The economic crash we are living with is a repetition of the one Japan had some years ago. The crash and part of the underlying conditions came from trusting the wrong people.
PLEASE don’t send a flood of your economic opinions unless they have to do with OUR subject. Our economic bureaucracy is a great deal like our academic bureaucracy. People put on coats and ties, went to the right lunches, stated the proper opinions, and after a certain number of years they seniored their way up the ladder to Financial Experts.
The same thing happened when Republicans gave the presidential nomination to Bob Dole, “because it was his turn.” Academic advancement has nothing to do with truth, futurology has nothing to do with the actual future, and economic trust has nothing to do with whether the guy with the coat and tie is accomplishing anything. If you choose your experts by anything but results, you get bad results.
Please note that, besides those who actually went to prison, no financial expert will cease to be a highly-paid financial expert because he helped cause a major national catastrophe. The actual result is to increase their exposure and income. In a financial crisis you call in recognized experts.
I predicted the same result on 9-11 when people were screaming about the criminal negligence in national security that caused that problem. I pointed out calmly that no one would-be fired, no one would be demoted, not one of the thousands, no one would even be criticized. As always people thought I was nuts.
Actually what people remember is not that I was right, but that I was nuts. Just as an experts who cause a crisis benefit from it, all people remember about me is that every time anything happens I say something ridiculous.
This is the same general impression the term “expert” is based on. People do not remember I was RIGHT. They only remember I was outrageous.
In our society, there is no benefit in being right unless you run your OWN small business. In that case the results count. But if you give EXPERT opinion, you get paid for fitting in.
One illustration of the reason experts have to be consistently wrong is how one set of experts cannot lose by causing a disaster, but they can lose by contradicting another set of professional experts. ONE of the reasons — please note I keep using that phrase — that the response to a terrorist act by a consistently ethnic set of terrorists is to strip search white grandmothers is that doing anything else would put the terrorists experts in conflict with the civil rights experts.
And LEGAL experts in general. The reason the public goes to planes with their shoes off and their pants dragging the floor is that a terrorist expert can do anything he wants to to the general public. But he cannot allow people to have their own weapons because low self-esteem types with costumes have that monopoly, because shirttail Napoleons with resplendent costumes at the top of the police bureaucracy want to be the only ones who control guns.
All the bureaucracies are happiest when protecting the public is left to experts only, while Americans cower in the corner with British fathers while burglars come in and rob with the family at home.
At the bottom of all this is our inability to be OUTRAGED. Before the Obedient Generation, Americans would not have put up with it.
In a sort of vague, brain-damaged way, Americans are beginning to mumble into their drool that outrage is missing, hence the Tea Party Movement. But this is light years away from the real problem. Nobody is more careful than those who are suddenly in the limelight as Tea Party Spokesmen to avoid saying anything that would lose them their new and only chance at fame. They want to become media EXPERTS on the Tea Party Movement, like respectable conservatives who are EXPERTS on opposing the left.
And so it goes on.
Experts chase their own asses in a circle, and we pay them and praise them for it.
#1 by Simmons on 02/01/2010 - 9:48 am
Word you’re looking for is “responsible.” Using it or its other forms in a conversation usually ends that coversation. But we love our abstract no responsibility BS so we keep on keeping on with our Kabuki theatre jive.
Still trying to find a decent tutorial for xhtml basics, any tips would be helpful.
#2 by backbaygrouch4 on 02/01/2010 - 5:39 pm
Well remembered is the day Mitt Romney lost the presidency. He had been handed a once in a hundred lifetimes opportunity to ascend to the top of the greasy poll. He blew it. He cared only for the opinions of experts who, in turn, cared only for the opinions of fellow experts.
The Supreme Judicial Court issued a decision stating that the Constitution of Massachusetts, written by Bible thumping Puritans, mandated that homosexual marriage be validated. Intellectually it was beyond absurd. Not since the Boston Police struck against the public order [to the great benefit of that old Iroquois warrior Calvin Coolidge] had a sitting state governor been dealt four aces.
The members of the General Court were scurrying about, terrified. Consider their plight. Here they were busily vesting oversized state pensions and the SJC put them in a position where they might have to make a decision that could adversely affect their reelection odds. All Mitt Romney had to do was stride into a joint session and demand the removal of the offending judges. All the legislature wanted was to be told what to do so that the onus would fall on someone else.
What did Mitt do? He consulted with his money boys, proclaimed his disagreement with the conjured up ukase, and intoned, “We must respect the court.” Ninety-nine per cent plus of the people did not respect the court were they to be called on it. However, he was hell bent on being respectable to the point of being contemptible of his own sense of right and wrong.
The people were crying out for a leader and Romney responded to the cautions of the experts. He had the example of Coolidge whispering to him from the walls of his office. Nothing would have roused up national support like a man who called the bluff on a hated judiciary. It was not a trivial opportunity. It involved basics in a clear cut way. But his advisors pointed to the black robes and said defer to those harlequins and not the Constitution, not to common sense. He valued his respectability and lost the White House, not to mention forty million or so out of his own pocket. The biggest fool of my generation.
#3 by Dave on 02/01/2010 - 6:03 pm
backbaygrouch,
I just love that scene in All the Kings Men where the Governor’s aide says, “Isn’t this beneath your dignity as Governor?” The Governor replies, “Ain’t nothing worth doing where you can keep your dignity”.
The aide then says, “Why humiliate yourself at this ungodly hour?” The Governor replies, “Some other time ain’t never now.”
That is exactly what the Romney’s and Obama’s never get.
#4 by warweaver on 02/01/2010 - 10:37 pm
This is what politicians never understand: that popularity is not the same as leadership.
Politicians these days are generally so busy avoiding pissing people off that they never end up actually doing anything.
I despise politicians – when politicians go around referring to themselves as ‘leaders’, we’ve hit a new low.
The new low has arrived. I don’t think state governments should be telling queers that they cannot marry. I dont see a good reason why they should do that, and I dont want government doing ANYTHING unless there is a GOOD REASON for doing so.
That said – there’s no damned protection for homosexuality in any of the constitutional documents I’ve seen or even heard of. They just didn’t feature that sort of detail.
That’s an interesting take on Romney.