6월 12~13일에 올지 모를 안팎의 먹구름
류근일(조선일보 前 주필)
 한 시대가 무너지고 있는 건 확실해 보인다. 잘 쌓아올렸던 괜찮은 것들마저 함께 무너져내려 그 다음에 올 시대가 전체주의 군중정치의 공포가 황행하는 시대가 되지 않기를 바랄 뿐이다. 그런 시대가 오더라도 그게 일시적인 것이 될지 영속적인 것이 될지는 전적으로 오늘의 주연(主演) 세대가 선택할 문제다. (발췌)
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인천계양의 황당한 사전투표자수 발표 -조작 의혹 제기-2편(2018년사전선거)-김재홍대표 전화생방송20180610일[선구자방송]
https://youtu.be/fUp3OHUNLks
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출처: 일베/ 

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[VON 김미영 원장 칼럼]
전직(前職) 대통령들 석방하고 미북회담 이후 대비해야!

2016년 개성공단 폐쇄는
확실한 한 방이었습니다.
이후 당장의 체제유지 비용을 확보하는 게
김정은으로서는 심각한 문제였습니다.
이보다 더 심각한 다른 것이 있다고 생각하면 오산입니다.

 저는 트럼프-김정은 회담이
대단한 것이라고 생각지 않습니다.
싱가폴까지 끌어낸 점이 조금의 성과라는 정도입니다.

다만 회담을 통해 핵무기 20기 반출을
이끌어내게 되면 평가해야 됩니다.
가능성을 좁혀 봅니다.
...

북한이 미국과 최고위급 물꼬
트는 것은 오래전부터 원했던 바입니다.
미국이 반대해 왔습니다.
콘돌리자 라이스 국무장관 표현대로 “나쁜 짓에 보상 없다”가 미국의 입장이었습니다.

오바마 시대 중동문제가 일단락된 덕분에
트럼프가 자신감을 갖고 북한 다루기에 응한 것입니다.

트럼프의 등장으로 본격적인 한반도 현상타파가 시작됐다고 볼 수 있습니다.
그러나 지극히 소수만 인정하지만
진짜 북한을 아는 사람은 이 정도까지
끌어온 최고 공적은 박근혜 대통령에 돌리게 됩니다.

핵실험에 대해
개성공단 폐쇄 조치로 맞선 것입니다.

저는 박대통령이 이 조치로써
6.25 정전 이후 현상유지(Status Quo)끝낸
첫 지도자라고 말해 왔습니다.

박대통령의 통치방식에 대체로
부정적인 평가를 했으나 이 점에 관한 한
링컨의 노예해방으로 가는 선택에 비견된다고 말해 왔습니다.

북한 체제 유지 공학을 이해하면
쉽게 납득할 수 있습니다.
북한의 체제 유지는 단순한 메카니즘입니다. 김정은이 대량살상무기 개발 인력 포함 전체 인구의 1퍼센트 정도만 먹여 살려주면 북한 체제는 유지됩니다.

개성공단이 수년 간
이 체제유지 에너지 공급원이었습니다.
마약 위폐 등에 비교 안 되는
수월한 방법이었습니다.

김정은은 미국이나 한국을
안보적 차원에서 두려워하지 않습니다.
이유없이 군사적 도발을 하는 나라들이 아닌 것을 알고 있습니다.

그러나 2016년 개성공단 폐쇄는
확실한 한 방이었습니다.
이후 당장의 체제유지 비용을 확보하는 게
김정은으로서는 심각한 문제였습니다.
이보다 더 심각한 다른 것이 있다고 생각하면 오산입니다.

박근혜 대통령 석방시키고 전 국민적으로
사태 파악하고 각성해야 합니다. 
이명박 대통령도 국제사회에서는
합리성과 실력으로 높이 평가받는 지도자입니다.

