LIKE HE SAID

Having finished my walk and morning coffee, I was reluctantly girding up my loins for battle with the abusive but not inconsiderable Professor Egmont Kakarot-Handtke of Stuttgart when I read the delicious response of F. Lengyal, who reveals himself to be none other than I. M. Flaud.  I am most grateful for the assistance.  Now I can turn my thoughts to a lighter post inspired by several other comments.

By the way, one of the themes lately touched upon in the comments section of this blog is the perennial question of the purpose, function, or justification of Philosophy.  It is, I think, rather odd that this question has never exercised me in the slightest.  Having identified myself as a philosopher before I was old enough to drive, I somewhat illogically concluded that anything I was interested in was philosophy, including Game Theory, Freudian theories of personality, the economics of Marx, and nuclear deterrence theory.

If I were pressed to say what it is that I imagine myself to be doing as a Professor of Philosophy, I would reply that I grapple with deep, powerful, beautiful ideas and turn them over in my mind until they are transparently clear to me, at which point I show them to others, either in a lecture or in print, so that they too can see how beautiful they are.  That is what I was doing in my first book on Kant's First Critique, in my two books on Marx, in my early essay on Hume's Treatise, and in many other writings as well.  Is this, as Callicles pointedly asks in the Gorgias, an appropriate way for a mature adult to spend his or her time?  I leave it to others to answer.  However, I can report, after a long life devoted to such activity, that I have found it deeply satisfying, and not obviously harmful to others.

A COMMENT ON THE COMMENTS

I was more or less ignorant of economics until the late 1970s [notice that I have learned from previous comments about the proper use of the apostrophe], despite having read my way through some edition or other of Samuelson's textbook during the fall of 1954, while on my European wanderjahr.  Once I began serious study of micro, macro, and other arcana of the Social Sciences, I became puzzled by something and stopped an Economics Department graduate student one day for enlightenment.  "I have noticed something odd," I said to this budding wunderkind.  "There doesn't seem to be any variable for profit in the general equilibrium models.  What am I missing?"  'Of course not," he answered, obviously convinced that he was speaking to an idiot.

I was too embarrassed to ask why not, so I brooded on this for a while, and finally decided that I wasn't cut out for that discipline.  When I began reading the mathematical reconstructions of the Political Economy of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, I was pleased to see that each of the equations had a little Greek letter pi, which stood for the profit rate.

Eventually, I came to understand that the centerpiece of Marx's economic theory is his claim that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class, from whom profit is extracted by capitalists in the form of surplus labor value.  Despite my theoretical criticisms of the concept of surplus value, I clung tightly to the notion of exploitation as the source of profit, inasmuch as it seemed to me to be the deepest and most fundamentally true idea I had encountered in my long autodidactic study.

How could the manifestly brilliant men [mostly] in the discipline of academic economics have missed a truth that struck me as virtually self-evident?  I reminded myself of Upton Sinclair's oft-quoted observation:  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

POSSIBILITIES

As the summer heat continues, my thoughts turn to the fall, when I shall begin to visit Columbia University.  On October 6th, I deliver my inaugural address, so to speak, at the Heyman Center for the Humanities.  I have just reconnected with an old student of mine who is now a very senior professor at Columbia Law School.  In looking to see what he teaches, I noticed that Joseph Raz teaches one semester a year in the Law School.  Wouldn't it be fun to meet him and maybe do something together!  My former student, Andrjez Rapaczynski, is the only student I have ever had whose unanswerable question during a lecture forced me to rewrite a lecture and deliver it a second time.  Needless to say, he earned an A+.  Andrzej did a doctorate in philosophy before getting his law degree.  My favorite story about him is that when he started teaching at the law school, he was assigned a course on property, a standard law school subject.  Instead of talking about leases and property transfers and whatever, he lectured on Locke's theory of property!  I am looking forward to seeing him again when I start going to Morningside Heights.

