|
sanity, humanity and science post-autistic
economics review King: Is there a single correct alternative to neoclassical economics? The purpose of this short paper is to suggest that there is not, and to show that this fact is increasingly recognized by eminent practitioners of several varieties of heterodox economic theory. Davidson: If one wishes to explain (describe) the production, exchange and financial features and operations of a market-oriented, money using, entrepreneurial economy, then Keynes’s “General Theory” is the sole “correct” alternative to neoclassical economics. Neoclassical theory is, as Keynes specifically noted (on page 3 of his 1936 book) merely a “special case” of his general theory2 Moreover I would argue that Sraffian, Kaleckian, and other heterodox theories that try to explain the operation of a market economy are other special cases obtained by adding additional restrictive axioms to Keynes’s basic general theory.
King: Heinz Kurz and Neri Salvadori . . . surprisingly, [come] to the defence of pluralism. Economic reality, they note, is widely believed to be very complicated. The questions that economists ask are therefore inherently difficult, and it is unlikely that they have simple answers. Since no theory can consider all relevant factors in any particular economic context, there is a strong prima facie case for theoretical pluralism. Davidson: All reality is complicated. But that is not a sufficient defense for pluralism. For example, it is said that an equation that takes account of all the gravitational forces that affect the tides on any place on Earth, can run to several pages. This does not stop weathermen from using a simplification of the law of gravity to provide a useful approximation of the time of high tide at any specific place on the ocean shore by relating the tides solely to the gravitational forces of the Earth and the Moon. Complications per se do not require plural alternative explanations for observed phenomena. King: Geoff Hodgson argues that the notion of a single, ‘‘general’’ theory applicable to human behaviour in all societies, at all points in time, is a dangerous delusion that has led astray not only neoclassical economists but also many heterodox theorists. Failure to appreciate the need for historical specificity in economic theorising has not only blighted the work of several generations of general equilibrium theorists, but also reduced the analytical achievements of some of their most vocal opponents, including Clarence Ayres, John Maynard Keynes and Joan Robinson.
Davidson: Keynes’s General Theory is meant to explain a modern, money using, market economy. If one wishes to analyze (explain, discuss) feudalism, or the economies of biblical times, one must add additional restrictive axioms to Keynes’s general theory to obtain a special case theory of feudalism, or of biblical economics, etc. Nevertheless, a common general theory will underlay all these specific cases of historical economies. King: One does not have to agree with all [of] Hodgson... to accept the truth of his contention that ‘‘there are several problems with general theorizing in the social sciences. One is of analytical and computational intractability. Facing such computational limits, general theorists typically simplify their models, thus abandoning the generality of the theory. Another related problem with a general theory is that we are confined to broad principles governing all possible structures within the domain of analysis. In practice, a manageable theory has to confine itself to a relatively tiny subset of all possible structures. Furthermore, the cost of excessive generality is to miss out on key features common to a subset of phenomena’’.
Davidson: Hodgson, as well as King and many others, have confused the concept of a general theory with that of Debreu’s concept of general equilibrium as the mother of all economic theory! Unlike Debreu’s general equilibrium theory, Keynes’s general theory analysis is an axiomatic based approach that required fewer restrictive axioms than any other economic theory. Moreover, in defending his fewer axiomatic approach as a realistic general economic theory, Keynes noted “It is for those who make a highly special assumption to justify it rather than for those who dispense with it to prove a general negative”. In that sense Keynes was not only a developer of economics as a mathematical (axiom-oriented) logical analysis, but his theory had a pragmatic vision of a physical real world process in mind. Roy Weintraub in his recent book How Economics Became a Mathematical Science3 noted that a new image of mathematics emerged in the early decades of the 20th century, and this image shaped the development of mainstream mathematical economics. “To preserve the relationship between rigor and truth, economists began to associate rigor with axiomatic development of economic theories, since axiomatization was seen as the path to discovery of new scientific truths” (Weintraub, 2002,p.98) But this mathematical approach leads to the question of whether “truth” is discovered by having sufficient axioms to obtain the “right” level of generality or by an axiomatic theory based on the least number of assumptions (“a general theory of employment, interest and money”) that is descriptive and applicable to reality? The right level of generality was Debreu’s vision of discovering truth. On the other hand, using the least number of assumptions descriptive of the real world was Keynes’s approach to the “truth” -- as suggested in his analogy of comparing classical economists with Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who continued to use the restrictive axiom of parallels to explain why lines apparently parallel often crash. This is also the belief that underlies Sidney Weintraub and my vision of a Post Keynesian economic theory where the axiomatic base of a general theory should not only be a small as possible – but these axioms should be applicable to the real world. The restrictive bigger axiomatic foundation of Debreu’s general equilibrium theory, in my view, is not applicable to the real world market economy that we live in.. The onus is therefore on those who, like Debreu, would add such restrictive axioms to obtain a general theory to demonstrate the relevance to the real world of their additional postulates of specific case analysis. In economics, the school of Bourbaki mathematical philosophy was transplanted into post-war American economics by Debreu. The seed bed that encouraged the domination of this non-real world view of economic theory was the Cowles Commission of the early 1950s (Weintraub, 2002, p. 104). The Bourbaki method argued that economists developing special cases had to build on the foundation of general (Walrasian-Debreu) equilibrium case. The general structure of this equilibrium foundation was obtained by developing chains of syllogisms from what Debreu considered fundamental axioms that might be buried under accumulated debris of real world details. In this Bourbaki approach “good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality” (Weintraub, 2002, p. 113). In other words, Bourbaki did not accept Keynes’s search for the “maximum” general theory, i.e., a general theory that had the smallest axiomatic foundation that still provides a readily recognizable description of a real world economy. (Keynes’s general theory threw out three classical restrictive axioms4.) According to Bourbaki, Keynes’s general theory -- based on fewer axioms than Debreu’s general equilibrium theory -- is not “good” theory. Instead, Debreu’s general