02-24-2021, 08:18 PM
(02-21-2021, 11:17 AM)David Horn Wrote:(02-21-2021, 10:55 AM)Einzige Wrote:(02-21-2021, 08:35 AM)David Horn Wrote:(02-20-2021, 11:14 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(02-20-2021, 09:52 AM)David Horn Wrote: It's noteworthy that economic dogmas have a short shelf life. What we call "the economy" has changed so much in the last 200 years that its hard to see much of the past being relevant today. Keynes was uniquely foresighted by being fully open about the economic model. He focused on the human factors. Marx, on the other hand, was totally immersed in his model, which is so out of date today it's hard to take it seriously anymore.
But Keynes wasn’t right on everything either. Nearly a century ago he predicted that by this time most of us would be working 20 hours per week or less. Later futurists made similar predictions. And yet it seems that so many of us perhaps the majority are working more instead of less and have had to forgo gatherings with friends along with hobbies. One of the big lies of our times IMO. Wonder if we’ll ever see this more leisured society ever happen.
Keynes noted what should happen, but failed to appreciate the power of the ownership class to overwhelm the working class by getting them to believe they were unworthy. After all, Keynes was an economist, not a sociologist. Sadly, the veil remains in place. There are a few folks working to pick that lock. My money is on Heather McGhee -- first among the many.
Lol, Keynes hated the working class.
... and the importance of this is what exactly? It's not all that uncommon for the highly educated intelligencia to relate poorly with people who they don't respect or even understand very well. Keynes favored eugenics too -- yet another reprehensible belief he held. That in no way diminishes the insight he had on how the economy actually works, nor does that insight provide a fig leaf for his many failings.
That's why I chose Heather McGhee as an archetype of the next socio-economic wave. Unlike Keynes, she actually sees the humanity in the downtrodden, and has an innate talent for translating that into progress.
Few people relate well to everyone who deserves to be related to (the exclusion of course if for the evil-doers of the world, and I don't want to relate to Ted Bundy or Pol Pot). We all have some equivalent of a curtain between ourselves and people with whom we have little in common.
Today we are aghast about the idea of eugenics because it is so extremely classist as a concept, yet there was one a huge concern that the very stupid and crazy would never carry their weight. Often institutionalized, they would be public charges with little to redeem them as economic participants. If they did get freedom they would have few honorable means of supporting themselves. The people formulating the rationale and policies behind eugenics were among the best and brightest of the time, so that ensured that the promoters of eugenics often failed to understand the humanity of the stupid and crazy.
We now elect them (OK, that is a horrible joke!)
The peak distribution of IQ (to the extent that that is a valid measure) has a mode and mean at 100. People 40 points lower than that or 40 points above that are comparatively rare. Human evolution favored what we see as average, and not something higher. In general, people with IQ's around 140 live well, and people with IQ's around 60 don't.... but there is no obvious survival value in having an IQ around 140.
People are downtrodden for reasons other than stupidity, vice, and laziness. Can we afford to have downtrodden people (except for those who have done horrible things that make them unsuited to living among us)? I think not.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.