Gary Becker
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Arrow's impossibility theorem can be seen as a cohomological obstruction to constructing representative consumers without magical thinking.
Becker's theory of stable homogenous tastes on the other hand is....words fail me...the greatest indictment of peer review. Ever.
Just for a moment...put yourself in my shoes. I have an amazing theory of welfare with evolving tastes and a cult that claims stable tates.
Why stop at stable tastes? Why not declare yourself the last Pasha of Scotland and immune from bigamy laws as a winged son of Zeus?
$500 Challenge: Get me an invited Econ gig at Chicago / Harvard to confront the theory of ordinal welfare with stable homogenous tastes.
Rules are that it has to be in the Econ department on video with Becker present at Chicago or Jorgenson at Harvard.
Unlike Paul Samuelson & Ken Arrow, Gary Becker was cut from different cloth. He reminded me of my dealings w/ Lenny Susskind, Larry Summers, Brad Delong, Jagdish Bhagwati, Ed Witten, Mildred Dresselhaus & others, so possessed by ideology that academic reason could just vanish.
In my recent interview of @EricRWeinstein, he referred to "stable preferences" as Achilles' heel of neoclassical econ. Exhibit A is this famous quote from Becker. At face value, Becker is saying a model w/dynamic preferences wouldn't even be economics anymore. Do others agree?
Gary wasnât stupid. He was just on a failed dead end mission of intellectual suicide. He was shrewd, creative and wildly wrong about human beings at levels that are difficult to convey.
And so it fell to him to tell the ultimate academic lie on behalf of his profession of economics: all humans have stable unchanging tastes.
So dumb. So unethical. Such an intellectually pathetic move. But then he was refereeing the same game within which he was flagrantly cheating.
He was easy to beat in any argument not judged by ideologues. But in Chicago and elsewhere they pretended this was genius rather than a flagrant attempt at patching the vulnerabilities that will sink Neo Classixal economic imperialism.
He lived, and died, in a protected world, not unlike an academic Hermit Kingdom. An intellectual North Korea where people were always bowing before him if they wanted to survive and needed his favor.
But the vulnerability is real. And believe me, he and I both knew it. It was tense as hell dealing with him for a reason:
The fiction of Stable Tastes is THE analog of rhe exhaust vent on the Death Star of NeoClassical Economjc Imperialism. His lifeâs work.
I look forward to showing you just how that little exhaust vent works.
