The geneology of unintended consequences

In the note he devoted to the Regency in his Precis of the Reign of Louis XV, Voltaire marveled at the consequences of the rise and fall of Law’s system in France: “Finally, that famous system of Law or Lass, which seemed it must ruin the regency and the state, in fact sustained one and the other by some consequences that nobody could have foreseen.”

The idea of unforeseen consequences will have a long history in economic thought. Voltaire introduces it hear in a marveling tone – and yet, what he shows is not a marvel, but the development of a trend that developed because of the ‘side effects’ of Law’s system. This is one of Voltaire’s signal contributions to that product of the Enlightenment, the conjectural history, of which the most famous example is Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Even as Montesquieu adheres to the classic rise and fall model of the economy, one in which Nemesis is still visible, the watermark beneath the elegant system, Voltaire dispenses with Nemesis and introduces the complexities of a feedback system that defies, to an extent, any easy moral analysis.

“The cupidity that it awakened in all conditions, from the lowest people up to the magistrates, to the bishops and the princes, diverted the attention of all minds from the public good and all political and ambitious views in filling them with the fear of losing and the avidity of gain. It was a new and prodigious game, when all citizens bet one against the other. Avid gamblers do not quit their cards in order to trouble the government. It happened, by a prestige of which the mechanism was not visible except to the strongest and finest eyes, that a completely chimeric system gave birth to real commerce, and the rebirth of the India Company, established in the past by the famous Colbert and ruined in the wars. At last, if many private fortunes were destroyed, the nation soon became more commercial and rich. This system lit up intellects in the same way the civil wars sharpened courage.”

Voltaire’s is a brief account of the rise and fall of the System, putting into a few paragraphs a broad description of the ‘complexity and rapidity of the machine”. Voltaire does not moralize upon the upsurge of greed, for he saw pretty clearly that greed was not the vice that France was suffering from, but famine and disease. The sudden fortunes acquired by upstarts was, in comparison, a comedy, and one with the strange effect of securing the state. Surely in being able to see these things calmly, Voltaire was influenced by Mandeville, as well as an proto-economist named Melon. And yet Voltaire was enough of a moraliste to understand the symbolism of what he testifies that he saw: Law, an ‘unknown’ and an adventurer, ‘arrive at the halls of the Palais Royale followed by Dukes and Pairs, Marshals of France and Bishops.” The world was only briefly turned upside down, but in that moment a glimpse was given of another possible world.

That possible world is masked by the image of the Age of Reason, which, although an excellent pamphleteering title was not, pace Tom Paine, a very informative description of what the Enlightenment wrought. From Voltaire to Adam Smith, the unintended consequences of action – particularly political action – was the theme constantly sounded against the schemes of sovereign reason, until finally, in the Critique of Pure Reason, reason itself becomes a sort of impotent god, like one of those deified people selected in certain tribes described in the Golden Bough, whose divine life was spent incommunicado, walled up, and generally tabooed. Although it is also true that reason plays a more multitudinous role in the writings of all these writers – if the unintended consequences of political reason, or of the passion for gain, operates as a positive force in the cultivation of progressive society, its negative dimension can be countered by the citizen’s virtue, or practical reason. Paine could just as easily have spoken of the Age of Virtue, for it was virtue that was evoked in the Assembly as the basis of the revolution.

Behind Voltaire and Mandeville’s tonally different but thematically similar analysis of the unexpected social virtues of private vices there lies, in fact, a Plutarchian theme: that of the dispute between virtue and fortune. The contest is staged in two of Plutarch’s speeches – on the fortune of the Romans and on the Fortune of Alexander, as well as in his biographies.

In the speech on the Romans, the contest between Fortune – which is amoral – and virtue – which is moral – is identified with another contest, between fortune and forethought.

