MARX SHTICK

When I was flailing about, looking for something on which to blog, someone suggested a commentary on Volume Three of CAPITAL.  I went back and took another look at Volume Three, and although there are, as one might expect, a number of interesting passages [to which I had appended lengthy marginal notes in my copy], it does not call to me as a project.  There are two things in Volume Three worthy of extended commentary.  The first, on which I have written at some length in UNDERSTANDING MARX, is Marx's attempt to resolve once and for all the problems with the Labor Theory of Value that are not handled in Volume One.  Marx has a brilliant idea, which however does not quite work.  To summarize the matter succinctly and, I fear, somewhat mysteriously for those of you who are not true devotees of Marx's economic theory, his solution works in the special and important case in which the economy is embarked on a balanced growth path of the sort analysed by John von Neumann in a famous theorem, but it does not work in the more general case in which here is luxury production and consumption.

The other topic is the famous claim that as a capitalist economy develops and substitutes capital for labor, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.  The point of the claim is that there is, built into capitalism, a self-defeating thrust toward crisis.  Alas, on this one, Marx was just plain wrong.  The Japanese economist, Okishio, proved in a 1960 theorem [I think that is the correct date] that in a capitalist economy equilibrated by a single economy wide profit rate, an capital-intensive innovation in production that temporarily yields a super-profit for the entrepreneur who has introduced it will, when it has been adopted throughout the economy by all other producers in the same sector, result in an unambiguous rise in the rate of profit.

Why is Volume One such a coruscatingly brilliant work, quite unlike anything ever seen before or since, whereas Volumes Two and Three are somewhat pedestrian and tedious, illuminated to be sure by flashes of genuine insight but hardly worthy of the intense study that is so rewarding to readers of Volume One?  There are several reasons, I think.  First of all, it is in Volume One that Marx gives full voice to his penetrating insight into the mystifications and false consciousness of capitalist economy and society.  This material, found essentially in the first ten chapters of the book, is, I say with absolute confidence, far and away the most brilliant philosophical, sociological, psychological, and economic analysis ever attempted.  There is simply nothing else in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth centuries to compare with it.  The second reason is that for a variety of expository and analytical reasons, Marx chooses to restrict himself in Volume One to the special case of Equal Organic Composition of Capital in which Ricardo's Labor Theory of Value actually holds true.  This enables Marx at one and the same time to acknowledge what is of enduring value in Ricardo's theory and also to focus on the deep, underlying problem of which Ricardo was not even aware, namely, Why is there profit at all in a capitalist economy?  To this day, sophisticated mathematical economists are incapable of recognizing, let alone dealing with, this fundamental question.  The third reason is that although Marx was a brilliant intuitive economic theorist -- one of the two or three greatest economic theorists of all time, according to Michio Morishima -- he did not have the technical tools to carry his analysis forward in a successful fashion beyond the point that he was able to reach by intuition alone.  It is this failing on his part that led Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, in an infamous and disgracefully snide crack, to refer to Marx as a "minor post-Ricardian autodidact."  [As I have remarked elsewhere, I have always thought that Samuelson, the author of the most successful elementary Economics text ever written, was offended at the thought that Marx might arrive at important truths without having taken Introductory Micro.]

My two books on Marx say at length what I think of his theories, and it would be otiose to repeat here what I put on paper there.  So I am afraid that I as still left casting about for something to blog about.

TICK TOCK

Patience is one of the many virtues that I have never managed to cultivate.  If I were a farmer, I would be forever pulling up sprouts to see whether they were rooting.  But time does pass, and with the passage of time, Nate Silver's "Monte Carlo simulations" [as one commentator has taught me to call them] inexorably push Obama's election chances up.  At the moment, they stand at 80.7%, a gain of 6.2% in the past eight days.  News reports indicate that Romney campaign operatives are beginning to recognize that they are on a glide path to defeat.  I would imagine they are pinning their hopes on a combination of the vast sums their super-pacs will throw into negative ads and some sort of stunning upset victory in the presidential debates.  But the scores, if not, hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent on ads thus far have had little or no effect, and the debates are absolutely certtain to be a draw at best for Romney.

Barring a catastrophic international upheaval [the collapse of the Euro Zone, an Israeli attack on Iran] or a domestic terrorist attack, the only hope of the Romney camp is to take some big chance in a desperate effort to change the contours of the race.  But they have had their VP moment, to no noticeable positive effect, and if they send Romney out to make a violent frontal attack on Obama in the first debate, his legendary unflappability will make Romney look as cranky and strange as Clint Eastwood and the chair.

So, I repeat what I said some while ago on this blog.  Romney will not win, and Obama will be re-elected.

EXPLICATION DE TEXTE

I had an email asking me what the pun is in the title of Philip Roth's novel, Portnoy's Complaint.  Okay, so that is a bald-faced lie.  Nobody asked.  I just wanted to explain [this might be taken as an instance of "The Teacher's Complaint."]  The title is a double pun:  First of all, there is the medical sense of complaint, as represented by Roth's faux medical definition at the beginning of the novel of what is bothering Portnoy.  Second, there is the fact that Portnoy's is perpetually complaining about his mother, who seems to be the real, albeit hidden, focus of his obsessive sexual fantasies.  Finally, in 16th century English poetry, a "lover's complaint" is a poem in which the poet, addressing his beloved, bemoans the fact that she does not requite his passion.  All in all, a rather witty title.