한국이 끝까지 천지분별 못하고
국제사회를 움직여줄 지도자들을 감옥에 넣고 기업들 괴롭혀 성장동력 파괴하고 자유민주주의 부정하고 계급갈등 부추기며 사회주의의 길로 계속 걸어가면 앞으로 북한을 등에 업고 한반도 전체가 휘청이게 될 것입니다.

자주적 고난의 행군이 바랄 일입니까?
북한 개발 국제 컨소시움 형태로 북한을
변화시켜 나가려면 한국에 좋은 지도자가
필요합니다. 국제사회를 설득시킬 엄청난
자산인 전직 대통령들에게 지금 무슨 짓들 하고 있는 것일까요?

절망적으로 헤매는 대한민국 어디까지
가려고 이러는지 참 알 길이 없습니다.
국민들 어서 깨어나야 삽니다.

/김미영 법치와자유민주주의연대(NPK) 사무총장 전환기정의연구원장

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상인들 간의 거래는 신뢰를 유발한다.

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진실의 티셔츠.

선악을 가르는 선은 모든 인간의 심장을 관통하고 있다.  --- 알렉산더 솔제니친

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좌파들의 공격에 학문의 자유마저 잃어버린 옥스포드 대 교수

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True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind. --탈레브

진정한 성공이란 비열한 경쟁에서 빠져나와 마음의 평화를 위해 자신의 행동을 조정하는 것이다.

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진화에서 유머의 역할

 

Beyond a joke

The brain holds many secrets that admen would love to learn - not least, how to change behaviour. Rory Sutherland explores how comedy rouses the grey matter.

 

Rory Sutherland

 

Conventional economic thinking would suggest it is easy to outcompete Coca-Cola. You could produce a drink that tastes nicer; or make a drink that tastes just as nice but make it cheaper; or produce an equally nice-tasting drink but sell it in a bigger can.

 

No-one has ever managed to do this. Instead, the most successful attempt to compete with Coca-Cola in the past 100 years is Red Bull. This drink does none of the things economists recommend: it costs a fortune, comes in a very small can and tastes slightly disgusting (at least that was the universal verdict in all early research).

 

The reason for this glaring discrepancy is that the part of the brain used to write economic papers is not the part of the brain that chooses a drink. The part of my brain that causes me to chug a can of Red Bull on the way home from work has a logic all of its own.

 

It’s highly likely that we have a strong instinctive belief that drinks or foods that perform a pharmacological function should not taste conventionally nice (I have always been unconvinced of the efficacy of Nurofen Meltlets because they taste so delicious). Red Bull’s high price almost certainly maximises the placebo effect (analgesics are more effective when you tell people they are expensive). And the small can signals the drink’s potency: "They need the small can for my own safety since, if I were to drink a whole 330ml, I might go postal."

 

But no consumer will ever tell you this. "Yeah, it’s OK – but could you make the drink more expensive and a little bit more disgusting, please?" If we want to understand those black-box parts of the brain, conventional research alone won’t cut it. The black box operates through instinctive feelings rather than thoughts or words, and is largely "opaque to introspection". Moreover, because it is the product of evolution and not design, you must often start with observable behaviours and reverse-engineer the underlying mechanisms from there.

 

Over the past few years, I have become convinced that advertising or marketing is potentially a kind of Galápagos Islands for understanding evolutionary psychology. Just as the beaks of finches can reveal a great deal about physical evolution, so the patterns of human consumerism can help us reverse engineer a better understanding of what people really want, as distinct from what they say they want. Amos Tversky, the late research partner of Daniel Kahneman, remarked of his groundbreaking work that he "merely studied in a systematic way things about behaviour that were already known to advertisers and used-car salesmen".

 

Red Bull can tell you a lot about how people really choose a drink. In the same way Ray Kroc showed an extraordinary insight into the evolutionary psychology behind McDonald’s: "People don’t want the best burger in the world; they want a burger that’s just like the one they had last time." We have evolved to like eating food we have survived eating before.

 

And just as you can’t understand the success of Red Bull or McDonald’s without asking a few questions about evolutionary instincts, you cannot explain the importance of comedy in advertising without understanding the evolutionary origins of humour.

