Sisyphus and his rock
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Titian(1490-1576), Prado Museum

Sisyphus is a figure from out of ancient Greek mythology, the founder and king of the city Ephyra, which was (supposedly) later renamed Corinth. He sinned against the gods, particularly against Zeus, by being avaricious and deceitful. He killed travelers and guests, a violation of the Greek laws of hospitality called xenia, a particular sin against Zeus in his role as the protector of guests.

As a punishment for these and other affronts to the gods, Zeus ordered Thanatos, the personification of death, to chain Sisyphus in Tartarus, a deep abyss even below Hades, a place reserved for the torment and suffering of the most wicked. Unfortunately, Sisyphus tricked Thanatos into showing him how the chains worked by putting them on himself. (How can a god be so gullible?) Death having been bound, no one could die so long as Thanatos remained chained. This particularly enraged the god of war, Ares, who was annoyed that battles had lost their zest because his opponents could not die. The angered Ares freed Thanatos and turned Sisyphus over to him.

The myths record other adventures of Sisyphus, each one being an offense to one god or another. In the end Sisyphus was punished for his trickery by being made to endlessly roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. Just as Sisyphus reached the top, Zeus would enchant the boulder to roll back down, and Sisyphus would have to return to the bottom of the hill to push the huge rock once more up the hill.  This picture of endless damnation has over the ages become a metaphor for pointless and interminable efforts, often described as Sisyphean.

Progressives’ Sisyphean Labors

I was reminded of this myth yesterday while reading a post quoting the Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist George Santayana.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

That is, those who cannot learn from the history of human mistakes are condemned to make those same mistakes over and over again in a never-ending sisyphean labor. Those afflicted with this condition are certifiably insane under the widely known Einstein definition of insanity: Insanity is a condition in which the demented continually repeat the same actions, expecting to get a different result each time.

I have used the theme image for this essay, of Sisyphus eternally rolling his huge rock uphill, once before, in the post The Insuperable Problems of the Democratic Party. In that essay I noted three insurmountable problems facing the Democratic party, each one of which is a sisyphean labor that they can never finish, eternally preventing progressive Democrats from achieving their goals. Considerably shortened from my previous essay, they are:

1. The policies progressives favor can not be supported and sustained by the U.S. economy. The pudding holding the proof of this statement is the ever-burgeoning national debt that now stands at 105% of GDP. As long as the federal budget does not constantly pay off debt, that debt will grow exponentially. If in addition the federal budget is chronically in deficit, the debt will grow super-exponentially. The national government would then be financially doomed along with Democratic Party control over it.
   
   
2. Their view of economic reality obscures from their sight the economic solutions of our problems that would really work. Their view of reality predisposes them to increasingly autocratic solutions, which means they usually want to increase government’s economic power. Yet, the blunderbuss of government Keynesian stimulus programs and other state economic interventions more often than not unbalance innumerable supply-demand relationships, creating either shortages or surpluses each time. Do this a little and the economy can become stagnant. Do it a little more, and the economy can fall into a recession. Do it a lot more, and the economy will dive into the abyss of depression.
   
   
3. Their view of social reality similarly obscures from them the realization that the complexity of reality denies them the capability of solving social problems for all parts of society using the same program for all. Because of their diffuse and various forms, social problems may require very different solutions in different parts of the country, or for that matter for different groups of people in the same locality.

The latter two unconquerable problems arise from the fact that human social systems, particularly economies, are chaotic systems within the meaning of chaotic given by the mathematical theory of chaos. Without recognizing these aspects of Reality and fashioning means that enlist Reality as an ally, progressives will be forced to eternally roll that rock up the hill, over and over again. In the process, unfortunately, they will also drive us into a totalitarian fascist regime by following Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in rolling their damnable rock,

An Opportunity for Neoliberals (AKA Conservatives) to Educate Progressives

Even progressives must grow tired  of rolling a large boulder to the top of a steep hill, only to see Zeus cause it to roll back to the hill’s base again. Herein lies a tremendous opportunity for neoliberals to draw progressives back from the dark side of the force, to save them from their dirigiste tendencies.

It is early yet since the GOP triumphs at the polls last month to expect much introspection from progressives. Nevertheless, a few progressive intellectuals displayed nervous uncertainty about how well their ideology describes reality long before the election. Under the leadership of Lawrence Summers, some Keynesian economists have been trying to find explanations for low economic growth throughout the Western world in the old Keynesian doctrine of secular stagnation. Under the influence of habit and cultural inertia, to be sure, they have been seeking for secular stagnation’s causes in all the wrong places, in market failures rather than in government failures. They would not be Keynesians if they did not.  However, if they could be made to see that government has demonstrably been the greatest source for companies’ reluctance to invest, neoliberals might win some converts. A few high-profile apostates such as Larry Summers might well cause other progressives to begin to question their dirigiste faith.

As a particular example of such an apostate, consider the economist Paul Romer, currently the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank. He is also the son of a former Democratic governor of Colorado, Roy Romer. An article on the Bloomberg website calls Paul Romer The Rebel Economist Who Blew Up Macroeconomics.

Romer’s apostasy began when he started to write a paper in which he intended to celebrate advances in economic understanding of what causes economic growth. But the more he considered the world situation, the more he had second thoughts. As the Bloomberg essay put it,

… Romer quickly found his heart wasn’t in it. The world economy wasn’t growing much anyway; and the math that many colleagues were using to model it seemed unrealistic. He watched a documentary about the Church of Scientology, and was struck by how groupthink can operate.

The essay Romer finally ended up with was entitled The Trouble With Macroeconomics and was a blistering indictment of the Keynesian world view. This essay had an immediate explosive impact on Keynesian economists and those foolish enough to listen to them, as witnessed by the Washington Post article The state of macroeconomics is not good. Consider the abstract to Romer’s paper.

For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backward. The treatment of identification now is no more credible than in the early 1970s but escapes challenge because it is so much more opaque. Macroeconomic theorists dismiss mere facts by feigning an obtuse ignorance about such simple assertions as “tight monetary policy can cause recession.” Their models attribute fluctuations in aggregate variables to imaginary causal forces that are not influenced by the action that any person takes. A parallel with string theory from physics hints at a general failure mode of science that is triggered when respect for highly regarded leaders evolves into a deference to authority that displaces objective fact from its position as the ultimate determinant of scientific truth.

As the writer of the Washington Post article puts it, the paper gets even more brutal from there. For those not conversant with string theory, it is a theory of elementary particles as being different vibrational states of one-dimensional strings. The problem with string theory is that up until now, no one has figured out how to test it experimentally. (That may be about to change to a very small extent.) As a result, string theory has been considered by many, particularly by physicists, as just another religion.  Macroeconomics can ill-afford being considered the economic counterpart of string theory.

Paul Romer’s case shows that as contradictions with reality accumulate, progressives can indeed be forced to re-examine their basic assumptions,

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