MY PARIS KITCHEN

Here is a picture of my Paris kitchen.  The kettle is on the stove.  The dishwasher is under the sink to the right.  The fridge is under the counter to the left of the stove.  The microwave/oven is under the counter to the right of the sink.  There is also a washer/dryer in the closet opposite the stove.  There is a Nespresso machine on the counter to the left of the stove.

ELBOW ROOM

Parisians have a conception of public and private space that differs markedly from that of Americans, and the difference is, for me, one of the special charms of Paris.  Let me begin with some matters of fact and law.  Susie and I bought our Paris apartment in the spring of 2004.  It was listed as a “Loft, rue de Maître Albert” [odd, considering that it is on the ground floor], with a “surface” of 32.58 square meters.  For those of you a trifle out of practice with the metric system, that is 339.32 square feet.  By comparison, the apartment we have just moved into in the Carolina Meadows retirement home is 1607 square feet, which is to say roughly five times as large.  Our Paris apartment is truly a pied-à-terre if your feet are not too big.  Lest you imagine that we bought the smallest apartment available, I will just note that in our little copropriété or co-op, there are next door to us in the courtyard two smaller apartments which together have exactly the same square meterage as we do!

 The precision is essential to a Parisian.  “Surface” includes only that part of the floor space in which one can stand up erect, so in those charming top-floor apartments under the gambrel roofs of Paris, the bits of floor under the sloping roof which are only good for shoes or perhaps a cat box do not count when the apartment is advertised.  Indeed, if one buys an apartment and then discovers that the floor space, or “surface” is less than advertised, one has the right in law to demand a proportionate refund of the purchase price.

The obsession with precision in floor space manifests itself in many ways.  We pay quarterly co-op dues and also, of course, periodic assessments for whatever repairs and such must be made to the buildings.  Our dues are precisely apportioned according to our floor space, as measured in ten-thousandths of the total, or tantiemmes.  Our apartment has 277 tantiemmes, which is to say 2.77% of the total floor space of all fifteen apartments in the co-op, and so we pay 2.77% of any dues and assessments.

Our apartment’s tininess is by no means unusual.  When we were in Paris two weeks ago, we were invited for drinks and snacks to the apartment of a charming American ex-pat with whom we struck up a friendship in the local café as a consequence of her delightful dog, Apollon.  Joan lives, not for two or three weeks at a time, but year-round, in a seventh floor apartment [sixth floor by the French system of counting] with Apollon and two cats, Mozart and Clara [for Clara Schuman].  She has a view of the towers of Nôtre Dame [a signal selling point].  Her apartment is roughly half a square meter smaller than ours.

How do Parisians survive in such constrained quarters?  The answer is that they spend a great deal of their time in the ubiquitous bustling, exciting public spaces that are the distinctive charm of Paris.  Half a block from our apartment is Place Maubert, a lively constantly active space dominated by Le Metro, our local café.   Susie and I go the Le Metro every day, sometimes several times a day.  A single espresso or kir gives us the unquestioned right to sit for as many hours as we desire, watching the huge tour buses negotiate the narrow side streets, observing our fellow patrons, saying hello to the waiters we have come to know and like [such as Samy, who juggles trays of drinks and dinners like a juggler at the Cirque de Soleil], and checking on the condition of the local street person who has staked out ownership of one small bit of sidewalk.

The French protect their public spaces, cleaning them, improving them, renovating them, maintaining them.  In the spring and summer, at lunch time, the open air cafés are jammed with people eating, gossiping, relaxing.  The French workers, by the way, are quite as productive as American workers, but they cherish and protect their time to enjoy the social life of the streets.

Susie and I do not spend long periods in our apartment.  I think a month is the longest we have stayed.  But we do not feel cramped or oppressed in 339.32 square feet, and I think we could spend much longer before we began to need more space.  Our kitchen, in which I have prepared duck, rabbit, quail, tuna, swordfish, dorade royale, coquilles St. Jacques, and countless other dinners, is probably no more than 40 square feet, including the stove, fridge, microwave/oven and dishwasher, and yet I am happier there than anywhere else on earth.

