Matthew Rockwell

Archive for the ‘Debunking’ Category

Christian No More: On Leaving Christianity, Debunking Christianity, And Embracing Atheism And Freethinking

October 4th, 2010 | Author: subsweating

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Christian No More: On Leaving Christianity, Debunking Christianity, And Embracing Atheism And Freethinking : This book is for everyone: Atheists will find excellent arguments to help them defend their positions; Agnostics will appreciate the clarification it brings; Christians who are struggling will find this book a great help in breaking free from their shackles as they learn exactly why there’s no possible way Christianity is true and why they don’t have to worry ever again.

The Bible says that the world’s languages began with the Tower of Babel. Today we know better. But how could the Bible contain stories that aren’t true? Author Jeffrey Mark was a devout Christian throughout his life until, during his early 30s, he began studying the Bible more seriously than he ever had. And that’s when he made the disturbing realization that so many stories were simply untrue. For him, this realization started with the Tower of Babel. That in turn launched a series of events that eventually led him to abandon his long-held beliefs. Letting go of his beliefs resulted in pain, anger, and distrust towards everyone around him. But slowly he was able to rebuild his life and come to terms with the realities of the world and ultimately find happiness. If you’ve ever questioned your beliefs, Jeff’s story will inspire you. Travel with him through his journey as he explores the deeper truths behind the Bible while discovering science, logic and reason, and ultimately revealing Christianity for what it really is. This is a book that every Christian must read! Good Logic and Reasoning – R. Kelley – Happy Jack, AZ
I think Mr. Marks accomplished his task of sharing with others the hows and whys of his journey from Christianity. A couple of readers were a bit hung up on Jeffrey Mark’s biases to such a point that they failed to enjoy the journey. Remember it’s “his” journey therefore “his” biases. All writers have biases..subtle or in your face.

Well, Mr. Marks thanks for allowing most readers to appreciate such cogent logic and reasoning. Sadly, reason and logic too often are suppressed in the minds of Christians. It’s only when they use their eyes to see, ears to hear and brains to reason that true enlightenment prevails.

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Industrial Conspiracies

August 18th, 2010 | Author: subsweating

Industrial Conspiracies : The earth is moving, the universe is working, all the laws of creation are working toward justice, toward a better humanity, toward a higher ideal, toward a time when men will be brothers the world over.

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WARS AGAINST NAPOLEON, THE: Debunking the Myth of the Napoleonic Wars

August 5th, 2010 | Author: subsweating

WARS AGAINST NAPOLEON, THE: Debunking the Myth of the Napoleonic Wars : Popular and scholarly history presents a one-dimensional image of Napoleon as an inveterate instigator of war who repeatedly sought large-scale military conquests. General Franceschi and Ben Weider dismantle this false conclusion in The Wars Against Napoleon, a brilliantly written and researched study that turns our understanding of the French emperor on its head.

Avoiding the simplistic cliche’s and rudimentary caricatures many historians use when discussing Napoleon, Franceschi and Weider argue persuasively that the caricature of the megalomaniac conqueror who bled Europe white to satisfy his delirious ambitions and insatiable love for war is groundless. By carefully scrutinizing the facts of the period and scrupulously avoiding the sometimes confusing cause and effect of major historical events, they paint a compelling portrait of a fundamentally pacifist Napoleon, one completely at odds with modern scholarly thought.

This rigorous intellectual presentation is based upon three principal themes. The first explains how an unavoidable belligerent situation existed after the French Revolution of 1789. The new France inherited by Napoleon was faced with the implacable hatred of reactionary European monarchies determined to restore the ancient regime. All-out war was therefore inevitable unless France renounced the modern world to which it had just painfully given birth. The second theme emphasizes Napoleon’s determined efforts (“bordering on an obsession,” argue the authors) to avoid this inevitable conflict. The political strategy of the Consulate and the Empire was based on the intangible principle of preventing or avoiding these wars, not on conquering territory. Finally, the authors examine, conflict by conflict, the evidence that Napoleon never declared war. As he later explained at Saint Helena, it was he who was always attacked-not the other way around. His adversaries pressured and even forced the Emperor to employ his unequalled military genius. After each of his memorable victories Napoleon offered concessions, often extravagant ones, to the defeated enemy for the sole purpose of avoiding another war.

