My favorite short passage in the entire corpus of
philosophical writings is the two and a half page preface to Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. At one point
Kierkegaard writes, “when Philip threatened to lay siege to the city of
Corinth, and all its inhabitants hastily bestirred themselves in defense, some
polishing weapons, some gathering stones, some repairing the walls, Diogenes
seeing all this hurriedly folded his mantle about him and began to roll his tub
zealously back and forth through the streets. When he was asked why he did this
he replied that he wished to be busy like all the rest, and rolled his tub lest
he should be the only idler among so many industrious citizens.”
I am so disturbed by the blowing up of a hospital in Gaza
and so utterly unable to do anything at all about that or all the other
terrible things happening, that I decided to fold my mantle about me and write
something more about the modern re-examination of classical economic theories. I am under no illusion that the world needs
these words at this terrible time, but perhaps at the very least you will not
consider me an idler.
Early in his writing, Ricardo explored the idea of a corn
sector in which corn is the only input in addition to labor – no tools, no
implements of any sort from others sectors. He observed that if this were the
case, the analysis of labor values and prices would be elementary and no
theoretical problems would arise. The profit rate would be identical the rate
of growth in the amount of corn produced in each cycle, and so forth.
Now consider an economy with only one sector producing not
corn but traditional men’s suits – each suit of clothes consisting of a jacket,
a vest, and two pairs of pants. Since economic theory bears no relation to
reality, we may suppose that the workers in this sector consume suits of
clothes, use suits of clothes as tools, work on suits of clothes as input, and
produce suits of clothes as output. Clearly, Ricardo’s analysis of a corn
sector producing only corn as output will apply equally to the fanciful case of
an economy with a single sector producing men’s suits.
Now suppose that in the suits economy, there are three
sectors, not one: a jacket sector that uses jackets, pants, and vests as input
and produces jackets; a vest sector that uses jackets, pants, and vests as
input and produces vests; and a pants sector that uses jackets, vests, and
pants as input and produces pants as output. So long as the pants sector
produces twice as many pairs of pants as the jackets and vests sectors produce
jackets and vests, the economy should function in exactly the same fashion as
the economy with a single suits sector, assuming that by the higgling and
jiggling of the marketplace the appropriate balance of sector sizes comes into
existence and can be maintained.
Now imagine a real economy producing hundreds of different
kinds of goods, in which all of the output is reinvested to expand the level of
production cycle by cycle. If there were some way in which the size of the
various sectors could be balanced so that there was no excess output from any sector, then presumably we could define an imaginary complex commodity – what
Piero Sraffa called the Standard Commodity – whose components were all of the
inputs into the various sectors in precisely the proportions required for the
economy to grow at a steady rate without wastage or shortages or any other
inefficiencies.
The great Hungarian-American economist and mathematician John Von Neumann, in
an elegant theorem in neoclassical growth theory, demonstrated that in an
economy with no luxury sector growing at the maximum rate possible, there would
always be a balanced growth path with the various sectors in just the required
proportions, and that the economy would find its way to this balanced growth
path through the natural seeking of maximum profits by entrepreneurs in the
various sectors.
This theorem has no more applicability to the real world than
any of neoclassical economics’ other elegant theorems, but it is a really
lovely elaboration and confirmation of Ricardo’s early intuitions.
43 comments:
In earlier posts you wrote that neoclassical economists did not solve the problem of the source of profit, i.e. where profit comes from. So how could Ricardo intuit that in a corn-as-only-input economy the profit rate would be identical with the rate of growth in the amount of corn produced in each cycle, when he didn't know where profit came from in the first place?
I appreciate that you feel helpless in the face of all the terrible things that are happening in the world around us (and to yourself). But I’m rather bewildered that your response is to turn your back on it all and go off into an aesthetic mathematical world which has produced (in your own words) a “theorem [that] has no more applicability to the real world than any of neoclassical economcs’ other elegant theorems.”
Maybe it would be better were you to reproduce some of your former reflections/observations on Vietnam, say?(I’m assuming you have such among your collected papers.) For that was a time too when many of us felt helpless but didn’t let that drive us into mere tub rolling?
