Current Economic Constellation

[Ragnarök_62]

(12-13-2016, 04:21 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-16-2016, 03:05 PM)Odin Wrote:

(05-16-2016, 12:22 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: the clean up crew.

This is the perfect descriptor of Nomads!

They are as much to blame for the current mess as any other generation; maybe a little more.

Nope,  try rainbows and unicorns which shit golden bricks promises made by:
... NeoLiberalism

Ian Welsh Wrote:I
One should understand why people have lost trust in experts, the media and politicians.
It is not difficult, it is the same reason people lost faith in Soviet Communism: promises were made that turned out to be lies: they were not kept.
Soviet Communism was supposed to lead to a cornucopia and a withering away of the state. Instead it lead to a police state and a huge drought of consumer goods, and often enough, even food.  Communism failed to meet its core promises.
The world order we live in was born in 1979 or 1980, with Thatcher and Reagan. It made a few core promises:

• If the rich have more money, they will create more jobs;
  
• Lower taxes will lead to more prosperity;
  
• Increases in housing and stock market prices will increase prosperity for everyone;
  
• Trade deals and globalization will make everyone better off.
  

These core promises all turned out to be lies. It’s that simple. For most of the population, the last 40-odd years were either an experience of stagnation, or an experience of decline.
Understand clearly, by 79 people had lost faith in the post-WWII order. They were willing to try something new.
That order has now betrayed too many people, and it is falling. It will continue to fall.  We are in the twilight of Neoliberalism (longer article on that later.)
But this is why people are going for “fake news”. This is why people are willing to listen to demagogues. This is why people don’t trust the press (why should they, the press lied to them repeatedly, it is the original fake news). This is why they don’t listen when hundreds of economists say Brexit is bad (why should they, most economists missed the housing bubble.)
Neoliberalism has discredited everyone who bought in to it.  Who didn’t buy into it?  Well, the hard left and what people are now calling the “alt-right”.
So people are turning in those directions, though more to the right.  Because people are ideologically and identity driven, and most are not intellectuals, what they look for are signifiers that someone is not like the people who screwed them, who lied to them for 40 years.
Trump does not talk like those people.  Farrage does not talk like those people. On the left, Corbyn does not talk like those people and to a large extent, neither did Sanders.
And so they are turning to people who don’t parse like the regular type of elite. Many of those people are also selling them a bill of goods (Trump, to a large extent), or are nasty pieces of work (Trump, Alt-Right), but that doesn’t matter to a lot of people: they can’t take the pain any more; the assured long decline and they will take a flyer on anyone who might shake things up.
Lying is bad policy. It may get you what you want in the short run, even the medium run, but it destroys the very basis of your power and legitimacy.  That is what neoliberal politicians, journalists (yes, yes they are neoliberal) and experts have done to themselves and the order they supported. No one with sense trusts them: if you trust them, you have no sense, it is definitional.  I always laugh when some idiot says “but 90% of economists think X is bad”.
FAIL.  They also missed the housing bubble. They lied or were “mistaken” about trade deals. Their opinion means nothing.
All this screaming about fake news is something I will take seriously when the New York Times, who helped sell the Iraq war based on “fake news” is listed as fake.
The current order has very little credibility left, and they are losing more and more.  Look at all the poll failures: somehow the polls almost always get it wrong against insurgents, not for them.
No, neoliberalism is dying, and its defenders are discredited, and both things deserve to be the case.  That does not mean its death-throes will be pleasant (they won’t be) or that what replaces it has to be better, just that it has run its course.
Those who supported it took their rewards in their time: the top tier got filthy stinking rich, the courtiers received good jobs and money, when for their victims, the good jobs and money were going away.  They will have to be satisfied with that, because posterity will be absolutely scathing to them, as it is to the generation leading up to World War I.
Lie repeatedly, fail to keep your promises, and things like Trump and Brexit will happen. It is that simple.

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