Right on! Second time is a charm...hopefully. It was so great seeing all of you again! It reminded me how much I would enjoy a forum to test and wage ideological battle, if only to satisfy my poo-flinging monkey desires. In my day dream hand-wavy imagination, I also fantasize that this will be a great way to recommend must-read books to each other, perhaps after moments of particularly intense rivalry we could even refresh our discussion by mentioning good movies or food we have recently enjoyed, but the overarching purpose of our blogging would be to bare and cut our teeth against each other's world views. For those in the robot camp I should clarify, process this human emotion >:(. Or at least that is my best laid plan. I am hoping that both Munir and Margaret will participate when they can because they constitute the heart and soul (or the robotic equivalent) of the economist side, but as they are both busy being programmed right now I expect that I will be able to make unanswered pot shots at them from the less rigorous branches and canopy of the arts. To keep with the metaphor, I will undoubtedly resort to swinging to various positions in order to get the best of their entrenched and towered economist ideas. Although, as I have mentioned to Margaret, I am not entirely clear on what that position is, and she has already corrected my attack by making an important distinction between micro and macro economic theory. Abandoning the field of macro economics, I thought I would like to pillage the casualties and publicly throw down the gauntlet by sending in this great interview between Amy Goodman and Manfred Max-Neef.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/22/chilean_economist_manfred_max_neef_us
These are the bullets I want to fire at you:
>economics is a subsystem - What I like about this is that economics is not an absolute model, it has limits, and therefor should be considered as an alternative to other metaphors or models, but not as the supreme model. My unfounded monkey accusation from here would be to question whether economists fall into a trap of mistaking complexity for comprehensiveness.
>sidebar: Marg, I think this casts an interesting light on your biology-economist interests. What is more comprehensive, to understand economics or biology. Does Manfred give you pause, are you sure you have found your people?
>"the difference between knowledge and understanding" and Max-Neef's example of how we can measure the phenomenon of love in many ways but that is not the same as understanding love, which is something that is understood through experience and not objective study. I like this distinction because I think it can be broadened to show how often objectively established 'truths' or 'facts' are held up as all encompassing decoders of life, relegating what is intuitively understood to a lesser order.
Hopefully this kicks things off. Have at thee!
