| This is aWikipediauser page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other thanWikipedia, you are viewing amirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other thanWikipedia. The original page is located athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SlamDiego. |
| “ | What Wikipedia says is what a transitory plurality of the interested want it to say. | ” |
| “ | Wikipedia has far too many editors whose veryconcept oftruth hangs upon the defense of their own egos. | ” |
| Contents |
|---|
An Inadequate Summary
|
Years ago, I stopped actively editing Wikipedia articles. I cannot prevent the corruption of economics articles byad hoc coälitions of Keynesians (of various sorts) with Ricardians (of various sorts), and editing any others tends to help give the whole of the project an unwarranted appearance of legitimacy.
Wikipedia editors (including, most certainly, many administrators) seem in constant war against the English language, and theytalk through their hats about rules of English.
American editors are likely to insist that a structure isBritish English, rather thanAmerican English, and not admit that it is merelyproper English. (I write this not only as an American, but as one of the opinion that British English is in a worse state than is American English, as shown, for example, by the acceptance of “orientate”.)
Commas in dates, in place designations, and in the use of “junior” offset an element, almost like parentheses, so that a second comma is grammatically required to return from the offset.
The actuallogic of commas seems to have escaped most editors. Attempting toreason with people about it is somewhat futile; I'll instead cite a few very relevant passages fromThe Chicago Manual of Style (with underscores added by me):
It's not a peculiarly legal term.
JzG andRJC have each (on separate occasions) asserted that calling an act “libel” constitutes alegal threat, to rationalize disciplinary actions.[1][2] Let's look at the definition of “libel”:
Now, definition 2 is plainly a legal or legalistic reference, but only applies to admiralty law or to an ecclesiastical court, and it would bethe complaint itself that would be called (without pejoration) a “libel”. But I have yet to see any editor threaten topresent such a “libel” against another, and certainly this wasn't the use to whichJzG andRJC were objecting.
That leaves definition 1a and 1b. But, plainly, one can want and have a name forthe act of presenting to the public false publication that damages a person's reputation without even taking a position on whether such acts should or should not be legal. (Some people maythoughtlessly presume that libel should be illegal, making it all the more likely that they will willy-nilly infer a legal threat.) And one could certainly bothname an act and believe that it should be illegal without actually threatening to bring legal action.
(In my own case, I don't believe that libelper se should be illegal. A person's reputation is the beliefs of others, which is to say that it is thethoughts of others. One does not have the right to compel others to think what one wishes about them; theproperty right here is of thethinker, not of the subject of the thought. So the standard intellectual foundation of laws against libel and slander is rubbish. Anytrespass would have to be located in violation of some contract with persons misled, and such contracts may not exist.)
JzG has argued that, because “libel” is defined under law, it is a legal term. But, by this token, anything (including weights and measures and names ofvarieties of cheese) defined under law would be legal terms, and thus using them would constitutelegal threats.
I've more than once noted a confusion ofcentrism withneutrality. It's important to understand that, with respect to a conceptual space,
while
More specifically,
For any given conceptual space,centrismcannotbe reconciled with neutrality, though neutralitymight be in the center of some conceptualmeta-space. (Neutralityabout neutrality would then be a position within ameta-meta-space, &c.)
The superset is marginalism; the Austrian School wasn't and never became neoclassical.
The first published appearance of the term “neoclassical” in reference to economics is inVeblen's “The Preconceptions of Economic Science”, Pt III (QJE v14 (1900)):
No attempt will here be made even to pass a verdict on the relative claims of the recognised two or three main “schools” of theory, beyond the somewhat obvious finding that, for the purpose in hand, the so-called Austrian school is scarcely distinguishable from the neo-classical, unless it be in the different distribution of emphasis.
Note that Veblen writes of a world in which theAustrian School is viewed as different from the neoclassical economists (though Veblen sees them as having shared preconceptions to which he objects).
Yet, in textbooks written by neoclassical economists (and by many anti-marginalists), neoclassical economics and marginalism are usually simply treated asthe same thing, and Austrian School economics are treated as avariety of neoclassical economics.
In fact, the Austrian School is certainly marginalist. The neoclassical economists have also always been at least somewhat marginalist, albeït that for a time they walked away frommarginal utility (and not all of them have reëmbraced it). Butneither school subsumes the whole of marginalism.
Thereason that the neoclassical school iscalled “neoclassical” or “neo-classical” is that, while they embraced marginal utility in the explanation of thedemand curve, they explained the supply curve much as had theclassical economics, in terms ofobjective costs whose structure was determined by physical processes. TheAustrian School, meantime, saw the supply curve as acomplementary demand curve, with the marginal utilities of producers determining their willingness to trade goods and services for money. The neoclassical economistsutterly failed to understand this view, and mistook the Austrian School for claiming that price were simply determined byone demand curve. Hence Marshall's foolish-yet-lauded analogy of cloth being cut by both blades ofscissors.
The neoclassical economist were so convinced that Marshall's synthesis had captured all of the insights of marginalism that they began to write the history of economicsas if marginalism hadcome together with Marshall'sPrinciples. Many eventually lost the distinction betweenmarginalism in general andneoclassical economics in particular, and hence (since the Austrian School were plainlymarginalist) began to write of the Austrian School as “neoclassical”. But the Austrian School has for the most part resisted such unfortunate confusions.
The typical mainstream economist misunderstands mathematics in a way that perversely complements the misunderstanding of mathematics by the typical Austrian School economist.
It's interesting to me to note that theAustrian School and the neoclassical economists share the mistaken belief that the neoclassical economists generally understandmathematics. From this belief, the neoclassical economists thought (and generally continue to think) that their (distinctive) economics, generated with bad mathematics, must be right. The Austrian School saw that the economics waswrong, and erroneously inferred that there must be something wrong with the application of mathematicsper se to economics.
The proposition that errors of aggregation of utility will cancel each other out presumes that utility reallyis very strongly cardinal, though it can only beobserved as something less. But if utility isn't very strongly cardinal — and there isn't good reason to suppose that it is, even if we accept expected utility theory (which cardinalizes utility to the point that onlyaffine transforms are equivalent) — then we are talking aboutaveraging the meaningless. It isn't that some estimated values are too big and others too small so that they can cancel. Rather, there areno underlying values to be estimated.
(Further, if weaccepted such strong cardinality, we wouldstill have to query the expectation that errors wouldcancel-out. They would surely cancel-outat the limit; butthe limit is reached at infinity. In real-life, there would be no reason to expect the errors to cancel-out, and little or no reason to expect the errors to even befinite.)
