Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We can know, we do have good evidence on the big questions, he argues, and what we know for sure is that the other side got the system wrong.
I flinch from taking on Joe Stiglitz, who's a giant in the field, I really do, but does anyone else see similarities between him and his opponents?
Both reject ideology.
Both seek the mantle of science.
Both have similar doubts about who can really know what.
Your machine can't work, not won't can't.
People don't know enough to make it work properly.
No, no, it's your machine and the meddling with it that can't work.
You just don't know enough to make it work any better than it does on its own.
What if they're both right?
What if the machine is just erratic, eccentric, in an unknowable way that makes it both more than a machine and impossible to regulate with confidence?
The economist John Kay has seen many economic models of how the cogs fit.
In a sense, one of the very large and in some ways puzzling questions of economics is why the uncoordinated, to some degree shambolic, free market process...
actually worked better and more efficiently than the coordinated, centrally planned regimes you know of, for example, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
It's a conclusion that still remains quite surprising, and yet it's empirically true.
And these kind of mechanistic models that tell us the ways in which coordination can be achieved...
spontaneously without people designing it, are very illuminating in helping us, I think, to understand that process.
The mistake which today I think a lot of economists make is believing that these kind of models are actually realistic descriptions of how real economies operate.
They plainly are not.
The mechanistic approach isn't without value.
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