Scientists around the world are speaking out against the dangers of developing lethal autonomous weapons. The following open letters showcase their concern:
0 Comments
Reviving the Spirit of Existential Rebellion in a World of Propaganda, Lies, and Self Deception11/9/2017 Edward Curtin Behind the Curtain. “Search for nothing anymore, nothing except truth. Be very still and try to get at the truth. And the first question to ask yourself is: How great a liar am I? – D. H. Lawrence, Search For Truth Like existential freedom, honesty and truth-seeking demand a perpetually renewed commitment. No one ever fully arrives, and all of us are blown off course on the journey. Even when we think we have reached our destination, we are often startled by the enigma of arrival, and must set sail again. We are all in the same boat. The search for truth is a process, an experiment, an essay – a trying without end. Yet surely it is not an exaggeration to say that most people are liars and self-deceivers. Honesty, while touted as a virtue, is practiced far less than it is praised. There is almost nothing that people are less honest about than their attitudes toward honesty. Few think of themselves as dishonest, and even to hint that someone is so is received as a great insult that usually elicits an angry response. So most people follow the advice of the character Jean-Baptiste Clamence from Albert Camus’ The Fall: “promise to tell the truth and then lie as best you can.” In that way you satisfy your own and others’ secret desires for deception and play-acting, and other people will love you for it. However, it is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy. Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda. Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition. Trump is a liar. No, Obama is a liar. And Hillary Clinton. No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it’s CNN or NBC. And so on and so forth in this theatre of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media (MSM) propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter while setting the different audiences against each other. It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters. In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life. Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Sartre and Bad Faith Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous. Being lied to by the MSM is mirrored in people’s personal lives. People lie and want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi): He put it as follows: In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this “lie” to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived. Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government’s and corporate media’s lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering. Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans. For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem. But it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves. We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer. The problem is the will to know. But why, why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain. Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Difficult? No, it’s almost impossible. But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip. As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down. This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia and China, among others, as it expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities. Jacques Ellul on Propaganda The French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population. He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal. The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty. Ellul says, “He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.” But he can’t live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense. He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn’t so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda: The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even readymade opinions….The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework….the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him. Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the “truth.” But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people’s emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda. In today’s mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith. Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith. The Spirit of Existential Rebellion In the wake of World War II and the complete shattering of any illusion about the human capacity for evil, there arose in Western Europe, particularly in France and Germany a “philosophy” called existentialism. More an attitude towards life rather than a formal philosophy, and with its roots going back at least as far as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the 19th century, existentialism emphasized individual freedom, authenticity, personal responsibility, and the need to confront the unimaginable horrors of World War II and the absurd situation in which human beings had created nuclear weapons that could obliterate the planet in a flash, as the United States had used to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How to respond to the birth of global state nuclear terrorism became a task for the existential imagination. The traditional belief that an all-powerful God could bring the world to an end had now been replaced by the idolatry of nuclear madmen who had hubristically violated the limits that the Greeks had long ago warned us not to exceed by making themselves into gods. Having unleashed the Furies, these false gods have created a world in which the droning sound of nuclear intercontinental missiles haunts the secret nightmares of the world. We have been living with this unspeakable and unspoken truth for more than seventy years. Opposition to the nuclear standoff and its accompanying proxy wars has waxed and waned over the years. Dissident minorities and sometimes many millions across the globe have mobilized to oppose not only nuclear weapons but the war makers who have waged continuous wars of aggression throughout the world and have created the national-security warfare state, seemingly intent on world destruction. However, today the sound of silence fills the empty streets, as passivity has overtaken those who oppose the growing nuclear threat and the ongoing U.S.