I think John von Neumann goes right after The great Hungarian-American economist and mathematician.
right. Thank you.
Matters are bad enough with the actual situation but it should be pointed out that photos seem to show that the parking lot/autos, not the building, sustained the major hit and damage appears to be from a rocket, not a JDAM type explosive. All the photos I've seen are consistent with a malfunctioning rocket clearing the hospital and hitting the parking lot with the explosion going away from the building. A JDAM air burst would have created a crater and flattened/damaged trees (the dead fronds on the palms appear untouched and they go up easily (personal experience). The number of casualties appears exaggerated.
I would submit, aaall, that—unless you are a military analyst with access to the latest analytical technology (in which case, please confess to that)—your comments on the hospital bombing/explosion are quite valueless. Likewise your downplaying of the number of casualties. So 300 is less than 500. So what? Does that really diminish the awfulness of what happened at that hospital.
Aside from the unfolding genocidal awfulness on the ground in Gaza, which isn’t really mitigated by whatever the facts about the hospital strike may be, there is the awful damage being done to our understanding by people weighing in on all sides with their groundless pseudo-reasoned speculations.
anon, aaall,
I'm interested in what you people think about the hospital bombing.
I've read a number of articles about it and watched Spanish Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias's
daily program where he blames in on Israel.
Biden, on the other hand, seems to blame it on Islamic Jihad or Hamas. I imagine that Biden has been briefed by the CIA or other U.S. intelligence agencies.
I myself am confused and do not have a theory on who is to blame. Raul Sohr, on CNN-Chile last night, said that someone has to examine the remains of the missile or rocket to see whether it was Israeli or Palestinian, which makes sense to me. Sohr did not hazard a guess on who is to blame.
I’d recommend, s.w., that you withhold judgement on this particular event. For every two Arab speakers (of dubious affiliation) speculating on a rocket gone astray I can give you one Israeli, Hananyi Naftali, boasting that the Israeli air force did it. There’s already one summary account of the event and the consequent claims and counterclaims on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosion
But worse than the ‘fog of war” are the lies of the warring parties.
As to “a theory on who is to blame,” we’re back to the old frame of reference debate which has troubled other discussions on this as well as many other sites. I myself am in no doubt who to ultimately blame, however, such is my frame of reference: the way Israel has mistreated the Palestinians since it came into existence. And that, if you live almost anywhere in the western world, is the almost unspeakable truth which underlies and shapes so much of the analysis of this whole region.
Anonymous,
I speculate about it because I found today that people I run into, even people whom I hardly know like the woman owner of the vegan store (I'm a vegetarian myself) where I buy soy milk about once a week, are shocked and dismayed that someone deliberately (that is, Israel for her) would bomb a hospital.
That Israel mistreats Palestinians (to use your phrase) does not seem to upset most "normal" people (who, from what I can see, take a certain quota of unjustice to be the way life is), but willfully bombing a hospital crosses a line for a whole lot of people.
This article from The Guardian seemed useful:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-hospital-piecing-together-what-happened-as-israel-insists-militant-rocket-to-blame
These articles also seem useful:
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/18/rashid_khalidi_gaza_israel
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/18/un_special_rapporteur_palestine_albanese
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/16/the-myth-of-israels-most-moral
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/18/al-ahli-hospital-bombing-israel-performing-its-usual-post-atrocity-routine
After listening to an interview on the NewsHour tonight w someone v knowledgeable (the link is not up yet), I'm convinced that all the currently available physical evidence (e.g., type of crater, etc.) points to an errant rocket that had lots of fuel and after hitting the hospital, burst into flames. The damage is *not* consistent w an Israeli bomb.
That said, to focus on this one horrific incident is to miss the bigger issue. Israel has dropped approx. 6,000 bombs on Gaza in one week. The scale and intensity of this bombing campaign are such that significant civilian casualties are pretty much inevitable. For various reasons (e.g. letting humanitarian aid in; permitting evacuations to the south), I favor a ceasefire of sufficient length to let in hum. aid. Have just emailed my Congressman to that effect.
s.w. @7:30 p.m.
