09-17-2016, 07:02 AM
(09-16-2016, 12:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: One problem is the elites of both the center Right and center Left bought in early and aggressively to the "Flat World" / "electronic herd" / "plugged in world" bullshit of Thomas L. Friedman and others of that ilk. Such bullshit went along the lines of "we are globalizing, get over it" and "if only you join the electronic herd / retrain yourself, the rising tide will lift your boat too."
It's not bullshit elites bought into. Look at the people who advocated for these policies--especially those involved in them. How have they done for themselves? Seems to me pretty damn well. What people want you to think is that economies grow organically. How they unfold, who becomes winners and losers, are the result of "natural forces". They want you to believe that the post-war era of widely shared growth was a one-time effect of America being the sole remaining industrial nation in the aftermath of WW II. I believed this BS in the nineties. Obama did too, it was in his Audacity book.
In actuality economies do not grow by themselves. They develop on a framework established by the state. There is no such social science known as "economics", the actual science is "political economy" something of which the field's founders were aware, but which was llost over the last century and a quarter.