equilibrium theory of value which expresses itself in terms that few, if any, would readily recognize as an apt description of a real world economy (Weintraub, 2002, p. 114) provides the Bourbakian “right” level of generality. In other words, in a Bourbaki view of economics, theories that are readily recognizable as descriptions of reality are not necessarily important. As Weintraub (2002, p. 120) notes, Debreu’s 1959 monograph “The Theory of Value . . . still stands as the benchmark axiomatization of the Walrasian General Equilibrium model . . . the 1959 book wore its Bourbakist credentials on its sleeve, though there may have been few economists at this juncture who would have understood the implications of” Debreu’s statement on p. x of the preface: The theory of value is treated here with the standards of rigor of the contemporary formalist school of mathematics. The effort towards rigor substitutes correct reasoning and results for incorrect ones......leads to a deeper understanding of the problems to which it is applied...also lead to a radical change of mathematical tools.... Alliance to rigor determines the axiomatic form of analysis where the theory, in the strict sense, is logically disconnected from its interpretation. Here is a declaration of independence indicating there is no need for the elements of a rigorous economic theory to have counterparts in the real world. Debreu considered that “the model of Walrasian equilibrium was the root structure [the right level of generality] from which all further work in economics would eventuate” and he showed disdain for attempts (like that of Kenneth Arrow and Frank Hahn) to forge explicit links between the Walrasian model and contemporary theoretical concerns in macroeconomics” (Weintraub, 2002, p. 121) In his bold leap of faith, Debreu believed his work to be “the definitive mother-structure from which all further work in economics would start, primarily by weakening its assumptions or else superimposing new interpretations upon the existing formalism. This stance, however, requires one very crucial manoeuver that was never explicitly stated by Debreu, namely that the Walrasian general equilibrium approach was the root structure from which all further scientific work in economics must be developed (Weintraub, 2002, p. 122). Just as Jefferson’s declaration of independence liberated the thirteen colonies from fat King George, Debreu’s declaration of what constituted the mother-structure “liberated” economics from its dependence on real world analogies. Weintraub (2002, p, 122) states that Debreu’s “Bourbaki program marked a definitive break with physical metaphors”. Successes in the natural sciences may depend upon “bold conjectures and experimental refutation, but economics had nothing else to fall back upon but mathematical rigor”. It is this Bourbakian view that, I believe, the proponents of “pluralism” are protesting against -- even though they do not know it.
King: The Post Keynesians Victoria Chick and Sheila Dow make an equally powerful, if largely implicit, case for pluralism in their penetrating analysis of what is implied by mathematical modeling in economics. Formalising an argument is not, they suggest, an unambiguous improvement, as neoclassicals believe. On the contrary, it is a matter of costs and benefits. Formalism entails a particular view of the world, namely that it displays event regularities strong enough for it to approximate to a closed system. Davidson: Formalism can be consistent with “open models” as I (Davidson5) demonstrated in my development of the use of nonergodic systems in economic theory. It is the importance of nonergodic processes that makes refutation in economics difficult if not impossible. In my view most (but not necessarily all) important economic stochastic processes are nonergodic and hence a permanent rejection of any conjecture about important economic phenomena such as employment, economic growth, etc. are linked to specific historical events, culture, and an uncertain, not statistically reliably (even in principle) predictable future. Although Debreu’s expresses “enthusiasm” for the way he incorporates “uncertainty” into his axiomatic model, his concept of uncertainty has nothing to do with the concept of an unpredictable future. Debreu introduces “uncertainty” by merely redefining the interpretation of a commodity to take account of contingencies (or expressed different states of the world) and a complete set of contingency markets for every date in the foreseeable future. Thus for Debreu uncertainty does not require an open model. Weintraub (2002, p. 125) notes that the “Bourbakism propagated by Cowles had identified neo-Walrasianism and good economic theory . . . . neo-Walrasian theory had become conflated with the very standard of mathematical rigor in economic thought . . . .why precisely should the Walrasian framework be taken as the sole ‘structure’ from which all mathematical work should depart? . . . was it not better to make a case for the right level of generality, then claim one had the maximum level? The Bourbaki answer is that rigor was a matter “of style...and politics...and taste”. Similarly, when King notes that “ Hodgson’’s own proposal for the reconstruction of economic theory, putting the history back, is innately and profoundly pluralistic” I believe that Hodgson’s view of what is good economics is a matter style, politics and taste on Hodgson’s part.
King: Chick and Dow do not completely deny the legitimacy of formalism in economics, in all circumstances, for all purposes. On the contrary: some problems lend themselves to closed-system thinking and cry out for precise, formal solutions. They argue only that it is a serious mistake to suppose that all economic problems are of this type. Davidson: I believe that Chick and Dow are confusing Debreu’s Bourbakian variant of formalism with the use of formal logic. In Chick’s and Dow’s view what problems are susceptible to Debreu’s formalism is, I think, a matter of taste, style, and politics.
King: If pluralism does not (quite) rule out formalism, what does it exclude? Unqualified relativism, for one thing; logical incoherence, for another. Hodgson is the most outspoken in denying that ‘‘anything goes’’, and the most sternly critical of postmodernist claims in this regard. “An acceptable policy of pluralism’’, he suggests, ‘‘concerns the policy of institutions towards the funding and nurturing of science. Such a policy involves ‘pluralism in the academy’. But it would not extend to the individual practices of science itself. This confusion, between encouraging contradictory ideas in the academy and encouraging them in our own heads, is widespread in post-modernism . . . There is much to be said for tolerance of many and even antagonistic scientific research programmes within an academic discipline or university. But we should not tolerate the existence of inconsistent ideas within our own heads.”
Davidson: But how can we assure that different models are not logically inconsistent unless we have a benchmark “general” model with a minimum number of well-specified axioms that acts as the foundation of all other models? King:, King notes that Hodgson states “the policy towards science must be pluralistic and tolerant, but science itself must be intolerant of what it regards as falsehood . . . Any failure of social science to erect an adequate and coherent general theory is not rectified by applauding incoherence’’ Horses for courses, as Geoff Harcourt has always put it, but they must each have four legs and a jockey and proceed anti-clockwise around the course.
