Dave keeps pointing out that race determines economics. True. I will discuss that more later. But right-on it is a good point of departure to show another example of the fact that, like futurology and history, economics is an institution, and just as futurology has nothing to do with the future and history has only a nodding acquaintance with what actually happened, economics is not produced to reflect reality.
When I was a professional economist I saw studies that studied correlations between economic growth and everything. You would think that economic growth and investment would be perfectly linked. Like all correlations this one was not perfect either.
Why was this information produced? Why did economists try to find these correlations? Obviously for prescriptive purposes. If investment corresponds to growth, one could begin to say that in order to get growth one only needed to increase investment.
What was not discussed was the single clear correlation: wealth and skin color. I brought this up in the big weekly seminar at the University of Virginia to which all professors and grad students went once a week. Even in 1964 they refused to discuss it, not because it wasn’t obvious, but because it WAS obvious.
Back then, economic GROWTH was everything in economics. Liberals insisted that the “centrally planned economies, the Reds, were growing at astronomic rates. This demonstrated that socialism was the way the third world, the “developing economies,” would catch up with the West.
A quarter of a century later, both the developing economies and the centrally planned economies were at least as far behind as they had been in 1964.
In fact, the only well-known writer who predicted the economics of the coming forty years was George Orwell in his novel 1984, which came out in the late 1940s. In the society he described, everyone was destitute, but every year it was announced that the Plan had been fulfilled, growth was phenomenal, and “spontaneous” demonstrations broke out in the streets.
And every year even the Party members got poorer and poorer, the “proles” got even more abject. That was what happened in the “centrally planned” economies for the forty years after the book was published. On paper Outer Mongolia and Bulgaria double their output every few years..
If you don’t have a market economy your economy can double monthly on paper. Why would that information be produced in such countries? Because if you DIDN’T overfill every Plan on paper, you lost your job.
Or more.
In the “developing” world, anybody handling paper who didn’t show huge growth could simply disappear. So the necessary information was produced.
You cannot understand economics by looking for The Truth or some kind of Conspiracy or some kind of Bias. People look at economics as reality with a bias. In fact, the “bias” you are talking about is the real reason the field is studied in the first place.
If they had started with that, forty years of complete nonsense data produced by two-thirds of the world would have been seen for what it was and we could have had an “economics” that was useful.
#1 by backbaygrouch4 on 02/19/2010 - 10:00 am
Oh, call this wild analysis, The Importance of the Unasked Question. The brainiacs in Congress regularly grill the economic leadership of the nation. Consider the present financial plundering occurring under the rubric of crisis. Have any of the elected pols posed the following, “Mr. Greenspan [Bernanke, Summers, Geithner, etc.] why has not the margin rate been raised in 15 years? It is one the most important tools in combating unnatural exuberance.” Or, “Mr. Gold Sacks [AIG, Citicorp, etc.]?”, what degree of leveraged capital did your firm reach through the issuance of derivatives which functioned as the private minting of money”? Any economist knows that bubbles are the product of a concentrated application of money to a limited economic function/area. When oil prices spiked, transferring billions to the Arabs, Iranians, Venezuelans, etc as a byproduct, oil executives were brought to task even though there were no anomalies in either production or usage. No one asked, “Mr. Gold Sacks speculator why was there a enormous increase in the issuance of oil futures in a stable market situation”? Why were the questions not asked? Because they might have put a face on the disaster impoverishing White Americans today. It might have led to an answer and a mostly Jewish cabal. No, we can’t go there, it would be obvious, it would be racist.
#2 by Dave on 02/19/2010 - 11:03 am
The economy will recover when Johnny recovers his ability to think.
Congress, the FED, the CFTC, the SEC, the commercial and investment banks and their regulators have nothing to do with it.
And the elaborate tomes and intellectualisms and the whole fetid semantics of what is called “economics” will go the way of the oceans of nonsense sitting in the dusty “stacks” of university libraries.
#3 by Simmons on 02/19/2010 - 11:26 am
I hate economics, wordist claptrap. I read “Wealth of Nations” very good, I read “Road to Serfdom” starting the into wordism, I read today’s “economic” dissertations, and they need some BUGs logic.
Voluntary eugenics is the cornerstone of the next “economics” along with good nurture to add value to the product on a fairly long time function. My futurology based on the fact that today’s rabbis are trying to omit the exponential function from debt finance (jews are good but not that good), and that the economics of family will be making a comeback as GS and others walk further out on the gangplank.
#4 by Simmons on 02/19/2010 - 1:43 pm
Leftwing eugenics has failed, the new superman was born given a ridiculous nick name “Tiger” and he chased low end white strippers as his main vocation, left wing eugenics alles kaput.
The economics that was to usher in the new golden era of eugenics for the gentile cattle (see their end time prophecies)is a joke, you cannot fix stupid even with economist flapdoodle.
#5 by Epiphany on 02/19/2010 - 9:42 pm
I find it most fascinating to think of all the nonsense that is babbled in colleges and Universities, these days, especially in the Philosophy Departments. One really has to wonder if some people are too afraid to admit that they do not understand, or agree, with such Philosophers.
Bob Whitaker, your book, Why Jonnie Cannot think, was most brilliant.