The bottom line is that Iceland didn’t bail them out. Now compare their unemployment of 2% to the US or Canada. Both nations that have a lot of big corporations. I don’t know for sure, but I bet that Iceland has fewer businesses per capita than either US or Canada. I also think Iceland has better social programs, but I’d have to research that further. Something I don’t have time for at the moment.
I did find this, though … “Iceland has the lowest rate of relative childhood poverty in the developed world at 4.7 percent, …” “There are only two countries where more than 20 percent of children were found to be living in relative poverty: Romania and the United States.”
Companies are sentient beings now? People don’t run them? Shouldn’t the people responsible for running the companies be held responsible for criminal acts? Would you say that because X mobster was part of an institutional structure, that he had no responsibility for his actions? At what point does that end?
Thing is, it’s economists who are taking the lead in the public fight against the naive libertarianism that people have come to associate with the public face of economists. Do you maybe mean #notallpundits?
Senator Warren’s version of Confiscationism is, like all Libscreech, an attempt to present the visceral, emotional acceptance of sympathy based ethics as a rational, logical and reasoned argument.
They had their heydey, for sure, being pets of Cold War strategists and third-world autocrats. Their status as pets in the world of power politics made them the pool to draw from for media pundits, so that’s why #notallpundits fits better, as far as I’m concerned.
Economics is a multipolar world inside a much bigger machine of academia, journalism, money, and power, so I basically can’t get behind the joke that makes economists the male half of the hashjoke. Sorry to be so humorless about it. I see the field of economics as much more important for leftists to study than the right. Disinterest in economics is something for reactionaries, right or left, and if economics is ignored by a politically active person, they become, I think, reactionary by default. If there’s anything the left can hold over the right in this time, it’s a little bit of self-righteous refusal to descend into reactionary stubbornness.
Some see the left’s obsession with real world consequences as our weakness, but given the growing weakness of stubborn narratives to own public debate, I think it is only a weakness during physical, violent civil war. And while the right clamors for violent civil war because they can only debate in terms of blind stubbornness, they should realize that if violent civil war occurs, their opponents can adapt in a moment when faced with the need for self-defense. Until that point, I’m happy to disarm in favor of social science and good-faith debate.
At least, that’s what I tell myself. Sometimes I have bad days.
Well, it’s the left that created the whole field anyway right? Capitalism was named and described by Marx and we’re still talking within that structure today. So, yeah, I get that and totally agree with you there. The chicago school and their ilk are, frankly, all reactions to the primary insights the Marx talked about in the first place. So, I get that and in fact that’s a key piece of my own work (where culture and capitalism meet and mingle with the state). But, I think it’s also true that the punditry have embraced the language of the clasical economists in shaping their arguments and so they are claiming the mantel of the field (and often work in the field). So maybe it’s more about this internalized debate within the academic field itself about what it is - a pure science or a squishier social science or humanity field. A more conservative economist is going to say it’s a pure science and a leftist is going to argue for a more ambiguous terminology and who we get to hear in public is going to depend on the outlet or venue.
Yup. I think econ actually should be at the top of the list of default undergrad degrees for people interested in things like social work, public policy, non-profits, and community organizing. There have always been problems with making any morally-weighted economic movement work in the real world, so it’s natural for any ideological movement to think of “economics” as an enemy, because the opposition to every economic movement’s most fervent dreams tend to run into economic trouble. On the left, the neo-classical freshwaters are the foe (while the slides into inefficient, incompetent, and authoritarian tyranny were the real economic problem), on the right it’s anything that can be tainted with Marx (while like the left, they’ve slid into their own kind of tyrannical ditch).
For me it’s the vast, inefficient, authoritarian, and incompetent corporate world, which problem is too easily diminished by calling the problem “capitalism”. No institution should be allowed to hold back a civilization, regardless of which -ism it appropriates as its reason for being. My -ism doesn’t really have a name, and what holds it back is that it is focused on evolving, against their will, the most wealthy and economically invested institutions yet created.
You lost me a few comments back, but I gotta add in a little off-topic point.
I took a few classes in econ when I was in college getting a degree in network engineering. And the Micro Economics class, to me, felt almost pseudo-scientific. There were numerous assertions, and a few graphs (that were totally backward, the dependent variable always goes on the Y-axis), and a lot of interpretations. But I never saw interpretations get tested. It was like learning the language of naturopathy: Let’s all assume that the explanation for every phenomenon is true, and not look into it any further. There were a lot of claims made that were never tested. If there were experiments to back up the stated reason for a pricipal, they were never stated.
It might have been that it was just my crappy junior college, and bad teaching, but the level of concern for investigating the methods was zero.
What I really hated was the simplistic mechanistic nature of the micro econ class. It was like nobody could possibly conceive of nuanced descriptions of economic systems. All systems had to be treated as either purely Capitalism, purely socialism, or exactly 50/50 of each.
Part of that is the nature of micro- as opposed to macro-. One of the problems with the neo-classical right-wing crusade of the last 50 years is that it tries to do away with that messy real-world-suffering thing that macroeconomics is concerned with and build everything anew on theoretical “microfoundations”. Another aspect of that part is that, to be blunt, econ is thought to be a way to train business leaders and their toadies. So it’s been kind of folded into the business curriculum and the social whirl of douchebags.
The other part is that they’re teaching you the algebra of the discipline. They build things up from simple equations and theoretical conditions, just like with elementary- and middle-school mathematics and high-school physics. It seems simple and mechanistic, but there’s good stuff there, eventually. Good teachers of intro classes spend some time talking about real world scenarios, but like most institutional teaching, economics doesn’t fare well under the weight of low pay and low expectations.
So, yeah. I don’t think mathematics and physics should be taught that way, either. Calculus and differential equations may be too difficult as daily work for middle-schoolers but they should be presented with the ideas as a goal, as something that lies beneath. But people have come to expect abstract, disconnected weirdness from math instructors. In other fields like econ students blame the disconnected dullness on the field. Like you say, they don’t go much into the way these tricks and ideas were developed and how the principles continue to “hold true” (or not). The history of math and physics is being seen more and more by teachers as a delightful thing to add to classes, which is great. Unlike with math and physics, the history of economics remains Politically Dangerous.
Because econ has been appropriated by the douchebag class, it’s easier for instructors to leave out the messy history lessons behind the dry theoretical conditions. In my time as a student, the only time another student stood up and yelled at an econ instructor in a protest about the content of the course was to yell about how cost-benefit analysis was a communist plot. It’s like evolution: there’s a large portion of the populace which was raised on anti-democratic fanatical cultism, and they teach their little podlings that it’s fun to jam the education of everyone else. So just like with biology, politically sensitive origin stories tend to be left out of the course.
