God is dead, Marx is dead, Friedman is dead... and I am not feeling too well, myself.

The last week my genius friend Bing - post-graduate student in Physics in the U.S. - who is knowledgeable about everything on earth (and out), was kind enough to agree on the old post on the Chicagoans Waterloo. It then started a short messages exchange that I am assembling here. It will be nice to read it in two years or twenty years and see how much we were wrong or right to be as concerned and hopeful for a change as we are now.

B: totally agree with your opinion!! maybe you've also seen this:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10102008/watch.html

George Soros was Karl Popper's student at one point, perhaps that explains why he recognizes fundamentalisms / unquestioned ideologies with dubious assumptions when he sees one.. whether it's communist or liberal.. unlike most economists / speculators.. i've always thought that unfettered free market economics with the assumptions of society progressing due to rational actions done by self-interested individuals (plus the "trickle down" philosophy) and an infinitely elastic market don't seem quite correct.. but unlike in physics, there's only one experimental lab for economics, and we have to pay the price if the assumptions turn out to be wrong.. i guess Soros has a much better way of articulating this situation, that's why i'm going to buy his book!!

W: Hey Bing, thanks a lot for the link!I actually haven't seen it yet,which is kind of a shame I can say now...indeed,what he says is just a consequence of your neat (and amazingly synthesized) point on the misleading foundation of neoclassical economic theory - brought to his recent splendour by the fundamentalist Chicagoans - with the political support over the past decades of neo-conservative republicans and some lobbies. The firsts truly believed (or at least I like to think so) in markets left alone and the trickle-down economics, while the seconds were just doing their job, promoting their own interests at the political level. Soros' principal-agent dilemma argument at the end of the video is perhaps the strongest one... with devastating political implications. I really think he's right when he says that a new era is starting... How to say that... God is dead, Marx is dead, Friedman is dead... and I am not feeling too well, myself.

B:Maybe God is not yet dead.. time and again he's bounced back from near fatality.. and maybe now he's laughing at us and the crass bankers...
but yeah i can't help being shocked at how many billions of dollars governments can instantly pour into the Iraqi war (then) and collapsing banks (now), while the MORE pressing issues of humanity - global poverty and lack of access to basic healthcare and illiteracy - which could be comfortably dealt with by the same amounts of money are conveniently neglected.. even claiming they are too expensive to undertake, or "not in the national interest".
And financial engineering.. can everything always be solved by modelling phenomena? when the same modelling process makes significant assumptions on which variables can be ignored and what can't be.. it's WEIRD how in the very earliest books on economics people like Alfred Marshall had put humanitarian concerns first.. but economics books nowadays resemble mathematical tracts. maybe i'm wrong.

W:I couldn't agree with you more, on every single point! Including the God's laugh...

Then Bing wrote a weighty poetry which I am not attaching now as I'd have to ask him first. However, it's good to remind how Bing and I met each other. We've only seen one night, at St.Gery in Brussels - perhaps during the pub crawl that the author of this blog organized with the rest of the Strangelovers Laison Committee for the new batch of EC trainees. He had come to Brussels to meet a friend he had studied with in Cambridge - physicist as well - who had just started the stage at the Commission. We quickly got into this conversation on how alienating it is the North American way of doing post-graduate studies, and from there we got on pretty quickly on everything, including all difficult things except our favourite Trappist beer. And it is always a great event when you meet such a person.