A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Monday, April 22, 2013
WHO KNEW?
As I continue to assemble materials for my Collected Papers, I keep coming across things I had forgotten I had written. This afternoon, I stumbled on a 138 page manuscript, entitled "The Language of Economics: A Course of Lectures." I have no memory of writing it, but I read it through, and it has a good deal of interesting things in it, so I shall include it in my volumes of papers. It has started to dawn on me that my sense of myself as a sluggard who rarely works may be somewhat skewed. I watch a good deal of television, play enormous numbers of computer card games [more than ten thousand since I bought my new computer a year and a half ago], and mostly daydream, but judging from the amount of unpublished material in my files, I must have spent at least some time writing. How odd that I can recall so many details of my life and yet cannot remember writing all this stuff.
Oddly enough, quite recently someone asked for a cite for an article of mine that I could not remember having written. A search of my hard drive found it. I think it was written for a conference, was supposed to be published, but for some reason wasn't, and I had forgotten all about it.
ReplyDeleteIt's now on my web page.
But I don't see how you can waste time playing card games online, when there's the massive time sink of World of Warcraft just waiting to grab you.
It is one more evidence of how totally clueless I am that I simply cannot develop any interest in these elaborate on-line games that the rest of humanity adore. I like the fact that many of them are cooperative and open-ended rather than competitive and focused on winning something, but I just can't get myself interested in them. I bow to the superior wisdom of the masses.
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ReplyDeleteDavid Friedman? How funny to run into you here!
ReplyDeleteI tried to drop you a line a couple of months ago to let you know how much I enjoyed the "Usenet Posts of Libertarian Interest" you have posted on your website, but the email address linked from that page is no longer valid.
Now that I see that your blog is where you hang out these days, I'll have to drop in from time to time to say hello. :)
Would "The Language of Economics" make a good basis for an RPW mini-tutorial? I probably have a greater appetite for philosophical treatments of economics than many, but economics is an important field for public debate and public policy -- see Brad deLong's recent talk "The Economist as...?"
ReplyDeletehttp://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/04/20130423-the-economist-as-presentation-script-notre-dame-public-intellectualism-conference.html
which begins
"Whenever I begin thinking about the economist as public intellectual, five questions come to the fore:
(1) Why should anybody care what we economists say?
(2) What do we economists have to say?
(3) Do we say it well?
(4) Is there any way to change things so that we say it better?
(5) Given what we economists have to say and how we say it, should the rest of you listen?"
Questions 2,3,4 at least, would seem to fit under the heading of language.
I think it would, although I would have to scan it first. All I have is a typescript. But I wouldn't want to mislead you. The manuscript is a version [in some cases interestingly expanded] of things in MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY and "A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Labor Theory of Value," both of which I published. Let me see what would be involved in scanning it.
ReplyDeleteProf.
ReplyDeleteYou're in the news!
"Inside the offbeat economics department that debunked Reinhart-Rogoff"
Posted by Dylan Matthews on April 24, 2013 at 4:00 pm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/24/inside-the-offbeat-economics-department-that-debunked-reinhart-rogoff/
No No No No No!!! That is Rick Wolff, an old friend and a fine Marxist economist, but alas not me. I am Robert Wolff. We have been confused before, principally by 200 UMass undergraduates, who took my Intro Micro course [which I taught one year] thinking they were getting the very popular Econ Professor Richard Wolff.
ReplyDeleteIt's a good thing, then, that my avatar is a bird: this way I don't look red-faced!
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