He is on the record for saying this regarding financial markets: "They don't just oil the wheels of economic growth. They are the wheels."
It's easy to be rankled by this statement. I don't think I'd agree that their the wheels. However, it is true that they do oil the wheels of industry to move much faster than it ever did prior to the rise of modern finance in the early 20th century.
The argument of post Keynesians like Minsky fully understands this but nevertheless argues that the financial markets are kind of a double edged sword-they may oil the markets and our economy could not have achieved 20th century growth without them but it also makes the market susceptible to deep recessions and depressions over time.
I was just watching Charles Ferguson's Inside Job about how the financial market and its enablers in government and the economics profession led us to the disasters of 2008 and the slow recovery since. Te movie has gained no little amount of notoriety and I had no little trouble finding a version in English-which is strange as the original movie was in English. Yet the first version I found was in Italian. Finally I found this version put out by an Occupy group which is in English but has annoying Spanish subtitles at the bottom of the screen. In time you get used to ignoring it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsjeObJMDQQ
In an way the movie takes an anti-Keynesian position as well and Phillip Mirowski argues that we must at least consider this other dimension-of simple pecuniary interests in the views expressed by Neoclassical economists. Keynes famously argued that over time what matters are ideas not crude interests.
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Serious-Crisis-Waste-Neoliberalism/dp/1781680795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379793508&sr=1-1&keywords=phillip+mirowski
You can contrast Keynes 'the word is run by little else' with Sinclair's observation that it's exceedingly difficult to get a man to understand something he's paid not to understand.
I would agree that you should at least factor them in. The film showed that Glen Hubbard-who was an economic adviser to Bush and was the leading candidate to be Romney's Treasury Secretary-wrote a paper in 2004 lauding the use of CDOs without disclosing in the paper that he had actually been paid to write the piece by the industry.
There certainly are no shortage of examples of Neoclassical economists espousing views and being rewarded handsomely for doing so without disclosing this fact. Yet, even such a determined critic as Steve Keen argues that they are motivated by principles-he argues the wrong principles-and not by 'crude interests.'
If so, I guess the NCers have that Zizekean piece of luck where they do what they believe is right and just happen to be paid very handsomely for it. They don't do what they do for enjoyment-'jouissance'-it just so happens that doing the right thing leads to their 'jouissance.'
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/09/john-cochranes-zizek-moment.html
So we have the usual debate of interests vs. ideas.
It's easy to be rankled by this statement. I don't think I'd agree that their the wheels. However, it is true that they do oil the wheels of industry to move much faster than it ever did prior to the rise of modern finance in the early 20th century.
The argument of post Keynesians like Minsky fully understands this but nevertheless argues that the financial markets are kind of a double edged sword-they may oil the markets and our economy could not have achieved 20th century growth without them but it also makes the market susceptible to deep recessions and depressions over time.
I was just watching Charles Ferguson's Inside Job about how the financial market and its enablers in government and the economics profession led us to the disasters of 2008 and the slow recovery since. Te movie has gained no little amount of notoriety and I had no little trouble finding a version in English-which is strange as the original movie was in English. Yet the first version I found was in Italian. Finally I found this version put out by an Occupy group which is in English but has annoying Spanish subtitles at the bottom of the screen. In time you get used to ignoring it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsjeObJMDQQ
In an way the movie takes an anti-Keynesian position as well and Phillip Mirowski argues that we must at least consider this other dimension-of simple pecuniary interests in the views expressed by Neoclassical economists. Keynes famously argued that over time what matters are ideas not crude interests.
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Serious-Crisis-Waste-Neoliberalism/dp/1781680795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379793508&sr=1-1&keywords=phillip+mirowski
You can contrast Keynes 'the word is run by little else' with Sinclair's observation that it's exceedingly difficult to get a man to understand something he's paid not to understand.
I would agree that you should at least factor them in. The film showed that Glen Hubbard-who was an economic adviser to Bush and was the leading candidate to be Romney's Treasury Secretary-wrote a paper in 2004 lauding the use of CDOs without disclosing in the paper that he had actually been paid to write the piece by the industry.
There certainly are no shortage of examples of Neoclassical economists espousing views and being rewarded handsomely for doing so without disclosing this fact. Yet, even such a determined critic as Steve Keen argues that they are motivated by principles-he argues the wrong principles-and not by 'crude interests.'
If so, I guess the NCers have that Zizekean piece of luck where they do what they believe is right and just happen to be paid very handsomely for it. They don't do what they do for enjoyment-'jouissance'-it just so happens that doing the right thing leads to their 'jouissance.'
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/09/john-cochranes-zizek-moment.html
So we have the usual debate of interests vs. ideas.
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