“Wherefore our present discourse
does, in a measure, bestow a fair and enviable dignity
upon Rome, if we raise the question over her, even
as we do over earth and sea, heaven and stars, whether
she has come to her present state by Fortune or by
Forethought."
Fortune, it should be said, is not merely chance. In another essay on Fate, Plutarch distinguishes between the contingencies that can befall anything, living or non-living, and the fortune that impinges upon the course of human life:
‘that which is fortuitous allows also chance, and belongs to things practical; but what is by chance cannot be also by fortune, for it belongs to things without action: Fortune, moreover, pertains to rational beings, but chance to rational and irrational beings alike, and even to inanimate things.” Although Plutarch attributes this doctrine to Aristotle, he fundamentally agrees with it, and uses it to give an illustration of unintended effects, or the effects of fortune: ‘Now the cause by accident, when it is found in a thing which not only is done for some end but has in it free will and election, is then called Fortune; as is the finding a treasure while one is digging a hole to plant a tree…” (Volume 3, Essays and Miscellenies)

The example is, as any good Derridean would expect, mysteriously influential on the concept exemplified. Fortune (for Plutarch, tyche) and treasure are bound together through a deal of etymological weather, which is why the beginning of political economic discourse begins by replaying the Plutarchian dramatis personae…

DSK and his fantasies

Freud wrote that the system of the unconscious doesn’t contain a ‘no’. It uses, instead, contradiction to mark a negation – which is why, in dreams, seemingly inconsistent narratives will merrily unfold themselves, making it hard for the dreamer to tell the dream in waking language.

I thought about this watching DSK trying to explain the events of the morning of May 14, 2011 on TF1, where he was interviewed last night by his wife’s friend, newscaster Claire Chazel. The entire interview revolved around a negation: when asked to give his side of what transpired in the thirty some minutes he spent with Nafissa Diallo, DSK came up with no account whatsoever. Instead, he declared that what happened was a ‘moral error’ and that – bizarrely – he was not ‘proud’ of it.

That he was not ‘proud’ of what happened – a phrase he used at least twice – seems to be Strauss Kahn’s attempt to say that he was ashamed of it. But not being proud and being ashamed are, of course, two different things. The idea that something happened for which he had to disclaim ‘pride’ tells us much more about Strauss Kahn’s view of himself as a sexual ‘seducer’ than, perhaps, he might suppose.

Having chosen the famous politician’s strategy of the non-apology apology, Strauss-Kahn went on to heighten the contradictions by claiming that he used no violence and he used no money. In essence, then, what Strauss Kahn is not ‘proud’ of is the story that seems like a very common erotic fantasy. A maid comes to the hotel room, she glimpses Strauss Kahn in his mighty nudity, she swoons with sexual desire, and she offers to suck him off, which he graciously allows until he comes in her mouth, when she spits his semen out.


How plausible is this story? It is about as plausible as a dream. Strauss Kahn himself recognizes this – after telling us that no payment was made, he also tells us that Diallo made the accusations and created the entire storm on account of the fact that she wanted money. Now, of course, in this part of the narrative, we are to believe that as the memory of Strauss Kahn’s irresistible member faded, she decided to charge him with rape to make some money.

What is plausible and what is implausible was one of the great problems around which Aristotle’s Rhetoric turns. The plausible is from the beginning a class instrument – in Aristotle’s terms, it is what seems well to an educated male citizen. That is, to one of the ruling class in the city. And these stories of willing maids and hung males certainly circulate among this class. But outside of that context, the whole story, it seems to me, could be made so wildly implausible by a halfway decent prosecutor that DSK would choke on it in court. I was talking to a friend this morning who thought, after the first five minutes, that DSK did rape Diallo – something he hadn’t thought before – simply because he was the sort of man who got away with jumping women. Perhaps this is true. TF1, however, has done little to cast any light on the subject, and – with a format of questions that never followed up on DSK’s evasions – seems to conspire with his ‘rehabilitation’.
I think that project is fucked from the beginning. I hope so.

on the emotional frontier

Robert I. Levy, in an essay entitled Emotions, Knowing and Culture [1984], proposed two axes for analyzing emotions on the sense making level – that is, not as private experiences, but as experiences that enter into the public domain. On the one hand, he speaks of hyercognition – “Hypercognition involves a kind of shaping, simplifying, selecting, and standardizing, a familiar function of cultural symbols and forms. It involves a kind of making “ordinary” of private understandings.” In contrast to that stands hypocognition – “Hypocognition forces the (first order) understanding into some private mode.” Citing his own work on “sadness” among Tahitians (Levy claims that, while there are words for severe grief and lamentation, there are “no unambiguous terms that represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness… People would name their condition, where I supposed that [the body signs and] the context called for “sadness” or “depression”, as “feeling troubled” pe’ape’a, the generic term for disturbances, either internal or external;…”) Levy writes that these are some “underschematized emotional domains”, and that these are hypocognized. “One of the consequences of hypocognition is that the felt disturbance, the “troubled feelings,” can be interpreted both by the one who experiences them and by others around him as something other than ‘emotion’. Thus, the troubled feelings that persist too long after the death of a loved one or those that occur after some loss that Tahitian ideology holds to be trivial and easily replaceable are in the village often interpreted as illness or as the harmful effects of a spirit.”