 

According to one theory, humour evolved as a kind of social behaviour change mechanism. A means for people to point out mistakes without getting punched in the face. (In King Lear, the fool is generally the only person who is talking any sense.) It is hence a mechanism for us to learn of our mistakes while deriving pleasure from the discovery. If the purpose of advertising is to change behaviour, the role humour can play in making this pleasurable rather than painful seems vital.

 

In Inside Jokes – Using Humour To Reverse-Engineer The Mind, the three authors, among them Daniel Dennett, propose that humour "evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature – aka natural selection – cannot just order the brain to find and fix […] mis-leaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny."

 

If humour is a way of making it enjoyable to change our minds, it matters immensely. It matters because advertising is becoming progressively less and less funny. It also matters if we are to solve the most important behaviour change challenges of our time: say what you like about environmentalists, they aren’t exactly a barrel of laughs. Ironically, the one person who could sell the virtues of electric cars to 200 million people isn’t Al Gore – it’s Jeremy Clarkson.

 

Rory Sutherland is the vice-chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group UK

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탈레브의 책 <스킨 인 더 게임> 서평

자유 시장과 같은 복잡계를 함부로 건드리면 치명적인 결과를 낳는다. 따라서 자유주의는 그에 따른 당연한 선택이다.

자유 시장에 대한 반론 중의 하나는, 그것이 대기업으로 하여금 시민들을 지배하게 한다는 주장이다. 이에 대해 탈레브는, 거래에 “스킨 인 더 게임”을 도입하면 된다고 말한다. 잘못된 거래에 대해서 법적인 책임을 묻도록 하면 되는데, 그것이 보통법의 정신이기도 하다.

 

Global Elites Have No Skin the Game

 

•David Gordon

 

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Random House, 2018

 

To review Skin in the Game is a risky undertaking. The author has little use for book reviewers who, he tells us, “are bad middlemen. … Book reviews are judged according to how plausible and well-written they are; never in how they map the book (unless of course the author makes them responsible for misrepresentations).”

 

The risk is very much worth undertaking, though, because Skin in the Game is an excellent book, filled with insights. These insights stress a central antithesis. Irresponsible people, with what C.D. Broad called “clever silly” intellectuals prominent among them, defend reckless policies that impose risks on others but not on themselves. They have no “skin in the game,” and in this to Taleb lies their chief defect.

 

Interventionist foreign policy suffers from this defect. “A collection of people classified as interventionistas … who promoted the Iraq invasion of 2003, as well as the removal of the Libyan leader in 2011, are advocating the imposition of additional such regime change on another batch of countries, which includes Syria, because it has a ‘dictator’. So we tried that thing called regime change in Iraq, and failed miserably. … But we satisfied the objective of ‘removing a dictator.’ By the same reasoning, a doctor would inject a patient with ‘moderate’ cancer cells to improve his cholesterol numbers, and proudly claim victory after the patient is dead, particularly if the postmortem showed remarkable cholesterol readings.”

 

But what has this to do with risk? The fallacy of the interventionists, Taleb tells us, is that they disregard the chance that their schemes will fail to work as planned. A key theme of Taleb’s work is that uncertain outcomes mandate caution.

 

“And when a blowup happens, they invoke uncertainty, something called a Black Swan (a high-impact unexpected event), … not realizing that one should not mess with a system if the results are fraught with uncertainty, or, more generally, should avoid engaging in an action with a big downside if one has no idea of the outcomes.”

 

The same mistaken conception of risk affects economic policy. “For instance, bank blowups came in 2008 because of the accumulation of hidden and asymmetric risks in the system: bankers, master risk transferors, could make steady money from a certain class of concealed explosive risks, use academic risk models that don’t work except on paper … then invoke uncertainty after a blowup … and keep past income — what I have called the Bob Rubin trade.”

 

Instead of relying on mathematical models, economists should realize that the free market works. Why use misguided theory to interfere with success in practice? “Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market. … Friedrich Hayek has been, once again, vindicated. Yet one of the most cited ideas in history, that of the invisible hand, appears to be the least integrated into the modern psyche.”

