Keynes e Incertidumbre

With the words ‘We simply do not know,’ Keynes describes in his General Theory what he calls ‘objective uncertainty.’ There is simply no way in which one can foresee certain events or developments because they are objectively unknown. The past does not predict the future. This constitutes a fundamental break with the dominant neoclassical worldview …

My friend and colleague Paul Davidson drew exactly here the dividing line between Keynesian and orthodox economics … Davidson says, and he is right, that the assumption that all uncertainty can be reduced to a known and objective probability distribution constitutes the core of the ‘panglossian optimism,’ which makes the proponents of the neoclassical doctrine believe that free competition leads to socially optimal results.

Davidson criticizes also Paul Samuelson … because he wanted to build economic science on the the basis of what Davidson calls an ergodic statistical process or an ergodic axiom.

To accept the ergodic axiom is to make the claim that economics is just like the exact sciences. Economics should, in principle, be able to make completely correct predictions. Davidson uses the example of astronomy. Astronomer have no difficult in calculating the orbits of celestial bodies and they are capable of predicting the occurrence of an eclipse up to the exact second. ‘We simply do not know,’ on the contrary, means nothing else than that such economics and other social sciences are not capable of this. In economics and the other human sciences, we deal with processes that do not obey the ergodic principle. In all human action, there is always unpredictability.

https://rwer.wordpress.com/?action=user_content_redirect&uuid=7281246072e06cc598cdce5fe8b7ec3f1c9c2dbf67ab50129eaecd7afcd245fe&blog_id=10060093&post_id=46319&user_id=5858645&subs_id=5929411&signature=c93123fc7e806e0a79775c4ab7e0b531&email_name=new-post&user_email=luisharroyo@gmail.com&encoded_url=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZmxhc3NiZWNrLWVjb25vbWljcy5jb20vd2hhdC1qLW0ta2V5bmVzLW1lYW50LWJ5LXdlLXNpbXBseS1kby1ub3Qta25vdy8&email_id=b7c5a865cd929b8a3938939ffd31c7e8