о другом историке

[avva]

Я начал читать книгу "Что такое история?" британского историка Эдварда Карра - о том, чем занимается история и каковы ее методы - после того, как несколько раз прочитал о ее влиянии на современных историков.

И черт меня дернул пойти заодно и почитать статью в Википедии про Карра - очень подробную - из которой складывается грустная и в одном месте трагичная картина.

В отличие от Роберта Конквеста, который в юности заигрывал с коммунизмом, но вырос из этого, а потом написал первую на западе историю сталинских чисток, Карр начал с британского либерализма, а потом всю жизнь медленно, но неуклонно двигался к марксизму, и благополучно к нему пришел. В 40 лет он мог еще написать биографию Маркса под названием "Карл Маркс: этюд о фанатизме", а несколько десятилетий спустя так стыдился этой книги, что отказался переиздать ее.

При этом исторической специальностью Карра была - современная российская и советская история; и об этом он писал многочисленные статьи и книги, включая "Историю Советской России" в 14 томах (!), написанную хоть и с независимой точки зрения, но с очевидным про-советским уклоном и тенденцией верить официальным советским цифрам и заявлениям.

В 37-м году Карр решил посетить СССР и посмотреть своими глазами на прогресс советского строя. Выходя из гостиницы в Ленинграде, он столкнулся с Дмитрием Святополком-Мирским, с которым был дружен в Англии: Мирский был эмигрантом, литературным деятелем, но в 32-м году, после того, как вступил в британскую компартию и получил разрешение советского правительства, вернулся жить в СССР. Карр с радостью приветствовал Мирского, но к его удивлению Мирский сделал вид, что его не узнает. Карр в ответ начал настаивать на знакомстве, и Мирскому пришлось в конце концов признать, что он его знает.

Когда Карр вернулся в Британию, он прочитал лекцию о своем визите в СССР и Германию и упомянул, в частности, странное поведение своего старого друга. Он выглядел сконфуженно, сказал Карр, говорил какие-то очевидные глупости невпопад, а потом взял и отвернулся от меня.

Через пару месяцев после отъезда Карра Мирского арестовали за шпионаж; он умер в лагере под Магаданом два года спустя.

Comments

[burrru.livejournal.com]

Довольно трудно всерьез относиться к сторонникам марксизма. Экономические выводы Маркса очень интересны и (в рамках начальных допущений) верны, но социальные теории марксистов ниже всякой критики.

[averros.livejournal.com]

The basis of economic theory of Marxism is the labor theory of value: value of a good is created by (and in proportion to the amount of) labor spent on it.

This theory is easily debunked by an observation of somebody digging a hole and filling it back in, repeatedly. Labor is being spent, value created: none.

From this patently false statement about the nature of economic value Marx diligently derived an entire edifice of pathetic nonsense (which, thanks to the explosion principle, sometimes manages to look reasonable).

[burrru.livejournal.com]

Есть более серьезная и обоснованная критика экономических теорий Маркса.

В то же время, кризисы перепроизводства и их повторяемость - очень важный момент и с ним приходится считаться.

[averros.livejournal.com]

There's no need for any "serious" critique of Marx - it is sufficient to point the fallacy in the basic postulate, the lack of support for all derivations from that postulate follows according to the rules of logic. In other words, the entire Marx's economic theory is nothing more than illogical verbiage. No ifs or buts about this. Pure unadulterated junk, as should be obvious to anybody who is not fazed by the monumental size of this particular economic fallacy and the religious ardor of believers in it.

As for crises of overproduction, a similarly simple application of elementary logic shows that they do not exist in reality. What happened is the quite predictable (from the elementary theory of supply and demand) result of government intervention designed to support price levels for particular products, motivated by another monumental economic fallacy (aka Keynesianism) which holds that increasing prices by monetary inflation or other means magically transmutes into creation of real wealth.

In the intervention-free market it is possible for an entrepreneur to overestimate demand and so produce more goods than there's market for at profitable price level. However, it is vanishingly unlikely for this mistake to be made by all entrepreneurs at once, and persistence of this mistake is also unlikely (because entrepreneurs react to prices falling below costs by reducing or halting production to avoid further losses), so such mistakes cannot be systemic and are self-correcting. For an economy-wide crisis to occur it is necessary to have an economy-wide forcing factor, which can only be supplied in form of government regulation or direct intervention.

