tr0ibo1able
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Can I suggest perhaps using a chatbot to critique your analysis so that you can see where post-keynsians may agree and disagree with you. To get an idea, this was a summary I was able to generate for DiGiovanni’s post (I promise I will read it later but just wanted to get something back to you quickly):
Post-Keynesians would read DiGiovanni’s post as a talented insider finally arriving at conclusions Keynes/PKs have held since the 20s, but stopping just short of the full break. They’d applaud the demolition of the six EA approaches. They’d say the positive alternative shouldn’t be “imprecise UEV plus near-term welfare” but rather a non-probabilistic framework built around conventions, weight of evidence, option-value preservation, and institutional robustness — and they’d point out that PKs have been developing exactly this toolkit, largely ignored by the EA and rationalist communities, for years.
Further, the article stays entirely inside a probabilistic framework — even its critique of expected value uses expected value concepts (UEV, credences, imprecise probabilities). From a PK view, the deeper missed point is that genuine uncertainty isn’t just hard to quantify, it’s unquantifiable in principle, and no refinement of the probability calculus fixes that.
The other big gap is the absence of a positive theory of action under true uncertainty. Keynes, Shackle, and Davidson all had answers — conventions, weight of evidence, option-value preservation — but DiGiovanni ends up in a kind of paralysis (“suspend judgment”) without drawing on this tradition. PKs would also flag the missing institutional dimension: the article assumes the problem is individual decision-making under uncertainty, when the Keynesian answer was always partly collective — build institutions that reduce the damage uncertainty can do, rather than trying to calculate through it.
Cheers I will take a look. Though I suspect if you are responding to the arguments in these particular papers, and those papers don’t draw on post-keynsianism, I worry they won’t have put forward the strongest possible case.
Keep in mind post-keynsianism has been developing these ideas of how to manage cluelessness for more than 100 years.
Yeah it’s honestly quite amazing/impressive to me, that those looking into this seem to have arrived at very similar insights to Post Keynesians on this point, but have done it without reference to that school of thought (which has been around and developing for more than 100 years)
So I guess my theory is that those working on these ideas could find both a lot of common ground but perhaps further insights they may not yet have considered by engaging more directly with post-Keynsian methodology.
As a strong free will sceptic I agree that you can never reasonably tell someone “you ought to do X over and above Y”.
However, it makes complete sense to me in a purely deterministic world to make one small addition to the phrase: “you ought to do X over and above Y in order to achieve Z”. The ought has no meaning without the Z, with the Z representing the ideal world you are deterministically programmed to want to live in.
lol embarrassing. Looks like it didn’t actually read it. Will try again…
Would be very interested to hear from you though, if you do your own analysis of what PK would critique from those posts. (You will be far better placed than me to make sure it doesn’t miss things)