Davidson: The horses for courses analogy is misleading. In my view the legs of any economic model (horse) must be the same basic axioms underlying Keynes’s general theory. Those who wish to add additional restrictive axioms must, as Keynes notes, specifically justify the use of these additional postulates as realistically applicable to the real world. Only if all the horses shares the same basic axiomatic legs can we let them race on different courses King: Kurz and Salvadori also insist on the need for logical consistency in economic theorising. For them this criterion is enough to rule neoclassical analysis out of the race, since its conception of capital is fundamentally flawed. If the ‘‘principle of substitution’’ is central to mainstream theory, they argue, it should be applied in a logically consistent manner. In the long period, this means that an increase in the price of one input induces a decrease in the quantity of that input per unit of output. ‘‘All propositions of the theory can be traced back to this basic idea. If it is not true in general, the theory appears to be in trouble’’ (Kurz and Salvadori, 2000:238). But it has been known since the mid-1960s that it is, in general, false when applied to the collection of heterogeneous commodities known as ‘‘capital’’. Davidson: Unfortunately for Kurz, Salvadori and King, Keynes rejected the axiom of gross substitution long before the 1960s capital controversy. In Keynes’s chapter 17 on the essential properties of interest and money, Keynes specifically rejects the ubiquitous applicability of the axiom of gross substitution. And Arrow and Hahn6 have demonstrated that in the absence of gross substitutability, all existence proofs of a general equilibrium are jeopardized.
King: From a quite different perspective the Post Keynesian Paul Davidson has criticised what he terms the ‘‘babel’’ of New Keynesian economics, in which market imperfections that prevent downward price and wage flexibility are denounced as the fundamental cause of involuntary unemployment while in the same breath a falling price level (‘‘deflation’’) is decried as a serious macroeconomic evil (Davidson, 1999; compare Solow, 1997 and Taylor, 1997 for graphic examples of this incoherence). Horses for courses, once again, but all four legs must be pointing in the same direction.
Davidson: And the horse merely must show that his legs display the essential properties of interest and money– independently of the substitutability of labor and/or capital as factors of production. In sum, then, I believe that encouraging pluralism in economics without a common general theory foundation merely encourages heterodox economists to erect a modern Tower of Babel, thereby making it easier for Mainstream economists to ignore the resulting incomprehensible babel coming from this heterodox structure. Instead, heterodox economists who want to affect the development of their discipline as taught in major universities and economic journals must unite behind Keynes’s general theory and demonstrate that what passes as mainstream theory is merely a special logical case requiring additional restrictive axioms that are unrealistic and therefore policies based on this special case will be disastrous if applied to the real world global economy of the 21st century.
Notes
1. J. E. King, “Three
Arguments for Pluralism in Economics”, post-autistic
economics review, issue no. 23, 5 January 2004, article 2, http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review/issue23.htm 3. E. R. Weintraub, How Economics Became A
Mathematical Science (Duke University Press, Chapel Hill, 2002). Pre-modern Science: Smith and Coase on Smith Smith’s concept of The Invisible Hand, many have argued, has roots in
theology. And in general it is
easy to find passages in Smith that seem to rely on the notion of a
divinely-ordained harmony in the world.
In his essay, “Adam
Smith’s View of Man1,” Ronald Coase argues, contra Jacob Viner,
that Smith’s views on psychology in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments do not, despite appearances, have theological
underpinnings. Smith, says
Coase, in showing “that particular characteristics of human beings which were
in various ways disagreeable were accompanied by offsetting social benefits2,”
did not typically appeal to a
divine harmony as an explanation.
I think he makes a persuasive case in this regard. Smith appeals not
to God but to Nature as the well-designing author of our
harmonious-despite-appearances psychology. Coase goes on to say that, in this respect, Smith was
essentially an evolutionist before his time: “In all these cases nature, as
Adam Smith would say, or natural
selection, as we would say, has made sure that man possesses those properties
which would secure the propagation of the species. (emphasis added).3”
Examine this astonishing statement. To vindicate Smith’s scientific
credentials, Coase assimilates a patent providentialism to modern science!
What is the difference that makes a difference between an evolutionist providentialism
and a divine one? And yet, of course, to this day evolutionary theory is
marred by such providentialism –
a thoroughly anti-scientific excrescence. The idea that evolution promotes
the good of the species is more or less gone, thankfully – though it had a
long run. But the idea that evolution promotes the good of the organism is
alive and kicking. The fact that
Darwin himself, in his theory of sexual selection, rejected this more subtle
species of providentialism, has not prevented its remaining intact in biology
until fairly recently. But we still have prominent evolutionists trying to
explain the human brain, human art and science, human morality, by appeal to
the survival value of these innovations – and rejecting more or less out of
hand explanations that fail to identify such survival value. The history of the reception of the theory of sexual selection in
biology, recently well recounted by Geoffrey Miller in his book, The Mating Mind4, is a case
study in the struggle of the pre-modern and the modern in science, and can
serve as a preliminary to a more general discussion of the elements of what I
am calling modernist explanation. This will be followed by an account of the
struggles of modernism in that most pre-modern of sciences, economics,
culminating in a claim that the real scandal that Keynes’ work represented
for the discipline was its modernism. Sexual selection, especially the idea of runaway sexual selection
developed by H. A. Fisher in 19305, makes clear in a startling way
that adaptive traits may hinder the organism’s chances of survival. The
peacock’s tail, famously,
reduces the peacock’s chances of survival but increases the chances
that its genes will spread by making it more attractive to mates. A
providentialist may still take solace in the thought that the female
preference for long tails remains unexplained, but here is where, in its
runaway version, sexual selection becomes strikingly modern, in my terms: the
female preference for long tails, so the theory goes, can be self-justifying.
If enough females have a bias toward longer tails in mates, the preference
for longer tails will be adaptive, by leading to offspring with longer tails
who will be preferred as mates!
Certain conceptions of science, those I am calling pre-modern, find
this sort of theory prima facie
absurd. It opens the door, patently, to arbitrariness and indeterminacy and
unpredictability: why not short tales? The ground starts to slip out from
under the explanation: how can a “scientific” explanation make something, in
effect, its own cause? And providentialism is obviously shaken to its roots
by this sort of thinking, Miller summarizes the reaction to Fisher of the
famous biologist Julian Huxley: “He defined evolutionary progress as
‘improvement in efficiency of living’ and ‘increased control over and
independence of the environment’. Since sexual ornaments had high costs that
undermined survival chances and did not help an animal cope with a hostile
environment, Huxley viewed them as anti-progressive, degenerate indulgences6.”
