The poverty of philosophy

What Hacker News says

1. claudiawernerDec 2019
   Very true, and an interesting example. While it's true that many great scientists were agreeable, sometimes lack of agreeability can mean you provoke more interesting responses, and more heated debate. Two examples - Karl Marx and Andrew Kliman, as political economists, were/are known for being not only rude but provocative in rudeness - to the point where a response is provoked simply because of the language they used. Marx's Capital, for example, got such a wide response not only because of the bold claims but also the rhetorical style it was written in (his contempt is shown in the famous preface to The Poverty of Philosophy, a response to Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty[0]). Kliman insists (and continues to insist) that his opponents don't understand him, that they haven't read the relevant litarture, and other things. He's even gone as far as accusing his opponents of having a psychological a-priori presumption against the theory he advocates[1].

   On the other hand, Kliman is at the forefront of post-Samuelson heterodox economics today, and his extremely influential theories have spawned a great deal of debate. It's hard to imagine that debate happening if he were "quieter".

   [0] "M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error."

   [1] "Mohun and Veneziani (2009: 278) state that we “conjecture that [his paper’s logical and factual errors were] not apparent to Veneziani because of a psychological a priori commitment to the falsity of the TSSI, in turn founded on a psychological a priori commitment to the demonstration of the internal inconsistency [...]"

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2. balance_factorAug 2017
   The zeitgeist has shifted? The zeitgeist hasn't changed since 1847, when Marx wrote about the character of monopoly in The Poverty of Philosophy. It hasn't changed since President Harrison signed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. It hasn't changed since Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, over a century ago (with Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York recombining in 1999, the broken up monopoly come back to life).

   It hasn't changed since the breakup of Ma Bell in 1982, the Baby Bells having re-formed into two companies: Verizon and AT&T, who control the last mile of wire and wireless, the network neutrality of which they have been fighting against. It hasn't changed since the big eight accounting firms became the big four accounting firms. It hasn't changed as Google and Facebook swallowed up all online advertising, search, social networks etc.

   The idea that the zeitgeist has shifted from monopoly is absurd. Billionaires from Warren Buffett to Peter Thiel seem to think otherwise. In every industry, mergers and acquisitions leave an increasingly fewer companies with control of more and more of their markets. The data is out there and quite obvious, you really have to put on some kind of ideological fantasy land kool-aid trip to see otherwise.

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