Levy’s idea has not, unfortunately, been taken up by intellectual historians. Perhaps this is because one thinks, still, of emotion as being a very intimate and incommunicable state of feeling, which, though perhaps aroused by an external incident, is wholly enveloped within the individual self, much as a tooth ache is felt by the possessor of the tooth and not by the dentist who pulls it. But the affections are not spontaneously invented within us, even if they are, of course, neurologically guided. In fact, one would expect that the kind of epistemic and social ruptures that are thought to constitute the great transformation within the Occident – defined as capitalism, or the industrial or scientific revolution, or the emergence of new encompassing institutions – should present situations that evoke feelings that are ‘underschematized’.

It is an oddity of the work of Foucault, and of his followers, that though Foucault was very clear about the kind of epistemic rupture that he dates, approximately, to the late 18th and early 19th century, the rupture is not witnessed. On his account, it happens in a sense without any contemporary realizing it. I call this odd in that Foucault thought that he, on the contrary, could very well recognize the ‘end of man’ and the shifts that signaled another epistemic rupture. If we suppose that such things could be witnessed, perhaps the witnesses would struggle with hypo-cognition – perhaps they would not be able to interpret their feelings about what they witnessed, about the new thoughts they thought. Suppose, suppose. We are not, I think, looking for total witnesses, but instead searching for partial testimonies. Testimonies of those who were something like affective pioneers. Among whom I would put Rousseau.

Perhaps the enormous influence of Rousseau in the French revolution and in the late Enlightenment owes something to the obscure sense that Rousseau was not only a 'thinker', but he was a sort of witness to what had grown up within the old order as it began to fail affectually - he articulated a certain collective problematic of articulation, in which a connected system of new ways of living sought a schema in which to feel. The feeling about things is not a given: nor are the people of Europe or the "West" magically equipped with an all embracing set of affective categories that they can wrap around the world. The total social fact of collective feeling is not an unchanging universal, although the form in which it works is to make it feel like a universal. 