Huxley was not unique: sexual selection, which Darwin regarded as equally as
important as natural selection, did not enter the mainstream of biological
thinking until more than 100 years after Darwin wrote – until the 1980's. The Modern The modernism I want to discuss finds its proper antonym not in the post-modern but in the pre-modern
or traditional. The sense I intend is most adequately delineated in Marshall
Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity7,
an enormous and sui generis piece of scholarship. The hallmarks of modernism
I want to focus on are, first, the subsumption of ends by means, and, second,
closely related, the ubiquity of self-reference. An example will clarify. How does modern art differ from
pre-modern art? One important
way, surely is that for a good deal of the former, art is not the transparent
means to an end outside itself, mimesis or representation, but instead
becomes its own subject--art about art, art for its own sake, etc. So art,
traditionally the means of representing the world, now seeks to represent its
own activity--the end has been subsumed by the means in some sense--and
self-reference, with its associated paradoxes invariably moves center stage. An associated idea is that of
bootstrap phenomena. Bootstraps, as in "pulling oneself up by one's
own" are self-generated or self-caused phenomena. Modern thinking spurns
foundations: think of Sartre's notion that man's essence is to have no
essence, to be condemned to be free and forced to create his own meaning,
willy-nilly. The absence of external foundations, theological or otherwise,
makes modernity both exhilarating and terrifying. It would fill reams and reams of paper to do justice to
all the ways in which the theme of means become ends, and the associated
themes of self-reference and bootstrapping, are played out in area after area
of modern thought and thought about the modern. I don't intend these three elements to capture the richness of Berman's argument, but I believe they are central to modernism in the sense he uses it, although in no way exhaustive of that sense. Summing up his argument, he writes: To be modern . . . is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal.
3. Conventions: Why do you, an American, drive on the
right side of the road? Because you expect others to do the same. Why do others do so? Because they
expect you and others to do so as well. Collectively, then, we drive on the
right side of the road because we drive on the right side on the road.
Alternatively, why do you, an Englishman, drive on the left side of the road.
Because you expect other English people to do the same, etc. 4. Money: Why do you give up
real goods and services for worthless pieces of paper? Because you expect
others to give you (different) real goods and services for the paper in turn
tomorrow. Alternatively--same fundamentals--why do you refuse to give up real
goods for worthless pieces of paper?
Because you expect others to refuse as well10. 5. Co-evolution: Why does
animal A have such long, sharp teeth? Because animal B, its prey, has such a
hard carapace. Why does animal B have such a hard carapace? Because animal A, its predator, has
such sharp teeth. Alternatively--same fundamentals--why does animal A have
such short, dull teeth. Because animal B, its prey, is so soft and mushy. Why
is animal B so soft and mushy?
Because animal A, its predator, has such short, dull teeth. (See
Sigmund, Games of Life, on co-evolution.11) 6. Runaway Redux: Why is the peacock's tail so long. Because long
tails are preferred by females, so the low survival value is offset by the
increased chance of mating. But why do females prefer long tails? Because, given a substantial group of females in
the population who prefer long tails, a female with a gene for preferring
long tails will also carry the gene for long tails. Its offspring will thus do
better reproductively. 8. 19th Century Capitalism:
How can the level of investment be so high while the level of consumption is
so low? Means of Production are
being produced today to be used to produce means of production tomorrow etc.
-- the means have become ends. Alternatively, a low level of investment might
make sense despite robust consumption if the level of investment will be low
tomorrow -- the means of production needed for the consumption goods industry
is high, but the means of production needed to produce means of production
are low. So modernist explanations, I shall stipulate, are characterized by:
c. The reversal of means/end relationships. Means become ends in themselves. d.
Bootstrapping phenomena, as in "pulling yourself
up by your own" As a consequence, arbitrariness, and multiple
equilibria. Modernism
on the Fringe: Marx
In economics, the locus classicus of modernism, indeed the source--in
the Manifesto-- of the phrase Berman uses as the title of his book, is
the work of Karl Marx, definitely far out of the mainstream. Marx, throughout his writing, returns
again and again to the essential difference between a pre-modern economy of
small producers where, in his well-known terminology, exchange proceeds
according to the transparent schema
C-M-C' (a commodity of one type, C, is exchanged for money, M, which
is in turn used to purchase a different commodity C'), on the one hand; and the modern capitalist economy,
whose dynamism springs from its obedience to a diametrically opposed schema:
M-C-M', on the other. Here, money purchases commodities (labor and raw
materials) which are fashioned into goods to be sold for still more money, so
that the process can begin again. Unlike the first, this second process has
no natural stopping point, and no foundation or rationale outside of itself,
in some pre-existing human needs, the need to satisfy which begins and the
satisfaction of which ends the exchange process in the first schema. The mere
means in the first schema, money, has become the end in the second. And what is the money for? To create more money. Thinking about
the second schema, we experience the same dizziness, the same hall-of-mirrors
effect that I would argue characterizes the modernist turn in all areas of
life and culture. (I think of this modernist experience as the Land 'O Lakes
effect, after the butter box of my youth, which pictures an Indian woman
holding a box of butter, on which is pictured an Indian woman holding a box
of butter, on which is pictured . . .)
Marx's most succinct definition of capital captures this modernist
theme beautifully. He calls capital "self-expanding value". Again we have a self-referring
infinity in which means has become end: value creating value creating value .
