Monday, November 22, 2010

"Chomsky Calls ECONNED “Great”"

One of my favorite quotes:
Noam Chomsky- The intellectual for people who aren't nearly as smart as they think they are.
Alas, the author is anonymous to me.

From naked capitalism:
From an interview of Noam Chomsky by Keane Bhatt, “Chomsky: ‘The Business Elites … Are Instinctive Marxists’” in TruthOut. The funny bit is I was reading this piece (per referral by reader May S) and found this section in it:

KB
: In characterizing the U.S. financial crisis, you say that “markets are inefficient … They can be controlled by some degree of regulation, but that was dismantled under religious fanaticism about efficient markets, which lacked empirical support and theoretical basis; it was just based on religious fanaticism.” Was this “irrational fundamentalism” the major factor in the development of the current world economic crisis? I ask because in “Hopes and Prospects,” you direct readers wishing to understand the crisis’s roots to Foster and Magdoff’s “The Great Financial Crisis.” Their thesis is that due to long-run stagnation tendencies in the real economy, “profits were increasingly directed away from investment in the expansion of productive capacity and toward financial speculation.” For Foster and Magdoff, the religious fanaticism was politically expedient and helped feed a series of massive financial bubbles, but this push compensated for the underlying, long-term stagnation tendencies of the real economy.
NC: I think that there’s some truth to that. There are books that are now available that I would’ve also referred to which go way beyond what I said – people from right in the middle of the economics profession going to the point of declaring economists criminals. For example, Yves Smith’s book – which is really good – I mean, she just says that those guys are a plague. The field ought to be dismantled. And she goes into the real details of it and shows what there is in economic theory that is so corrupt that it’s hard to discuss. It’s a great book.
I know his remarks probably make me, in the words of reader Nathan T, ” a radical totalitrian liberal communistic anarchist.” However, if you read his remarks, he depicts me as “right from the middle.” Go figure.
The rest of the interview is very much worth reading, and you can find it here.
If you just can't get enough Chomsky, here's the Chomskybot where you can generate Chomskytalk, without having to pay an MIT salary for the stuff:
I suggested that these results would follow from the assumption that the theory of syntactic features developed earlier appears to correlate rather closely with a parasitic gap construction.
On the other hand, relational information suffices to account for a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories. Thus an important property of these three types of EC is rather different from an important distinction in language use. With this clarification, the natural general principle that will subsume this case is necessary to impose an interpretation on the traditional practice of grammarians.
We will bring evidence in favor of the following thesis: the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate the extended c-command discussed in connection with....


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see also: WikiPedia -- Chomskybot