Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Britain's Wealth was NOT Built on Slavery u0026 Colonialism" video.

  1. Part 1: Just began to watch this, and this is a tricky topic, indeed its been a tricky topic from my work years ago since i discovered the historical work by an economist in the 1950's that claimed the former African American slaves were economically better off during slavery than after. It generated an academic storm that returns with contextual differences every few decades. If i am correct Dr. Kristian Niemietz's historical economic quantitative method is called Cliometrics (Wikipedia). Cliometrics is the application of econometric methods that is the "reversal" of methods of econometric analysis for forward planning and evaluating outcomes of policy, so that it can evaluate the past and do retroactive analysis. Of course econometrics evaluates policy forwardly, which means comparison between policy and no policy, and comparison between competing policy. Of course this human science has to be understood in terms unusual for natural sciences. In natural sciences we can repeat experiments with different variables and even with changed frameworks or determinations of abstraction. We can play with the covariant and contra variant and invariant distinctions is grasping laws of nature. Its a method of infinite counterfactual testing. in econometrics there is no such possibility of trying out one policy, measuring the outcomes, and then trying out a different policy measuring those outcomes and comparing the two. So counterfactuals can be entertained in the imagination and compared in the imagination prior to a decision or judgment, but once the decision has been made and the policy implemented, the time and place of that decision has now become a fact. A fact we cannot go back to, short of time travail backwards in time, revisit and try the other decision and policy to see what happens. We can put it like this in modal terms the necessities and possibilities that are constraining and open at the point of a decision and policy cannot be revisited. its not just that the future may contain new facts un imagined or radically new machine or institutional legal technologies of systemic even Categorical change, what we can project with a policy in its context is only a narrow and highly abstract dimension of measurement. With this symmetry condition of continuity for comparison say over time of a tracking variable, nothing else "outside" this metric can be measured and quantified. But many other things are in play and effected not measurable within the symmetry. The symmetry necessary for econometrics to measure and compare, excludes other possible variables a priori. But this symmetry condition(s) is created with the policy as not just an accidental addition but as constitutive of and with the policy. Other possible policies open at the time of decision would need their own internal symmetric conditions which would exclude everything else in its historical a priori. Since the two possible policies are disjunctive and share no natural basis or constant in given by nature, really the two policy symmetries are radically incongruent. That is they do not even share a space or time they both can exist in to compare them. This is the radical difference between natural and human sciences in terms of object method and criteria of standards for comparison. Now when we shift to talk about Cliometrics we really are in a position where the facts have happened and the counterfactuals are annihilated. they are inexpressible quantitatively as they would lie outside of the symmetry framework. I described them form Einstein as the absolute elsewhere, but it turns out his term is already in use in a similar sense. It has occurred to me that this makes the application of say retro active justice and compensation very difficult to determine since no criteria of comparison can be constructed. Now it is from within the abstracted symmetry frames that people think they can simply compare possible worlds, but there is no such space, they are deceived by the nature of the abstraction and what it leaves behind, different abstraction leave different things behind and the different things are radically different they are not the same stuff left behind. this makes arguments about double effect more difficult to maintain because there cannot be comparisons of two different double effects from two different possible policies. That then also makes the notions of intentionality and responsibility of agents/actors difficult, in addition to the fact that there can be no quantity given for a counterfactual decision no utility measure. There is a research paper on line on the history of this work in 20th century "THE ECONOMICS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN SLAVERY:THE CLIOMETRICS DEBATE" by Richard C. Sutch 2018 for the NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH.
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  2. Part 2: What interests me here is how this method has been used to try and do the above comparisons of outcomes and counterfactuals. it has led in my mind to the imposition of the methodological abstractions back into the event and situation of an agent making a decision in context. They imagine the decision context to be simply a kind of manifold conjunction of various abstractions. From my point about this is impossible and absurd. It leads to the thought that decisions and judgements of agents in a context can be deduced by some kind of artificial synthesis of abstractive linear choice possibilities. it gives the impression that judgement can be replaced by calculations possibly like differential analysis within comparable differences. This is to try and remove the human and their intuition and judgement and replace with say computer algorithms. Such an approach appears scientific in that the "subjectivity" of a human judger and actor is now expelled form the account for this manifold of abstract metrics. it means no one is responsible, except perhaps the machine and/or the millions who contributed to its program code and data sources. I started work on this historical approach in 2009 though on line economics course on YouTube that did the history of economics and econometrics by Mark Thoma. Then I saw lectures by Amyerto Sen and by Ronald Dworkin to economists and lawyers and both just talked about aesthetics and art. Sen discussed Adam Smiths letters on the use of his economics book in abstraction from his ethics book. A point made to me by my Scottish Enlightenment lecturer in 2001. After that i decided not to try and learn econometrics even though the on line course was very good. I argued for years against a guy who claimed the alternative outcomes to Stalin’s programs in the 1930’s would have been even worse for the population. My inters tint his now is n as a way to better understand the real contrast between the left and right and the conservatives. A hint of which is in my account above between a formulae of abstractions and human aesthetic judgement. These are not then simply disjuncts they are radically differently orientated. I might say one thinks essentially of a human person as judger, the other in terms of abstract metrics of populations as a whole. The former can becomes obsessed with taste and personal virtue, while the latter scientism risks thinking in terms of everything’s a property function and one is responsible. I have since moved to think these problems through Nelson Goodman to try and persuade the left into making people responsible for decisions central to their policy and institutions, because increasingly these institutions appear to be are managed as if no one is there. I want to return the ghosts of Danton and Robespierre to their Rightful place in the lefts ideology. Back in 2009 I could watch all the available economics lecture courses in the world. Now you would need to live a long, long, time or be part of a massive “community”.