The empirical observation of the history confirms this deduction - all of the so-called "overproduction crises" were directly caused by the government mandating production limits or price floors for particular goods. The resulting overhang of the already produced inventory (esp. in agriculture where goods are perishable) which couldn't find buyers *at the mandated prices* had to be destroyed. It is, indeed, a serious business; but the cause of this insanity is not what the economic cultists who believe in the "animal spirits of the market" make it out to be - it is eminently predictable and inevitable outcome of specific policies introduced by the cultists themselves.

[burrru.livejournal.com]

Если бы все было так просто, я бы остался без работы... По счастью, рынок устроен существенно сложнее. Невозможно объяснить экономический мир одним только балансом спроса и предложения, как невозможно объяснить физический мир, основываясь лишь на изменениях потенциальной и кинетической энергии.

[averros.livejournal.com]

I think you missed the point - there's no reason to seek complicated and contrived explanations when the obvious and simple working of the basic economic laws is sufficient to account for the observed phenomenon.

Ockham's razor, if you wish.

As for explanation of physical world... of course, basic laws are not always sufficient to explain the behavior of complex systems, but no system, complex or simple, can violate these laws. That's merely the principle of scientific reductionism. The economic law of supply and demand is a consequence of the physical laws (i.e. conservation of matter - i.e. the fact that goods do not appear or disappear on their own) and purely mathematical observation about monotonicity of supply and demand curves (I will skip the discussion of the so-called Veblen goods, because it is not directly applicable, and much nonsense is said about them anyway). As such, it cannot be violated in any higher-order economic phenomena. If there's a theory which claims that such violation can happen, that theory is un-scientific and illogical. It is as simple as that, no need to examine the gory details.

[burrru.livejournal.com]

Если бы все было, как Вы говорите, то рынок был бы легко предсказуем и, соответственно, сбалансирован. К счастью, это не так.

[averros.livejournal.com]

The market *is* predictable; it's just that it is cannot be predicted quantitatively. But the qualitative rules like "you print money, you'll get inflation" or "you put price ceilings, you'll get shortages" are very reliable.

On the other hand, predicting timing or specific macroeconomic numbers is not possible using the information contained within economic parameters themselves (in fact, anybody claiming to have a theory modeling that, even statistically, is a fraud). The reason for that is inaccessibility of utility functions of economic actors. The best one can do is to guess - that's what entrepreneurs do.

In a sense, economics is very much like evolutionary theory - you can have enormous explanatory power without much in a way of predictive power (in fact, market is an evolutionary algorithm, the only known effective method for finding efficient decompositions of large search spaces in a generic way). But, I guess, not many economists ever heard about Eric Baum's experiments. Or realize that functioning market doesn't require rationality (or even sentinence) of economic actors.

[burrru.livejournal.com]

Этот Эрик Баум?
http://www.whatisthought.com/eric.html

[averros.livejournal.com]

Yep. His Hayek Machine experiments are quite illuminating (though I do not think he ever considered exploring their implications regarding the nature of the real-world economies; he seems to be more interested in artificial intelligence).

[burrru.livejournal.com]

Спасибо за информацию. Я посмотрю, можно ли применить его идеи к реальным экономическим моделям.

[averros.livejournal.com]

Will be hard to do, I think; Baum worked with evolution of software code; in the real market evolution is memetic (i.e. people watching other people to fail or become successful and imitating what works, adding their own ideas).

AFAIK, nobody has any useful data on how the real-world memetic evolution works, and what would be useful representation for memes (see Thought Contagion by Aaron Lynch and The Electric Meme by Robert Aunger). The reason for that is that meme transfer is mostly horizontal (i.e. similar to gene swapping by bacteria or gene transfer by retroviruses) rather than vertical (from parents to children), and not many (if any) artificial life experiments explored this kind of evolution. The representation of memetic information (aka "knowledge") is (and has been) a central topic in AI research for decades, with little progress so far outside of narrow domains. Cyc (Douglas Lenat et al) is the only serious active project in general knowledge infrastructure I know of, and it seems to go nowhere.

So my take on this is that Baum's results have more philosophical than practical impact. He has shown that working market does not need consciousness or rationality, and, in effect, demonstrated that the key for exploiting hidden structure of large problem spaces is modularization (known in the economic parlance as "division of labor"). His results also provided the first serious counter-argument to the only valid argument by the proponents of the Intelligent Design (as opposed to the abiogenesis hypothesis): that the time needed to search the space of genetic sequences needed to create the first replicant vastly exceeds the geologic age of Earth, though I think he doesn't realize it himself: biochemistry is a free market, of sorts, with bound chemical energy playing the role of money.