The rest of the title of what appears, by page three, to be an intriguing book, is "How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy." Pretty heady stuff to be bringing up, and almost has a ring of desperation, if such thing exists in academia, to it.
The most disturbing information thus far, a few pages in on a Amazon preview until they cut me off from reading for free, especially such important information as this, is that Greenspan, the wiz kid who ran our economic 'system' -- de facto purely by the winning streak he found himself attached to and then developed a faulty theory around -- is not working according to his preferred ideology, which was: the 'market,' that loosely associated factors of money changing hands, value assigned to products and services, the devaluing of labor, expertise and skill in the game of factoring of sale prices closeout liquidation game, the banks/hedge funds/big bulls and starving bears interpretation of who should have money and who should have to wait, insurance bilking, interest gouging, the complete and utter denial of the human factor in building an economic infrastructure -- he admits his 'ideology,' which in this case sounds more like 'assumptions' were, quite over-confident, but for no real reason, other than in that insular world, when things are going great, better than ever, the bosses take credit, come up with a consistent polarity of explanations and come up with proclamations like the 'market' is self-stabilizing.
Nothing really is self-stabilizing, except perhaps the earth, not a species (they tend to go extinct, over time), nothing man-made is infallible and cannot be broken, which, in turn, can usually be fixed, repaired, recovered or laid to rest with homage to what that now-lost time has given us to build on, and supposedly, grow wiser.
So how does an economic expert, a wizard of the free market economy, a guru of financial laws and principles, not consider those times when the 'economy' did not stablize itself, and what that lead to, and how we should have learned something from the dustbowl, the Great Depression, the various 'crashes' which imply a lack of stability.
"GREENSPAN: I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak."
"Even Jim Cramer from CNBC's Mad Money admitted defeat. 'The only guy who really called this
right was Karl Marx."
The language the left-brain accounting book-cookers use is suitably subdued. "Corrected." "Risk was incorrectly priced." "Reembedded markets," referring to a stock they thought would fall but is unclear as to whether it was a secret goldmine or just a little better than the trickle they were predicting. That seems to be the biggest problem of the whole fiasco that is wrapped up in a lack of sane and logical application or rational regulations, seems to be locked in this key phrase "how the incentive structures rewarded traders who were able to push financial risk far into the future..." with no fail-safe 'circuit-breaking policies" in place, due to a 'free-market' KGB -- and then, the admission that the policies followed by governments and 'institutions' (that rule or measly little lives, the meek here waiting to inherit something before it doesn't matter anymore) have been proven wrong -- 'and...have nothing...to replace them."
That's the infinitely incomprehensible part, to me, at least. The stupidity with which people in power act in times of plenty (lead by the nose by greed) and the lack of urgency that plagues the genus of power-brokers (politicos, spinners, pundits and lobbyists, who cross many genres) and big-ticket gamblers, 'whales' at a casino, foxes guarding the hen house, a giant den of thieve watching ticker tapes like junkies, addicted to symbols and numbers they failed to interpret with any meaningful thought put into it, apparently.
"Prices" according to Friedrich Hayek's "economic philosophy...are the tendrils through which wants and needs are communicated."
"We need the imagination to reclaim both democracy and the economy -- we need to understand the basic flaw in imagining that the two could be separated. This means telling ourselves different stories to replace the fantasies about the free market." Then he brings up John Lock and his theory on madness as just a mind with 'bad data' corrupting its, well, sanity, which is the ability to function, undetected and unprotected, in our hierarchy of needs, wants, desires and ability to manipulate and control the flow of those things that satiate and sustain us as human beings.
What is the answer? Read Karl Marx right away? Panic fueled by no real action being taken by anyone since the roles are so entrenched in meaningless areas of jurisdiction, locus of control, and spheres of influence.
The action has to come from movement, from the very people who can't play the game with the big boys, coz they lack the material resources to push things along, which is what we've become. The resources to do things, and think of new ideas to propel a better way, those are undervalued, go undiscovered, are left to fester in the minds of troubled geniuses. A great idea with no plan and a plan with no execution is just a post in note in the goals notebook looked at every few years and ripped out pages discarded, for increasingly more practical matters that consume your time the more you live.
People complain about mundane things they have to do, not recognizing how precious some of that is, yet embrace the truly soul-sucking activities that cross our paths just because we need money to live in this world. Democracy is the lady all dressed up for her last old world ball. Still impressive, in theory, but fading in relevance to our lives. It's a man behind the curtain, and we're about to unveil it. Not a pretty sight, especially since our leaders, like Atlas, just shrug when the going gets tough.
