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There's some interesting ideas here. The suggestion that the Enlightenment may have erased several millenia of human wisdom is interesting - it's reminiscent of

There's some interesting ideas here. The suggestion that the Enlightenment may have erased several millenia of human wisdom is interesting - it's reminiscent of coming across a piece of legacy code, erasing it, and starting over. After you work out all the edge cases, your "clean" code starts to have a lot of the same stuff as the code you erased. I also found the criticisms of economics interesting. Other than micro-economics laws like supply, demand, division of labor and others, I've never read an economic theory that didn't have some hand-wavy aspect to it. The suggestion that the entire field has served more to dehumanize us than add to our general understanding of scarce resource distribution is a valid point to raise. Though I felt like Adam Smith was the wrong person to place the blame on, if blame need be placed. If they're suggesting that the field hasn't advanced our understanding much past the basics, then why blame the person who best crystalized the basics? There's clearly some controversial stuff in here that's meant to be controversial, but if you can look past that, there's some unique ideas.

quonn 10y ago
> The suggestion that the Enlightenment may have erased several millenia of human wisdom is interesting If this were true, then what about previous influential european philosophies, ideas and religions?
mcguire 10y ago
"Other than micro-economics laws like supply, demand, division of labor and others, I've never read an economic theory that didn't have some hand-wavy aspect to it." Steven Keen's Debunking Economics has some arguments that might make you revisit microeconomics (although much of the book is bad). Also, check out Misbehaving by Richard Thaler.
edblarney 10y ago
In economics, there are just to many variables to satisfy - and of course, the impossible variable which is the nuance and choices that humans make. That doesn't make it unworthy, it just means we have to understand what we measure and why, and the limitations of it. If you pay your mother to babysit, that goes into the GDP. If she does it for free, like most families - it doesn't go onto the GDP - yet the same amount of value was created. The GDP also does not measure consumer surpluses, which is crazy. It also doesn't account for the degradation of so many things. Clean water for example. A lake is polluted - unless someone is hit, economically speaking, it doesn't factor into the GDP. Well, we clearly 'value' clean water and streams on some level, maybe we should have a 'balance sheet' of 'natural assets' and put a number on them. People tend to move around measurable things, and putting numbers on things changes hearts and minds. Example: insurance companies are starting to change more for certain elements of climate risk. Maybe not quite 'climate change' in the grand sense, but certainly local climate issues. Then business have to respond because costs go up. I find a lot of business people are like that - once it's in numbers, measures, costs, it's easier to get on board. If there's a real macro problem with economics, is that we need to measure something better than the GDP :) Also, because of comparative value, it's hard to be objective with the GDP.
naravara 10y ago
>There's some interesting ideas here. The suggestion that the Enlightenment may have erased several millenia of human wisdom is interesting As a counterpoint, you could argue that the Church (and the general chaos after the fall of Rome) did the erasure and the Enlightenment was the result of rediscovering bits and pieces of it, both from historically Western sources preserved by the Arabs and Byzantines as well as trade and contact with the East. A lot of liberal Christians view the Church as a sort of progressive force in human life, shepherding humanity towards redemption from its inherently sinful nature. If you set aside the questions of theology and just group people together based on their valuing a world that is comprehensible, ordered, and stable vs. one that is cryptic, fuzzy, and unpredictable you'd probably find similar numbers of religious and secular thinkers on both sides. The Church is a bureaucratic institution at the end of the day, and bureaucrats do love their comprehensible, orderly systems. They're both trying to 'improve' humanity, it's just a question of what they believe that 'improvement' entails. It shouldn't be surprising, as most of the Enlightenment thinkers were, themselves, educated by clergy so of course the ones who excel will be the ones who did well under that type of approach to the world.

quonn 10y ago

> The suggestion that the Enlightenment may have erased several millenia of human wisdom is interesting If this were true, then what about previous influential european philosophies, ideas and religions?

mcguire 10y ago

"Other than micro-economics laws like supply, demand, division of labor and others, I've never read an economic theory that didn't have some hand-wavy aspect to it." Steven Keen's Debunking Economics has some arguments that might make you revisit microeconomics (although much of the book is bad). Also, check out Misbehaving by Richard Thaler.

edblarney 10y ago

In economics, there are just to many variables to satisfy - and of course, the impossible variable which is the nuance and choices that humans make. That doesn't make it unworthy, it just means we have to understand what we measure and why, and the limitations of it. If you pay your mother to babysit, that goes into the GDP. If she does it for free, like most families - it doesn't go onto the GDP - yet the same amount of value was created. The GDP also does not measure consumer surpluses, which is crazy. It also doesn't account for the degradation of so many things. Clean water for example. A lake is polluted - unless someone is hit, economically speaking, it doesn't factor into the GDP. Well, we clearly 'value' clean water and streams on some level, maybe we should have a 'balance sheet' of 'natural assets' and put a number on them. People tend to move around measurable things, and putting numbers on things changes hearts and minds. Example: insurance companies are starting to change more for certain elements of climate risk. Maybe not quite 'climate change' in the grand sense, but certainly local climate issues. Then business have to respond because costs go up. I find a lot of business people are like that - once it's in numbers, measures, costs, it's easier to get on board. If there's a real macro problem with economics, is that we need to measure something better than the GDP :) Also, because of comparative value, it's hard to be objective with the GDP.

naravara 10y ago

>There's some interesting ideas here. The suggestion that the Enlightenment may have erased several millenia of human wisdom is interesting As a counterpoint, you could argue that the Church (and the general chaos after the fall of Rome) did the erasure and the Enlightenment was the result of rediscovering bits and pieces of it, both from historically Western sources preserved by the Arabs and Byzantines as well as trade and contact with the East. A lot of liberal Christians view the Church as a sort of progressive force in human life, shepherding humanity towards redemption from its inherently sinful nature. If you set aside the questions of theology and just group people together based on their valuing a world that is comprehensible, ordered, and stable vs. one that is cryptic, fuzzy, and unpredictable you'd probably find similar numbers of religious and secular thinkers on both sides. The Church is a bureaucratic institution at the end of the day, and bureaucrats do love their comprehensible, orderly systems. They're both trying to 'improve' humanity, it's just a question of what they believe that 'improvement' entails. It shouldn't be surprising, as most of the Enlightenment thinkers were, themselves, educated by clergy so of course the ones who excel will be the ones who did well under that type of approach to the world.