suppliers what big box appliances they will make for sale in Sears stores, and at what price. In industries like automobiles, "market share" becomes a central concern of each firm, and product differentiation, rather than price, controls their decision making.

Eventually, a global capitalist economy develops that is thoroughly integrated with national political regimes and capable of controlling what taxes are paid, and even demanding [and getting] public funds for bailouts when their reckless decisions has endangered their firms.

Once again, this takes place, despite ceaseless rhetoric about "free markets" and "the free enterprise system," because it is good for business, good for profits, good for capitalism. The problem is not markets [as though everything could be blamed on the buying and selling of vegetables in the local Whole Foods], but deep flaws in the INEVITABLE evolution of capitalism. The people who dominate our economy are not stupid. They introduce the systemic changes that lead to our various crises because it makes them rich to do so.

There simply is no way to turn the clock back to the 1950's or 1890's or 1850's. We are long past the time when firms were small, run by their entrepreneur owners, and markets were unaffected by the failure or success of individual firms. You may not like where we are, but it is where we are, and the only possible way forward that does not continue to enrich the few and impoverish the many is to embrace the trend toward planned economic decisions and subject those plans to a different set of criteria -- planning for the good of all, not the enrichment of the few.

Now, this is not the silliness of "market abolitionism." It is, not to put too fine a point on it, socialism.

REPLY TO COMMENTATORS -- ONE

My recent debilitating health problems have made it difficult for me to keep up with the comments on this blog. In an attempt to catch up, I am going to post two more or less extended replies as independent posts -- first some words about how to study Marx, and then some replies to comments on my CREDO. Marx first.

If you are trying to get a handle on Marx's thought, it is helpful to start by getting some sense of what he wrote, and especially about the relative volume of materials on various subjects. My English edition of the works of Marx and Engels runs to 42 volumes [my German edition is roughly the same length -- it is my Paris apartment]. Seventeen of those volumes are taken up with manuscripts [early versions of CAPITAL, etc. and Marx's enormous correspondence, most of which is with his life-long collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who was living in the north of England while Marx was living in London.] Several more volumes consist of Marx's reporting for the New York HERALD. Marx was what today we would call a foreign correspondent -- a stringer paid by the word. These newspaper articles deal with contemporary political events in Europe, and since Marx was notoriously dilatory about completing writing assignments on time, many of them, although published under his name, were written by Engels. Several volumes contain short books Marx wrote either on contemporary events [THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS NAPOLEON, THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE] or as attacks on figures on the left with whom he had theoretical disagreements [THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPYY, and so forth]. There are also several volumes of what are best called juvenilia -- books and book reviews and journal articles written by Marx, or by Marx and Engels, when they were in their twenties. These focus for the most part on their internecine disagreements with other "Left Hegelians," which is to say young German intellectuals who chose to construe Hegel as a radical rather than as a reactionary philosopher. In this category are THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY and the uproarious THE HOLY FAMILY. There are also some unpublished manuscripts from those early days, about which more below.

And then there are the works of economics. CAPITAL itself is six volumes long -- Volumes One, Two, and Three, and the "fourth" volume, THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE, which is actually three volumes long. Add to that the CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY and the manuscripts now called the GRUNDRISSE and you have perhaps five thousand pages of serious economics. This was, and was conceived by Marx to be, his chef d'oeuvre, his hauptwerk, his masterwork. Only Volume One of CAPITAL was published in his lifetime, but the entire work was completed by him, and was published posthumously by Engels.

If you want to know something about Marx, you must engage with this vast body of economics, for Marx was, first and foremost, the most brilliant theorist of capitalism ever to live. Marx is unique among great economists. He was the first historian of economic theory. He read German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Latin with ease, and had read everything that was available in his lifetime on economics -- the minor authors as well as the great ones. It may surprise you to learn that Marx had the very greatest respect for the work of Smith, Ricardo, and a number of lesser lights. He had contempt for the minor epigones of his own day, such as the egregious Nassau Senior, whom he called Vulgar Economists and took great delight in lampooning.

Marx was also the first great economic historian. His primary focus was on the development of capitalism in England, about which he wrote brilliantly, on the basis of his extensive archival research in the British Museum. Needless to say, we know a great deal more now than he knew then about the transition from the medieval feudal economy to the rapidly growing capitalist economy of the nineteenth century, but his work was decades, if not generations, ahead of his time.