The most disturbing information thus far, a few pages in on a Amazon preview until they cut me off from reading for free, especially such important information as this, is that Greenspan, the wiz kid who ran our economic 'system' -- de facto purely by the winning streak he found himself attached to and then developed a faulty theory around -- is not working according to his preferred ideology, which was: the 'market,' that loosely associated factors of money changing hands, value assigned to products and services, the devaluing of labor, expertise and skill in the game of factoring of sale prices closeout liquidation game, the banks/hedge funds/big bulls and starving bears interpretation of who should have money and who should have to wait, insurance bilking, interest gouging, the complete and utter denial of the human factor in building an economic infrastructure -- he admits his 'ideology,' which in this case sounds more like 'assumptions' were, quite over-confident, but for no real reason, other than in that insular world, when things are going great, better than ever, the bosses take credit, come up with a consistent polarity of explanations and come up with proclamations like the 'market' is self-stabilizing.
Nothing really is self-stabilizing, except perhaps the earth, not a species (they tend to go extinct, over time), nothing man-made is infallible and cannot be broken, which, in turn, can usually be fixed, repaired, recovered or laid to rest with homage to what that now-lost time has given us to build on, and supposedly, grow wiser.
So how does an economic expert, a wizard of the free market economy, a guru of financial laws and principles, not consider those times when the 'economy' did not stablize itself, and what that lead to, and how we should have learned something from the dustbowl, the Great Depression, the various 'crashes' which imply a lack of stability.
"GREENSPAN: I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak."
"Even Jim Cramer from CNBC's Mad Money admitted defeat. 'The only guy who really called this
right was Karl Marx."
The language the left-brain accounting book-cookers use is suitably subdued. "Corrected." "Risk was incorrectly priced." "Reembedded markets," referring to a stock they thought would fall but is unclear as to whether it was a secret goldmine or just a little better than the trickle they were predicting. That seems to be the biggest problem of the whole fiasco that is wrapped up in a lack of sane and logical application or rational regulations, seems to be locked in this key phrase "how the incentive structures rewarded traders who were able to push financial risk far into the future..." with no fail-safe 'circuit-breaking policies" in place, due to a 'free-market' KGB -- and then, the admission that the policies followed by governments and 'institutions' (that rule or measly little lives, the meek here waiting to inherit something before it doesn't matter anymore) have been proven wrong -- 'and...have nothing...to replace them."
That's the infinitely incomprehensible part, to me, at least. The stupidity with which people in power act in times of plenty (lead by the nose by greed) and the lack of urgency that plagues the genus of power-brokers (politicos, spinners, pundits and lobbyists, who cross many genres) and big-ticket gamblers, 'whales' at a casino, foxes guarding the hen house, a giant den of thieve watching ticker tapes like junkies, addicted to symbols and numbers they failed to interpret with any meaningful thought put into it, apparently.
"Prices" according to Friedrich Hayek's "economic philosophy...are the tendrils through which wants and needs are communicated."
"We need the imagination to reclaim both democracy and the economy -- we need to understand the basic flaw in imagining that the two could be separated. This means telling ourselves different stories to replace the fantasies about the free market." Then he brings up John Lock and his theory on madness as just a mind with 'bad data' corrupting its, well, sanity, which is the ability to function, undetected and unprotected, in our hierarchy of needs, wants, desires and ability to manipulate and control the flow of those things that satiate and sustain us as human beings.
What is the answer? Read Karl Marx right away? Panic fueled by no real action being taken by anyone since the roles are so entrenched in meaningless areas of jurisdiction, locus of control, and spheres of influence.
The action has to come from movement, from the very people who can't play the game with the big boys, coz they lack the material resources to push things along, which is what we've become. The resources to do things, and think of new ideas to propel a better way, those are undervalued, go undiscovered, are left to fester in the minds of troubled geniuses. A great idea with no plan and a plan with no execution is just a post in note in the goals notebook looked at every few years and ripped out pages discarded, for increasingly more practical matters that consume your time the more you live.
People complain about mundane things they have to do, not recognizing how precious some of that is, yet embrace the truly soul-sucking activities that cross our paths just because we need money to live in this world. Democracy is the lady all dressed up for her last old world ball. Still impressive, in theory, but fading in relevance to our lives. It's a man behind the curtain, and we're about to unveil it. Not a pretty sight, especially since our leaders, like Atlas, just shrug when the going gets tough.
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