Jimmy Wales wrote:
I have done a good deal more reading on their site, and I find that virtually none of their material even comes close to NPOV. It's filled throughout with standard Marxist jargon -- which is very out of the mainstream and treated (properly!) by most economists in the same way that astrology is treated by psychiatrists.
Jimbo, you beg the question by ignoring that most economists treat each others views and models (properly in my view) the way most scientists treat astrology. Why should Marxist economics dogma be held to a higher standard than Keynesian derived models and predictions that do not work well, if at all, prior to NPOV'ing for inclusion in Wikipedia? 8)
Remember trickle down Reagonomics? That debate will be interesting when, or if, sufficient people interested show up.
Now that data is available for arithmetic evaluation of claims will any partisans abandon their dogma?
Now that no political gain is impending will any partisans come forward to defend or attempt to assist with presenting the dogma in a NPOV fashion?
Take this section for example, from "Market Socialism":
Should the working class succeed in taking political power, capital would be abolished but there could be no question of simply 'abolishing' the market. This would take time. However, the market inevitably generates inequality and the accumulation of capital, and even more seriously, commodity production and the day-to-day activity entailed in buying and selling oneself on the market is the very ground on which bourgeois ideology grows.
There are several unstated assumptions here that are central to Marxist dogma but which have no place in an NPOV presentation. For example, it assumes that "should the working class succeed in taking political power" the market *could* be abolished, but not "simply" -- it "would take time". That's dogma on the same scientific level as phrenology.
Not quite that bad. The debate to attempt to NPOV the information by identifying who has used what assumptions and what assertions have working analogues in the real world should be quite interesting and informative. The results, if integrated well, could turn into a highly informative article.
For example: Military logistics as practiced by the U.S. might have some bearing on whether moneyless information can efficiently drive distribution.
I have been told that Arrow did some extremely interesting Nobel Award level work on information augmenting money in market distribution. This could be just the opportunity to engage in a critical reading and dialogue with people carrying different implicit assumptions in their world view. Assuming of course that they are as reasonable as most hard core Capitalists.
I suppose we could try to work with this stuff by prefacing everything with "Marxists claim..." and ending it with "but virtually all economists regard these Marxists as cranks." But that doesn't make for a very useful article about "market socialism".
I think we can do better than this but it will take some time and serious interest. Perhaps, as the Marxists trickle in, we could send an engraved invitation to the John Birch society that their participation would be welcome? They should have a few Trickle Down and anti Trickle Down adherents hanging around somewhere, both camps confident that their assumptions and models are better than Marxist equivalents.
The Marxists can help us sort out the Trickle Down jargon while the capitalists help identify implicit Marxist assumptions.
We could also request participation from unaffiliated critics and adherents to new big ideas unproven in the wild.
If all else fails, perhaps we could interest some grade school math and science students in helping us with the actual arithmetic based upon actual economic data.
regards, Mike Irwin