
The Genius in My Basement (2011) - Bootvis
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/24/genius-in-my-basement-review
======
609venezia
Did anyone here get to experience one of Norton's lectures? It seems
"Cambridge failed to renew his contract... citing his eccentric lecturing
style which they thought deterred students," so I am curious what they might
have been like

[https://www.thejc.com/news/obituaries/obituary-simon-
norton-...](https://www.thejc.com/news/obituaries/obituary-simon-
norton-1.482207)

~~~
mathgenius
Luckily for us, one of his most important lectures was recorded and uploaded
to youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO0iyzYUTgo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO0iyzYUTgo)

Make sure you watch all of it, there's some bombshells in there.

~~~
609venezia
Thank you. (For other readers, this is an interview about public transport
issues)

It sounds like he had a relatively severe stutter. I hope the university
didn't fail to renew his contract on that account.

------
kvathupo
Once I read "public transport addict" in the blurb, I immediately knew it was
Norton of Monstrous moonshine fame.

------
mathgenius
I bought this book after reading about Simon Norton's passing early this year.
It's nice to read about this quirky genius, but I did find the author's
writing too over-done.

------
grabbalacious
When it comes to geniuses, the inability to hold down a job, eccentricity of
style, rudeness, etc, are _features_ , not bugs. The potential benefit to
society far outweighs the very real inconvenience they cause to the people
around them. So how to accommodate? I would say: (1) identify by their record,
(2) attract them, (3) give them a space and a budget, (4) no responsibilities
and no position of authority, (5) answerable, informally, to just one person,
say a vice-chancellor, (6) exempt from all questionnaires, committees, audits,
compulsory teaching, form-filling, etc (7) leave them alone.

~~~
zarkov99
They are definitely bugs I am sorry. There might be easy work arounds, sure,
but they are bugs nonetheless, in that these characteristics do not benefit
their owner or anyone else.

~~~
grabbalacious
It isn't nice, I know, but it comes down to: agreeable people tend to agree
with other people. So they can't make significant original contributions.

~~~
kryptiskt
There have been very few men in history nicer and more considerate than James
Clerk Maxwell, and he made the biggest leap of genius in physics ever with
electromagnetic field theory, the foundation of everything that is modern in
physics. Well, there is statistical physics too, which he also was a founding
father of.

~~~
claudiawerner
Very true, and an interesting example. While it's true that many great
scientists were agreeable, sometimes lack of agreeability can mean you provoke
more interesting responses, and more heated debate. Two examples - Karl Marx
and Andrew Kliman, as political economists, were/are known for being not only
rude but provocative in rudeness - to the point where a response is provoked
simply because of the language they used. Marx's _Capital_ , for example, got
such a wide response not only because of the bold claims but also the
rhetorical style it was written in (his contempt is shown in the famous
preface to _The Poverty of Philosophy_ , a response to Proudhon's _The
Philosophy of Poverty_ [0]). Kliman insists (and continues to insist) that his
opponents don't understand him, that they haven't read the relevant litarture,
and other things. He's even gone as far as accusing his opponents of having a
psychological a-priori presumption against the theory he advocates[1].

On the other hand, Kliman is at the forefront of post-Samuelson heterodox
economics today, and his extremely influential theories have spawned a great
deal of debate. It's hard to imagine that debate happening if he were
"quieter".

[0] "M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in
Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is
reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a
bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French
economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to
protest against this double error."

[1] "Mohun and Veneziani (2009: 278) state that we “conjecture that [his
paper’s logical and factual errors were] not apparent to Veneziani because of
a psychological a priori commitment to the falsity of the TSSI, in turn
founded on a psychological a priori commitment to the demonstration of the
internal inconsistency [...]"

~~~
QuesnayJr
I genuinely cannot imagine a less consequential figure than Kliman, mainly
because if they were less consequential I would never have heard of them. TSSI
is when Marxist economics became what the philosopher Imre Lakatos called a
"degenerating research program". People have a psychological a-prior
presumption against the theory he advocates because he is transparently
playing a game with words. It was well-understood the context in which Marx
wrote, and everyone understood Marx in connection with that context. His
contemporaries understood him that way, and everyone for the next hundred
years understood him that way. Kliman now pretends that everyone between Marx'
time and now read Marx wrong, and only he, Kliman, has uncovered the key to
decode Marx. At the same time, his supposed key, the TSSI, is so arid and
unrelated to any real-world activity that the response to more serious
scholars (even serious Marxist economists) is repulsion.

It's clear that Marx mastered a certain rhetorical strategy that made him
disproportionately influential -- the rhetorical strategy of the bully. People
love the bully. Who doesn't want to be the bully, rather than the bullied?
Freud used a similar strategy, to similar effect. I'm not surprised that
Kliman has turned to the same strategy, but at least Marx was animated by the
great events of his day, but all Kliman can hope for is to defeat his rivals
in argument over interpreting Marx. As someone once pointed out, it is
philosophers who interpret the world. The point is to change it.

