History of my Wikipedianism

Keynesian Theory

I made a lot of edits to Keynesian pages in 2017–2018. For many years I had been unable to come to a clear view of whether he was offering the pure milk of reason (as Mark Hayes, for instance, tells you) or a confection of paradoxes (as you will hear from Henry Hazlitt). My earliest reading in economics began with the General Theory and moved on to Samuelson’s textbook, which is a masterclass in sweeping mysteries under the carpet. Do all its readers end up more confused than they began?

I consulted Wikipedia and found that it didn’t help me. I resolved to kill two birds with one stone by studying the matter and making the Wikipedia pages more useful. And it was a struggle, whose initial results were some poorly conceived Wikipedia additions which now make me blush, but whose conclusion I still view with satisfaction.

Once I’d got on top of understanding Keynes, and come to a view of the correctness of his theories, I found that I was walking a tightrope in presenting matters in an ‘unbiased’ way.

I’m certainly not indifferent to intellectual history as a pursuit in its own right. One of the formative influences on me was Sir Leslie Stephen’s ‘English Thought in the Eighteenth Century’. But while you can look on Toland and Dodwell as harmless eccentrics whose views no longer matter, you need to look at Keynes through a different prism. Specifically what I wanted to do for myself, and thought would be most useful for readers, was to probe the most vulnerable points in Keynes’s arguments and in the criticisms addressed at them, hoping to bare their strengths and weaknesses. This is very likely to come across as biased, essay-like etc. Every time enlightenment dawned on me I sought to communicate it through Wikipedia; then I had misgivings, and often took back or modified what I had written.

So an increasing divergence grew up between what I felt able to say on Wikipedia and what I wanted to say. Wikipedia has the answer: communicate your enlightenment by other means. And that is what I did; the reader who wants an unbowdlerised presentation of Keynes’s theory as I see it will find it in my book, available at astonishingly reasonable prices from all good booksellers.

This had a liberating effect, because it meant that I could delete or soften anything which might be contentious without it being completely lost. (Obviously I’d have loved to promote my book through the ‘Further reading’ section, but recognised the inadmissibility of doing so. Only much later did it occur to me that I could mention it here.) It also occasioned a new set of doubts: if I deleted something which someone might or might not criticise, could I be suspected of seeking to withdraw material for the benefit of sales of my book? So I was quite cautious in making changes.

Two parts of my Wikipedia writing which had received particular attention concerned doubtful points in Keynesian interpretation and his theory of prices. The doubtful points are likely to linger in the mind of the reader as nagging doubts, and are swept under the carpet by many studies. I tried to list what people had said about them (often without acknowledging the purpose of their discussion), but there are arguments so bad that they do not survive the light of day. How, in this case, do you provide a factually useful summary without being suspected of bias?

The exposition of Keynes’s theory of prices was a careful (and I believe lucid) reconstruction of the reasoning in two little-read chapters of the General Theory. Most studies (eg. Hansen) really can’t be bothered with them. I thought that a patient exposition would be helpful to readers. Nothing similar is likely to be found in journal papers or textbooks because it doesn’t reach the level of novelty to justify formal publication. Consequently Wikipedia is the ideal medium, were it not for the fear that anything written on the subject will be torpedoed for the sin of attaching meaning to obscure passages without support from the secondary literature.

I found Keynes’s conclusions to be correct, save for a couple of minor errors which I mentioned, but I found his path to them to be tortuous and confused and the results not worth the reader’s time (which was Keynes’s own view – he said he’d delete the chapters if he came to make a second edition).

The torpedo was eventually discharged and my summary removed. Of course I didn’t mind too much, because anyone who wants it can find it in my book. But it does mean that Wikipedia no longer helps the reader who wants to understand Book V of the General Theory. I took this as an opportunity to delete my discussion of the doubtful points in Keynesian interpretation, since they occasioned more fear of criticism than satisfaction over their merits.

And that is where I left the matter. I have no idea what people think of what I wrote. If there’s anything you hate, feel free to delete it. There are a few things I’d prefer to withdraw myself (in order to reduce my vulnerability to criticism), but I’d suspect myself of auto-vandalism if I did so. I monitor the pages but they’re fairly quiet.

Welfare Economics

I returned to sustained Wikipedia editing in 2020. As it happened there were two topics which I felt I should get involved in simultaneously.

Wage Subsidy

For all my life I’ve believed in the value of a Wage subsidy, and believed that it was called ‘Negative income tax’ (which is actually a better name for it than it is for its true denotation). I thought that Wikipedia was confirming my understanding but doing so rather clumsily, and as a conscientious editor I felt I ought to make it clearer.

But a little research showed that I was wrong; NIT was actually another name for UBI, and ‘wage subsidy’ is the correct name for what I believed in. It received a brief mention in the article on Minimum wage and nothing else. But combining the references in the Minimum wage article with my own reading I had enough to justify the notability of a new article on the subject, so I duly created one.

However I felt that I should also try to reduce the scope for other people to get confused by the meaning of NIT, so I’ve been editing the UBI and NIT pages with a view to removing duplication and ambiguity. UBI, in particular, has a large population of active editors, and everyone is reluctant to make contentious changes to active pages for fear of reversions, disagreements, etc.; but that’s why duplication arises in the first place, so there’s a duty to make the attempt.

Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics

Many decades ago I was impressed by Karl Popper’s claim that Pareto had proven that a command economy, if it was efficient, would have to emulate the behaviour captured in the differential equations satisfied by competitive markets. (I quote from memory (‘The Open Society and its Enemies’) – the book is in my attic.)

I had occasionally looked at the article on the Fundamental theorems. It rather perplexed me. The maths came out of thin air and the prose made claims which looked both biased and implausible (especially the statement that income inequality could only be redressed by ‘lump sum’ payments).

I got hold of the Mas-Colell et al. textbook (which I thoroughly dislike) and struggled through it. [Email me for details.]

Anyhow it turns out that the errors and biases I imagined to be present were genuine, but had all been copied faithfully from the Mas-Colell book. I fixed them and added a long section on the history of the fundamental theorems. It won’t get anyone through their finals, but I suspect most normal readers will find it more interesting than the maths (which I won’t touch with a bargepole).

In preparation for this, to develop my own understanding, I largely rewrote the article on the Edgeworth box. I added a lot of new material and a veritable spirograph of diagrams. Everything which raises my mistrust in the fundamental theorems comes up here, and I covered it as best I could with a guilty feeling that I was stirring up heresy in previously innocent lands.

My main stumbling block in the area is the bizarre definition of competitive equilibrium. I took the plunge of questioning the definition on its own page (written by a highly competent editor), and when no reply came, fixed it. I wake up every morning dreading a rocket and a reversion, but they don’t come.