- led wars throughout the world. The spirit of resistance has gone to sleep. The German writer Karl Kraus understood this in the days of Hitler’s rise during the 1930s when he said, “The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such destruction the world can go on.” We need to somehow resurrect the spirit of resistance that will bring together millions of people across the world who oppose the death dealers. I think it is time to recall the power and possibility implicit in the spirit of existential thought. The existential emphasis on individual responsibility and authentic truth telling in the works of various writers, including Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, and Albert Camus (who didn’t consider himself and existentialist but whose work emphasized many of the same themes), inspired large numbers of people in the late’ 50s into the mid-to-late’60s, including the international anti-nuclear movement and young American anti-war activists. Contrary to popular understanding, existentialism is not about navel gazing and hopelessness, but is about responding freely and authentically to the situations people find themselves in, which today, is the end- time that is a time when the fate of the world lies in the hands of nuclear madmen. But by the end of the 1960s this existential spirit of rebellion started to dissipate. Academic gibberish replaced this rebellious spirit with the introduction of ideas, such as post structuralism, leading eventually to postmodernist nonsense that not only refuted the need for personal responsibility, but eliminated the person altogether. By 1999 a leading exponent of postmodern rhetoric, Jean Baudrillard, was dismissing everything the existentialists emphasized. He said, “No one needs this kind of ‘existential garb’ any more. Who cares about freedom, bad faith, and authenticity today?” If such words were just the ranting of an intellectual lost in a fantasy world of abstractions, that would be one thing. But they are a form of propaganda echoed throughout western societies, particularly the United States, through the repeated emphases over the decades that people are not free but are the products of biological brain processes, etc. Deterministic memes have become dominant in cultural mind control. Such postmodern abstractions have denied everything that makes possible the fight against nuclear annihilation and the warfare states’ domination of western Europe and NATO, led by the United States. The self is an illusion. Freedom is an illusion. Responsibility is an illusion. Guilt is an illusion. Everything is an illusion. A kaleidoscopic mad world in which no on exists and nothing really matters. This deterministic and nihilistic message has become the main current in western cultural propaganda since the late 1960s and has reached a crescendo in the present day. It is responsible for the growth of passivity and denial that dominates contemporary public consciousness. It underlies the refusal of so many otherwise intelligent people to engage themselves in the search for truth that would lead to their joining forces with others to create a mass anti-war movement. While many people think of existentialism as only an atheistic approach to existence, this is incorrect. There are atheist and agnostic existentialists, yes, , but existentialism’s core emphases have deep roots in the various religious traditions, such as Judaism and Christianity, etc. That is because freedom, authenticity, truth telling, and social responsibility, while often buried within the institutional structures of these faiths, lie at their core. So if we are going to resurrect the spirit of rebellion necessary to transform today’s world, we need to renew the virtues that the existentialists emphasize. The first step in this process is to ask with D.H.Lawrence the question, “How great a liar am I?” Anti-war activist and author of the indispensable book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, James Douglass, made an intriguing suggestion in another book, Lightening East and West, when he said: The exact opposite of the H bomb’s destructive purpose, but psychic equivalent of its energy, is the Kingdom of Reality which would be the final victory of Truth in history –a force of truth and love powerful enough to fuse billions of individual psyches into a global realization of essential oneness. There is no reason why the same psyche which, when turned outward, was able to create the condition for a self-acting force of over 100 million degrees of heat, thus realizing an inconceivable thermonuclear fusion, cannot someday turn sufficiently inward to create the condition for an equally inconceivable (but nature balancing) fusion in its own psychic or spiritual reality. An end-time can also be a beginning. Gandhi said: ‘When the practice of the law becomes universal, God will reign on the earth as God does in heaven. Earth and heaven are in us. We know the earth, and we are strangers to the heaven within us.’ While Gandhi’s words are couched in religious language, their meaning can resonate with secular-minded people as well. These words speak to the power implicit in the human spirit as a whole. That power begins and builds when people of all persuasions are convinced that they must freely pursue the truth at all costs. As the poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” In these very dark times – these end- times created by nuclear weapons – seeing the truth is dependent on the will to truth, and the will to truth only arises when people believe they are free to alter the circumstances in which they find themselves. This belief in freedom is at the core of all existential thought and is why we need to resurrect it today. Posted by samoasoftball Housing Shortage in Eureka! No jobs for you! Randy Weaver, a North Coast Labor Market Consultant, did a Humboldt Housing Affordability presentation to the Redwood Region Economic Development Commission (RREDC) this week and some of the quick observations were pretty interesting. There has been very little growth in Eureka over the last umpteenth years. The median price for a home in Eureka is $250,000. $317,000 in McKinleyville and ....