Lavishly illustrated, persuasively argued, and carefully illustrated with original maps and battle diagrams, The Wars Against Napoleon presents a courageous and uniquely accurate historical idea that will surely arouse vigorous debate within the international historical community.

REVIEWS

“Weider and Franceschi’s outstanding new “must read” book shatters the myth of the so-called “Napoleonic Wars” and compels a long-overdue reevaluation of the image of Napoleon as simply a “war loving conqueror.” Jerry D. Morelock, PhD, ARMCHAIR GENERAL Editor in Chief (May 2008 issue)

“… the authors argue strongly, persuasively, and intellectually for what is, essentially, the other side of the usual story. They will surely provoke debate within the historical community wherever there is interest in this period. Recommended for all libraries adding to their Napoleonic collections.”D. Poremba, Library Journal, 01/2008

“supported with maps and diagrams, this courageous book is a very intriguing read.” Skirmish Magazine 04/08

A man of enduring peace and people’s democracy? – Ashtar Command – Stockholm, Sweden
“The War’s Against Napoleon” is a book written by two members of the International Napoleonic Society, General Michel Franceschi (who is apparently a Corsican, just like Napoleon) and Ben Weider. Curiously, the latter author is a former president of the International Federation of Bodybuilders!

Both Franceschi and Weider are great admirers of Napoleon Bonaparte, and their book portrays Napoleon as a friend of peace, a liberator of the oppressed and a great visionary who envisioned something like the European Union already two centuries ago. They even claim that Napoleon was something of a democrat. Those who betrayed Napoleon at various points in his career are in for a good whipping, including Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who later became king of Sweden and Norway.

Naturally, a book of this kind isn’t *entirely* convincing. After all, it could be argued that the Holy Alliance was better at keeping “peace”, that the Swiss were more democratic than the French, or that Napoleon certainly didn’t want Haiti to be liberated. And what about The Grand Pensionary Schimmelpenninck?

Still, I recommend the book. Napoleon is often depicted as some kind of monster, a megalomaniacal conqueror similar to Hitler and Stalin. This is certainly how he was depicted, at least subliminally, in Swedish high schools during my teens. Somehow, we all assumed that the British were the good guys who saved the world from this maniac. And while Bernadotte wasn’t necessarily portrayed as a great hero (he was, after all, something of an autocrat who conquered Norway – and we were all supposed to be good democrats and pacifists), he was nevertheless seen as an exciting and exotic character due to his illustrious past. For a long time, I wondered how on earth people like Hegel, Goethe or Nietzsche could admire this man.

Well, at least we didn’t see him as the Antichrist!

If this is how you have been brought up to see Napoleon Bonaparte, this book will provide some needed antidotes. And no, I don’t agree with everything the authors say. They have obvious problems with the French intervention in Spain, for instance. Nor are they very successful in proving the emperor’s democratic and liberal leanings. Napoleon was hardly a man of “peace” or “democracy”, but he was no Hitler either. The view of Napoleon as some kind of early fascist is ridiculous.

Personally, I think Napoleon wanted to control Western Europe while securing the neutrality of the traditional rulers of Central and Eastern Europe, in order to strike the main blow at Britain. Perfidious Albion, of course, wanted to restore the Bourbons! This view of Napoleon would explain a lot of things, for instance why he didn’t export the French revolution to Prussia, Austria or Russia. Instead, he let the rulers of these nations keep their thrones even after defeating them in military battle. He only insisted on a break with the British. Note also that he didn’t emancipate the Russian serfs, despite ample opportunity. Nor did Napoleon want to conquer Russia itself. The march to Moscow was a punitive expedition against the czar, who had broken the blockade of Britain. Indeed, as long as Russia was a French ally, Napoleon had no objection to its territorial expansion at the expense of pro-British Sweden. While this certainly sounds like great power politics, it’s nothing on the scale of Hitler or the Mikado. It’s also unclear why the British aren’t seen as quite mad – they almost *succeded* in conquering the whole world…

“The Wars Against Napoleon” isn’t the most objective book around, but perhaps it can wake up those used to the British view of history from their dogmatic slumber.

Incidentally, you may also want to check out the website of the International Napoleonic Society. Their book section contain many interesting titles, all hopefully available from Amazon.com.