SIXTY DAYS

The conventions are over.  The Republican convention was bizarre, the Democratic convention pretty much the sort of successful event one would expect from a collection of grown-up professionals.  Now the campaign begins [I feel like the psychiatrist at the end of Portnoy's Complaint.  -- By the way, does everyone understand the witty pun on the word "complaint?"]  I have donated the maximum allowed by law first to the Obama primary campaign and then to the Obama election campaign, so there is nothing for it but to just check Nate Silver's 538.com every day for reassurance.  Several comentators to my earlier blog about probabilities have cleared up my confusion about what Silver's statistical estimates actually are.  If I understand all of this even marginally, each day that passes with no essential change will result in a slight uptick in his estimate of Obama's re-election chances.  Sixty days.  Sixty nights a bit more sleepless that usual.  Romney will not crush Obama in the debates, nor, I imagine, will Obama destroy Romney, but from Obama's perspective, a draw is a win, since he is leading.  My mean-spirited fantasies have turned to speculation about the self-immolating anguish that the Republicans will suffer when they awake on November 7th to discover that their worst nightmare [to quote Sylvester Stallone] has possession of the White House for four more years.

I will now turn my restless energies to Bennett College.

BEHAVIORISM

Back in the '50's, when I was a student and then a young Instructor  at Harvard, Sigmund Freud's theories of human personality, which were enjoying a considerable [and, in my opinion, deserved] reputation, were challenged by the school of Psychological Theory known as Behaviorism, of which the Harvard professor B. F. Skinner was the leading exponent.  It was the contention of Skinnerian behaviorists that they could give a completely adequate explanation of even the most complex behaviors without reference to internal thought processes, conscious or unconscious, restricting themselves solely to observable stimuli and responses.  According to Skinner, human behavior, like animal behavior, could be regulated by schedules of positive and negative reinforcement [rewards and punishments], such as pellets of food for chickens or pigeons.  In the laboratory, Skinner's disciples were able to achieve such wonders as conditioning a chicken to play perfect games of tic-tac-toe.  Skinner himself viewed his theories as beneficent, since they taught that desired results could be achieved by properly constructed schedules of positive reinforcement, without the need for punishment at all.  Some readers of this blog may be familiar with the enormous stir created by Noam Chomsky's scathing review, in 1959, of Skinner's attempt in Verbal Behavior to explain language acquisition by Behavioral Theory.

In those days, an urban legend was making the rounds in Cambridge, Mass. about a malicious game devised by some of Skinner's more reprehensible students.  According to the legend, they would go to a student party and spot a shy, anxious, socially awkward young man [of whom, at Cambridge parties in those days there was sure to be an adequate supply], and they would observe him quietly until they spotted some distinctive bit of socially unacceptable behavior that he exhibited, such as picking his nose.  Then they would position themselves around the room, and as soon as he moved his finger to his nose, they would all smile broadly at him for a moment.  [This was the positive reinforcement.]  By the end of the evening, it was said, they would have him touching his nose again and again, like a pigeon pecking a key that released a pellet of food.   The poor young man would be utterly unaware that he had been "conditioned by a schedule of positive reinforcement."

Readers of this blog may have noticed that I have a rather embarrassingly compulsive need for encouragement from my readers in the form of the comments appended to blog posts.  Periodically, I express my dismay with the enterprise of blogging, exhibiting a pathetic desire to be reassured that my efforts are not falling on deaf ears [or, perhaps more accurately, on blind eyes.]  I think I have developed this tic as a consequence of a lifetime in the classroom, where one is constantly rewarded with reactions from one's students -- laughter at a joke, a groan when an exam is announced, the shy smile from the quiet young woman the back row who never speaks in class but seems to understand one's subtlest points and most obscure references.  None of these "positive reinforcements" are available in the blogosphere, where even the identity of one's readers may be concealed behind bizarre web handles.

I shall soldier on, confident that someone out there is reading me.  When I grow anxious and feel unappreciated, I shall consult Google's statistics, which faithfully record every visit to this page.  How strange we humans are.

I OFFICIALLY RESIGN FROM THE HUMAN RACE

Good God!  Jim is perfectly correct.  In January I wrote a multi-part Appreciation of MIMESIS, a fact that I had totally forgotten.  It is clear that I am not to be allowed out alone without supervision.  My apologies to one and all.  I will now commit myself to an Assisted Living facility where sympathetic attendants will look after my every need and pretend not to notice when I ask three times in five minutes what day it is.  aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!

STATISTICS PUZZLE

Nate Silver, as all political junkies know, is the baseball stats guru who has morphed into a politics stats guru, running the blog 538.com, which now appears in the NY TIMES.  [538 is the number of votes in the Electoral College, for overseas readers of this blog.]  Silver achieved a brilliant forecasting record in 2008, successfully predicting the outcome in 49 of the 50 states and all 35 Senate races.  Silver currently gives Obama a 75% chance of victory.  Now, if my rudimentary grasp of statistics is correct, that means that roughly, over a long run, someone with Obama's current chances against his opponent should win three-quarters if the time, and someone with Romney's current chances against his opponent should win roughly one-quarter of the time.  Right?

But in 2008, if my memory is correct, Silver was giving Obama and McCain winning chances in the various states in the range of 70-90%, not in the range 96-99%.  Which means that either his statistical estimates were way off or 2008 was a really, really anomolous roll of the dice.

It is like adventures in white-water rafting or sky diving, which are billed as very dangerous, but in which virtually no one in fact ever dies.

It seems to me that if Silver is so often correct when he predicts presidential or senatorial races, then he should be assigning probabilities close to 1, not in the 75% range.

Am I missing something?