What you don't seem to get is that chances are 85/90 percent that no one deliberately bombed this major hospital in Gaza city. There were two plausible possibilities: 1) an errant rocket fired by Islamic Jihad or Hamas; or 2) an errant (mis-targeted) Israeli bomb. The physical evidence is not consistent w the damage that wd be caused by an Israeli JDAM (the type of bomb Israel is using).
But again, this misses the bigger issue, which is the scale of the bombing campaign in this densely populated area.
Gaza est delenda :))
Anonymous @9:19 p.m.
That's clever but not very helpful.
correction: the missile hit the parking lot, acc. to this interview, as aaall said. Again, not the main issue.
anon, the AJ articles are labeled "opinion" and if you read them they are long on that and short of any analysis specific to the instant case. While my experience with explosives was decades ago, one doesn't need any to follow what happened here. The photos, including the one in the Guardian article that s.w. linked show an intact building and surrounding foliage. No serious crater excludes a ground burst JDAM. An aerial burst would have shredded surrounding buildings and vegetation. Impact and damage is consistent with a rocket launch gone bad. Those pics are all over the place - check them out and compare
There are ample examples of Israel behaving badly without making things up. It's unfortunate that this event seems to have short-circuited Biden's efforts to slow-walk Israel's response as an invasion of Gaza will be a disaster for that nation.
LFC,
I have no doubt that if Islamic Jihad bombed the hospital, they did it by mistake.
However, if Israel did, they did it deliberately because given their level of technological ability and their knowledge of Gaza, they know what they are doing.
Nevertheless, I read The Guardian article as aaall does above and it seems a serious journalistic investigation done by several of their staff 24 hours after the event, which leads me to believe, although not conclude with Cartesian certitude, that the rocket came from Islamic Jihad.
I doubt that such evidence will convince many hard-line leftists and supporters of the Palestinian cause such as Pablo Iglesias, Chris Hedges and Norman Finkelstein, but although I agree that in general Israel's bombing campaign has killed too many innocent civilians, I don't believe that they targeted the hospital or hit it by error.
s.w.
The link to the PBS NewsHour interview that I mentioned has now become available, and it is here:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/examining-intelligence-assessments-over-who-is-responsible-for-gaza-hospital-blast
I was impressed by the interviewee, as I've already mentioned, though his name is escaping me at the moment.
I'm sorry I wasn't able to provide the link earlier.
LFC,
thanks
Although, Diogenes the Cynic wrote only letters, I wonder why he was such a nuisance to Plato & Aristotle at the Academy & later the Lyceum? He tried to make fun of Plato writing the Laws since he already wrote the Republic. My response to him would be that you can never have too much of a good thing. Plato called Diogenes: Socrates gone nuts!
Diogenes response to the Philosophers
"If life is a dream where only the individual-self exists, then when we die, we wake up from that dream and enter true reality & find our point of origin."
"If life is not a dream but reality, then we are not alone, but are surrounded by trillions and trillions of living awarenesses like our own, and when we die we enter eternal rest & begin to dream again."
"However, since it is possible to experience a dream, it is also possible to experience a nightmare."
LFC,
That PBS Newshour piece opens with this:
The IDF also released a video with audio recording and translation of what Israel claims are to Hamas officials talking and purportedly admitting that the rocket had been fired from the cemetery next to the hospital and fell on the hospital.
U.S. officials tell me their preliminary assessment, using independent intelligence of imagery and intercepted phone calls, is that — quote — "Israel is not responsible."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/examining-intelligence-assessments-over-who-is-responsible-for-gaza-hospital-blast
Well, experts consulted by the UK's Channel 4 News have said that the audio recording that the IDF claims was of Hamas operatives does not appear to be authentic, in terms of the accents and speech patterns.
And the US government is clearly all-in with Israel's military operation, so anything they say short of blaming Israel is unlikely to be persuasive.
The weapons expert interviewed on the Newshour is Marc Garlasco, a former US Defense Dept analyst and current adviser to PAX Protection of Civilians (which I think is based in the Netherlands). (Interestingly, he has a history of collecting Nazi memorabilia, along with other WWII memorabilia, and his grandfather fought for Germany during the war. The Nazi memorabilia collection became an issue for him while he was working for Human Rights Watch in 2009, at a time that HRW was critical of Israel's actions in Gaza. Garlasco ultimately was forced to resign.)
