Thinking People Change Their Minds When Presented With Intelligent and Persuasive Evidence That They Should, And Yves Smith Is a Decidedly Intelligent (perhaps Brilliant) Explorer… — Here - in commemoration of the New Year - she presents another captivating, illuminating essay: Over time, I’ve changed my point of view on other issues, although the process has typically been gradual rather than as a result of a particular work producing a large shift. For instance, when I started this blog, like pretty much all finance-trained (indoctrinated?) types, I though running government deficits was a decidedly bad idea. I’ve now come to appreciate that there are almost inherent reasons why the business sector underinvests, which means that governments need to deficit spend on an ongoing basis. And I learned about Modern Monetary Theory and perceive it to be an accurate and important correction to economic and popular mythology on how our monetary system works. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (which I should have read long ago) is proving to be a particularly potent example of this general phenomenon. One economics book listing designated it as one of the four the most important economics books in history. They are probably right... Not only is the social order at risk, but so to is the environment on which we depend. The first time around, the struggle between market forces and social opposition was relatively novel, and some of the pushback came from businesses themselves. Now, we seem to have the veneer of democracy while in fact moving strongly in the direction of an authoritarian business-state combine, an improved version of Mussolini-style corporatism. Even though it seems unlikely that this system will unravel, the dissolution of a much more successful-looking world order was simply minconceivable in the summer of 1914. Highly-integrated cross-border market systems are more fragile than they seem, and we are stressing this one in far more ways than was the case a century ago.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 02:45:11 +0000
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