Me: Your history and reasoning is correct as usual, but still fails to penetrate to the conceptual/paradigmatic level of analysis. Changing the concepts/paradigms that enlighten, create and enforce temporal universe realities are the most pungent ones possible for instance geo-centrism to helio-centrism and perfect circles to ellipses.

In the present monetary and economic case if you implemented a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale and the money/credit/demand rebated back to the merchant was a GIFT you’d change/end the present monopoly paradigm concept for the creation and distribution of all new money which is Debt Only to Debt AND Strategic Monetary Gifting. And the consumer gets $100 worth of groceries for $50, a $60k EV for $30k and a $500k house for $250k while the grocer, auto dealership and banker gets their full price with the rebate…but credit/the increase in demand due to Monetary Gifting does not fall. In fact this change in APPLIED CONCEPT implements beneficial price and asset deflation by increasing the money supply. Milton Friedman turns over in his grave…the same as Ptolemy did when Copernicus came along.

Steve Keen referring to Ben Bernanke: He’s certainly lacking in imagination and self-awareness. The word that comes to mind in describing him is “pedestrian”. He’s a True Believer in the Neoclassical paradigm, and can’t comprehend anything outside it. That’s typical of most believers in a paradigm: very few are able to see any flaw in their belief system.

That’s the way I taught economics: explain that the models they use are wrong, but they mark the exams, so you have to know what they believe in order to pass. I told students to treat the exam as if someone had made up crazy rules for Chess; you had to follow the rules even if they were crazy.

Me: Right again. Even the erudite find it hard to drop orthodoxies, fear risking to advocate for a conceptual change that is apparently illogical even though complete conceptual opposition is an historical signature of paradigm changes, and so they lack the imagination to see new paradigms. Pedestrianism has many hiding places even in brilliant minds like for instance cynicism which makes people give up before they even start…even though when the solutions that are also signatures of paradigm changes are evident, they fail to recognize that cynicism or even palliatives are actually unethical “alternatives”. I prefer Gramsci’s insight: “Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.”