. . . Our pre-modern, traditionalist, religious inclination is to ask
"to what end?" and to feel frustrated by our inability to get an
answer. Marx argued that to represent the modern capitalist economy as,
underneath the trappings of a sophisticated financial system and a highly
complex division of labor, nothing but a barter economy operating according
to C-M-C', a giant means to satisfy the end of human consumption, was a huge
mistake. He raged against
the "Robinsonades" of
the classical economists -- their attempts to explain the workings of a
modern capitalist economy by telling stories about Robinson Crusoe solving
his economic problem (the economic problem) all alone on his desert island. The idea that capital, the
dynamic process of self-expanding value whose revolutionary consequences Marx
documented, could be understood by analogy with the fishing net that Robinson
sacrificed some potential fish today to construct, in order transparently to
increase his fish consumption tomorrow -- Marx found absurd and
laughable. On the contrary, the
capitalism he saw and described was just as capable of producing means of
production today to increase the capacity for producing means of production
tomorrow, which in turn would make possible further means of production ad
infinitum--to produce for production's sake, as it were. The economic world he described, in other words, was a modern
economy, not the pre-modern and traditional economy of a Robinson Crusoe. To
miss this distinction, Marx would have said, is to miss, in effect,
everything. Thoroughly
Modern Maynard
Prior to Keynes, however, the mainstream of the profession did
miss this distinction, and, despite Keynes, still in large part does. What are the "representative
agent " models so beloved of modern macroeconomists, real business
cyclists and others, if not hi-tech Robinsonades? I believe Keynes' modernism was pervasive. Its most obvious
manifestations, however, can seem at first sight fairly isolated in his work,
and have been so treated by his interpreters. The Keynesian who believes Keynes' message to have been
well captured in the Hicksian ISLM apparatus has very little use, it would
seem, for Keynes' brilliant Chapter 12 in The General Theory,
"The State of Long-term Expectation"13. Here is Keynes' oft-cited discussion
of the Stock Market, of Infinitely-lived Asset valuation in general. The modernism of this chapter is hard
to miss. Here we are asked to contemplate the bootstrap character of the
valuation of an open-ended asset whose price today depends on dividends it is
expected to pay, to be sure, but also on the price it is expected to have
tomorrow, which latter price will depend on the price it is expected to have
further on in the future, and so on ad infinitum. Keynes' asks us to take seriously the notion that the
asset's price may very well lose any connection with the "solid"
fundamentals and become an airy bubble of self-fulfilling expectations. It is important to see, too, that
such an essentially modernist phenomenon Keynes regards not as temporary and
bound to disappear just as soon as professionals -- investors knowledgeable
about the fundamentals -- appear on the scene, but as comparatively
long-lasting and immune to arbitrage: This
battle of wits to anticipate the basis of conventional valuation a few months
hence, rather than the prospective yield of an investment over a long term of
years, does not even require gulls among the public to feed the maws of the
professionals; -- it can be played by professionals among themselves. In contemporary terms, Keynes is talking in this passage about "rational
bubbles".15 They
are rational because there is no assumption of stupidity on the part of
purchasers of the bubbled asset, stupidity that a canny professional might
profit from--and by doing so burst the bubble. The bubbled asset provides a
normal return in expectation, with the bubble itself growing at the rate of
return, and therefore passes a no-arbitrage or efficient markets test, no
matter how wildly divergent from fundamentals its price becomes, and is
destined increasingly to become. Only an infinitely-lived agent could undo, via arbitrage, a bubble on
an infinitely-lived asset, which fact puts Keynes' reminder that "in the
long run we're all dead" in a whole new light! It is somewhat ironic that the development of rational
expectations, a development that in its early stages was used as a battering
ram against Keynesian economics, enables us to understand the bootstraps and bubbles of Chapter
12 Keynes with much greater depth and clarity than we could before. The determination of the present not
by the past but by the unknown future -- via expectations -- can never be
grasped, with all its dramatically modernist implications for our economic
lives, as long as we reduce expectations about the future, by means of an
adaptive expectations scheme, to some determinate function of the past. Rational expectations -- honestly
deployed -- can be a potent generator of modernist outcomes: unfortunately,
this is usually noted, if at all, in the footnotes, where one finds the
specious arguments for ignoring all but the fundamental solutions covered in
the main text. It is important to see that Keynes, despite twinges of pre-modern
revulsion which lead him to propose at one point, half-seriously, that we
marry the asset to the asset-holder for life, to defeat speculation and thus
the melting of all that is solid into air -- ultimately felt that bubbles
could not be disposed of so easily: “This is the inevitable result of
investment markets organised with a view to so-called liquidity.”16 Contemporary thinkers who have carried on and developed Keynes'
modernist views of asset bubbles find the profession scarcely more receptive
than it was and is to Chapter 12. The pre-modernism of the profession lies
very deep: Look, for one example, at the vehemence of the reaction to Robert
Shiller's 1981 article on Stock Market volatility, work directly in the
tradition of Chapter 12.17
In a symposium on bubbles in the Journal of Economic Perspectives
of a few years back, we find one participant arguing quite seriously that the
Great Tulip Mania in 17th century Amsterdam--what Sadam Hussein might have
called the Mother of All Bubbles, on previous accounts -- can be
parsimoniously explained as a response to changes in fundamentals!18 But I have argued that modernism is pervasive in Keynes, not a
phenomenon confined to a chapter here or there. Here, I want to suggest that we broaden our minds about
the Keynesian message and remember, above all that his work stands in two traditions
simultaneously, both the mainstream, and the underground, heretical tradition
of underconsumption theorists, numbering among its members thinkers such as
Marx, Hobson, Major Douglas and Malthus19 -- some of whom Keynes
explicitly acknowledges as progenitors in his appendices to the General
Theory. The common vision of
this latter tradition is the one I have identified in Marx, of a modern
capitalist economy subject to
stagnation because its ability to produce outruns its ability to consume: the
modernist possibility of production for production's sake is here taken very
seriously indeed. Moderns
and Pre-Moderns: Keynes, Robertson, and Our Grandchildren
The modernist impulse in Keynes can be observed in the reaction it
provoked in his anti-modernist contemporaries. A small but symptomatic incident provides an
illustration. Keynes' theory of
liquidity preference contained the modernist idea that what determines the
interest rate today is speculator's expectations of what it will be tomorrow. This couldn't be the end of the
story, D. H. Robertson20 and others (Leontief, famously) insisted:
Where were the fundamentals of the process? Robertson's reaction was vehemently anti-modernist: Thus the
rate of interest is what it is because it is expected to become other than it
is; if it is not expected to become other than it is, there is nothing left
to tell us why it is what it is.
The organ which secretes it has been amputated, and yet it somehow
still exists--a grin without a cat.21 Robertson is not alone among economists in thinking that to establish
the bootstrap, foundation-less character a theory attributes to an economic
phenomenon is ipso facto
to refute that theory.
Alice in Wonderland is one thing; reality cannot have this airy
character. If your theory tells
you it does, it must need work.
As with under-consumption, I cite this aspect of Keynes as an instance
of his attraction to modernist explanations. I don't mean to condition my argument on an acceptance of
the speculative demand for money any more than on the acceptance of, say, Alvin
Hansen's Keynesian Stagnationism.
There are contemporary theories of the interest rate which inherit
from Keynes the modernist form without the particular content he filled it
with. Keynes himself, like many another great modernist, combines his modernist
description with a deep anti-modernist revulsion at the prima facie
absurdity of the phenomena he is
transcribing and, in his weaker
moments, with what amounts to a pious hope for an overcoming of modernism and
a return to a pre-modern golden age where means have been put back in their
place as means to independent ends to which they are transparently related,
where bubbles have burst and social life, as it were, makes sense again.