In the Newshour interview, Garlasco says the crater he sees is too small to have been caused by the kind of weaponry Israel would typically have used if they had launched an airstrike (ie, a Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM). He doesn't mention in the interview the possibility of Israel using a Spike missile instead. Spike missiles produce much smaller craters.
And when someone on Twitter did suggest the possibility of a Spike missile, Garlasco said that the damage at the Gaza hospital site could not have been caused by that kind of weaponry because the impact hole would have been "mere centimeters in width." Yet challengers quoted back to him an HRW report he authored in 2009 that said an HRW team had inspected a site hit by a Spike missile and found a crater about 120 cm by 80 cm, which actually looks about the size of the crater shown on the screen during the Newshour interview (although nobody mentioned the Newshour interview in that exchange on Twitter).
https://twitter.com/marcgarlasco/status/1714651717432672461
Raymond Geuss has an interesting little essay on Diogenes in his book "Public Goods, Private Goods" (Princeton, 2001), entitled "Shamelessness". I'm surprised he didn't become a politician or a propagandist of the sort we see so much of nowadays.
For anyone who says Israel would never intentionally target a hospital, the Al-Ahli Hospital (aka the Baptist Hospital of Gaza) had already been intentionally hit by Israel over the weekend. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote: "The Ahli Hospital was hit by Israeli rocket fire last night, with four staff injured in the blast. Other hospitals have also been hit. I appeal for the evacuation order on hospitals in northern Gaza to be reversed - and for health facilities, health workers, patients and civilians to be protected."
https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/news/news-and-statements/gaza-hospitals-are-facing-catastrophe-says-archbishop-canterbury
According to Le Monde, the day after the strikes the Israeli army called the hospital director to tell him that the two strikes had been warning shots to evacuate.
https://archive.li/https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/10/18/des-centaines-de-civils-tues-dans-un-hopital-de-gaza-toujours-sous-blocus_6195135_3210.html
It was only after that that the larger strike that killed hundreds occurred.
Of relevance to the ongoing discussion of Gaza including that on the hospital strike:
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2023/10/the-philosophy-of-military-action.html
Here's what Leiter writes:
"Some readers of your blog may not realize that there is a philosophical dimension to what’s happening in Gaza. In 2005, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, co-authored an article in a philosophy journal with philosophy professor Asa Kasher, in which they explicitly reject the Principle of Distinction in International Humanitarian Law. They argue, in effect, that in Israel’s military campaigns, greater priority ought to be given to protecting the lives of Israeli soldiers than Palestinian civilians — and they think they’ve given a moral justification for this conclusion. I think their arguments are not sound and have tried to show why in another journal article (and in this shorter encyclopedia entry and blogpost).
"This is not just an academic exercise on the part of Kasher and Yadlin. There’s strong evidence that this new “code of ethics” for the Israeli military has played an important role in Israel’s wars since it was written, giving commanders and soldiers cover for violating the Principle of Distinction with impunity. Israeli organizations like Breaking the Silence have collected a great deal of testimony to suggest that such directives have been transmitted down the chain of command and account partly for the huge numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties in Israel’s successive military campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon."
As LFC points out, Israel has attacked hospitals and schools before.
This has been going on for years. Do a search. Their justification is that that's the only way to get to weapons that they say Hamas is hiding in the buildings.
They have also deliberately targeted medics and journalists.
anon.,
That quote is from Prof Muhammad Ali Khalidi (CUNY), not from Leiter, although Leiter shared it in a post.
As Niccolo Machiavelli once said, "Time is the Father of all Truth to men."
It takes ten, fifteen, twenty, or more than twenty years, for memoirs, biographical analysis, and scientific historians to sort through and compile the data necessary for a neutral bias that can pattern out the true gist of what truly happened.
Take your sides if you want. It's still just war gossip.
Ricardo could explain the origin of profits because he was doing classical political economy, not neoclassical economics. He was writing before Chartism, the revolutions of 1848, and the social question became acute.