Adventure revisted

A post constructed from two former posts. If you look up the sociological work done on adventure, you will soon find that there is little or none. Astonishingly, it seems to hold no interest, in itself, for the sociologist. With one exception – a classic essay by Simmel. When, otherwise, the subject comes up, the sociologist views adventure in the same spirit as the tourist agency: as a category in the leisure field, requiring a guide, hotel accomodations, showers at the end of it, cameras, and flights to and fro. This is all the more astonishing in that adventurers certainly have existed. Adventurers brought down the Inca empire. Adventurers founded the Jamestown colony. Legitimists called Napoleon an adventurer for good reason – the same thing could be said for Garibaldi. So why the lack of interest? Perhaps it is because adventure, from the serious social science point of view, seems to have the irritating ability to turn the monumental into the ludicrous: it is continually shaking hands with the Commandantore. And, for the social scientist, there is a line: the truth must, in the end, be serious. It simply can’t be ludicrous. That would be an insult to all the founding positivist family. The adventurer, the politician, the artist, the scholar/virtuoso – they are all types that appear in the Renaissance. They are related insofar as they all have complex and conflicting relationships with the system of patronage. Of them all, the adventurer is the hardest, perhaps, to grasp, since it is difficult to say just what his object is. The politician aims at power, the artist at art, the virtuoso at knowledge, and the adventurer at experience – yet that seems much too vast and vague an object (although why it is vaster and vaguer than knowledge or power is a good question). Michael Nerlich, a literary critic, observes in The Ideology of Adventure that adventure is first used as an economic term: "Godfrey's selection of examples of aventure in his Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue francaise is, to be sure, one-sided, but it is of particular interest to us because his examples are almost exclusively of legal or economic meanings, with the first examples going all the way back to the late thirteenth century. Alongside the meaning of “output, earnings, income” ... the word aventure also occurs with the meaning of ‘catch, booty or harvest...” And later ... “Despite all the theories about ‘eventus, etc., I believe that this is the original meaning, sicne it is difficult to see why an ad-ventura would have had to be invented when eventus already covered the meaning.” Nechlin gives us this meaning with the note that it is controversial, and seems to infuriate some medievalists, who do not like the idea that the adventure of the knight on his quest is a thing of booty. In the same way, Kierkegaard strenuously objects to Moliere’s Dom Juan being endebted – dealing with money is, to Kierkegaard, a fall from the infinite adventure of seduction. Simmel’s essay on adventure begins by considering the “double-sidedness” of events in a life. On the one hand, events fall into a pattern in relationship to one another, so that one can talk of a life as a whole and mean a unified thing – on the other hand, events have their own center of gravity, and can be defined in terms of their own potential for pleasure or pain. To use an example not mentioned by Simmel, but getting at what he means: Famously, Kant had a regular habit of taking a certain stroll each day in Königsberg. It was famous as a regular habit – it was an example of some craving for order in Kant’s life, which some have read into his work. Now, one walk was, intentionally, much like the other – and yet, they all formed a distinct sub-system in Kant’s life of Kant’s walks. In ordinary life, we often talk about what we are “like”. If I lose, say, my wallet, I may say, I always leave it on the table. In so saying, I’m observing myself anthropologically – this is what the tribe of me is like. It has these rituals, these obsessions, these returning points. At the same time, there are rituals and obsessions I am not so aware of. Let us say I am a woman who continually falls in love with a certain type of man. He is surly, he has issues with his father, he is emotionally needy. How does her radar pick out these men? Of course, the exterior appearance – I like such and such a feature - is easy to account for, but not the similarity of temperament over lovers. Why does the same process happen over and over? In Hoffmann’s story, The Sandman – the story that Freud used as the template of the unheimlich, the uncanny – this automatism goes so far that the hero actually falls in love with an automaton, as if some interior routine evoked a counterpart in the world itself. Freud speaks of “fate” in the love life. Of course, fates preside over other things beside the destinies of our dicks and pussies. La Bruyere, for instance, outlines the characteristic of a man who is always losing things, bumping into people, misreading signs, mistaking his own house for somebody else's and somebody else's for his own. We might think that this state of confusion, in the extreme, is evidence of some pathological disturbance of the brain. However, there are a number of habits one "falls" into in one's life, resolves not to continue with, and still - falls into again. Simmel speaks of events and their meanings in themselves and in relationship to the whole of life. Which can also move in the other direction: “Events which, regarded in themselves, representing simply their own meaning, may be similar to each other, may be, according to their relationship to the whole of life, extremely divergent.” Simmel’s definition of adventure is on the basis of this relationship of the parts of life to the whole course of life: “When, of two experiences, each of which offer contents that are not so different from one another, one is felt as an adventure, and the other isn’t – so it is that thise difference of relationship to the whole of our live is that by which the one accrues this meaning that is denied to the other. And this is really the form of adventure on the most general level: that it falls out of the connections of life.” That falling out of the Zusammenhange – the “hanging together” of our life isn’t to be confused, according to Simmel, with all unusual events. One shouldn’t confuse the odd moment with the adventure. Rather, adventure stands against the whole grain of our life. There is a thread that spans our lives – Simmel uses a vocabulary that returns us to the “spinning” of the fates – and unifies it. Adventure follows a different course: While it falls out of the connections of our life, it falls – as will be gradually explained – at the same time, with this movement, back inot it, a foreign body [ein Fremdkörper]in our existence, which yet is somehow bound up with the center. The exterior part [Ausserhalb] is, if even on a great and unusual detour, a form of the inner part. [Innerhalb] As always in Simmel, there is a lot of sexy suggestion here, which clouds one’s questions – especially about the latent conflict between a thread spanning a life and a center. One recognizes the logic of the supplement here – an excess in affirming a proposition has the effect of making it less clear, rather than more clear. Simmel’s ‘proof’ of this theory about adventure is that, when we remember these mutations in our life, they seem dreamlike. Why would the memory set up an equivalence, as it were, between a dream and an adventure? Because it is responding to the logic of the exterior/interior binary. Dreams, which are so exterior to our waking life that we cannot see them as playing any causal role in that life, are so interior that we share them with nobody else. Introjected – Melanie Klein’s word – wasn’t available in 1912 for Simmel, but something similar is going on. “The more “adventurous” an adventure is, the more purely it satisfies its concept, the “dreamier” it becomes in our memory. And so far does it often distance itself from the central point of the I and the course of the whole of life consolidated around it, that it is easy to think of an adventure as if somebody else had experienced it.” These traits – which are expressed, Simmel says, in the sharpness of beginning and ending which defines the adventures in our life, as opposed to other episodes – make adventures an “island” in our life. These traits too call up another in the chain of signifiers that are suggested by the dream – that is, the artwork. Adventurers are like artists in that the adventure, like the artwork, lies both outside of and deep within the whole of a life. It lies outside of and deep within from the perspective of memory – while the perspective that unfolds during the course of the adventure is one of presentness – this is why the adventurer is deeply “unhistoric”. That present is neither caused by the past nor oriented towards the future. To illustrate this, Simmel uses the example of Casanova. What he says should be put in relationship to Moliere’s Dom Juan, who, as I have pointed out, was always proposing marriage – to propose marriage was his compulsion, as he explains it to Sganarelle, just as Alexander the Great’s was conquest. A reading of the play, like Kierkegaard’s, that regards the marriage mania as a mask for the real seduction underneath takes the conjunction of marriage and seduction too easily. This is Simmel on Casanova: “An extremely characteristic testimony to this [the lack of a sense of the future] is what Casanova, as can be seen in his memoirs, so oftin in the course of his erotic adventurous life seriously aimed at – to marry the woman of the momen he loved. By his disposition and way of life, there was nothing more contradictory, nothing more innerly and outerly unthinkable for Casanova. Casanova was not only a notable knower of men, but was maifestly a rare knower of himself; and though he was obliged to say that he couldn’t have held out in a marriage more than fourteen days, and that the most miserable consequences would inevitably attend this step – the intoxication of the moment so caught him up (by which I mean to lay more emphasis on the moment than the intoxication) that it swallowed up the future perspective, so to speak, hide and hair.”