$459,000 in Redway! Rental Vacancy rates in Eureka are at 3.4%. Fortuna has 9% available. Renters represent 61% of Eureka Housing. 64% of all houses in Eureka were built before 1959! 32% of them were built before 1939! Only 2% of the houses were built between 2000-2009. From 2010 to present there has been less than 1%. Only 23% of residents can afford to buy a house. In 2007 it was only 11%! When businesses are looking to relocate the most important criteria for such moves are: 1. Low Crime Rate: Not good that Eureka has a crime index rate of 1. Only 1% of all cities are as unsafe as Eureka. 2. Healthcare Facilities: Cost of Living index rate for healthcare is 119 compared to 100 for the US. Not good. 3. Education: Only 82% residents of graduated High School. Average student test scores are 24% less than national average. Student to teacher ratio in Eureka is 19:1 compared to 16:1 for the nation. Just about every living index is greatly higher than the national average. And we have one of the highest Homeless per capita rate in the nation also. These are what businesses take into account when they decide to grow into a community. What is the solution? Just the messenger here. 3/30/2017 <http://samoasoftball.blogspot.com/2017/03/housing-shortage-in-eureka-no-jobs-for.html> -Valentin Schmid
From wrong forecasts by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Wall Street, to wrong policies by the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government, wrong economic theory impacts everyone. Last year was a particularly bad one for the profession, as none of the mainstream forecasts on major events, from Brexit to Donald Trump’s election, and the effects of those events on markets and the economy, were correct. In fact, mainstream economics has been consistently getting it wrong since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. So why hasn’t the mainstream realized something is profoundly wrong with the models and theories it uses? Why do they marginalize alternative theories and theorists? Why are the people who have been getting it wrong still in charge? If you worked for companies like General Motors or IBM and are now out of a job because they have outsourced it to Mexico, you can blame wrong economic theory for this. They have models that extrapolate what is going on, they have to agree with one another, and they are covering their backs within their profession. That’s why they are always wrong. — Woody Brock, president, Strategic Economic Decisions The free-trade model advocated by elites from the IMF to Harvard has promised jobs for the developing world, while keeping the ones in the developed world. It hasn’t worked because the theory behind free trade, developed by 19th-century economist David Ricardo, is 200 years old and obsolete. “Ricardo’s theory fails in a world of mobile factors [of capital and labor]. It only works if everyone plays by the rules. Free trade … does not produce optimal outcomes because it is never free. It is a house built on the quicksand of assumptions that don’t reign in the real world and never will,” wrote analyst James Rickards in his book “The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis.” The elite economists at the IMF and the Fed have missed their growth forecasts for almost every major economy leading up to and following the financial crisis. Governments and companies making their plans based on the optimistic forecasts (these models never predict a crisis) are in for a rude awakening when they don’t materialize. “They have models that extrapolate what is going on, they have to agree with one another, and they are covering their backs within their profession. That’s why they are always wrong,” said Woody Brock, president of consulting firm Strategic Economic Decisions. Wall Street risk managers still use the same risk models that led to the subprime crisis. When the house of cards collapsed, it wiped out the savings of millions and plunged the country into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Because these same models are in use, another crisis is just around the corner. “They are treating the financial sector as an outcome of economic action, not as a cause. But we know that the financial sector is a cause if something goes wrong,” said Steve Keen, a professor at London’s Kingston University and author of “Debunking Economics.” After the financial crisis, fiscal stimulus and unprecedented money printing by central banks in the United States, Europe, and Japan promised us a solid recovery that has not materialized. “The elite view is if the right Ph.D. economist is seated as Fed chair, with the dual mandate firmly in mind, and money supply as a lever to move the world, the global economy may be pushed to equilibrium and made to run like a fine Swiss watch,” wrote Rickards. Wrong Models Economists like to pack the world with all its idiosyncrasies into neat little mathematical models that are supposed to predict the future, an undertaking historically reserved for prophets and magicians, at least in the humanities. Actual science like physics gets a pass. However, the models, no matter how sophisticated, follow the old rule of computer science first discovered in the 1950s: “garbage in, garbage out.” The most important model in the toolkit of mainstream neoclassical economists is the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model. It states that supply matches demand, and the economy functions like clockwork until some not-to-be foreseen exogenous shock comes around that disrupts the model. These models have been disproven in theory and in practice, and rely on assumptions that don’t apply in the real world. For example, the model expects the agents (us) to make decisions based on math and economic models and not based on