We'd have to jettison the delusion of having a "free market economy" for the parts of the economy that are actually planned. But that is a change in perception, not in reality, since the corporate bullshit makes a mockery of the "free market" anyway.
There's a very appropriate quib about it that Orwell puts in the mouth of Winston Smith in 1984: The best books are the ones that tell you things that you didn't know that you already knew.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Data analysis is about finding unknown knowns: You have all the data, but you don't understand it. That is probably what is so satisfying about it. (See, that was another unknown known: I knew the Orwell quib, I knew the way data analysis works and I knew that both are satisfying. But I had never put them together before...)
(The tricks life plays are that we can learn things, then forget them again. And in modern developed economies, an entire marketing, advertising, and communications industry is there to help us.)
("Ah, so they've invaded Afghanistan because of the Transafghan pipeline, that sounds just like those Big Oil Bush administration people, and Cheney was even CEO of Halliburton!") Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
In the case of me and Galbraith, the notion that there is a strong difference between the regulated private company and the public service got a rather heavy dose of salt.
Of course, there is still a difference, in that the private sector is steeped in a number of cultural myths that are less strongly present in the public sector.
And, of course, there is still outrage when a public official pays himself a million € a year. Which tends to weed out one particular type of narcissistic sociopath.