(Berman, by the way finds some of these same tendencies in the arch-modernist
Marx, who seems sometimes to hold up a vision of socialism as a rest from the
ceaseless flux, an overcoming, indeed, of history, a putting-paid to the
ceaseless, permanent revolution of modern life.) This modernist/anti-modernist dialectic in Keynes is most apparent in
his 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"22,
where he contrasts the "purposiveness" of contemporary economic
life with its potential overcoming in the lives of our grandchildren. The former idea represents still
another ringing in Keynes' work of the by now familiar modernist
changes. The purposive man, he
says: is always trying to secure a spurious and
delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward in
time. He does not love his cat,
but his cat's kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens but only the kittens'
kittens; and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. To him jam is not jam unless it is a
case of jam tomorrow and never jam today.23 But after describing and dissecting this modernist
purposiveness--interestingly named since it seems almost paradigmatically
anti-purposive to pre-modern eyes--Keynes sounds an almost religious
anti-modernism. The purposive
era will one day end ("when science and the power of compound interest
" have solved the economic problem!). And in this future made possible precisely by virtue of
the abundance obtained through centuries of purposiveness: We shall once more
value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor those who teach us to
pluck the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of
taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin.24 But Keynes, unlike the great majority of the economics profession in
his day and our own, did not allow his anti-modern hopes and values --
delusive or not -- to interfere with his ability to limn the modernist
reality in which we live and breathe. The modernist present is highlighted
and set off by the stark contrast with the imagined anti-modernist future. Keynes' modernism is, I believe, the most deeply interesting and at
the same time has proven so far the least assimilable dimension of his legacy
to the economics profession.
L’Envoi Taking the contra-positive formulation of Nietzsche’s famous
declaration, if everything is not permitted, then God is not dead. A determinist science, science that
recoils from arbitrariness and meaninglessness, that doesn’t permit, in
principle, everything, that only
counts as explanations the pre-modernist subset – keeps God alive, and its
adherents children.
2. Ibid: 107. 3. Ibid: 109. 4. Miller, Geoffrey, 2000. The Mating Mind. Doubleday,
New York. 5. Sigmund, Karl, 1993. Games of Life.
Oxford University Press, New York: 128-31. 6. Miller, op. cit: 58. 7. Berman, Marshall,1982, All That Is Solid
Melts Into Air, Penguin Books, New York. 8. Keynes, J. M., 1965, The General Theory,
Harbinger, New York. 9. Weill, Philipe, 1989."Animal Spirits and
Increasing Returns.” American Economic
Review: September. 10. See Wallace, Neil, 1980. "Overlapping
Generations Models of Fiat Money" in Models of Monetary Economies.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. 11. Sigmund, op. cit.: 148, et seq. , on
co-evolution. 12. Leijonhufvud, Axel, 1968. On Keynesian
Economics and The Economics of Keynes. Oxford University Press, London. 13. Keynes, J. M., 1965, The General Theory,
Harbinger, New York: 147-164. 14. Keynes,1965, op.cit.,p.155. 15. See Blanchard, Olivier and Stanley Fischer
(1989), Lectures on Macroeconomics, MIT Press, Cambridge, Chapter 5,
for a good discussion of this literature. Chapter 5 is titled "Multiple
Equilibria, Bubbles and Stability", and it sits uncomfortably in the
text, an apparent swerving away from the main track (which of course it is).
The last sentence of the chapter states ". . . though we find the
phenomena analyzed in this chapter both interesting and disturbing, we are
willing to proceed on the working assumption that the conditions need to
generate stable multiplicities of equilibria are not met in practice".
So it's goodbye to bubble solutions from then on. I wonder how many syllabi
in courses that use the text leave this chapter out? 16. Ibid, emphasis added. 17. Shiller, Robert,(1989), Market Volatility,
MIT press, Cambridge, contains the original article along with Shiller's
responses to the veritable cottage industry of critics which grew in its
wake. The article is "Do Stock Prices Move too Much to be Justified by
Subsequent Changes in Dividends", American Economic Review 71
(1981): 421-35, and appears as Chapter 5 of Market Volatility. 18. Garber, Peter, (1990), "Famous First
Bubbles", Journal of Economic Perspectives 4: 35-54. 19. See Bleaney, Michael, Underconsumption
Theories, (1976), International Publishers, New York, for an excellent
overview of this tradition. 20. Robertson, D. H.,(1940), "Mr. Keynes and
the Rate of Interest" in Essays in Monetary Theory, Staples
Press, London:1-38. 21. Ibid.: 25. 22. In Keynes, (1963), Essays in Persuasion,
Norton, New York: 358-373. 23. Ibid: 370. 24. Ibid: 372. (This article was
commissioned for La Science en 2004 of the L’Encyclopedia Universalis.) Economic science is far from being exact: the divisions between economists are notorious and their predictions are subject to disputes and revisions. Nor has there been any major discovery in economics in 2003 or in 2002 or in preceding years. One could even ask if there has ever been any; the annual awarding since 1968 by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences of a prize for economic science (commonly called the “Nobel prize for economics” although from this it does not follow that it is one) fails to convince. Nevertheless, economic relations exist; they even constitute an important part of human activities, and a scientific mind can only try to understand them. Generations of economists, of whom the most famous have often had a solid scientific education, have tried; thus one cannot ignore their thought, and eventually the influence that they may have had on the evolution of societies. So doing an update on economic knowledge and on the theories of economists is consistent with a scientific approach – even if, in the end, the results are slight or subject to caution. Knowing that we don’t know, or that we know little, is also part of scientific knowledge. Economic science and science The term “economic science” is usually used to designate a collection of economic theories. By “science” one generally means a body of knowledge or set of theories about which there is a broad consensus: they are considered to be true on the whole because they have been verified – or at least non falsified – by experience or observation. But in economics it is not uncommon to see different theories coexist for a long time, although they concern the same phenomena and give rise to divergent, maybe opposite, predictions. One can offer two reasons for this, which explain why the situation in economics is radically different from sciences in the strict sense.