Totalization and me

There are a number of theories that account for and explain modernization. All tend to isolate modernization in opposition to the pre-modern, traditional or ‘natural’ social arrangements, and one can see why: to understand an object or process, one must isolate it, however artificially, in order to focus upon it and analyze it. However, the work of isolation and focus has often been reified and projected upon modernization itself, as though the old order – however one describes it – is simply swept away, as though the epistemologically clarifying gesture reflects the totalizing character of modernity. This is not to say that modernity doesn’t strive towards being the total social fact that characterizes all societies locked in the universal history of capitalism. The institutional circles of the law, money, and education, which Simmel – to an extent – saw in the Philosophy of money, or – to name three other less institutionally bound signifies - industrialization, politicization and science, which form another total complex, touch everyone – even the lost tribe, the isolato. Above all our heads is the Van Allen belt. Within our bloodstreams there is plentiful testimony to the artificial paradise we have produced. But within our dreams and our gossip there are other murkier currents, there are pre-modern reflexes. Superstition rules the stock market, and favors, turn taking, and oddly earmarked symbols are traded between workers in the most rational of office spaces, where the halogen lighting creates its uniform zones of visibility and computer screens are monitored and monitor all actors. The great and little traditions – to use James C.Scott’s categories – do battle, or uneasily lay down one next to the other, not only in peasant tilled fields, but in the traffic jam and the service economy. .

token time in the moronic inferno

There’s a passage in Control, John A. Mills history of behavioralism in America, that strikes me as a key to American capitalism as it goes through the autoimmune disorder that is so rapidly destroying the middle class.



Because behavioralism did not have a place for the mind, it was very dependent on experiments on animals, where one could supposedly see everything – such as the rats in the maze work that was so popular in American universities from the 30s until the 70s. It is from work with chimpanzees, according to Mills, that token economics developed into the ultimate control:



“Lindsley also conducted a study with Azrin on the effects of reinforcement on cooperation between children.47 They reported that cooperative behavior could be conditioned and extinguished without any verbal instruction regarding the tasks from the experimenters. Thus their study suggested that cooperation could be learned for the sake of reward, without recourse to

more complex explanations of the behavior.