 

Upsetting a complex system like the free market, can have disastrous consequences. Given this truth, libertarianism is the indicated course of action. “We libertarians share a minimal set of beliefs, the central one being to substitute the rule of law for the rule of authority. Without necessarily realizing it, libertarians believe in complex systems.”

 

Taleb greatly admires Ron Paul, the foremost libertarian in politics, and he is one of two people to whom the book is dedicated. (Ralph Nader is the other.) Ron Paul grasps Taleb’s fundamental lesson that misguided theory should not supplant what has stood the test of time. “The insightful and luckily nonacademic historian Tom Holland ... wrote: ‘The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked,’ which is why while dedicating this book, I called Ron Paul a Roman among Greeks.”

 

One common objection to the free market is that it allows powerful corporations to dominate people. Taleb’s response converges with that of Murray Rothbard: “There are two ways to make citizens safe from large predators, say, big powerful corporations. The first one is to enact regulations — but these, aside from restricting individual freedoms, lead to another predation, this time by the state, its agents, and their cronies. … The other solution is to put skin in the game in transactions, in the form of legal liability, and the possibility of an efficient lawsuit. The Anglo-Saxon world has traditionally had a predilection for the legal approach instead of the regulatory one; if you harm me, I can sue you. This has led to the very sophisticated, adaptive, and balanced common law, built bottom-up, by trial and error.”

 

Rothbard held the same view. In his pathbreaking monograph “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,” he remarks: “There are, of course, innumerable statutes and regulations that create illegality besides the torts dealt with in common-law courts. We have not dealt with laws such as the Clean Air Act of 1970 or regulations for a simple reason: None of them can be permissible under libertarian legal theory. In libertarian theory, it is only permissible to proceed coercively against someone if he is a proven aggressor, and that aggression must be proven in court (or in arbitration) beyond a reasonable doubt. Any statute or administrative regulation necessarily makes actions illegal that are not overt initiations of crimes or torts according to libertarian theory. Every statute or administrative rule is therefore illegitimate and itself invasive and a criminal interference with the property rights of noncriminals.”

 

Another complaint against the free market stems from “behavioral economics.” Consumers, it is alleged, often act in an irrational way against their own best interests. Hence the benevolent action of bureaucratic experts is required to “nudge” people into rationality. Taleb responds. “We have survived in spite of tail risks; our survival cannot be that random.” (Tail events are “extreme events of low frequency,” i.e., the Black Swans mentioned earlier.) The supposed “mistakes” that the behavioral economists allege people commit often are good ways to cope with tail risks.

 

Taleb assails the leading behavioral economists in mordant fashion: “And if you dream of making people use probability in order to make decisions, I have some news: more than ninety percent of psychologists dealing with decision making (which includes such regulators as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler) have no clue about probability, and try to disrupt our efficient organic paranoias.” In another place, he calls Thaler a “creepy interventionist.”

 

Taleb extends his criticism of “pseudo-rationalism” to ethics. Here “universalism” is the enemy: “So we skip Kant’s drastic approach for one main reason: Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice. Why? As we will belabor ad nauseam in this book, we are local and practical animals, sensitive to scale. … We should focus on our immediate environment: we need simple practical rules. Even worse: the general and the abstract tend to attract self-righteous psychopaths. … In other words, Kant did not get the notion of scaling — yet many of us are victims of Kant’s universalism.” (In another place, though, influenced by Derek Parfit, Taleb assigns a positive though not exclusive rule to Kantian ethics.)

 

In one of the most original passages in the book, Taleb applies “skin in the game” to criticize Pascal’s wager. “This argument (that real life is risk taking) reveals the theological weakness of Pascal’s wager, which stipulates that believing in the creator has a positive payoff in case he truly exists, and no downside in case he doesn’t. Hence the wager would be to believe in God as a free option. If you follow the idea to its logical end, you can see that it proposes religion without skin in the game making it a purely academic and sterile activity.”