For any composition of final demand, one could find the commodities that are used as capital goods directly in producing that product. One could find the commodities used in producing those capital goods. And so on. At each step, one might renormalize such that the employed labor force is as in the observed economy.
This process, at least in the circulating capital case with no joint production, converges to Sraffa's standard system. Georg Charasoff, before Sraffa and Von Neumann, called the input to the standard system 'urcapital'. The standard system is in some sense embedded in the actual system, I am still making lots of abstractions, but maybe the standard system does has some empirical use.
Eric @1:48 a.m.
I have a hard time seeing what Israel would stand to gain by deliberately firing anything at that hospital. Not in the current situation where the last thing Netanyahu shd want, from a narrow self-interested standpoint, is to further inflame public opinion in the region.
I sent an email last night to my Congressman, using the email form on the website he has for that purpose, saying I support the call for a ceasefire (of at least some defined length, though I didn't suggest a particular length).
@ R. Viennau
Thank you for the response.
I saw the PBS video which is good evidence although I take into account what Eric says above about the military expert who was interviewed.
I also once again saw Raul Sohr in CNN-Chile. Sohr is about the most balanced, well-informed and serious political analyst I know. Sohr is still waiting for an examination of the remains of the rocket or missile before definitively deciding who is to blame.
I'll go with Sohr on this one.
If one has to choose a side in this kind of conflict, it's best to opt for the side of human rights, rationality, decency and non-violence and neither Israel nor the Palestinian leadership represents that side.
Eric
To be clear, I'm not suggesting I know for sure what happened. Obviously, I don't. But if Israel did fire a Spike missile at that hospital, whoever is issuing the operational orders at that level does not seem to understand that it wd increase calls for ceasefire (which the Netanyahu govt does not want), and increase unrest and violence in West Bank (which the Netanyahu govt doesn't need rt now). So maybe someone in the PM's office needs to be exercising more influence on whoever is giving the operational orders in Gaza.
During Operation Rolling Thunder etc. in Vietnam, LBJ inserted himself into specific targeting decisions. His generals were v. displeased. However in some circumstances this is called for. I don't know anything really about how Israel makes these decisions, but if people in the PM's office are not inserting themselves into the specific targeting decisions, they prob shd be.
P.s. of course it is (also) immoral/illegal to deliberately target a hospital, but I was talking in the comment above about the 'pragmatic' implications for Netanyahu and the 'unity' govt.
This is worth a read, I think, not least because it offers a rather different analysis of the Hamas-led attack, noting, for one, that
“it is clear that the broad operational success of Hamas’s initial breakout proved to be—paradoxically—fairly catastrophic. The number of large breaches that Hamas fighters made in the once-terrifying walls that Israel had built around Gaza allowed thousands of extremely angry young Palestinian men to surge out of the Strip and into the neighboring Israeli communities. Some of the videos of the events show fairly disciplined and well-organized groups of Hamas fighters: convoys of motorbikes, each with two Hamas-uniformed men on each, with the one riding behind carrying two AK-47s, one for each of them; well-armed pickups driving with similar discipline. Other videos showed much more disorganized groups: grinning men hamming for the cameras, brandishing guns and knives.
“Clearly, the Hamas squads had no evident plan for imposing discipline on the chaos. I am not saying the Hamas men committed no atrocities. I am, however, questioning the idea that they committed all of them—or that committing senseless atrocities against Israeli civilians was the sole or even the main aim of the breakout.”
And of perhaps longer term significance:
“Among most Western media today, the idea that Hamas may have political goals seems quite absent. Over the decades since its founding in late 1987, Hamas has nearly always been portrayed as intrinsically violent and deeply anti-Semitic. They are held to be unalterably opposed to the existence of Israel. And they are described as having a vice-like hold on a captive Gazan people, reigning over them through fear and intimidation. It is not too hard to understand why this is: most of these portrayals are written by people who have never met, interviewed, or interacted with Hamas leaders.”
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-only-way-forward/
This on the author:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Cobban
Whether this will change the tenor of the discussion remains to be seen. (I’m not holding my breath.)
