... I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. ... (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be ``true'', why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don't aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.3)

But my main concern isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you). Rather, my concern is explicitly political: to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/social-constructivist discourse -- and more generally a penchant for subjectivism -- which is, I believe, inimical to the values and future of the Left.4 Alan Ryan said it well:

It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth ... Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you've had it. ... But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess.5

Likewise, Eric Hobsbawm has decried

the rise of ``postmodernist'' intellectual fashions in Western universities, particularly in departments of literature and anthropology, which imply that all ``facts'' claiming objective existence are simply intellectual constructions. In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction. But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental.6

(Hobsbawm goes on to show how rigorous historical work can refute the fictions propounded by reactionary nationalists in India, Israel, the Balkans and elsewhere.) And finally Stanislav Andreski:

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.7

On the other hand, as our world enthusiastically becomes more risky, we can less afford to cling only to what we "know". Did we knew the scale of this economic crisis? Well, some of us could reckon that financial flows and games would be unsustainable; we still not surprised enough with what is going on; and we even can add hard prompt energetic and ecological strains to global predicaments soon. But we hardly knew anything empirically, and our understanding was still a broad (even if reasonable) extrapolation. To deal with this uncertainty, we need to theorize more rather than less, and be ready to act on not-so-tight knowledge.

Then there is a question of confidence: the style of rational argumentation neglects a non-verbal show of confidence (or even suppresses it), why opponents lie with straight face. All the distrust of progressive type of governing developed from the politics of confidence show. It all comes down to communication, after all. If hyperbolic or ludicrous formulations bring a true point better than rational pleas, what can we do better? We should not be afraid to believe (rather than "know for certain"), and to show the belief.

I'm defending this because I think it's just a typical idiotic upper middle class identity politics lifestyle leftist critique, where brand and posturing about "cool" things is seen as much more important than boring unsexy things that actually matter. Like water treatment plants. But hey, they're made of old fashioned things like steel and concrete, and they're smelly too! They've got lots os technology in them and they hence oppress lesbian miniority unemployed sculpters and further male patriarchic thinking, while destroying the third world, and whales!

Grrr.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

Although personally I also like the Pavlovian rats and levers analogy - not that it's necessarily incompatible.

oracles of economics, have you got any ideas?

This view of advertising is demolished by JK Galbraith in The New Industrial State, which I thought you were reading?

Basically Galbraith claims (if I am not mistaken this is a key part of what he calls the "revised sequence") that firms manage consumer demand through a variety of means and that advertising is a key way to both create needs and maintain a level of demand for them.

Obviousle since standard microeconomics takes consumer sovereignty as axiomatic, an analysis of how firms control consumer demand is anywhere between nonsense or anathema, depending on how well a neoclassical economist understands the extent to which Galbraith's view of advertising threatens the foundations of standard microeconomics.

The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.