Very nice entry about how our system (growth, growth, growth) is the wrong one. I really think there should be big changes and I wish I'd be better at doing something about it.
Funny, that was Herbert Hoover's plan, "let the banks fail and start over from scratch," it resulted in the Great Depression. Crops failed and people starved. Children went without education because they had to work to help support the family.
An economy is like a huge freight train, once it slows down and stops it's extremely difficult to start moving again.
Actually, this is not quite correct. While Hoover was indeed a strong opponent of governmental influence in business matters, which lead to a further expansion of the beginning depression due, he did not plan to "let the banks fail and start over from scratch". On the contrary, he tried several solutions to support the weaker small banks, but he didn't had the backbone to enforce strict rules (which lead to the failure of the NCC, which was designed to back up banks in trouble, but did this only with profit in mind and so could only fail). The sucessor, the RFC continued to start out weak, mainly being a political instrument, but in the end was the needed supplement and turned into a somewhat effective system by Roosevelt.
The problem is that people generally don't make good decisions when they're in a fearful crisis mode. If you look back at history, economic crises are much more likely to result in people embracing evil (authoritarianism, fascism, scapegoating, etc) than good.
I have to admit that I don't like tha article. But that might already be because of the beginning and the linked article. I am a bit sensitive when it comes to forced numbers of males or females.
Like I posted to your entry, I also don't like stereotypisation, but for me this entry is only in a tiny, tiny fraction about gender. What I like about it is the call to stop this senseless consumption, which will sooner or later kill us all.
Es erschreckt mich immer wieder wie sehr wir immer noch den Kopf in den Sand stecken was die beruehmten "Grenzen des Wachstums" angeht(siehe z.B. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Grenzen_des_Wachstums). Die meisten Diskussionen versuchen die zugrundeliegenden Parameter zu bezweifeln und damit die ganze Sache zu diskreditieren, aber in der Regel aendert sich meist nur der prognostizierten Zeitrahmen, nicht aber die grundlegende Erkenntnis dass irgendwann - und vermutlich ziemlich bald - Schluss ist. Ich habe Mathe studiert und im Rahmen meines Numerik-Praktikums an den Vorhersagemodellen von Meadows und dem Club of Rome herumgeschraubt. Die entpuppten sich als erschreckend robust...und das war fuer mich persoenlich ein Augenoeffner. Ich hoffe die Menschheit kriegt noch rechtzeitig die Kurve.
I understand the sentiment, but I think s/he has almost everything wrong except the details. Things like finding sustainability, and having public funding of health care for everyone, are all good things, but the more general abstractions this article puts them into are vague and confused in some strange ways.
For example, I don't think the writer understands what "growth" means in economic turns, and I think they're jumping to a conclusion that "growth" and "sustainability" are mutually exclusive, or somehow at odds with each other. Economic growth is what happens when value is created, and value is anything that people want. If people want sustainability, and they value it, there's a lot of economic growth to be had in achieving more sustainability.
Our mechanisms of measuring growth are limited and somewhat distorted by the fact that we can track money a lot better than we can track other value exchanges, but that's a separate problem, not addressed in this essay.
Right from the beginning, it started with a non-sequitur: "I've been thinking about this so-called 'stimulus' plan- dumping buckets of good money after seeing previous buckets of good money swiftly vanish into the pockets of those who should not have gotten it in the first place." I've seen a lot of criticism like this, people cynical of the stimulus plan because they're disgusted by what happened with TARP (the legislation the Bush administration came up with several months go, to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks). From my point of view, it's really annoying to read people lumping these two together, because I hated TARP, I thought it was a horrible idea, and I called my members of Congress several times to ask them to vote against it; on the other hand, I think Obama's Keynesian stimulus is in principle a good idea. So when I see people say, basically, "look at that awful stuff we just did, now we're going to do more of it" I just get the impression that they don't know what they're talking about. The two are so different, and based on such different ideas.
Furthermore, that idea that we have too many people, and need to have fewer: It's not going to happen if we don't have economic growth. Because when the economy shrinks, not only do people (on average) become less happy and less secure, we also tend to get a lot more children. Economic contraction would cause more population growth, and if resources get scarce, it would lead to even worse environmental damage.
The commenter who said that economic crises are when people turn to evil, is right on, also. The less secure people feel, the more closed and defensive and aggressive they become, and the less they want to trust and help others. That can become a vicious cycle, if we let the economy contract for too long.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 11:49 am (UTC)An economy is like a huge freight train, once it slows down and stops it's extremely difficult to start moving again.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 12:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 01:57 pm (UTC)Maybe. But if the train is following tracks that lead into a dark and endless pitch, I'd rather stop it and rethink my route.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-13 01:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 01:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-14 01:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-17 02:25 am (UTC)For example, I don't think the writer understands what "growth" means in economic turns, and I think they're jumping to a conclusion that "growth" and "sustainability" are mutually exclusive, or somehow at odds with each other. Economic growth is what happens when value is created, and value is anything that people want. If people want sustainability, and they value it, there's a lot of economic growth to be had in achieving more sustainability.
Our mechanisms of measuring growth are limited and somewhat distorted by the fact that we can track money a lot better than we can track other value exchanges, but that's a separate problem, not addressed in this essay.
Right from the beginning, it started with a non-sequitur: "I've been thinking about this so-called 'stimulus' plan- dumping buckets of good money after seeing previous buckets of good money swiftly vanish into the pockets of those who should not have gotten it in the first place." I've seen a lot of criticism like this, people cynical of the stimulus plan because they're disgusted by what happened with TARP (the legislation the Bush administration came up with several months go, to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks). From my point of view, it's really annoying to read people lumping these two together, because I hated TARP, I thought it was a horrible idea, and I called my members of Congress several times to ask them to vote against it; on the other hand, I think Obama's Keynesian stimulus is in principle a good idea. So when I see people say, basically, "look at that awful stuff we just did, now we're going to do more of it" I just get the impression that they don't know what they're talking about. The two are so different, and based on such different ideas.
Furthermore, that idea that we have too many people, and need to have fewer: It's not going to happen if we don't have economic growth. Because when the economy shrinks, not only do people (on average) become less happy and less secure, we also tend to get a lot more children. Economic contraction would cause more population growth, and if resources get scarce, it would lead to even worse environmental damage.
The commenter who said that economic crises are when people turn to evil, is right on, also. The less secure people feel, the more closed and defensive and aggressive they become, and the less they want to trust and help others. That can become a vicious cycle, if we let the economy contract for too long.