 

For Taleb, this will never do, as it neglects the whole point of religion. “It is therefore my opinion that religion exists to enforce tail risk management across generations, as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce.” Though one disagrees with this author at one’s peril, I wonder whether this account of religion is unduly reductionist. Does not religion involve cognitive claims about the nature of ultimate reality, which must be assessed directly, rather than viewed exclusively as tools for evolutionary survival? When, e.g., Henry Vaughan writes, “There is in God, some say/ A deep but dazzling darkness,” this seems a claim about the world, rather than a rule for our conduct in it.

 

Readers of Skin in the Game will be struck by Taleb’s originality, acuity, and erudition. He is a thinker of outstanding merit, and it would be risky indeed to ignore him.

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케인즈는 자신의 학설을 전파하기 위해 경제학자 피구의 책을 고의로 왜곡하고, 캠브리지의 경제학자 데니스 로버슨을 비열한 방법을 통해 괴롭히기도 했다.

 

How Keynes Took Over the World

 

 

•Murray N. Rothbard

 

 

Keynes’s General Theory was, at least in the short run, one of the most dazzlingly successful books of all time. In a few short years, his “revolutionary” theory had conquered the economics profession and soon had transformed public policy, while old-fashioned economics was swept, unhonored and unsung, into the dustbin of history.

 

How was this deed accomplished? Keynes and his followers would answer, of course, that the profession simply accepted a starkly self-evident truth. And yet The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft -refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon. How, then, the swift success?

 

Part of the reason, as Schumpeter has pointed out, is that governments as well as the intellectual climate of the l930s were ripe for such conversion. Governments are always seeking new sources of revenue and new ways to spend money, often with no little desperation; yet economic science, for over a century, had sourly warned against inflation and deficit spending, even in times of recession.

 

Economists— whom Keynes was to lump into one category and sneeringly disparage as “classical’ in The General Theory — were the grouches at the picnic, throwing a damper of gloom over attempts by governments to increase their spending. Now along came Keynes, with his modern “scientific” economics, saying that the old “classical” economists had it all wrong: that, on the contrary , it was the government’s moral and scientific duty to spend, spend, and spend; to incur deficit upon deficit, in order to save the economy from such vices as thrift and balanced budgets and unfettered capitalism; and to generate recovery from the depression. How welcome Keynesian economics was to the governments of the world!

 

In addition, intellectuals throughout the world were becoming convinced that laissez-faire capitalism could not work and that it was responsible for the Great Depression. Communism, fascism, and various forms of socialism and controlled economy became popular for that reason during the 1930s. Keynesianism was perfectly suited to this intellectual climate.

 

But there were also strong internal reasons for the success of The General Theory. By dressing up his new theory in impenetrable jargon, Keynes created an atmosphere in which only brave young economists could possibly understand the new science; no economist over the age of thirty could grasp the New Economics. Older economists, who, understandably, had no patience for the new complexities, tended to dismiss The General Theory as nonsense and refused to tackle the formidably incomprehensible work. On the other hand, young economists and graduate students, socialistically inclined, seized on the new opportunities and bent themselves to the rewarding task of figuring out what The General Theory was all about.1

 

Paul Samuelson has written of the joy of being under 30 when The General Theory was published in 1936, exulting, with Wordsworth, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” Yet this same Samuelson who enthusiastically accepted the new revelation also admitted that The General Theory

 

 

is a badly written book; poorly organized. … It abounds in mares’ nests of confusions. … I think I am giving away no secrets when I solemnly aver—upon the basis of vivid personal recollection—that no one else in Cambridge, Massachusetts, really knew what it was all about for some twelve to eighteen months aft er publication. 23

 

It must be remembered that the now-familiar Keynesian cross, IS-LM diagrams, and the system of equations were not available to those trying desperately to understand The General Theory when the book was published; indeed, it took 10 to 15 years of countless hours of manpower to figure out the Keynesian system. Oft en, as in the case of both Ricardo and Keynes, the more obscure the content, the more successful the book, as younger scholars flock to it, becoming acolytes.

