Basic Ecconomics(what is Ecconomics?)

[RainbowSingularity]

It seems in this current modern media frenzy of Egos & facists that many claim to know how & what Basic Ecconomics is, how it works and the intrinsic nature of Macro-ecconomics.

it would be good to have a thread that can be posted to other threads that has links and discriptions in it from universitys on how ecconomics works and the different basic types.
how they interact and the basic mechanisms of simplified systems that run the world.

 

[Seattle]

That's because most/many people have taken courses in Economics while in college or grad school.

How does "current modern media frenzy of Egos & facists" fit in here?

 

[iceaura]

Education in academic economics is negatively correlated with common sense.

Here's a hedge fund manager, Andrew Lahde, who bet against the subprime US lending market before the crash of '07 and won big, on the topic of higher education in business and economics:

"The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking... All of this behaviour supporting the aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."

The benefit of keeping a few competent economists around is that they can help you avoid being in thrall to defunct and discredited economic policy of the past. But never take them too seriously.

Remember Alan Greenspan's testimony, in public, to Congress, on the topic of the crash of 2007? This was a man with decades of real world experience in corporate America, decades of consulting on economic aspects of actual functioning corporations in national and international trade, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve for more decades - privy to it all, both the people and the money involved, and widely respected by many smart people everywhere;

but he had the disease, the flaw, the crippling infusion: a PhD in economics. And so there he was, overseer and enabler of the worst economic disaster since 1929, and he said this:

"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief..... I still do not fully understand why it happened - -

Let's be blunt: anyone who depends on moneylenders voluntarily foregoing personal gain from lending money, in protecting the interests of anyone other than themselves, is a fucking idiot.

And you don't come by that level of idiocy naturally - you have to take classes in economics.

 

[Seattle]

 

[RainbowSingularity]

How does "current modern media frenzy of Egos & facists" fit in here?

i was refering to several things.
cult-of-personality type Egocentric based assumed knowledge of people who gain popularity and
leaders or leaderships who have no real ecconomic ability to manage countrys economys(no specific countrys)
while these poor ecconomics & celebrity status are assumed as being the only type of knowledge to those who vote and whom know nothing about ecconomics and think they are voting for someone who can fix or make an ecconomy better.
i am not deriding voters per say, but the nature of the relationship of their perception.
most people have no fundermental cause & effect idea how ecconomys work.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

This is not the conspiracys sub forum.

 

[iceaura]

Anorexics share with misers and mobsters a singular, almost defining, delusion: that the people saying bad things about them are secretly envious, jealous, etc.

They sincerely believe that. Aren't they skinny, like everyone wants to be? Aren't they rich, something everyone wishes they were? Aren't they feared and influential and well dressed, as all admire?

It's a common, established, uncontroversially explanatory category of human psychological disorder.

That's my first guess as to why an education in economics is so often accompanied by a political gullibility and naivety regarding human behavior one would hesitate to insult a seven year old by assuming: it's inculcated, right there in the early chapters of the basic texts, as an aspect of the superior insight available via economic analysis, as a mark of comprehension - economic agents are governed by reason, and if they aren't they lose out to those who are. So at the top one finds reasonable, rational, long-term calculating men, all or most of whom climbed there by way of free - or at least rational - market exchange. And anyone who claims otherwise is envious, jealous, etc.

These people - the Alan Greenspan & Minions of our age, the people who are shocked when moneylenders wreck everything for personal gain - are not reliable advisors. That disproportionately many have long years of education in economics provides advance warning.

 

[Jeeves]

If you are airlifted to the 23rd-storey terrace of an office building and walk through the rooms of that floor, which houses the headquarters of Moonlight Insurance. You can describe what you see there; you can infer the relative status and function of the people you meet; you can discern the nature of their work, what each contributes to the corporation and their pay-scale; you can even speculate on their standard of living.
But you won't understand very much about the structure of the building or the character of its occupants or the quality of their lives.

This is exactly what happens with economists: they describe the values, conditions, mores, and methods of exchange that prevail in their own country or trade-network at the period when they come of age. Those conditions were not the same a hundred years earlier, and may not continue twenty, thirty years into their career. When things change, they're taken by surprise, because all of their principles, all of their convictions, were based on unsupported assumptions.

Very much like the shock of our helicopter passenger when he takes the elevator to the the 14th floor, or the 28th. You could start on all new descriptions of how the Minolta warranty & repair center operates, and the staff of Trans-World Airlines. But you still won't understand the construction of a skyscraper.

To have a real overview of economics, you need to begin with a study of ecology: the economy of life. Every exchange that takes place in the world - financial, interpersonal, social and political - can be reduced to the fundamental principles of nature and understood in ecological terms.
If you start with money relationships, you're describing castles in the air.

 

[pjdude1219]

you post shit like this and than wonder why people think you hate the poor?

 

[pjdude1219]

Let's be blunt: anyone who depends on moneylenders voluntarily foregoing personal gain from lending money, in protecting the interests of anyone other than themselves, is a fucking idiot.