One of the oddities of the real estate market is that with very few exceptions, the only factors determining price are location and square meterage.  A shell and a beautifully renovated apartment in the same location with the same square meterage will list for roughly the same price.  Fortunately for us, real estate values where we live have been rising slowly but steadily for the past four hundred years, and will probably keep doing so for another four hundred years.

I can’t wait to get back.

I WONDER

Donald Trump does not act like a man who is in bed with Vladimir Putin, in cahoots with him, nor does he act like a man who owes Putin money.  Trump acts like a man who is afraid of Putin.  What is he afraid of?

MATHEMATICS IN ECONOMICS

I have for several days wanted to return to writing about Paris in response to the thunderous demand [well, actually one comment and two emails, but I have very acute hearing].  However, before I do, let me say just a word about mathematics and economics, which has been the subject of several very interesting lengthy comments.

I think it is a mistake to ask whether economists should use mathematics.  That is like asking whether an electrician should use a Philips screwdriver.  The obvious reply is, For what?  The really interesting foundational questions in economics can never be answered by introducing more sophisticated mathematical techniques, fun though they are.  Before all else, one must decide what questions economics should be trying to answer.

The watershed transformation in economic theory is usually identified as the so-called Triple Revolution, or Marginalist Revolution, of the 1870’s, which is to say the work done independently and more or less simultaneously by Jevons in England, Walras in France, and Menger in Austria.  This complete transformation in academic economics was characterized by the introduction of the Differential Calculus, which made it possible to prove all manner of nifty theorems about consumer choice and price determination in a capitalist market.

It is easy and natural to suppose that the marginalist revolution was all about using more sophisticated mathematics, but that is, in my opinion, a complete mistake.  What actually happened in the 1870’s is that economists by and large stopped asking one set of questions and started asking a different set of questions.

There are two possible explanations for the decision of academic economists to change the questions they asked.  The first is that the new mathematical tools were so powerful, so flashy, such sheer fun that any really smart person interested in economics would naturally gravitate to them.  The second is that the old questions were rather uncomfortable, inasmuch as the answers clearly indicated that there was something seriously rotten about the state of things in nineteenth century capitalist Europe.

What were the old questions that economists asked before the 1870’s, and what were the new questions they started to ask afterward?  There were two questions that the old economists asked.  They were asked by Adam Smith, they were asked by David Ricardo, and they were asked by Karl Marx.  They were also asked by all the lesser lights who, together with the leading lights, defined the field known as Political Economy.  The first question was: How is the annual output of a nation divided among the three great classes of society, the Landowners, the Entrepreneurs, and the Workers?  The second question was: What are the conditions of economic growth, and what are the obstacles to growth?  The answers changed over time, of course, and in the work of Marx were profoundly complicated by the introduction of the notions of mystification, false consciousness, and ideological rationalization, but the questions remained the same.

The new economists asked completely different questions, and when they even tried to answer the old questions, their answers, tricked out in fancy math, were transparently ideological rationalizations.  The best summary statement of the new questions can be found in a classic 1932 work by Lord Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science [notice the term “science.”]  “Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”

Compare this question with the first question of the classical Political Economists.  The classical question presupposes that society is divided economically into classes and thus virtually compels us to recognize that the interests of the classes are antagonistic to one another, inasmuch as what is appropriated each year by one class is thereby unavailable to be appropriated by the other classes.  The new question of “Economic Science” presents the subject as a purely technical study of alternative inputs into production, the goal being to maximize efficiency.

For a variety of historical reasons, it appeared for quite some time that the old Political Economy was just a gentlemanly reflection on the human condition while the new Economics was SCIENCE complete with differential equations and such like.  But in the 1960’s. ‘70’s, and ‘80’s a number of clued up lefty mathematical economists recast the old story in nice, shiny equations, so that it became clear what the real difference between the two traditions was.

There is nothing wrong with mathematics in economics.  As I said, what matters is For What?