whether we are bored at our jobs and feel like a bit of online shopping. And yet, they are still being used by the world’s central banks as well as institutions like the IMF and world governments to craft monetary and fiscal policy. “The herd [of monetary elites] agrees that markets are efficient, albeit with imperfections. They agree that supply and demand produce local equilibria, and the sum of these equilibria is a general equilibrium. When equilibrium is perturbed, it can be restored through policy,” wrote Rickards, who also notes that equilibrium is “a facade that masks unstable complex dynamics.” The models’ shortcomings are so obvious, however, that the chief economist of the World Bank, Paul Romer, has broken ranks with the economic elite and last year published a scathing critique of macroeconomists in general and the equilibrium models in particular called “The Trouble With Macroeconomics.” His verdict: “Macro models now use incredible identifying assumptions to reach bewildering conclusions. … Macroeconomists got comfortable with the idea that fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates are caused by imaginary shocks, instead of actions that people take. … Once macroeconomists concluded that it was reasonable to invoke imaginary forcing variables, they added more.” It is the DSGE model that led former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to declare the following about the equilibrium interest rate on his blog for the Brookings Institution in 2015: “If the Fed wants to see full employment of capital and labor resources (which, of course, it does), then its task amounts to using its influence over market interest rates to push those rates toward levels consistent with the equilibrium rate, or—more realistically—its best estimate of the equilibrium rate, which is not directly observable.” So the rate the Fed wants to achieve, one that will supposedly bring about the best use of capital and labor (remember the assumption behind equilibrium here), is not directly observable, so the Fed is left guessing. Small wonder it can never predict a crisis and instead often causes one by leaving rates too low for too long and then later raising them at the most inopportune moment. And no wonder the economy still hasn’t taken off, despite zero interest rates for close to a decade, which brings us to another problem. Crises Don’t Fit “They ignore money and credit, probably the most important determinants of where the economy goes,” said Keen. For instance, Bernanke told Congress in March 2007 that “the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained.” It wasn’t. “They only extrapolate the current trends and that only matters if there is no change in the things they are ignoring. So if there is a change in money, credit, and debt, then they are going to be completely wrong, and that’s what happened in 2008,” said Keen. “What matters in the model is not money but the imaginary forces,” wrote Romer. Crises emerge because regulators don’t comprehend the statistical properties of the systems they regulate. — James Rickards, author, 'The Road to Ruin' Mainstream economists usually use the excuse that nobody saw a particular event coming, like the crisis in 2008, which is only true if the somebodies are mainstream economists and everybody else is a nobody. Keen did predict the crisis of 2008 using post-Keynesian models, which include private debt, and so did hedge fund legend Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, who also built models around private debt. There are scores of others who did the same and profited from it. None of them follow the mainstream. Rickards predicted the 2008 crisis using complexity theory borrowed from physics, which has nothing to do with DSGE models and the so-called “normal” occurrence or distribution of risk. “Crises emerge because regulators don’t comprehend the statistical properties of the systems they regulate,” Rickards wrote. wrong-economists-bull “There are models that do a good job identifying bubbles using complexity theory, causal inference, and behavioral economics, although the exact timing of collapse remains difficult to predict,” he wrote. It is mostly physicists who use complexity theory, but it can also be applied to capital markets. Unlike equilibrium models, complex systems allow for extreme events to occur rather frequently. They also have dynamic feedback loops so agents can learn from their past actions and from other agents. Brock also believes economists at the Fed and elsewhere rely too much on historical data to make predictions for the future. “They are trained that history is everything,” Brock said. Enough data will identify economic relationships. “That’s fine until structural changes occur and the previous relationship breaks down,” he said. Structural changes, like too much debt in the system, brought the economy to its knees in 2008 and now prevent us from realizing our maximum growth potential. “Structural changes mean historical samples won’t be good. You must use your subjective judgment so you know what is different,” he added. In a nutshell, “capital markets were condemned to a succession of calamities while academics-turned-central bankers waited decades for more data to convince them of their failures,” wrote Rickards. With the exception of Romer, however, mainstream economists aren’t convinced that there is something at all wrong with their way of doing things. Living in the Ivory Tower There are several reasons why economists cannot or do not want to see the evident flaws in their models and their way of thinking. According to Brock, it’s the fact that subjective analysis of structural changes would expose the economists to being wrong, a risk they cannot live with. “Most people who go for those jobs are risk-averse in the extreme. Subjective probabilities can’t be proven true. They do things where they can always back up positions with data. The fact that the data is irrelevant doesn’t matter,” he said. Keen thinks this risk aversion combines with a desire to hold on to power. “If the mainstream economists admit that they are wrong and the post-Keynesians are right, they