Marx was a great political sociologist, anatomizing the connections between economic developments and political formations in a way that no one had done before.

And he was one of the truly great economic theorists. The brilliant Japanese mathematical economist, Michio Morishima, in his book MARX'S ECONOMICS, describes Marx as one of the great mathematical economists, and despite the fact that he uses little more than elementary arithmetic, Marx's structural and theoretical intuitions were astonishing. That is a large subject, and if anyone is interested in reading some modern mathematical economics devoted to articulating Marx's ideas in modern mathematical form, I will be happy to recommend half a dozen books.

Marx was not a philosopher, despite the fact that his doctoral dissertation was devoted to the ancient Greek materialists. Dialectical materialism was Engels' idea, and it is really just bad nineteenth century metaphysics. If you want to engage with Marx, you really must study the economics. By the way, contrary to popular opinion, Marx was a brilliant writer, and the early chapters of CAPITAL Volume One are among the most beautiful theoretical writings I have ever encountered.

But a funny thing happened to Marx on the way to immortality. He got hijacked by a bunch of Russian revolutionaries, and later by a bunch of Chinese peasant revolutionaries, and in his name both groups created dictatorial state capitalist regimes that murdered tens of millions of their own countrymen and suppressed genuine intellectual activity for generations. You can blame Marx for this, if you wish, just as you can blame Jesus for the Inquisition, or John Adams for George W. Bush, or Mohammed for Al Qaeda, and if you choose to do that, I am not going to waste any time arguing with you. But if you actually want to know something about Marx, then read him.

Two further words. At the end of the Second World War, Tito and his partisans had succeeded in driving the Germans out of what became Yugoslavia without the help of Russian troops. So Yugoslavia, while allied with Russia, was independent. A group of Yugoslav philosophers wanted to find some way to appropriate what they liked in Marx without buying into the oppressive state capitalist dictatorship of Stalin. They seized on some manuscripts written by Marx when he was twenty-six, and never published, in which they found a humanistic Marx, a lively Marx, a humane Marx as philosopher of the human condition, whom they could put up against the Soviet version of Marx's doctrines without rejecting Marx and thus seeming to throw their lot in with the capitalist West. These manuscripts, which came to be known as THE ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRUIPTS IF 1844, were used by them to defend a theory of a "break" between the young Marx and the mature Marx -- the theory of the Two Marxes. For reasons that I will explain if anyone at all is interested, I do not think there is a sharp break between the work of Marx in his twenties and Marx in his fifties -- just the sort of development and evolution one would expect in the work of a deep thinker.

Now, as to books. A small group of very gifted analytic philosophers -- most notably Gerald Cohen and Jan Elster -- several decades ago undertook to make Marx's thought compatible with their version of analytic philosophy, giving rise to a school of so-called Analytical Marxists. The two most notable contributions to this literature, both mentioned by commentators on this blog, were Cohen's KARL MARX'S THEORY OF HISTORY and Elster's MAKING SENSE OF MARX. In 1990, I wrote a long article exposing what I believed to be fundamental inadequacies in Elster's book. The essay was published in the CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, and can be found on-line. Cohen's book is a bravura performance, and to its credit pays more attention to what Marx actually said about economics and economic development, but I find it in the end scholastic and unhelpful.

OK. That's enough about that.

INDEX NUMBERS YET AGAIN, AND THE PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS

Faithful readers of this blog will recall that in October, in response to a question, I posted a multi-part discourse on the study of society, one part of which was devoted to the vexing subject of index numbers. In that screed, I chose as my example the Consumer Price Index, but earlier this week I had occasion to revisit the problem of index numbers in a more immediate and personal way. Interestingly, this encounter with the conundrum of index numbers also led me into reflections on that old and familiar philosophical puzzle, our knowledge of other minds. [This really dates me, inasmuch as the problem of other minds was on everyone's mind -- so far as one could tell :) -- in the mid 1950's.]

On Tuesday, having just recovered from more than a week of an extremely debilitating flu that I probably picked up during a seven hour layover in Heathrow Airport in London, I was suddenly struck down by a blinding headache on the right side of my face and head. My primary care physician only sees patients on Wednesdays, and besides was himself sick, and the Same Day clinic at UNC Health Services had no room for me, so in desperation I drove myself to the Emergency Room of the UNC Hospital. There I spent seven hours, while they poked and prodded me, did a CT scan, and eventually concluded that I had an infected sinus, not a migraine, as I had thought.