Operant principles found their most ample application in token

economies. Token economies are staff-operated operant systems in

which the delivery of tokens controls the target population’s actions;

these economies are designed for use in institutional settings such as

mental hospitals, institutions for the mentally retarded, and schools.48

Versions of token economies were also used in jails. These systems

broke new ground in that the principles of behavioral science were applied

directly to nonlaboratory situations. As Kazdin commented, “it

is especially important to single out token reinforcement because it

has permitted a larger extension of programs than ordinarily is the

case with type [sic] of reinforcing events.”49 In institutions tokens are

awarded for the performance of basic social tasks, such as getting

dressed or helping to keep the ward tidy. In schools the usual “target behaviors” are the maintenance of an acceptable level of academic

performance or maintaining acceptable social behavior. Tokens can be

used to buy desirable items (e.g., cigarettes in mental hospitals) or to

gain access to social privileges (e.g., going to the cinema or gaining a

day pass in a mental hospital). Token economies provide us with a

paradigm for studying the role of operant reinforcement in the institution

and maintenance of acceptable patterns of social behavior.”



It is instructive to see the parallel between token economics and the Reagonomics/Neo-Keynesian paradigm under which the developed world has learned to accept the most absurd wealth inequalities and a lifestyle of decreasing reward for labor and increasing reward for shopping. In the world in which credit cards replace pay increases and zero down enters the bloodstream like the wickedest bit of cholesterol (was that your mortgage blowing up or a heart attack?), we are their chimps - in this moronic inferno, we have learned to keep the wards sparkly so long as we get a discount on the cell phone, plus some future flyer miles. The prob only really comes to a head when the scientists disband the lab, or the financial welfare queens disband some economy. Then all the tokens are worthless, because all the chimps have been guilty guilty guilty – in the eyes of the bond trader. Who, as is well known, is the only prophet we have left.

Two cheers for industrial policy!

Jon Gertner’s NYT mag piece on Manufacturing and (oh so scary!) industrial policy gets it. And, incidentally, it summarizes the guru of Obamanomics, ‘neo-liberal’ Larry Summers, rather beautifully:

“As the former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers put it, America’s role is to feed a global economy that’s increasingly based on knowledge and services rather than on making stuff.”

Jargon over objects, this is the echt neo-liberal style. Gertner doesn’t reference the source, but I imagine it was the Lizza piece on Summers in the New Yorker that contained all the information you needed to know that Obama’s administration was set on fail, two years ago. The funniest remark of the Obama four year term so far came in this article from Summers:

“Summers was equally doubtful of the idea that fairness required the government to bail out every struggling industry. He said, “The point that some of you made is one that, frankly, a number of the President’s more political advisers make with great frequency: how could you lend money to the big banks in New York and not lend money to regular folk who are employing a hundred people and are losing a hundred jobs?” But, he said, “just like occasionally in war there are unintended benefits, occasionally in bailouts there are unintended beneficiaries.” The bank bailouts, which, he noted several times, began under President Bush, “were directed at preventing a collapse that would have led millions of people to be out of work, not as support for those institutions.”



But to get to crowning Gertner’s article with a few laurel wreaths.

I liked how this article seems to get it. The manufacturing economy isn't "modular", but full of network affects. It is a root system, not a haphazard pile of building blocks. When you ship the manufacturing of an industry to another country, contra Larry Summers, you are shipping knowledge, you are shipping the increasing return on investment that comes with every next step in the industry. Not understanding this one bit, the economists as advisors and the political elite have truly helped bring the U.S. to this point of exhaustion. And they will continue, blindly, to work against the interests of the majority, because it is in the interest of the one sector that does hire economists - the financial sector. Notice that 60 percent of scientists and engineers are employed in the manufacturing sector, and notice that these aren't fake engineers - financial 'engineers". So far, the financial industry has been so successful that the trillions 'loaned' to it hasn't even emerged as an issue in the public space - because newspapers won't report on it (the GAO report on the Fed didn't even break into the back pages of the NYT) and the economists who reporters call up for the 'expert' quote are quite proud of themselves for managing to keep us from a 'depression'.


I liked the fact that the NYT mag piece didn't spend much time quoting any economists. In Lizza’s piece on Obama’s economic team in 2009, you could almost hear the disdain in Summers’ voice for the phrase “industrial policy.” How Un-Hayekian! How cruel to put impediments in the way of creative destruction!
Economists have the same view of the people who make ‘stuff’ as bug spray manufacturers have of bugs. They know enough about the way the bug’s nervous system works to get rid of em. But if you want to know how bugs really evolve, live, and reproduce, go to an entomologist. Obama hired Raid, when he shoulda been hiring Edward O. Wilson.