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One is working through the series of books, and the critiques, working out whether the strength of the critiques is analytical or rhetorical/political, coming to the conclusion that we are approaching a massive crash unless we engineer a downsizing (Japan) through to massive downsizing (US) of the ecological footprint per person of each of the high income nations.
The other is reacting to the real world situation as portrayed in the book as it occurs. Since, after all, if the book is accurate about the rough shape of possibilities that face us, even people who "know" that the LTG thesis is hogwash also have to cope with the reality that the LTG analysis portrays.
I believe it is more the second kind of knowing, and the seeming commonality of action is the result of the intersection of the channels for actions laid out in existing social regimes, and the playing out of the early stages of the Limits to (Material) Growth scenarios that we are in because all of the dominant channels of the regime that we have been in point toward rejection of the LTG thesis.
That is, does Bernanke manage decline because under the LTG thesis, managing decline is the way to preserve the status of the tribe of mainstream economists? No, he manages decline because the profound learned incompetence required to be a top flight mainstream economist renders it impossible to see the existing opportunities for managing success, and he is choosing from a set of possible actions each of which is a variety of managed decline.
That is the point of contact that I know best: I know with a lot of direct personal experience and repeated observation that mainstream economics is totally blind to being able to understand that the Limits to Growth thesis is correct. Mainstream economics does not have a syntax and grammer in which the Limits to Growth thesis can be coherently stated. And so every time they state the LTG thesis in the language of mainstream economics, they end up with a non-viable simulcra with enough surface similarity to pretend that rejecting the simulcra is rejecting the actual thesis.
Even the best of the mainstream economists, people like Dean Baker, when faced with an 8% Demand Deficit, can look around the landscape of an economy consuming 1/4 of the world's oil production while only producing 1/10 of it, with roughly 1/6 of the world's oil production to run our transport system alone ~ and not find anything for the US Government to spend a big chunk of 8% of US GDP on.
And while I don't have an inside baseball knowledge of the Obama administration, the administration strikes me as a "best and brightest" Harvard and Yale and Stanford type of administration, and that implies an equal degree of trained blindness throughout the administration. The "deer in the headlights" look is the problem that opportunities for success lie outside the field of vision of those presumed in terms of status to be the "best and brightest", so peering ahead shows only different ways of failing as far as the nearsighted navigators can see. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
"Everybody freeze, or the nigger gets it!"
By devouring the 90%, they insure their own demise.
Why is that, prey tell? Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
After all, under normal conditions, helping to understand the dramatic change coming and getting ready for it is not required of social theory ~ under normal conditions, it is far handier to have a strong bias for explaining why those with economic power should be allowed to do whatever they wish to do, by virtue of an economic theory which is blind to economic power.
And the supplanting of economic theory which arrived at inconvenient conclusions and replacing it with economic theory that arrived at more convenient conclusions started long, long before the Limits to Growth was every published, so explaining its continued progress from the 1970's through to today in terms of a reaction to the LTG is less persuasive than explaining it as a continuation of the strategies that accounted for its growing prominence through the 50's and 60's ~ tapping military and business sources of incomes to establish "economic analysis" units in PhD granting institutions which both funded the generation of the next generation of PhD's and also tilted the votes in academic departments in favor of the number crunchers.
A bias in your favor in both generation of new PhD's and hires of new PhD's means that over successive generations you shift the theoretical predisposition of young academics, who do the bulk of the work in peer review, and therefore tilt the degree of difficulty in getting different sorts of work published in the "top" journals.
Now, there was a very deliberate aspect to this, in that both military and business funding for this kind of economic research was a deliberate conservative strategy ~ but it was more a deliberate conservative strategy of the 1950's. By the time that the LTG was published, that channel of development was already entrenched as the status quo.
The fact that as a result economics has reached a cul-de-sac where it has blinded itself to almost all of the most important challenges facing economies in the real world is normal ~ there is no reason to expect development within an academic discipline to be dramatically different from development of "harder" technologies, and in harder technologies, development tends to follow established channels until the opportunities implicit in those channels runs out, and only then are the conditions ripe for more fundamental innovations to take hold and establish new channels with a wealth of unexplored new opportunities. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Is not the current geoeconomic situation tearing down the current syntax and grammar? Align culture with our nature. Ot else!
So I look around and I see Spain with over 4 million unemployed (an official rate of more than 20%) and for the life of me I cannot imagine what I would employ 4 million people to do "if I were King"...
Not that I'm the brightest of mainstream economists, but I wouldn't even know where to start in order to manage a "job guarantee" programme on that scale. So, in what may be my last act of "advising", I'll advise you to cut the jargon. -- My old PhD advisor, to me, 26/2/11
In that case I am left wondering why, precisely, you would want to increase employment rather than simply paying people a basic living stipend?
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
as for paying them a basic living stipend, good move.
or put 4 million spaniards on half time, so all can work. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
Between environmental remediation, sustainable infrastructure provision and direct provision of increased social services, all budgeted on the basis of on-costs after labor cost and so strongly biased to be done in as labor intensive a way as practicable, employing 10% to 15% of the workforce with Job Guarantee jobs is do-able.
Of course, once a substantial fraction of the unemployed are provided with Job Guarantee jobs, there will be an increase in private employment as well, so its not as if the Job Guarantee has to employ the entire 20%. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
I did my little tongue-in-cheek briefing to pose a dilemma- one I think is common today and growing more and more common. The dilemma of someone who has at least some of the levers to hand, and who gets it, but who is faced with the vast inertia of vested interests, denialists, predators, and a congress populated largely by manipulative, self-congratulatory dickheads, after a half-century of filtering out the last of the true old-style public servants. Think Russ Feingold. Don't know who would be comparable in Europe, but I'm sure they're there. Whether you credit Obama with the wit to see the elephant isn't the point.
That dilemma occurs everywhere, at a time of paradigm shift, unless you see the "other" as just fools.
Who gets it? How long ago did the light dawn? What would be (has been) their possible courses of action? Once the number of players who have made the transition grows beyond some critical mass, what happens? What's the range of likely outcomes? Some of this is knowable.
My question was embodied in the title. Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
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