Economics as architecture: Design everything to be idiot proof [archive.org] and you guarantee a world of idiots.
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[archive.org]. "In fact, the whole world may be looked upon as a vast general market made up of diverse special markets where social wealth is bought and sold.  Our task then is to discover the laws to which these purchases and sales tend to conform automatically.   To this end, we shall suppose that the market is perfectly competitive, just as in pure mechanics we suppose to start with, that machines are perfectly frictionless."

DeLong may imagine his ideas are somehow less vulgar than this, but they aren't.

On a similar note: [my comments elsewhere, now archive.org]

responding to David Schmidtz

"...a regime is meritocratic to the extent that people are judged on the merits of their performance."

Performance of what, exactly?

We can not and should not attempt to define value and worth exclusive of any other definition. Any success is provisional. The solution is to argue for meritocracy without allowing one definition to prevail. 

A courtroom, for example, is a place not of justice but of questioning, of argument among various definitions of justice. Foundationalism, whether of the market or any other god is hollow and empty. The only foundation is the architecture of debate.

Technocracy abhors what it sees as a vacuum.

Nuff said.

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I guess I'm now an occasional blogger