The Cobban piece is indeed interesting. She gives her bona fides as follows:
“… most of these portrayals are written by people who have never met, interviewed, or interacted with Hamas leaders. But I have. I first interviewed some Hamas leaders in Gaza and the West Bank back in 1989 during the height of the First Intifada.”
This raises an issue I’ve long puzzled over: why would you expect any truth on an issue to come from interviewing a politician? You might—MIGHT—learn something from a deposition or other form of sworn testimony backed up with the threat of punishment for lying, but an “interview” seems like something guaranteed to summon forth from the interviewee a load of self-serving horseshit. Recall “Frost/Nixon” or Bob Woodward’s entire *ouvre*.
Would you believe anything that Lindsey Graham had to say on an issue? No, you would simply assume the opposite of what he says to be closer to the truth (and yes, you can substitute for Graham your favorite Dem). Politicans, like actors, are professional liars. It is not for nothing that Washington, D.C. is known as “Hollywood for Ugly People”.
anon.,
In another piece at Boston Review published Oct. 11 (I sent the link to Leiter and he links it at his blog today), Rajan Menon wrote that Hamas is unalterably opposed to a two-state solution, rejects the existence of Israel, and wants to see a Palestinian entity that will run from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea.
Now it seems Boston Review has published a piece by Helena Cobban that I haven't read yet, but apparently it takes a different view.
So which contributor to BR, Cobban or Menon, is right?
Btw it's bizarre on its face to write, as Cobban does, that "the idea that Hamas may have political goals" is "quite absent" in the Western media. The goal of destroying an existing polity/state that a group views as an illegitimate settler-colonialist state is a political goal, even if it has a large theological component. Presumably Cobban means something else, but it's still a misleading sentence. Anyway I'll put the piece on my to-read list.
As memory serves, LFC, she disputes that Hamas adamantly seeks to destroy an existing polity/state. In other words Hamas has a politics that should not be so pejoratively summed up as you sum it up. She does note
'in one form or another, Hamas is here to stay. And yes, it is undoubtedly politically hardline. It has never completely disavowed the founding charter that called for Palestinian rule in the whole area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean"
But to that she immediately juxtaposes something that is often elided in discussions of the region (something that I believe Chomsky emphasised at least a decade ago) this:
"—just as Israel’s ruling Likud party has never disavowed its claims that all of that same area is part of the “Land of Israel,” working to expand Jewish control over the occupied West Bank."
But she goes on to note that in her judgement, based on her long experience of the people in the region, which includes conversations with leading members of Hamas, that
"Hamas’s leaders might be persuaded to join a negotiation for a robust two-state outcome—one that would more or less return Israel to the frontiers it occupied from 1949 to 1967 and that would allow the ten million or so Palestinian refugees to exercise the “right to return or compensation” they were promised by the UN in 1949."
anon. @2:04pm,
Helena Cobban's Wikipedia page is remarkable for describing her husband, William B. Quandt, only as the Edward R. Stettinius Jr Professor of Politics at UVA.
His own Wikipedia entry says that in addition to that he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was on the National Security Council in the Nixon and Carter administrations ("he was actively involved in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egypt–Israel peace treaty"). His Wikipedia page also mentions that former Israeli Amb to the US Michael Oren called three of Cobban's books on Middle East politics "three of the genre's finer examples."
The background that she describes in the article is useful for contextualizing the current crisis.
The one passage that most stood out for me was:
The elections [of 2006] gave the PLO and its U.S. and Israeli allies a great opportunity to work to find a way to draw Hamas into the political process. Hamas was willing, too, initially making inroads to form a “government of national unity” with Fatah. But the reaction from Israel and Washington was harsh. They threatened to kill any of the newly elected legislators who would agree to join such a government—which I know because I was the conduit for conveying one such threat.
(emphasis added)
Something seems to have been lost in the editing of the article, though, unless I am misreading it. Her first mention of Hamas military leader (Mohammed) Deif gives only his surname and no explicit description of who he is.
Since I mentioned Menon's piece but didn't give the link, here it is:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/beyond-moral-condemnation/
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