would have to abandon their posts, resign, and let us take over. That’s the last thing anybody will do,” he said. But given their dismal performance, how can these people stick around for so long? Keen said the problem starts in academia and then seamlessly flows through to the centers of power. In economics, all the non-orthodox people can’t get jobs in the main universities because we don’t push the mainstream paradigm. — Steve Keen, author, 'Debunking Economics' “In economics, all the non-orthodox people can’t get jobs in the main universities because we don’t push the mainstream paradigm,” he said, adding, “We don’t get the exposure, and we are not even part of this debate.” It is this lack of creative debate that has robbed academics and policymakers of better tools to interpret and handle economic problems. Mainstream economists live in their bubble and have given up serving science. They would rather serve their leaders, according to Romer. “Because guidance from authority can align the efforts of many researchers, conformity to the facts is no longer needed as a coordinating device. As a result, if facts disconfirm the officially sanctioned theoretical vision, they are subordinated,” he wrote. “Eventually, evidence stops being relevant. Progress in the field is judged by the purity of its mathematical theories, as determined by the authorities.” Romer also states that while some mainstream economists have been angered by his critique, others by and large agree but do not dare to speak out in public. What Romer describes as a “general failure mode of science” is not new. When Nicolaus Copernicus told his fellow scientists in the 16th century that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around, he was in for some trouble. Both Keen and Romer think of science as a belief system. Humans find it difficult to give up widely held beliefs, even if they are proven wrong. “Humanity shares belief systems. If you have a belief system, you live in a world that promotes that belief system, and you will be critical of opposing belief systems. The initial response of any discipline is to reinforce its current belief system,” said Keen. “It starts by distinguishing ‘research’ fields from ‘belief’ fields. In research fields such as math, science, and technology, the pursuit of truth is the coordinating device. In belief fields such as religion and political action, authorities coordinate the efforts of group members,” wrote Romer. He thinks macroeconomics has morphed into a belief field. What Can Be Done? Economics is called the dismal science, but it is not useless. There are economists and models that can explain complex human behavior, leading to better policy decisions. Mainstream scholars just have to admit their equilibrium-centric view of the economic system is wrong. “In the 20th century, we developed the technology to send people to the moon. It involves non-equilibrium systems. If you assume an equilibrium in that process, you have dead astronauts,” said Keen. He said economists should borrow from these branches of science to model the economy as a non-equilibrium system, and of course include money and debt. Brock said economists have to allow themselves to be wrong from time to time to grasp structural changes. “You have to be trained in game theory and political theory to understand” these changes, he says. Neither provides a neat outcome with 100 percent certainty but rather different probabilities. This is somewhat ironic, as the mainstream now claims its models are always right and yet they are wrong at the crucial times. Rickards thinks capital markets should be analyzed as a complex system with a non-normal distribution of risk. However, all these changes would only be possible if economists started to adhere to scientific methods again. “By rejecting any reliance on central authority, the members of a research field can coordinate their independent efforts only by maintaining an unwavering commitment to the pursuit of truth [via the consensus] that emerges from many independent assessments … assessments that are made by people who … accept their own fallibility, and relish the chance to subvert any claim of authority,” wrote Romer. Safe Bets In the here and now, there are some policies most non-mainstream economists consider safe bets. One of them is the reinstatement of the 1933 Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act. The act separated consumer banking from the securities business and served the country well until its repeal in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. “Glass-Steagall worked for exactly the reason complexity theory suggests. By breaking the banking system into two parts, Glass-Steagall made each part stronger by shrinking systemic scale, diminishing dense connections, and truncating channels through which failure of one institution jeopardizes [everything],” wrote Rickards. In fact, the repeal was a classic case of trying to make reality fit economic models rather than the other way around. “Economists were for the repeal because it fits their model on how the economy should operate,” said Keen. Another safely established danger signal is private debt. Keen says that once private debt passes 150 percent of GDP, a financial crisis is almost inevitable. “There are danger zones you don’t want to enter,” he said. Keen and Rickards both argue for strengthening the role of labor in the economy, including enacting some protectionist trade measures and giving workers more influence at their companies. Brock said infrastructure spending, lower taxes, and deregulation are the right fiscal policy levers. “It’s the incentives that are most important to determine growth,” he said. Neither of the cited economists and analysts believes, however, that humans could ever achieve perfection with modeling or predictions. It’s rather more important to let go of a false sense of pride and learn from past mistakes. “Science and the spirit of the enlightenment are the most important human accomplishments,” wrote Romer. “They matter more than the feelings of any of us.” |
Author
Waking dog collective Archives
February 2018
Categories |