 

Also important to the success of The General Theory was the fact that, just as a major war creates a large number of generals, so did the Keynesian revolution and its rude thrusting aside of the older generation of economists create a greater number of openings for younger Keynesians in both the profession and the government.

 

Another crucial factor in the sudden and overwhelming success of The General Theory was its origin in the most insular university of the most dominant economic national center in the world. For a century and a half, Great Britain had arrogated to itself the role of dominance in economics, with Smith, Ricardo, and Mill all aggrandizing this tradition. We have seen how Marshall established his dominance at Cambridge and that the economics he developed was essentially a return to the classical Ricardo/Mill tradition.

 

As a prominent Cambridge economist and student of Marshall, Keynes had an important advantage in furthering the success of the ideas in The General Theory. It is safe to say that if Keynes had been an obscure economics teacher at a small, Midwestern American college, his work, in the unlikely event that it even found a publisher, would have been totally ignored.

 

In those days before World War II, Britain, not the United States, was the most prestigious world center for economic thought. While Austrian economics had flourished in the United States before World War I (in the works of David Green, Frank A. Fetter, and Herbert J. Davenport), the 1920s to early 1930s was largely a barren period for economic theory. Anti-theoretical institutionalists dominated American economics during this period, leaving a vacuum that was easy for Keynes to fill.

 

Also important to his success was Keynes’s tremendous stature as an intellectual and politicoeconomic leader in Britain, including his prominent role as a participant in, and then severe critic of, the Versailles treaty. As a Bloomsbury member, he was also important in British cultural and artistic circles.

 

Moreover, we must realize that in pre-World War II days only a small minority in each country went to college and that the number of universities was both small and geographically concentrated in Great Britain. As a result, there were very few British economists or economics teachers, and they all knew each other. This created considerable room for personality and charisma to help convert the profession to Keynesian doctrine.

 

The importance of such external factors as personal charisma, politics, and career opportunism was particularly strong among the disciples of F.A. Hayek at the London School of Economics. During the early 1930s, Hayek at the LSE and Keynes at Cambridge were the polar antipodes in British economics, with Hayek converting many of Britain’s leading young economists to Austrian (that is, Misesian) monetary, capital, and business-cycle theory.

 

Additionally, Hayek, in a series of articles, had brilliantly demolished Keynes’s earlier work, his two-volume Treatise on Money, and many of the fallacies Hayek exposed applied equally well to The General Theory4​5​6. For Hayek’s students and followers, then, it must be said that they knew better. In the realm of theory, they had already been inoculated against The General Theory. And yet, by the end of the 1930s, every one of Hayek’s followers had jumped on the Keynesian bandwagon, including Lionel Robbins, John R. Hicks, Abba P. Lerner, Nicholas Kaldor, G.L.S. Shackle, and Kenneth E. Boulding.

 

Perhaps the most astonishing conversion was that of Lionel Robbins. Not only had Robbins been a convert to Misesian methodology as well as to monetary and business-cycle theory, but he had also been a diehard pro-Austrian activist. A convert since his attendance at the Mises privatseminar in Vienna in the 1920s, Robbins, highly infl uential in the economics department at LSE, had succeeded in bringing Hayek to LSE in 1931 and in translating and publishing Hayek’s and Mises’s works.

 

Despite being a longtime critic of Keynesian doctrine before The General Theory, Robbins’s conversion to Keynesianism was apparently solidifi ed when he served as Keynes’s colleague in wartime economic planning. There is in Robbins’s diary a decided note of ecstatic rapture that perhaps accounts for his astonishing abasement in repudiating his Misesian work, The Great Depression (1934).