~~~
claudiawerner
> It was well-understood the context in which Marx wrote, and everyone
> understood Marx in connection with that context.

Not really. Hilferding's reply to Bohm-Bawerk so early on showed that many of
Marx's critics still misunderstood him, and Marxist economists have dealt with
those criticisms time and time again, not only philosophical misunderstandings
but on the transformation problem too. The most outrageous is the charge of
inconsistency between Vol. 1 and Vol. 3 - luckily Marx isn't charged with such
inconsistency any more (only the failure to transform values to prices in the
specific context of competing capitals) but Kliman is partly responsible for
that turn. Bohm-Bawerk's objections to Marx's value theory gain new life in
fancy terminology (such as "Generalized Commodity Exploitation Theorem"). The
degenerative research program actually seems to be in the responses of
philosophers and economists to Marx[0].

>Kliman now pretends that everyone between Marx' time and now read Marx wrong,
and only he, Kliman, has uncovered the key to decode Marx.

The idea of the TSSI was about before Kliman, and it'll be about after him;
the point I was making is that he was the first one to be loud enough about it
to attract attention. Kliman at least attempts to make a convincing case based
on textual exegesis of Marx's works that shows misinterpretation, which is not
unreasonable in a world dominated by equilibrium economics and thereby
equilibrium responses to Marx. His only contention is that Marxian economists
had surrendered too much ground. Further, in several places his claim is _not_
that Marx is correct, only that the charge of inconsistency is misplaced.

>that the response to more serious scholars (even serious Marxist economists)
is repulsion.

That's not true; the TSSI is as popular as it is criticized. For every
explicitly anti-TSSI scholar I can probably name a pro-TSSI one. I'm sure
you'd agree that Marxists tend to like orthodoxy and established traditions
just as much as anyone else, which shows in the responses (by Marxian
economists) to the TSSI and _also_ to Okishio's theorem. There are plenty of
good mathematical and philosophical objections to the TSSI on Marxist grounds,
but very few claim it is as philosophically bankrupt and divorced from reality
as you seem to make it out to be. Veneziani and Mohun's objections are
mathematical, not "practical". The charge of a vacuous theory divorced from
understanding the dynamics of capitalism usually falls on the New
Interpretation rather than the TSSI.

>As someone once pointed out, it is philosophers who interpret the world. The
point is to change it.

I agree! As it happens, so do Kliman's co-authors. From Alan Freeman:

>I conclude that it is a legitimate political and research project to attempt
to understand capitalism on the basis of the Marx’s own work. The persistent
denial of its validity, on the false grounds that Marx’s theory has been
proven incoherent, should be resisted by the political movement. Whatever the
personal motivations of individuals that subscribe to this view, its actual
effect is to deny access to Marx’s own economic views. To persist in promoting
it now, above all, as is usually done, as an incontrovertible truth, must be
treated as an unscientific act of censorship. Before beginning I want to lay
before the audience the exact nature of the debate. First, it is not a
scholastic debate. An audience of trade unionists, political activists, and
professional intellectuals represents a genuine encounter, in Gramsci’s words,
between those who think because they suffer and those who suffer because they
think. _It is a debate whose purpose is to change the world._

[0]
[http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Marxism/Marxism%20As%20Science.p...](http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Marxism/Marxism%20As%20Science.pdf)

~~~
QuesnayJr
Bohm-Bawerk's notion of the contradiction was so potent because it was so hard
for Marxists to answer. Hilferding's response didn't even convince many
Marxists, which is why the transformation problem was the primary theoretical
dispute within Marxist economics for most of the twentieth century.

After Samuelson's famous article on the transformation problem, most people
concluded that Marx' system could not be rescued, and moved on with their
lives. Up until the 70s Marxist economics was a vibrant field, but after that
it's only a few dead-enders. Kliman himself laments this in an article that I
can no longer find online. Philosophers and economists don't spend much time
on Marx for the same reason chemists don't spend much time on phlogiston, and
physicists don't spend much time on aether theory.

