[I posted the following as an entry to Facebook six years ago.]

Every now and then, one of my Facebook Friends posts or comments to a posting about someone who has lost his battle with depression.

I recently saw one of those postings, and visited the page of the person who was said to have lost the battle. I saw his some of his final posts, and some of his pictures. And, yeah, he was battling with depression. If I'd know him, I would have told him to stop.

I don't mean that I would have told him to go somewhere and die. I mean that depression is not to be fought. I very much doubt that a depressive personality can ever be anything else; but I am absolutely certain that fighting it is not how to deal with it.

People who try to fight depression either are always fighting it or have lost to it. They compound the depression with a sense that there is something unacceptable about themselves, which can only be overcome by a fight. If they don't have that much fight in themselves, then they don't accept themselves; their lives hang on their belief in their ability to fight depression, to somehow refuse to be depressives.

It looks an awful lot like an unrecognized internalization of some of the things that the depressive was told as a child, by those who were failing that child, and who in many cases had taught and were teaching the perverted life-lessons that had made the child a depressive.

Depression is to be explained, to be understood, and to be put in context. There is no guarantee that life will then be livable, but at least one doesn't have to die upon losing a fight.

The extended quiescence of this 'blog has largely been an artefact of my limiting of various activities as I bore-down on critiquing Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, a work of heterodox political economy by Piero Sraffa. The task has been thoroughly unpleasant, because there is so very much wrong with his work and because he writes in an obscure manner. At the same time, I have been dealing with depression intensified by personal circumstances. Had I allowed myself to step away from the project more than I did, I might never have finished it.

I have not, indeed, finished it; but, on Wednesday morning, I completed a first draft of the article. That draft is now in the hands of some of the other economists whom I know. (Naturally, I have since found things that I want to change, though none of these represent a major issue.) So I think that I will be back to writing more entries here.

One of the economists who has graciously said that he would take a look at the article (not-withstanding that it is monstrous in size!) asked me what motivated my writing of it.

Over many years, I have repeatedly been annoyed by encounters with those who draw upon PoCbMoC. More recently, I have been concerned by increased popular support for administrating economies (which support happens to be egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian); and this book is part of the infrastructure of the experts who defend such administration.

Further, at the time that I finally began actually working on this article, I felt stalled-out in my paper on the axiomata of qualitative probability. (That paper was and is a rat's nest, in which the basic propositions are not currently each perfectly orthogonal to all others.) In a sense, then, this article on Sraffa's book was intended as a break, though I quickly discovered that the task was going to be far more onerous than I had presumed.

Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is the central text of neo-Ricardian economics, and a core text of post-Keynesian economics; it is also an important source for a variant form of Marxism that would abandon the labor theory of value. If I can get my article published in a reputable journal, that publication will eventually be the death of neo-Ricardianism and of the aforementioned variant of Marxism; I don't know enough about post-Keynesianism to know how well they might do without PoCbMoC. Some of my criticisms are relatively minor, but some of them strike at the heart of the work.

(It took rather a long time to develop my article, but reading it offers the impression a nearly continuous rain of blows, some dreadful.)

I say eventually because I wouldn't expect the present admirers to acknowledge how hard they'd been hit, but I'd expect a virtual end to the winning of converts. I don't know that I can find a journal to publish the article because

• it is quite long;
• the mainstream of economists are unfamiliar with PoCbMoC so that
  • editors and reviewers may think it insufficiently significant, and
  • those reviewers most likely to feel sufficiently competent to examine my article are admirers of Sraffa.

I intend never again to pore over a work, even as short as PoCbMoC, when it is discernibly crack-pot. As I told a friend, I have been doing my time on the cross here; let someone else go after other such thinkers. I am capable of original work of significance, and that is how I intend to spend my remaining time qua economist.

This 'blog was begun as I left LiveJournal, appalled by its evolving policies under its second and then third owners. One might reasonably conceptualize this 'blog as a continuation of that which I had at LJ, and some of the entries of this 'blog are recyclings of entries from the earlier 'blog.

None-the-less, this 'blog has become very different from its predecessor. LiveJournal is a social-networking site; part of the reason that it has withered is that its users migrated to more successful social-networking sites. My present 'blog doesn't work that way. I have recurring readers, but there's nothing much like the Friends feed of LJ or of Facebook. There is no centralized connector of interests (as on LJ). I have regular readers, but they are likely to use an RSS aggregator (such as Flipboard) and less likely to comment (especially if they are using such an aggregator). I get far more irregular visitors, who are here by way of Google (or of some other search service), grabbing some information, and not so much as visiting any page here other than their entry pages.

So it doesn't feel appropriate to offer mundanities of the sort that I would relate to a neighbor or to a friend on the telephone. My public entries tend to be things that I imagine strangers would appreciate reading. The restricted entries (basically accessible to friends who followed me as I migrated from LJ) are almost entirely personal; but a reader is required to make a special effort to access them, so they are not about ordinary events; they are usually very personal.

With entries to this 'blog thus typically requiring more thought, there are generally fewer of them, and the 'blog becomes dormant when I cannot — or believe that I should not — give thought to those entries.

The recent relative quiescence of this 'blog has obtained from a confluence of things. I have rival demands of my time or of my energy, have not always been in the best of moods, and have not known quite how I want to formulate some of the entries upon which I have been working.

With respect to the last, one problem has been that I've wanted to present the entries in a certain order (or at least a certain preörder), which has allowed bottle-necks to develop. I think, now, that I'd better loosen-up on some of these considerations of the order of entries.

Yester-day, I got hit with a significant wave of depression. I'd been trying to dodge it, but it got me.

My parents are expecting a visit from me; in fact, they expected me to have driven there by sometime yester-day. But I've not got my ducks in-a-row to travel, and right now I'd rather just curl-up in a ball for a while.

One of the things that really upsets me in such a context is when people throw-away my maybe. I tell them that I plan to do something or hope to do something or some-such, and some people act as if I've said that I will or even shall do it. I generally choose my words, even in extemporaneous conversation, fairly carefully, and I resent people ignoring what I've said with the result of a spuriously implied commitment, even if they don't themselves recognize the implication.