Brady on Shackle’s Views on Probability

A paper highly critical of Shackle’s theory of probability here:

Brady, Michael Emmett. 2013. “The Economic Consequences of G. L. S. Shackle’s Ignorance of Keynes’s Theory of Probability, Uncertainty, and Decision Making,” SSRN paper, August 13
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2309259

In essence, Brady argues that Shackle did not accept degrees of uncertainty, had a questionable view of inductive reasoning, and rejected the validity of even epistemic probabilities. Shackle’s view is supposedly that “there was only either a state of complete uncertainty or certainty” (Brady 2013: 2).

Perhaps these criticisms of Shackle are valid, but Brady’s claims about Post Keynesianism are problematic. As I have argued here, there are Post Keynesians, even prominent ones, who recognise degrees of uncertainty.

Yet another questionable assertion is that Ramsey thought that “all probabilities are real numbers between 0 and 1” (Brady 2013: 7). But Frank Ramsey seems to have accepted a “two-concept view” of probability: (1) as a concept in logic (and presumably a measure of the subjective belief of a person) and (2) as a concept in the natural sciences, namely, the frequency theory of probability (Gillies 2000: 180–181).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brady, Michael Emmett. 2013. “The Economic Consequences of G. L. S. Shackle’s Ignorance of Keynes’s Theory of Probability, Uncertainty, and Decision Making,” SSRN paper, August 13
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2309259

Gillies, D. A. 2000. Philosophical Theories of Probability. Routledge, London.

Brady on Speculation in Financial Markets

Food for thought from Michael Emmett Brady:

“There is a long 400–500 year history that demonstrates repeatedly, time and time again, that past and current speculation always leads to some kind of future economic problem.

Keynes recognized that financial markets, for the last 400–500 years since the introduction of modern, fractional reserve banking, exhibited the same speculative pattern over and over and over and over again. …. Obama, Bernanke, and Geithner … bailed out the Wall Street speculator crowd again, just as they were bailed out in the early to late 1980’s by Paul Volcker and late 1990’s–early 2000’s by Alan Greenspan. The result is that another bubble in the stock markets is being created. These financial bubbles are ergodic because the same pattern repeats again and again. New types of financial assets and financing are created by the banking industry. In the 1920’s, for example, these new financial assets were balloon payments for houses and margin account financing for stocks. The creation of these new types of assets is called securitization. The next step is debt leveraging. This allows speculators and speculating bankers to maximize their speculative debt financing. The growing bubble is fed by herding and copycat behavior that automatically leads to the creation of a larger and larger bubble. The next stage occurs as the bubble leads to a mania, which leads to a panic, which inevitably leads to a crash, which always leads to an economic downturn, recession, or depression of some sort. These kinds of events are stationary because they keep repeating over and over again. Their ultimate collapse can be predicted with a probability approaching 1. However, they are not normally distributed. One can’t use the normal distribution to describe the time series data in financial markets. The underlying processes are given by the Cauchy distribution.”
Michael Emmett Brady, September 18, 2009
http://www.amazon.com/review/R32PPK2MQ5SQUG

I find the idea that the repeated rise and fall of bubbles per se in capitalism to be ergodic worthy of further investigation.

Of course, one needs a strict definition of ergodicity and stationarity.

But another issue is how one defines “bubble.” It is entirely conceivable that a small or moderate bubble might in fact stabilise, reach plateau and then further bull or bear markets may follow, instead of simply deflating in a significant way.

Of course, if one wants to limit the definition of “bubble” used here to large, debt-fuelled bubbles, which really destabilise asset prices wildly, then the idea that the collapse of such bubbles “can be predicted with a probability approaching 1” is not so unreasonable, even though I assume that such a probability value would be what Keynes called non-numerical (Keynes 1921: 160), and cannot be understood as in the same class as a priori probabilities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Keynes, John Maynard. 1921. A Treatise on Probability. Macmillan, London.