~~~
claudiawerner
Samuelson's work is an odd one, because it attempted to fit Marx into a pre-
defined model, and the model is convincing from a mathematical point of view.
For whatever reason, Marxists (but especially analytical Marxists) decided
this was enough to give up on the labour theory of value, or at least work in
Samuelson's terms. The only proof of the redundancy of the theory of value
Samuelson could offer was in the case of identical inputs and outputs, two
homogenous goods, and we take labour as embodied and invariable[0]. Kliman and
many others (especially those trained as economists rather than philosophers)
accept this premise. Samuelson's other criticisms were repeats of Bohm-
Bawerk's, and though it would take a few more years for better objections than
Hilferding's to specifically reply to the critics and their criticisms, they
got there eventually, and they're here today.

Your analogy would be more apt if it turned out that the refutations of
phlogiston or the aether were flawed, both in the model used to construct the
premises in the refutation _and_ the refutation didn't hold much (if any)
water. As it turns out, scientific revolutions can be just as politically
motivated as anything else. But even then, Kliman and others are more than
happy to work given the premises constructed by Samuelson. Okishio, at least,
admitted the imperfection of the model his theorem is based on. Samuelson,
even after _contemporary_ early critiques from Paul Mattick, Geoffrey Kay, Ben
Fine, and others never did. At some point Samuelson's conception of Marx's
theory as one purely of prices and "proving" the notion of exploitation shows
just how shallow the analysis goes. You can determine prices without reference
to labour values (as Sraffa showed) and you can demonstrate exploitation in
capitalist society without reference to the traditional (Marxian) labour
theory of value (Nitzan & Bichler, Roemer, Veneziani & Yoshihara, Arthur
DiQuattro, Hardt & Negri, even Bowels & Gintis). In fact, the only conclusion
you really throw out is the falling rate of profit.

Even if nothing I said is true, the neoclassical paradigm was attacked just as
much in the Cambridge capital controversy to the point where if we were to use
the same standards you are using for Marxism, it would be just as dead. At
best, neoclassical economics is the phlogiston, and Marxism is the aether.
Sraffa would be happy, at least? Marxism as a mainstream question started
dying while every other heterodox opinion was moribund too. Ironically,
Marxist polecon is the only radical economics that still lives. That, at
least, should show its resilience. What you said can be said three times over
for Post-Keynesians, Sraffians, neo-Ricardians and pretty much everyone else
on the sidelines.

[0]
[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08969205155717...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0896920515571760)

~~~
QuesnayJr
The "reason" in "for whatever reason" is that Samuelson is right, and most
people saw that pretty quickly. Samuelson never returned to the question (he
did write a later New Palgrave entry on it) because he had more productive
things to do with his time. Samuelson wrote more than 300 papers on
macroeconomics, trade, finance, money, everything.

Your final paragraph has a basic misunderstanding of the Cambridge capital
controversy that is surprisingly common among the heterodox. There was a
primitive theory of capital to which the CCC applied. But modelling improved,
and this theory was completely superseded by the 70s. But somehow the
heterodox have inflated it into being the core proposition of all of
mainstream economics. The modern theory of capital is completely immune to the
arguments of the CCC.

~~~
claudiawerner
>But somehow the heterodox have inflated it into being the core proposition of
all of mainstream economics.

My argument wasn't that neoclassical economics should be discounted as a
result of CCC, but rather the grounds upon which it took place, where Marxian
(well, labour accounting) economics took just as much of a hit as neoclassical
economics did. My argument was that if your proposition is that the status of
a discipline should be counted based on what transpired between 1960 and 1980,
Marxian economics would only be as poor today as neoclassical economics was.
Neoclassical economics improved its models, and Marxian economics either
attempted to salvage an orthodox interpretation of Marx or to move on to other
research projects (Analytical Marxism, Rational Choice Marxism) that do away
with his "mystical shell".

I suppose when one thinks of trying to salvage Marx as trying to prove
Fermat's Last Theorem (in fact, it is very much like that with the Fundamental
Marxian Theorem), what Kliman et al. are doing given the models and notation
set out by Samuelson and Leontief, or what Veneziani and Yoshihara are doing
given neoclassical methods is a whole lot less objectionable. Neoclassical
economics isn't dead because of Sraffa, and Marxian economics isn't dead
because of the century-old presumption that Marx was an equilibrium theorist,
or the presumption that he was a physicalist.

------
bambataa
What is going on with the recent spate of “()” article titles?

~~~
yen223
That's a HN thing, to indicate the year in which the article was published.
Typically only used for articles published before the current year.

~~~
bambataa
When I posted that the title was literally just “()” without anything else.
I’ve seen it a few times in recent days.