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The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy

August 4th, 2010 | Author: subsweating

The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy : “A devastating bombardment of managerial ¬thinking and the profession of management consulting. . . . A serious and valuable polemic.”—Wall Street Journal Fresh from Oxford with a degree in philosophy and no particular interest in business, Matthew Stewart might not have seemed a likely candidate to become a consultant. But soon he was telling veteran managers how to run their companies.

In narrating his own ill-fated (and often hilarious) odyssey at a top-tier firm, Stewart turns the consultant’s merciless, penetrating eye on the management industry itself. The Management Myth offers an insightful romp through the entire history of thinking about management, a withering critique of pseudoscience in management theory, and a clear explanation of why the MBA usually amounts to so much BS—leading us through the wilderness of American business thought. Education vs. Training for Managers – Sharon Drury – Indpls, IN
Stewart’s book attacks the consultants’ practice of applying pseudoscientific solutions to management for what he now admits (after ten years as a business consultant that made him rich) were actually moral and political problems in organizations. For the future of management education, Stewart says managers don’t need to be trained in college (though admits accounting, finance, marketing are useful); instead, training on the job is needed in today’s fast changing markets. Instead, managers need to be educated, which includes classical philosophy (his degree from Oxford) to learn why people think and act the way they do. Though he concedes that most managers are good people, and that Mary Parker Follett (Harvard lecturer in the 30s) was correct in that management is all about people (vs. Taylor who reduced management to numbers), he blames efficiency and other management science that promotes competition as contributing to the lack of “commons” in society, which is similar to Greenleaf’s plea for organizations to serve the greater good in society. Stewart’s book is an expansion of his essay in the Atlantic Monthly in June 2006.

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Debunking Economics: the naked emperor of the social sciences

May 24th, 2010 | Author: subsweating

Debunking Economics: the naked emperor of the social sciences Excellent Starting Point for those Who Doubt – Scot Griffin – SF Bay Area, USA
I’ve read this book a couple of times, once when I was starting out trying to understand economics, once a bit later, after I had a fairly good understanding of what was going on.

Prof. Keen’s focus in this book is to establish that microeconomic analysis, which forms the conceptual underpinnings of macroeconomics, breaks down once you try to apply them beyond the individual and to markets as macroeconomics purports to do. He is devastatingly effective in accomplishing this task, at least to anybody like me who has a science or engineering background. Some economists, however, as indicated by some of the more negative reviews, have a hard time accepting what Keen has to say. That’s because economics is much more a religion than a science. One negative review, for example, asserts that Keen does not understand mathematics, which is demonstrably not true, as you will quickly find if you actually read the book and sift through the materials he makes available at his blog [...].

What Keen is attacking is not the math of neoclassical economics but some of the key assumptions upon which the mathematical models of neoclassical economics are built. This fact is not lost on defensive neoclassical economists, who try to change the topic by claiming to attack his math (without real explanation).

If you are looking for Keen to attack neoclassical macroeconomics directly, this book would warrant only 2-3 stars. For a full frontal assault on that topic, see Davidson’s “The Keynes Solution.” That being said, this book is worth reading (and even owning a couple of copies in different media, as I do).
Steve Keen’s book is so refreshing. Many people know that neoclassical, or Chicago School, economics is bunk, but not many know exactly why. Keen understands the mathematics, not just the philosophy of this economics, and shows us where it goes wrong. Basically, it’s “garbage-in, garbage-out”. That is, neo-classical economics is full of assumption that are blatantly false in the real world. Thus its conclusions are baloney except in highly idealized circumstances.

For example the perfectly rational, fully informed consumer doesn’t exist, not even as a rough approximation, except in extremely restricted circumstances. Nor do all consumers act as if they all had the same preferences, as anyone in the business of marketing knows. And similar assumptions are made about investors. Without these kinds of assumptions, the neo-classical theories of perfect competition, efficient markets, free trade, etc., have no basis.

Keen even cites a theorem that the premier goal of neo-classical economics – a competitive market economy in perfect equilibrium – is impossible if the economy is growing. Mathematically, such an equilibrium would be an “unstable stationary point”, so that any real market that accidentally found itself close to perfect competition would quickly move toward a less competitive market. Of course this is exactly what happens, as industry after industry has evolved more profitable markets, manipulated by the monopoly power of a few dominant corporations. The strong guys either drive out, or buy out, the weaker guys, by one means or another.