 

Robbins’s repudiation was published in his 1971 Autobiography: “I shall always regard this aspect of my dispute with Keynes as the greatest mistake of my professional career, and the book, The Great Depression, which I subsequently wrote, partly in justification of this attitude, as something which I would willingly see forgotten”7. Robbins’s diary entries on Keynes during World War II can only be considered an absurdly rapturous personal view. Here is Robbins at a June 1944 pre–Bretton Woods draft conference in Atlantic City:

 

 

Keynes was in his most lucid and persuasive mood: and the effect was irresistible… . Keynes must be one of the most remarkable men that have ever lived—the quick logic, the wide vision, above all the incomparable sense of the fitness of words, all combine to make something several degrees beyond the limit of ordinary human achievement. Only Churchill, Robbins goes on to say, is of comparable stature. But Keynes is greater, for he uses the classical style of our life and language, it is true, but it is shot through with something which is not traditional, a unique unearthly quality of which one can only say that it’s pure genius. The Americans sat entranced as the godlike visitor sang and the golden light played all around.8

 

This sort of fawning can only mean that Keynes possessed some sort of strong personal magnetism to which Robbins was susceptible.9

 

Central to Keynes’s strategy in putting The General Theory over were two claims: first, that he was revolutionizing economic theory, and second, that he was the first economist—aside from a few “underworld” characters, such as Silvio Gesell—to concentrate on the problem of unemployment. All previous economists, whom he lumped together as “classical,” he said, assumed full employment and insisted that money was but a “veil” for real processes and was therefore not a truly disturbing presence in the economy.

 

One of Keynes’s most unfortunate effects was his misconceiving of the history of economic thought, since his devoted legion of followers accepted Keynes’s faulty views in The General Theory as the last word on the subject. Some of Keynes’s highly influential errors may be attributed to ignorance, since he was little trained in the subject and mostly read work by his fellow Cantabrigians. For example, in his grossly distorted summary of Say’s law (“supply creates its own demand”), he sets up a straw man and proceeds to demolish it with ease.

 

This erroneous and misleading restatement of Say’s law was subsequently repeated (without quoting Say or any of the other champions of the law) by Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Blaug, Axel Leijonhufvud, Thomas Sowell, and others. A better formulation o fthe law is that the supply of one good constitutes demand for one or more other goods.10

 

But ignorance cannot account for Keynes’s claim that he was the first economist to try to explain unemployment or to transcend the assumption that money is a mere veil exerting no important influence on the business cycle or the economy. Here we must ascribe to Keynes a deliberate campaign of mendacity and deception—what would now be called euphemistically “disinformation.”

 

Keynes knew all too well of the existence of the Austrian and LSE Schools, which had flourished in London as early as the 1920s and more obviously since 1931. He himself had personally debated Hayek, the chief Austrian at LSE, in the pages of Economica, the LSE journal. The Austrians in London attributed continuing large scale unemployment to wage rates kept above the free-market wage by combining union and government action (e.g., in extraordinarily generous unemployment-insurance payments).

 

Recessions and business cycles were ascribed to bank credit and monetary expansion, as fueled by the central bank, which pushed interest rates below genuine time-preference levels and created overinvestment in higher-order capital goods. These then had to be liquidated by a recession, which in turn would emerge as soon as the credit expansion stopped. Even if he had not agreed with this analysis, it was unconscionable for Keynes to ignore the very existence of this school of thought then prominent in Great Britain, a school which could never be construed as ignoring the impact of monetary expansion on the real state of the economy.

 

In order to conquer the world of economics with his new theory, it was critical for Keynes to destroy his rivals within Cambridge itself. In his mind, he who controlled Cambridge controlled the world. His most dangerous rival was Marshall’s handpicked successor and Keynes’s former teacher, Arthur C. Pigou. Keynes began his systematic campaign of destruction against Pigou when Pigou rejected his previous approach in the Treatise on Money, at which point Keynes also broke with his former student and close friend, Dennis H. Robertson, for refusing to join the lineup against Pigou.

