I don’t think Zingales’ arguments were crazy. The question was very poorly framed anyway and allowed Zingales to dodge the question of whether we’d actually be better off without stimulus (we wouldn’t). But he’s right that this is not a “Keynesian” crisis in the sense of the debased popular current notion of Keynesianism — basically, run a big giant government deficit and ignore institutional roots. It is, however, a crisis that Keynes himself would have understood instantly.

Do you have any opinion on Walter Kaufmann, not the Nietszche stuff, but, say, Critique of Religion and Philosophy or Without Guilt and Justice?

Also, on Popper and Hayek, I seem to remember reading in Beyond Wittgensteins’s poker by Peter Munz, who claims to be the only person who was taught by both Wittgenstein and Popper, that Popper disagreed with Hayek, but wouldn’t criticize him publicly because Hayek had been instrumental in bringing him from New Zealand to England. He felt it would be bad manners.

Philosophy can do two things honestly. In the Academy it can drop the fraudulent pretense of revealing God (using the term figuratively), a task, in infinitely humbler form, taken up by the natural sciences. And outside it it can be regarded as providing (invariably tentative and always questionable to some degree) principles guiding action, such as the dramatic conventions used by Hollywood screenwriters.

Incidentally:–on a personal note–I have found arch analytic villains, St. Bertrand in particular, the most valuable in my intellectual development in spite of the fact they seem to me to be wrong in virtually every case I feel what they’re saying makes sense. One could say I’ve adopted and instrumentalist attitude to their work, using it to aid in the clarification of my thoughts and the development of my forensic skill. Furthermore, Russell is invaluable in deflating the grand claims made by traditional metaphysicians regardless whatever arrogance may be evidenced in his own work.

Marxist analysis should not just be rejected out of hand. He was prone to great generalizations (following his master Hegel), and made mistakes. Yet we can learn from his mistakes (the labor theory of value, possibly class struggle itself). Marx was, I believe, profoundly cynical and had no faith in democracy (or, really, any politics. In a sense his writing, even when empirical and economic, hints at pathology, or social pathology–not merely malthusian, like a shortage of resources, or famines, etc., but a world of human-animals. Something like a Hobbesian state of nature (and KM was acquainted with Leviathan) .

Reality’s far more fucked up than most realize–politically, and psychologically. Reading the daily drivel of the blogger economists, the political people, churchies, the unf’ed cafe liberals, you’d think we were all living in some Emersonian (as in Ralph Waldo) pastoral bliss, when we’re probably a year or two from full scale riots or another war.

Cool with me. And you can write your independent opinion, dissenting from most of the others’ reasons for objecting to the impaling, but asserting that my neglect of Hume and Quine renders the impaling invalid and null.

I don’t actually think simple moral judgments make the world go around or can lead to a cogent analysis of anything, but the taboo against morilazation strikes me as debilitating generic educated administrative liberal post-political bullshit.

That’s not exactly Hume’s point on the fact/value problem, either. EthicsSpeak does not refer: values, whatever they are (if anything) are not objects. When someone say something like “Madoff is a New Yorker” we can understand it, however superficial that may seem. That’s a true statement. When someone says “Madoff is evil,” that’s vague, if not meaningless. Not really true, except perhaps with a great deal of explanation. That may seem trite, but something to remember when starting into discussions of “normativity.”

Paraphrasing Stein in Conrad’s Lord Jim, “one must immerse oneself in the destructive element.”

SallyFieldsSpeak is hardly less valid than HoratioSpeak. Everyone has ungrounded, unproven commitments, and yours are far different than mine.

Karl Marx hisself detested the liberal reformers (and utopian socialists) who misread economic problems as some quasi-theological or moral battle. I don’t have my copy of Theory of Leisure Class handy, but I don’t recall Veblen resorting to SallyFieldsSpeak; Veblen actually interesting because of a certain Darwinian approach to classical econ., really (like questioning the Rational Man standard, for one).

Likewise your belief that other people’s convictions require convincing arguments, whereas yours can be stipulated.