The Root of All Evil

 

Colorless (sic) green ideas sleep furiously. Chomsky's famous example of a syntactically correct sentence that is simply nonsense semantically, and therefore - this is the fag-packet version - refutes the prevailing language models at the time he coined the example in his 1957 book "Syntactic Structures". In the intervening years between then and my going to Bangor Uni in 1980, to study linguistics, the seams of his grammatical theories were starting to bulge, due to the increasing bulk of rules, filters and other logical detritus, necessary to keep - mixed metaphor warning - the ship afloat. In short, his example fell as short of usable, as did his theory in general, which star started to fade from the eighties on.

The reason I mention this, is to do with theories and technologies that we think we know, but really don't, despite our having created them. Hannah Fry's piece in today's i's 'My View' byline, about ChatGPT, posited that, despite the usual brouhaha that emerging tech always precipitates, the readily-accessible presence of this incredibly agile and effective piece of Artificial Intelligence constitutes less of a threat to education and academia than one might initially suppose, given that similarly-AI-endowed anti-plagiarism tools have been around for some time and can be tuned for and turned upon any other AI-generated content. Also, rather than see the thing as a threat, one should at least try to imagine it as a potential academic tool, to spark ideas and suggest directions to investigate, to which students and content producers can then apply their own creativity, in giving life to new and original work. A human slant on the humanly-created inhuman, so to speak.

Of course, one possible thing to throw at the überbot would be the question of the conundrum of economics and capitalist realism: to come up with a construct or, preferably, constructs - even daft ones - to try and reframe our increasingly convoluted and frankly flaky, economic theories. I note a recent short quote from Ross Clark, of The Spectator magazine, where he succinctly - for The Spectator, at least - crystallizes the enigma that is macroeconomics. In one short sentence. 'Are we supposed to have tax cuts or tax rises, spending cuts or spending rises?' No bugger out there in the mighty world of finance and banking can answer that question, as they've painted themselves into a corner by dint of believing in every one of their half-brained economic theories: pseudo-science no better or more effective than Carters Little Liver Pills or blood-letting were in times past in curing medical ailments.

The stupid, and unfortunately most dangerous, thing about these clowns, is that they simply fail to take into account all the parameters necessary to formulate a truly macro view of the world, and it's economy, at all. Theirs is a naïve Weltanschauung, stuck in its origins of Silk Road camel trading, Venetian book-balancing, and the clubs, halls and coffee shops of the aristocratic elites of the day. Their models haven't significantly moved on since the invention of the Markets, and their parameters are still stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century; except these crusty old mechanisms are now larded with the complications of the modern speed of communications and trading 'products' of such Byzantine complexity that not even their inventors can predict what they might do at any particular time [cf Big Bang,1986, and Sub-Prime, 2008].

The main parameter missing from their equations - apart from any consideration of people as anything other than economic units - or society itself [cf Thatcher, 1980s], is the environment. Surely to Christ, this is the biggest single economic parameter out there? Everything, and I mean, everything, hangs off of this. Fundamental. Basic. The radix profundus itself. Failure to address the issue of climate simply negates any economic theory so doing. Period. Which brings me back to Chomsky. Whilst his linguistic theories may well have proven over time to be somewhat flawed, if not exactly sketchy, the grizzled old polymath is also a respected political, social and economic theorist and commentator, with a prodigious, profound and continuing, written output. He also stands on the side of the angels, which is good. I'll leave things with a brief quote from an interview with him by C.J. Polychroniou, about five years ago, but still as relevant and true currently, where Chomsky says:

"[it]... again raises the question of how we can look away [from the actions of governments, banks and the fossil-fuel industries]. For ExxonMobil [cf also current news items], the explanation is simple enough: the logic of the capitalist market rules [my italics] - what Joseph Stiglitz, twenty-five years ago, called the "religion" - that markets know best. The same reasoning extends beyond, for example, to the major banks that are pouring money into fossil fuel extraction...surely in full awareness of the consequences." Therein lyeth the truth, crux and substance to it all.