And you don't come by that level of idiocy naturally - you have to take classes in economics.

lets not forget that the financial industry actively looked for people with sociopathic and psychopathic traits to hire from the highest levels on down.

 

[CptBork]

Remember Alan Greenspan's testimony, in public, to Congress, on the topic of the crash of 2007? This was a man with decades of real world experience in corporate America, decades of consulting on economic aspects of actual functioning corporations in national and international trade, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve for more decades - privy to it all, both the people and the money involved, and widely respected by many smart people everywhere;

but he had the disease, the flaw, the crippling infusion: a PhD in economics. And so there he was, overseer and enabler of the worst economic disaster since 1929...

So there were no prominent academic economists out there criticizing Alan Greenspan's policies? What should we go with instead, mercantilism perhaps? If you want some kind of radical system implemented that's never yet proved itself to be equal or better, why condemn those who believe in systems that tend to work more often than not?

 

[Jeeves]

So there were no prominent academic economists out there criticizing Alan Greenspan's policies?

Of course there were. Dozens. Just not "prominent" enough to interrupt the feeding frenzy.
https://qz.com/126875/the-economist...r-alarm-it-would-be-wise-to-listen-this-time/

What should we go with instead

Are you convinced that the choice is between an uncontrolled cycle of debt/default/foreclosure/bankruptcy and

some kind of radical system

?

why condemn those who believe in systems that tend to work more often than not?

Maybe because they're responsible for all the real-time suffering that happens in the 'less often' or 'not' phases.

 

[iceaura]

So there were no prominent academic economists out there criticizing Alan Greenspan's policies? What should we go with instead, mercantilism perhaps?

Do you actually have no idea how strange that sounds?

Somehow, Greenspan's deregulation and tax cut + easy credit and slack enforcement policies -
a blatant, flagrant, disastrous, type specimen example of how to fail at governing an industrial corporate capitalist economy with compound interest banking -
has been entered into some people's history books as market capitalism itself.

And those people - people who are blind to the role of government in setting up market capitalism so that it does not wreck itself and its society - are disproportionately well-educated in academic economics. It's a pattern. We observe that pattern - right here, even.

why condemn those who believe in systems that tend to work more often than not?

Such as the policies put in place by the Roosevelt Administration, and essentially maintained between 1933 and 1983? Why indeed.

 

[CptBork]

Maybe because they're responsible for all the real-time suffering that happens in the 'less often' or 'not' phases.

If you want to blame them for everything that went wrong, you have to credit them for everything that went right as well. That's the point I'm making. Criticizing people for screwing up once in a while doesn't do much for anyone if you can't point to people who've screwed up less. Given that Iceaura is attacking the community of economists at large, not just one or two people at the top, he needs to point out some time in history when people with no such education were doing a better job of managing things somewhere on the planet.

 

[Seattle]

He always, strangely, adds the bit about "compound interest banking"?

 

[iceaura]

If you want to blame them for everything that went wrong, you have to credit them for everything that went right as well.

Nothing went right on their watch. The stuff that went right was set up by others, and fought against by them, and revoked or undermined by them.

Criticizing people for screwing up once in a while doesn't do much for anyone if you can't point to people who've screwed up less.

The government officials and supporting intellectuals of the Roosevelt administration, and those who maintained and governed that setup over the following decades until just after 1980.

Given that Iceaura is attacking the community of economists at large,

I'm more specific than that. I'm attacking a characterized community of influential people - many not actually economists, though many are.

he needs to point out some time in history when people with no such education were doing a better job of managing things somewhere on the planet.

That would be fairly easy - since prosperity has increased over time in many places and comparatively difficult circumstances for fairly long stretches, and these guys are destroying it here and now in the US despite some of the easiest circumstances ever known. (Venice, Italy, in older times, for example. China has had some long runs of increasing prosperity.)

But it's not actually relevant - I am pointing to a characteristic of the current political scene in the US, the people setting policy in the current and recent past (since 1980 or so), not some characteristic of educated people or economic theory in general.

 

[iceaura]

He always, strangely, adds the bit about "compound interest banking"?

Compound interest on loaned money, if allowed at all, needs firm and diligent regulation. Without competent governance, it is very quickly and dramatically destructive. History lesson.

 

[Jeeves]

If you want to blame them for everything that went wrong, you have to credit them for everything that went right as well.

Okay. What went right due to an economist?

he needs to point out some time in history when people with no such education were doing a better job of managing things somewhere on the planet.

He probably can, but I missed that response.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/51/1/25/251849
http://www.discover-peru.org/inca-economy-society/
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/n...ed-Kerala-Is-Leading-India-20170612-0012.html
https://www.encyclopedia.com/histor...ve-american-economies-adaptation-and-security

 

[Jeeves]

The double c in the title hurts my built-in spelling app.

 

[iceaura]

The double c in the title hurts my built-in spelling app.

"I behold the nomics"
Kind of makes sense.