As the whole world now knows, this kind of faith-based economics can lead to economic disaster. Ironically, as Keen shows, many of the creators of this ideology recognized the absurdity of these assumptions. Yet they so much wanted to believe in the conclusions that they either glossed over these problems or, in the case of Milton Friedman, even tried to make a virtue of them (p 150). In fact Friedman would have flunked even the most elementary course in logic, since his argument amounted to saying that if a conclusion is true then the assumption must have been true.

This kind of ideological economics should have been relegated to a crackpot fringe, but it served very powerful corporate and financial interests. Via Friedman’s Chicago School, it became the basis of economic policy for much of the world after the 1970s. Keen shows that Karl Marx too made bad assumptions, in order to derive his labor theory of value, yet, overall, he had a better grasp on reality than Friedman.

Keen gives a brief overview of several alternative schools of economics (Austrian, Post-Keynesian, Sraffian, Complexity, Evolutionary). Each of these constitutes a trenchant critique of one or more aspects of mainstream economics. I hope that Keen writes another book that gives us more depth on these alternatives and adds ones that he didn’t get to, such as Ecological Economics.

More to the point, a new approach to economics itself is needed. For example, it is obvious that the fundamental goal of this new economics must be to help guide the world toward a sustainable global economy during the 21st century. In particular, economics must be rooted in an understanding of ecology and natural resources, combined with an understanding of the psychological, social, and political behavior of humanity and of current cultural forms. Thus I see economics as the science of “human ecology”.

The mistake has been to try to build an all-encompassing theory using only a few simple concepts and models (labor, capital, consumers, investors, supply and demand curves, utility curves, etc.). This approach captures only a few idealized situations and totally misses the big picture of human ecology, which is a complex, dynamic system, beyond the grasp of simple human intuitions. Instead we need a scientific approach, typically using non-linear dynamic models and computer simulations of different scenarios, to capture key qualitative aspects of actual economic behavior.

A premier example is the Limits to Growth study, recently updated from the 1970s. We need the same kind of effort in modeling the global political economy that is now going into modeling global climate change. The goal is to identify scientifically the key variables and how they interact, including the full range of possible behaviors under different assumptions. For example, the updated Limits to Growth examined 10 “State of the World” scenarios through the year 2100, using the Five variables Resources, Industrial output, Population, Pollution, and Food. This is the new “macro-economics”.

The new “micro-economics” focuses on developing the social and business structures and regulatory regimes that will best guide economies toward sustainability, whether at the local, regional, or global levels. Many people make ad hoc proposals on how to restructure or re-regulate business and finance. What is needed are proposals with a scientific basis – proposals directly based on the new macro-economics.

The mathematical backdrop is that, according to chaos theory, a system “on the edge of chaos” can be controlled very effectively with very little energy if the right controls are applied to the right variables at the right times. This is an aspect of “sensitivity to initial conditions”, and it may be tested by incorporating controls into the computer simulations of the macro-economic models, developing and validating more detailed sub-models as the controls get more specific.

Mainstream economics is perhaps the most moribund academic discipline in the world today. Now a shake up is imminent thanks to Steve Keen and his colleagues, with assistance by a big jolt from the global financial crisis.
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Debunking Economics explains to non-economists why conventional economic theory–known as “Neoclassical Economics”–is fundamentally flawed.

This should come as no surprise, as the world wallows in the deepest financial crisis it has experienced, but it has been hidden from public view to date by the academic profession’s habit of ignoring any substantial criticism.

Given the mess that the world economy is now in, economics can no longer simply ignore its own flaws. But knowing why the theory is wrong takes effort. In this book, I explain the many technical flaws in neoclassical economics in a manner that any intelligent reader can understand.

The book was first published in 2001, and continues to be published in hard copy format today by Zed Books UK. My prediction of the financial crisis has led to increased interest in my approach to economics, and I have decided to produce an eBook version of it to make it more accessible.

For more, visit my website www.debunkingeconomics.com, or my Detwatch blog on the financial crisis www.debtdeflation.com/blogs. For the print version, visit Zed Books at http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=home or Amazon’s site with the URL http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Emperor-Social-Sciences/dp/1856499928/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229315138&sr=8-1.

Debunking Economics: the naked emperor of the social sciences

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