Once I was admitted and had changed into a hospital gown [always a diminishing experience], a nurse asked me, "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst pain you can imagine, how bad is the pain?" This question was repeated periodically for the next seven hours, until I was able to say that I was pain free. [Three small doses of morphine, delivered intravenously, had no effect on the pain whatsoever, so I think I can stop worrying about becoming a dope addict, but some arcane combination of pain meds late in the proceedings did the trick.]

As soon as I was presented with the question, I recognized that I faced at least three problems of varying philosophical interest. The first problem was a purely practical matter of self-interest and self-preservation. If I took the question seriously, I would have to conclude that a 10 represented agony so extreme that I was on the point of death, screaming uncontrollably. By that measure, I could not honestly rate my pain as more than a 4 or 5 [assuming a linear scale, but never mind that]. But I had a suspicion that if I said "five," they would decide I was not doing so badly, and would wander off to treat someone who had said "ten." So I hedged my bets and said "seven, or eight."

The second problem returned me to the question of index numbers. For a while, nothing changed, and I kept responding "seven, or eight." But then the nature of the pain itself altered. Instead of being focused and sharp, it became duller and more general, so that I felt invaded and compromised by it in a way that unmanned me. Was this a reduction to 6 or 5, or perhaps even an increase to 8.5? Miserable though I was, I am and shall always be a philosopher, which means not that I tolerate pain without complaint, but that I recognize a philosophical problem when it presents itself. Put simply, pain is multi-dimensional, and no linear index can adequately represent its structure and variation. Now, I understand why ER nurses ask this question, but I simply could not acquiesce in a diagnostic procedure that I recognized to be flawed. The net result was that I became known to the very nice and attentive ER nurses as "the one who does not like numbers."

The third problem was even more intractable. Suppose I was an extremely sensitive plant who cringed at a pinch and cried at an ingrown toenail. My ten might be any normal person's three. Alternatively, I might be a stoic who replied "six" as he died under torture. There is no satisfactory way of making what in the Economics trade came to be called interpersonal comparisons of utility. Hence indifference maps and all manner of other adjustments to the original apparent transparency of utilitarianism. Wittgenstein to the contrary notwithstanding, this is a problem with no solution. [Just try asking a woman who has given birth without an epidural about her big, strong husband and his complaints about sports injuries.]

The story has a qualifiedly happy ending. After the lovely Nurse Practitioner, Megan Randall, approved my release, I went home pain free. The next day, some pain had returned, and when I tried to get a follow-up appointment at the ENT clinic, they blithely told me they could fit me in in two weeks. In the interim, they prescribed a new anti-biotic and a nasal spray. Several days of that had me feeling well enough to go out to dinner with Susie, but then, yesterday morning, I had blinding, stabbing pains on the other side of my face. A trip to my dentist [I thought it was a not yet completed root canal procedure] reassured me that I was suffering another sinus infection, and this time, the pain medication my dentist prescribed [Percocet] did the trick. So here I am on Saturday morning, pain free and able to turn all of this misery into a blog post that I hope will amuse.

Meanwhile, I notice that the real world is going to hell in a hand basket, but more of that anon.

MORE ON THE CREDO

The comments on my Credo, both on line and in emails, indicates some unclarity about the meaning and purpose of my effort at a fundamental statement. I was not presenting a philosophical defense of a certain moral principle, and I certainly did not intend my reference to lone prairie riders and barn-raisings as the sort of silly-clever thought experiments that some philosophers are so fond of. Rather, I was trying for a brief, simple vision of the human condition, something that could inform and guide philosophical and other reflections on the particularities of our present situation. Free market enthusiasts employ a competing vision, of isolated individuals whose most important relationships are market contracts. That, I believe, is simply factually wrong as a vision of the human condition.

Now, there is a great deal to be said about my bonds with persons very far from me in time and space, and there are always conundrums regarding people in comas and so forth. There is plenty of time to worry about such ephemera.

Had I wanted to lengthen and complicate my account of our interdependence, I would have invoked developmental psychology, the works of Erik Erikson, and much else, to explain why the notion of an isolated and independent individual owing nothing to anyone is simply a [culturally conditioned] fantasy, corresponding to nothing at all in the real world.

Now, if anyone wants to engage with me on that level, fine. But please, let us not waste time on wondering what I can possibly owe to someone whom I do not need.