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  3. Part 3: the counterfactual discussed at 10:00 mins in terms of the cost of the Empire in terms of taxation verses no such taxation, is a classic example of the above. I had worked on a way to understand or at least express the problem but in a discussion between Peter Boghossain and Carl Benjamin mentioned Habermas and his systems approach to this. This is not just the classic left view that national public spending not only creates investment and spending without inflation(Keynes), but also that the multiplier means if the debt is at time t but paid back at time t+10, the whole economy has expanded and so the debt repayment is a fraction of the original debt to GDP ratio. They also Have the Critique of liberalism that the private investment determined by risk and reward within a taken for granted structure, free rides on the past and treats such prior endowments and structures as a gift not paid for in the investment and returns private model. This is kind of like Noziks point with his example of the football player and their abstract simple “addition” model for their worth w.r.t. the other players. For the left Critique the liberal private cost benefit model is the abstraction then. What falls out of both the abstract liberal private view of legitimacy, and the left instituional abstractions formulae for legitimacy of the whole population is all the other stuff lost and gained that is not in the audit. The liberals have also followed a free rider model for the lefts social justice projects I think Nails Ferguson has made this reverse argument. Obviously double effect is difficult to do here and I think Habermas can be useful here. There can be no metric for freedom and dignity. The left think they can get this from abstract legal analysis back and forward but end up about capability and capacity versions of freedom to ie money. The right still focus on free from State law and minimum State stuff from the 1970’s and 1980s. Some social theorists from the left have tried to do transcendental arguments in this like Karl-Otto Apel. An example I thought up around 2010 was that Sen’s argument for the Gini coefficient for overseas investment could from a point of view of the priority of international positive rights and utility outcome comparisons, could result in a conventional unity of world metropolitan actors in their high degrees of freedom in formal and informal networks in multiple institutions. Then the new dialectic is not Europe verses the third world but metropolitan elites verse everybody else as a massive world population aggregate. Then for any European State the City elits relation to “their” Commonwealth would not be directly mediated by a Social Contract with a substantive Category of the limit of the State, rather the elits would now view “all the worlds’ people here and elsewhere” as less well of than them as a collective. So the gini coefficient would come home the metric is now for those outside the City mediated by a world like not State wide, space of formal equality as international right but with variations for particular endowments. Those in the same State as the elite are now treated as if in the third world. The new master metric would be marginal utility increase for the poor in the whole world with elites everywhere kind of exempt from the equation. Inequality would become a global issue of relations between the poor in the world and the elites would act as if they are the impartial all good all-knowing representors of the world. The city country relational opposition would wither away along with the social contract into a world contract. See perhaps “Development Socialology Actor Perspectives” (2001) by Norman Long. The nature and determinations of the economic science and its metrics are not then politically neutral but contain implicit even covert political implications just like the difference between the Edison and Tesler approaches to the supply of electricity. This political difference and differences of freedom does not appear in the data metric, which might deal only with cost benefit. The political difference is not simply a double effect or unintended consequence it is systemic. I mean i found out some of my project had been done in the 1970's, but really its all footnotes to Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues".
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  4. My recollection of what happened to multitude of economic voices and Critiques after 2009 was that upon the publication of Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (2013) the elites all used this as a basic framework for all the debates. I knew then that from there going forward the economic debate would become narrowed ossified highly professional and specific and general at once. All the other possible voices were effectively pushed out of this new normative framework. While it allows different views a shared agreed place to start from it also closed down and excludes debate. It was interesting to watch in real time how all the intellectuals reorganised themselves around this book very quickly. Facilitated by the major Economic Academic institutions. I guess they were glad to have something to say in response to the 2011 riots. I imagine a similar minor or pseudo paradigm shift happened with Rawls's Theory of Justice 1971 as it followed the 1968 student protests. His was all a massive post facto detail of responses. For me the Bank of International Settlements Audit and risk agreements from 1988ish had already made it a bank led rules decision that Sovereign States had the infinite ability through public taxation to pay off any private banking debts and losses. Sovereign debt was classed as zero risk and unlimited collateral. it means the whole country pay the debts of the banks. but the bank debts were really due to middle class over leveraged mortgages, so the poor in any country mediated by the State and its obligation to back up the banks absolutely, paid off the middleclass losses. People didn't grasp with me at the time the significance of this, that is housing and mortgages and international banking regulations have a implicit or covert political implication. This system was agreed in this way during the Labour government 1997-2010. All forward thinking lefties in the 1990s brought houses in London Middle, several unconnected people even advised me to in Camden in 1990. Later in 2000's everybody wanted a piece of the pie. They must have known it was going to collapse and that the Sovereign State would automatically and mechanically follow the rule and bail out the the middleclass. People knew they had been ripped off but the intellectuals made it impossible to make a move in their debate. Then you get a riot, and then the book saves them all to talk about global inequality, then feminism then BLM, global environmental catastrophe and Global Colonialism and mass immigration. Now the middleclass left talk about political correctness racism and sexism which will be the framework for their social housing projects for their new post 2008 poor and third world equality projects. I would love to see the contract and the rules for social housing tenants.
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