Economic theory and
experimentation Theories, whatever they may be, are in the beginning the fruit of imagination, of beliefs, or even sometimes of the opinions of those who formulate them. In order to sort them out, so as to retain only one concerning a given phenomenon, the ideal method is that of controlled experiment, where the studied phenomenon is isolated, by conserving only what is taken into account by the theory, apart from certain perturbations considered as trivial. But in economics such experiments are not possible. As John Stuart Mill noted in 1843: The instances requisite for the prosecution of a directly experimental inquiry into the formation of character would be a number of human beings to bring up and educate from infancy to mature age ; and to perform any one of these experiments with scientific propriety, it would be necessary to know and record every sensation or impression derived by the young pupil long before it could speak. It is not only impossible to do this completely, but even to do so much of it as should constitute a tolerable approximation. One apparently trivial circumstance which eluded our vigilance might let in a train of impressions and associations sufficient to vitiate the experiment as an authentic exhibition of the effects flowing from given causes. (A system of Logic, Book VI. chap 5. point 3)
Knowledge and laws in economics Certainly astronomers, for example, do not carry out experiments. However they use results reached by sciences that do undertake them and, above all, give an essential place to observation. The regularity of physical phenomena, their repetition, their universal character (in time and space, at least on a certain scale), enable astronomy to explain a great number of phenomena and, even, to make highly accurate predictions. The situation is very different in economics, where it is impossible to find situations which in the main are differentiated only by the action of one or a few well identified factors – the first step towards the establishment of causal relationships and therefore of laws. It is why it is not possible to find in economics laws taking the form of precise relations, always verified, between two or more variables, other things remaining unchanged -- this last condition being almost never verified, even approximately. Economists however create confusion by using the word “law” where it does not apply. This is the case, for example, of the “law of supply and demand”, according to which the price of a good whose supply exceeds its demand tends to decrease – or to increase in the contrary case. As soon as one tries to give a more precise content to this so called “law”, one perceives that it is very vague: who makes the price vary? And how? Is this price unique? Can’t it happen that the people who demand the product organise themselves and refuse to pay a higher price? Can they not purchase other goods instead? In fact, the use of the verb “tend” fits what economists can at the very most hope to achieve: to detect some tendencies in the phenomena studied. Tendencies
rather than laws
The word “tendency” suggests a direction, but not a certain result. The tendency is in itself the manifestation of a law, but this one does not appear clearly because of the existence of disruptive non negligible elements, that can be called “counter tendencies”, and for which it is not possible to isolate their effects. Thus, in place of talking of a “law” of the equalization of profit rates (widely evoked by David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and even Karl Marx), we will say there is a “tendency”, because this equalization can take time and also resources in collecting information and in comparing various profit rates and the risks with which they are associated. A more controversial case is that of the tendency for the profit rate to decrease (set out by Karl Marx). The idea is simple: if one thinks that all value comes from labour, and that with time, the accumulated labour (under the form of machines, equipment, offices, etc.), or “dead labour”, increases in comparison to the living labour; then the profit rate must diminish. But here there is only a “tendency”, which can be blocked by an increase of the profit (the share of the living labour appropriated by the capitalists), or by a diminution of the value of the “accumulated” labour (obsolescent or unused equipment). The problem faced by the theoretician, if the diminution of the profit rate is not evident, is to know whether it is due to the existence of counter tendencies or due to the erroneous nature of the theory, i.e., the tendency to diminution does not exist. Because it is not possible to have a controlled experiment to settle the matter, both points of view can continue to coexist indefinitely. ( . . . ) Economic theory and
self-realisation There is another aspect of economics that distinguishes it fundamentally from the natural sciences; its theories can transform the world that it studies. This is what we call, not altogether correctly, self-realisation. The discourse of economists, their predictions and their speculations often turn out to be erroneous. Even so economics influences the people at which it is aimed, and whose actions shape economic life and constitute its substance. People base their economic decisions on more than just “objective” factors such as tastes, available technology and the distribution of resources. They also base their decisions on their beliefs at the time of deciding, for example, beliefs regarding the “business climate” or future prospects. There is also the fact that the government, the big firms and the participants in stock exchanges act according to economics theories – which often take the form of mathematical models – whose form has thus an effect, more or less important, on economic reality, even if this influence is not that assumed by these models. It is this action of the subjective, of beliefs, on the real world that is called, somewhat incorrectly, self-realisation – which concerns the very special case where what has been predicted is realised as a direct consequence of the prediction itself. Where then is the “reality”, the “real” world that the science intends to analyse and understand independently of the opinions and beliefs of the scientist? Two typical examples show why the answer to this question is not obvious. Assume that one has observed that an upturn in the stock market accompanied by a decrease in interest rates and an increase in household expenditure has been followed, say 4 out of 5 times, by a revival of the economy. If these conditions (stock market upturn, low interest rates, increase of spending) are observed at a given moment, and if the idea according to which they should entail a revival is widely held, then those who share it will, by their actions, make it happen. The revival is thus as much a consequence of shared beliefs, concerning a causal relationship, as it is a consequence of the causal relationship itself (assuming that it really exists). Another example concerns the stock market, where the beliefs of investors play a central role. Take the price of options, i.e., the premium that someone has to pay at a certain time to have the right to buy a security or commodity at a future date at a given price (fixed in advance). This premium will depend in particular on the expectations held regarding future fluctuations of stock market prices, on their “volatility”. It is thus that Fisher Black and Myron Scholes (Nobel Prize winners) proposed a formula to calculate the price of options – assuming among other things that stock exchange prices follow a law of the type “random walk”. If all actors in stock markets adopt this formula, attributing the same value to these parameters, then this formula will, very precisely, give the observed prices of the options. But is one to say that Black and Scholes’s model perfectly explains reality, as if it were independent of the model? No, of course not. One can, at the most, note that there is consensus among the actors on the price of options – all agreeing on the price given by the formula of Black and Scholes, which plays the role of a convention. Here the conjunction of the subjective and the objective is at a maximum. The beliefs of members of a society and the theories and models of the economists – resulting from their beliefs – are facts, data, which can play an important role in the economic life. Even if they are difficult to figure out and define, a scientific approach in economics must take them into account – even if this has the consequence of rendering vain or impossible purely mathematical formulations (something the profession has difficulty accepting). Economy and Mathematics: a serious drift The prominence that economics books and journals give to mathematics,
sometimes very complex, is impressive.
