Re: not just mortgages



On Sat, 8 Dec 2007, morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Then we had voodoo economics by David Stockman.

Ever read Stockman's book after he left the Reagan administration? He
finally admitted that the Laffer stuff was all largely a con from the
very beginning.


No, but I read a book (its on the www.panix.com/~asd website) by a former financial editor for the WSJ for like two decades who gave an overview of all the economic crap going back a couple of decades (sounded pretty good, too), and the Laffer stuff was great because politicians could "grasp" its "logic" without having to think very much. Like one-liner, nano-thought/sound-bites. The editorial pages of the WSJ almost always have some crap about how the rich are such terrible victims of: i) taxes, ii) govt regulation, iii) etc., and iv) the whole world owes itself to the rich for everything, and v) the rich _are_ different/geniuses/entitled..
...blah, blah, blah.

snore, zzzzz, yawn

My own "take" on all the economics crap is that: i) its all pretty damned complicated, ii) if you want to get a feeling for what is going on you best NOT read the textbooks but read the "*** detector" books written by the "moderates" who have decades of hindsight and really are WILLING to talk about all the screwed up thinking, inconsistencies, predictions that didn't come true (both of our political parties, as far as I'm concerned, are not all that wise in these matters), simple minded ideas for complext problems, etc., and iii) note that there are a lot of economists out there willing to pilory their own profession and people in it, so that is a pretty good idea that not all is well at all.

And, I'm finding that even history books don't tell all (or even most of) the story; you have to read economic history, bank history, labor history, sometimes biographies on some of the people, and you get even
another perspective by reading books dealing with commerce, international relations, and trade history (a while back I read a book on Japanese international relations). Lastly, it might even help to read the
"alternative/minority" --instead of the mainstream--thinking (eg. the
anti-corporation-anti-big-business literature [and some of this is my
favorite stuff/snot, and the economists never talk about the role of
corporate crime in society or estimate the negative contribution of it]),
too.

I remember reading one economics book and it had a short chapter on communism and what it all boiled down to was a set of _arguments_ that basically said: since it can't work, therefore it doesn't work. And, thus with a few "master strokes" of such thinking, made it all evaporate in a manner that excused the author(s) from any kind of serious "lets look and see a few examples" (including that the Incas had 200 years of stable socialism until the conquistadors came, and there were two periods in Chinese ancient history that the Emperor had socialism over some area of China, and there were communities of socialism in the USA going back some 300 years in the USA) at least as far as one could take it, and with all
the caveats that would have to be taken, too.


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