On this website, we attempt to concentrate our efforts on only the pure systematics and dynamics of Bernard Lonergan’s Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics. That is, we treat only the formal cause or immanent intelligibility of the pure science of Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics. Without knowledge of the pure science, applied science, which is concerned to treat human efficient causality, is in the dark. Fed, Treasury, BEA, NBER, CBO, university professors, financial analysts, and corporate strategists please take note!
It would be beneficial to Niall Ferguson and to the readers of his descriptive history, The Ascent of Money, were a macroeconomist to select an episode and, rather than describe the event, explain it using the tightly knit explanatory conjugates and relations of Lonergan’s Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics. A scientific analysis would provide both greater clarification and explanation in Ferguson’s work, and further cumulative verification of Lonergan’s hypothesis-become-theory. A similar recommendation would apply to Ray Dalio to assign and supervise an in-house economist to clarify and deepen Dalio’s excellent catalog of historical financial blunders., Also James Mackintosh of the Wall Street Journal could take the same course to make even better his “Streetwise” articles. Mackintosh might also enjoy reading Lonergan’s seminal Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, called by P. McShane “the most significant book of the twentieth century.”
For both graduate students of macroeconomics and their professors, the understanding and implementation of Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics, AKA Macroeconomic Field theory, could provide the basis of a happy and rewarding career.
Einstein said in connection with Special Relativity Theory, Everything is relative. Lonergan said regarding macroeconomic dynamics, The analysis is functional and purely relational. In normative Monetary Field Theory all velocitous and accelerative flows of products and payments are connected in a purely-relational, unitary, coherent system. And coherence means that all the explanatory conjugates and equations “hang together in a single unified theory.”
On one hand, in Centesimus Annus we affirm and emphasize the freedoms of the person, including the right to own what the person crafts, and we emphasize the dignity of the person. On the other hand, we note in the totalitarian system of government:
As healing can have no truck with hatred, so too it can have no truck with materialism. For the healer is essentially a reformer; first and foremost he counts on what is best in man. But the materialist is condemned by his own principles to be no more that a manipulator. He will apply to human beings the stick-and-carrot treatment that the Harvard behaviorist B.F. Skinner advocates under the name reinforcement. He will maintain with Marx that cultural attitudes are the byproduct of material conditions, and so he will bestow upon those subjected to communist power the salutary conditions of a closed frontier, clear and firm indoctrination, controlled media of information, a vigilant secret police, and the terrifying threat of labor camps. [CWL 15, 104] (A Gathering of Entries re Marxism) Click here)
Einstein would characterize Faraday’s and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory as the “greatest alteration … in our conception of the structure of reality since the foundation of theoretical physics by Newton.” (quoted in Hirshfeld, 2006, p. 212) Perhaps we might say something comparable about Lonergan’s macroeconomics, gnoseology, and theology.
It’s unfortunate that people can’t rise above instinctual political and ethnic tribalism and us-against-them mentalities to higher-level principles of right rather than wrong, good rather than evil, truth rather than falsity, love rather than hate.
Let desperate, intellectually and personally weak individuals gain unmerited power and glory and many of them will do whatever they perceive necessary to hold onto that power and glory. They will deceive even themselves. They will develop a god-complex and come to consider their twisted inclinations and shallow hunches the supreme truth. For those many, no lie will be too big; and no giveaway to buy votes will be too profligate or damaging to the public welfare and the good of order. So, we ask, Do our empowering systems of politics and communication – executive, legislative, judicial, deep-state, academic, electronic and print – allow the general public to become hostage to weak, shallow, deceitful, power-holding individuals?
How many socioeconomic problems are primarily cultural problems, with clueless leaders throwing more and more money in vain at what are basically problems of culture and its ethos? A president or prime minister or chancellor must not confuse cultural problems with economic problems. A vast educational effort is called for.
A Must-Read: Fred Lawrence, “Money, Institutions, And The Human Good”: An Ordered Perspective Distinguishing Social and Monetary Values.
when a limited liability company has served its day, it goes to bankruptcy court; but when bureaucrats take over power, they intend to stay. … when the pressure of terrorism is needed to oil the wheels of enterprise, then the immediate effect is either an explosion or else servile degeneracy. (CWL 15, Editors’ Introduction xxxiv) Continue reading