Together with physicists, economists are probably those who use
advanced mathematics the most. There would appear to be a paradox here:
mathematics being synonymous with rigour and precision, how is it that they
can play such a role in a discipline where vagueness reigns?. The answer
probably lies in the roots of this vagueness: the economic and social world being
particularly difficult to grasp schematically, to reduce to simple laws, the
temptation is great to flee it and to take refuge in fictitious worlds, in
models having little to do with what we can observe (especially concerning
forms of social organisation), but which lend themselves to endless
mathematical developments. It is symptomatic that among the journals of reputable disciplines, that it is those of economics that have, by far, the highest proportion of purely theoretical articles, with lots of mathematics but without any concrete data (this also happens in theoretical physics, but much less). Some economists – including famous ones who have sometimes built their reputation on their mathematical expertise – lament this state of affairs. These include the Nobel Prize winners Wassily Leontief, John Hicks, Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz. Nevertheless, the recruitment and selection processes for economics teachers and researchers continue to privilege those who demonstrate (particularly in their publications) their knowledge of mathematics, thereby perpetuating the situation or even making it worse. This approach that economics uses to give itself the image of having a scientific character can, however, have the opposite effect, by providing evidence that economists are charlatans and pedants, who try to impress others with their formulas, while the predictions that follow from them leave, at the very least, much to be desired. Economy and Ideology The desire to prove that economic science could be different from other
human and social sciences, because it can be put into a mathematical form,
also leads to aberrations. It was with this desire that the currently
dominant theory of the formation of prices was originally proposed in the
1870’s by Leon Walras, who above all sought to determine prices that would,
according to him, be “fair”, that is to say, such that the rights of each
person would be respected. In order to do this, Walras conceived a form of
social organisation where prices are “called out” by an entity exterior to
the traders, and where there is “tatonnement” (without exchanges) until the
“faire prices” are reached, (these prices happening to be those which
equalize the global demands and supplies). The mathematic form which was
progressively adopted to represent this system happens to describe a very
centralized economy, where the person who calls out the prices, and makes
them vary, plays an essential role, especially by organising the exchanges
(they can only occur through him).
However, this very special form of organisation is necessary for the
demonstration of what is considered to be the principal result of economic
theory: there exists a system of prices which equalizes, on the basis of
these prices, the supplies and demands. The demonstration of this “existence
theorem” – for which the Nobel Prize was awarded to those who first made it,
Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu
– is undoubtedly a piece of technical wizardry. But it also is the source of a great confusion, because it
is systematically presented as proving “mathematically” that a market devoid
of hindrances – “perfect” – always leads to a desired situation (where the
choices of participants are compatible, and thus realizable). This is absurd,
because the demonstration assumes a very centralised form of organisation,
the opposite of the idea one generally has of market systems. Only a central planner can possibly be interested by this “theorem”.
Even so it is generally what formal economic theory relies upon and pretends
relates to markets. Another example of this kind of absurdity are the “representative agent” models, very fashionable since the 1990’s (one here thinks of another Nobel Prize winner, Robert Lucas). These models suppose that the observed evolution, “macroeconomic”, of some of the basic variables of an economy (such as the GNP, consumption and investment, and employment and price levels) can be assimilated to the choice of a unique individual (obviously imaginary), who is both a consumer and producer, and who decides to divide his available time (present and future) between labour and leisure, and to divide what he produces between consumption and investment. Various mathematical techniques are then used – among others, the optimisation of non linear programs – to determine the share which enables this individual to maximise his (present and future) satisfaction. The result obtained is then compared to that of the economy on the whole (at it appears in statistical series, concerning employment, production, etc.), and theoreticians then try to give the parameters, which characterize the “representative agent”, values which reproduce at best the observed evolutions. Only ideology – here, the belief in the all-powerfulness of mathematics joined to the virtues of the “market” – can explain why people, otherwise very reasonable, can dedicate their time and energy to these types of models. Do we need economists and
economic theories? For a critical mind, the situation in economics is like this. On the one hand, it consists of an important accumulation of facts, data and statistical treatments, more or less elaborate, which try to bring out relations or tendencies by relying on relatively simple theories – but between which it is hardly possible to discriminate, because the elements which are not included in each theory are numerous and often non negligible. On the other hand, it consists of endless speculations, which use mathematics like Moliere’s doctors used Latin, trying to make us believe in the scientific character of the discourse, when on the contrary, it is the scientific approach which is sacrificed. Many economists, however, both undertake sensible studies, on specific points, using a certain number of simple ideas, and yet participate in the speculations of the “grand theory”, when it has (almost) nothing in common with what they do when they carry out their empirical studies. The “simple ideas” that are the basis of these studies are generally old ideas, the fruit of observation and of the experiences of our societies. Thus, there is now a fashion for the “asymmetry of information” (a theme which led Joseph Stiglitz to his Nobel Prize in 2001). This term refers to the fact that in many transactions the parties involved do not have the same information regarding the object of the transactions. A typical example is that of the relation between insurer and insured, or between a banker and a borrower. Insurers and bankers have always known of the problem and tried to avoid it, but without talking about “asymmetry of information” or trying to put it in a mathematical form. Stiglitz, however, has earned his stripes (and the Nobel Prize) by “demonstrating” that the existence of asymmetries of information profoundly modifies the behaviours and the allocation of resources – a thing we have known for long time. But he also has lead concrete studies, based on observations and available data, where he shows the importance of the asymmetry of information to many important questions of economic policy. To do so, he called upon a few simple ideas, accessible to all, far from the mathematical formulas of his academic publications. The conclusions he comes to, and the policies he recommends, are however far from being approved unanimously, as testifies the controversy – at the end of the 1990’s – between the IMF and the World Bank (where Stiglitz was at the time the chief economist) on the way to tackle the crises which then affected certain developing or “in transition” countries. It is clear that mathematics are not the element which will enable the settling of the controversy, and that behind it lie very different visions of the world and different arguments concerning especially the consequences of the intervention of the State. It is obviously unsatisfactory not be able to settle such matters. But knowing what are the arguments advanced, and on the basis of what observations and from what data, is part of scientific knowledge. Given the importance of things economic in the life of our societies, this knowledge is necessary, even though it is inevitably limited. Note* Translated by Emmanuelle
Benicourt and Edward Fullbrook.
|
|