An interesting characterization. Sometimes the Brits gave up power easily--Canada and Australia, for example--and other times they did not. If you're not in favor of collectivizing production, you're for some for of private ownership. Most of us want to collectivize some production--we don't want a lot of private police or armies. The problem is more the private interests participating in the markets. Corporations are a particular problem because management is often motivated solely by maximizing profit. Economists have too often become shills for financial interests. When I hear an economist tout tax cuts as paying for themselves at these relatively low levels if taxation, it makes me more than a little sick. No serious, honest economist would make the claim. We shouldn't expect them to predict the future when what happens can be impacted by politics. They're economists, not politicians.
You have been here long enough to know full well this is the wrong section of the forum for your random babbling opinion based off of a convo from another thread?. You think that warrants its own thread? Your opinion is either arrogant or stupid you pick. The title is clickbait and we open it curious to see a news source and a current event for such a flammable thing.... And we get.. Nada
Your poor thread, just sitting there and not getting any real attention. Heres a free bump for the needy!
Our loony left is about to give up and scatter to different parts of the globe: China, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, etc. But I wouldn't call it a crisis. I'd call it addition by subtraction.
This is the continuation of a thread that was closed because someone violated copyright laws ... I used the first part of the titie someone else used. I forgot to reference the person I was conversing with to get their attention. As a moderator of other forums--CompuServe and now a new forum I won't mention here (it's not reasonable to advertise), I don't see why the offending message isn't deleted and the other participants allowed to continue the discussion. My opinion about economics is informed (I'm an economist) and to the point. You? I don't think you have even a beginner's understanding. Go back to sleep.
@Striped Horse ... see first post in this thread.... www.politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/america-shows-many-signs-of-impending-catastrophic-collapse.536542/
LangleyMan: we've already driven past that signpost and I see no need for turning around only to drive past again. See my post No. 302 HERE. I appreciate you are an economist, and no disrespect intended to you personally (do I divine that you teach economics at school or college? - you seem to have that style in your posts?), but my personal experiences and impressions haven't changed. Having said that I have known 2 or 3 very astute individuals who were also economists. My take away from knowing them is their very clear enunciation of the limitations of economics and the way they engineered their success despite what they argued was this hindrance. But I suppose that is true of really smart people; they tend to use education and professional qualifications as stepping stones and then often discard these as they forge ahead. I have very fond memories of an East Ender who was on the edge of being a charming crook who could outthink his contemporaries in the international bond market. I always admired him for his independence of thought and willingness to follow his own star and ignore the herd mentality that hampered the rest of his competitors.
Aren't all societies showing some signs of impending "collapse" all the time? There is a good book on this: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond Also a YouTube lecture I wonder, if you wrote something called "Success: How Societies Choose to Become Fat and Happy" would it even find a publisher?
I think there was a big reckoning following the 2007/8 crash. It was never supposed to happen. The fact is that economists often do not factor in human nature into their models and calculations, and we humans can fcuk up almost anything given the chance. The thing with the crash imo, was that it was absolutely predictable - not so much when it would happen, but that it would happen. The crazy leveraging ' casino operations (greed if you will) were unsustainable and were clearly destined to meet thine doom sooner or later.
Don't know what you mean by "engineered ... success" despite "the limitations of economics." I agree economics has limitations and would add that I believe many economists promise results that require political decisions to make happen. Most of us do that to some degree or other. I went from running a business into teaching economics and history, got into writing systems software, then finally into politics. My education is in economics, history, and business.
I also think some very obvious things are conveniently overlooked. For example, the sudden crash of Long Term Capital Management in 1998. LTCM were, de facto, leveraging their equity 30x to create massive profits. But when the market turned against their gamble, they crashed due to that huge leveraging. It wasn't rocket science that this would happen. It was an obvious outcome. But everyone who was anyone in Wall Street and around the investment banking world had piled into LTCM because of their mouth-watering returns and Meriwether's reputation. For me a clear case of human greed turning a blind-eye to reality and a precursor of what was to come 10 years later. And speaking of political decisions, we might look at the munificence of Bill Clinton's "Plunge Protection Team" that effectively controlled the downside in the US stock market, in order to avoid sudden plunges - making it a fixed market. One consequence of that, I believe, is that the rating agencies, come the crash of 2007/8, were regularly qualifying bundled paper as triple A, that were, in fact, far worse than junk. The mafia and Yakuza used to be famous for that sort of market manipulation: they called it pump and dump. Wall Street and the leading investment bankers around the planet "made their bones" in that massive collapse. And the joke is that they got bailed out and taxpayers around the world continue to pick up the bill. There rarely has been a clearer case of profits being privatised and losses being socialised. Not least on the economic side of 2007/8 is Paul Krugman's article in the NYT's "How Did Economist's Get It So Wrong?" (HERE). I seem to remember that the same idea of "beauty" to use Krugman's term, played a not insignificant role in the LTCM affair, where it was argued that the firm were proofed against loss (or some such nonsense).
While economists study markets in general terms, they're often in over their heads identifying systemic risk in financial markets. It was outright fraud by the rating agencies. A lot of people should have gone to jail. The only thing that will slow them down is taking their money, and in some cases locking them up. I disagree with Krugman to this extent--financial markets aren't inherently stable because they're deliberately destabilized by people maximizing personal gain. The perps are 110% aware of what they're doing. That markets would be destabilized by fraud and greed is as understandable as the law of demand.
I entirely agree with your first three para's. The financial meltdown will happen again; arguably is happening again (so I am told anyway), and all because the thieving culprits were left off so as to save the banks from going belly up. The US, UK and the EU should've duplicated Iceland and put the main players in prison and sacked the politicians and bureaucrats that turned a blind eye. Likewise the FM's. There has always been remarkable fraud and insider dealing in the financial markets (ditto the capital markets, stock markets, commodity markets --- all of them...). Crookedness and corruption in those markets are quite standard because human nature is the determinant. My take was that Krugman had factored human nature into his analysis. If he hasn't, then he needs to.
Yep. We're incentivizing them to do it again. I think Krugman is well aware that markets are crooked.
America will persist. It is the US empire that shows signs of collapsing. For whatever reason, many Americans cannot make a distinction between their country and the government.
Collapse? We are the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. We've already been through one Civil War, and multiple riots and rebellions, going back from the start when the Whiskey Rebellion occurred. The idea that the republic is going to end is rather laughable. Even if the worst of both the left and right are correct, and there is somehow a modern Civil War, it likely wouldn't end with the creation of two new nations anymore then the last one did. The American people have more arms then the entirety of all the US military, five times more if I remember correctly. But even in that terrible fantasy, what would likely end up happening is one side would in the end conquer the other, and start up again. And as far as our "empire", we can do more today then the British Empire ever could, or any other that has existed in the history of mankind. In other words not only are we the best by any realistic measure, even if there was an internal battle, outside of real doomsday scenarios (nuclear attacks on the mainland for example), there is little chance of the US falling anytime soon.