 

The most glaring misstatement in The General Theory, and one which his disciples accepted without question, is the outrageous presentation of Pigou’s views on money and unemployment in Keynes’s identification of Pigou as the major contemporary “classical” economist who allegedly believed that there is always full employment and that money is merely a veil causing no disruptions in the economy—this about a man who wrote Industrial Fluctuations in 1927 and Theory of Unemployment in 1933, which discuss at length the problem of unemployment! Moreover, in the latter book, Pigou explicitly repudiates the money veil theory and stresses the crucial centrality of money in economic activity.

 

Thus, Keynes lambasted Pigou for allegedly holding the “conviction…that money makes no real difference except frictionally and that the theory of unemployment can be worked out…as being based on ‘real’ exchanges.” An entire appendix to chapter 19 of The General Theory is devoted to an assault on Pigou, including the claim that he wrote only in terms of real exchanges and real wages, not money wages, and that he assumed only flexible wage rates.

 

But, as Andrew Rutten notes, Pigou conducted a “real” analysis only in the first part of his book; in the second part, he not only brought money in, but pointed out that any abstraction from money distorts the analysis and that money is crucial to any analysis of the exchange system. Money, he says, cannot be abstracted away and cannot act in a neutral manner, so “the task of the present part must be to determine in what way the monetary factor causes the average amount of, and the fluctuation in, employment to be different from what they otherwise would have been.”

 

Therefore, added Pigou, “it is illegitimate to abstract money away [and] leave everything else the same. The abstraction proposed is of the same type that would be involved in thinking away oxygen from the earth and supposing that human life continues to exist”11. Pigou extensively analyzed the interaction of monetary expansion and interest rates along with changes in expectations, and he explicitly discussed the problem of money wages and “sticky” prices and wages.

 

Thus, it is clear that Keynes seriously misrepresented Pigou’s position and that this misrepresentation was deliberate, since, if Keynes read any economists carefully, he certainly read such prominent Cantabrigians as Pigou. Yet, as Rutten writes, “These conclusions should not come as a surprise, since there is plenty of evidence that Keynes and his followers misrepresented their predecessors”12. The fact that Keynes engaged in this systematic deception and that his followers continue to repeat the fairy tale about Pigou’s blind “classicism” shows that there is a deeper reason for the popularity of this legend in Keynesian circles. As Rutten writes,

      

There is one plausible explanation for the repetition of the story of Keynes and the classics.…This is that the standard account is popular because it offers simultaneously an explanation of, and a justification for, Keynes’s success: without the General Theory, we would still be in the economic dark ages. In other words, the story of Keynes and the Classics is evidence for the General Theory. Indeed, its use suggests that it may be the most compelling evidence available. In this case, proof that Pigou did not hold the position attributed to him is … evidence against Keynes. … [This conclusion] raises the … serious question of the methodological status of a theory that relies so heavily on falsified evidence.

 

In his review of The General Theory, Pigou was properly scornful of Keynes’s “macédoine of misrepresentations,” and yet such was the power of the tide of opinion (or of the charisma of Keynes) that, by 1950, aft er Keynes’s death, Pigou had engaged in the sort of abject recantation indulged in by Lionel Robbins, which Keynes had long tried to wrest from him131415

 

But Keynes used tactics in the selling of The Genera Theory other than reliance on his charisma and on systematic deception. He curried favor with his students by praising them extravagantly, and he set them deliberately against non-Keynesians on the Cambridge faculty by ridiculing his colleagues in front of these students and by encouraging them to harass his faculty colleagues. For example, Keynes incited his students with particular viciousness against Dennis Robertson, his former close friend.

 

As Keynes knew all too well, Robertson was painfully and extraordinarily shy, even to the point of communicating with his faithful, longtime secretary, whose office was next to his own, only by written memoranda. Robertson’s lectures were completely written out in advance, and because of his shyness he refused to answer any questions or engage in any discussion with either his students or his colleagues. And so it was a particularly diabolic torture for Keynes’s radical disciples, led by Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn, to have baited and taunted Robertson, harassing him with spiteful questions and challenging him to debate.16

 

Published as Selling the General Theory in Keynes, the Man.

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