The upshot [of Say's Law]: Depressions are impossible. The very act of producing forecloses the possibility that a society will be unable to afford the fruits of production. The overall standard of living might be high or low, but it depends on how efficiently the society makes use of its resources. Unemployment cannot be a significant factor.
But depressions are real, and Say’s Law is wrong. People don’t spend all of their incomes, and what they save is not automatically converted into other spending by anyone, now or later. In the classical worldview, banking was supposed to ensure that savings aligned with investment through the establishment of interest rates ensuring that the money people wanted to save would be profitably invested in new projects. [Keynes's] A Treatise on Money had tasked central banks with handling this duty. By cutting interest rates, central banks could make it more attractive for firms to borrow the money needed to expand production and discourage people from putting money in the bank, where it would earn a lousy return. Keynes argued that although this might work—he remained to the end of his days an advocate of low interest rates and cheap money—it very well might not.
Carter, Zachary D..The Price of Peace (pp. 261-262). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Implicit here is the idea--or at least my idea--that depressions make no sense. They are creations of the system and not of Nature. In the Great Depression, the U.S. had not lost factories or suffered great crop failures, etc. It was a failure of the human-created system, not of some "law." My thought anyway, but I think Keynes was there way ahead of me.
The North Vietnamese were not hooked on the idea of economic growth determination (which was one of the great hang-ups of Rostow), but were determined to extend their regime’s control to the entire country rather than maintain their industrialization. That was what motivated them, and that was what they considered their unfinished business. They had invested a great deal in it and they would continue to invest in it; no North Vietnamese government could afford to do less.
If you don't understand your adversary's incentives--or more fundamentally, your adversary's values--you don't understand your enemy & you'll surrender your ability to persuade, and even to coerce, your adversary.
Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.
A polarity? A dialectic? Being & Becoming? Many possibilities but a basic insight with any label.
To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
We need more courage.
Modern Medicine and Big Pharma remain caught in a vicious cycle: doctors need Big Pharma because they’re taught to treat rather than cure or prevent; but the reason they don’t know any better is because medical education has been co-opted by Big Pharma itself. And so the cycle repeats.
How to break the cycle?
The [G. K.] Chestertons and [Patrick] Deneens of the world, insisting that liberalism destroys values, tend to overlook the overwhelming liberal assertion of the primary human value of pluralism because to them pluralism is simply not a value.
Another related speculation has even less evidence to support it but has a certain a priori likelihood. Nearly all writing about chance before modern times was in terms of fortune, fate, the goddess Fortuna, and the Wheel of Fortune.
And while numbers and quantification are useful, those metaphors and personifications are still of value. In a sense, we don't know (unknown unknowns) and can't know (known unknowns) some things.
When we survey the biological worlds, we find only two groups of organisms that practice large-scale warfare: human beings and ants.
Ants aren't that bright; what's our excuse?
The French Revolution, Tocqueville wrote, was like Islam in that it ‘flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs’.
In short, the modern ideology of the Revolution (and its successors) are function in some ways very much like a religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment