Grr-owl

Might just have been case there was no position, then Egan moving on/moved on opened it up, but, yeah, I'd reckon we all hope it's cause smart people are making wise decisions....

Is it as simple as asking how long we can go on borrowing until someone wants their money back, and as we can't find another lender prepared to lend, the whole system collapses?

He contacted Goody and asked if he could come onboard. Can't recall if Chocco actually named the position. Just said that he offered to work at MFC and was knocked back. Pretty sure I heard it on SEN, probably with Lyon and Watson.... you might be able to find it if you search long and deep enough.

When Ferguson talks about most things, I can make sense of it, but as you suggest when it comes to economics he can be incoherent. At least, it seems incoherent to me. As is no doubt obvious, I know barely nothing of economics, so it’s only prudent to be prepared to accept that he may be right, but somehow I just can’t quite get how that could be. The pieces of the puzzle don’t quite fit. In his podcast with Sam Harris — #117 if you are interested, from 1:27:28 — they discuss inequality. Sam brings up Scheidel’s The Great Leveler, which argues that “very bad things” such as mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues are what redistribute wealth. Ferguson agrees, citing two world wars, multiple revolutions, hyperinflations and a great depression in the last hundred or so years, for their impact on wealth distribution which “left the world in 1950 in a remarkably egalitarian state.” He says that over time, with relative peace, we’ve reverted to the kinds of distributions of wealth and income comparable with those in the period before the First World War. Then he says, “It never struck me as plausible that there was a fiscal policy that could replicate the effect of two world wars, a revolution, a great depression etc, which was the argument Thomas Piketty made….” My question to you is, is his position in any way legitimate? Ferguson’s view essentially elides, dismisses, Keynes’s influence entirely...

As I heard from the horses mouth, Chocco came asking for a job in 2019 and was knocked back. Good to have him where he clearly wants to be.

I hear it is a plant to smooth the path for Zac Merrett....

...and Petty.

Jacko , Benny Brown, Weid, May, MB, TMac, Tomlinson, Gawny, Rick.... beginning to think we maybe have a good and versatile crop of big men...

"With" pain or "from" pain? Not sure he's got his grammar right. Go back to the parlor, Nut, and make sure, would ya?

I imagine Dusty had quite a bit to deal with.

I figure change will not come without circumstances forcing it, or at least compelling it. And that means a crisis of some sort. I had a big post mapped out, going into the colonial model - UK, USA, China, economic and political models in sympathy, decentralisation and sovereignty (lately an important issue re Aussie wine, 14 points on how to be a good boy, alliances with old enemies, welcome realignment in the US etc) - and it cuts to issues discussed in Reclaiming the State, which I'm reading as you recommended. I've been utterly blown away. There it all is, the entire misstep, laid out in a nutshell, so thanks for that. I’ve also finished The Square and the Tower, which discusses Keynes, and so I’ll lay off further opining about neo-liberalism for the moment until I've digested those. Just on Ferguson… take a look at this (short) video: I find his history books enlightening, but his economic commentary and journalism is often dismissed as rabidly conservative. But, unless I’m mistaken, in this video he brings attention to the fact that Adam Smith and Friedman in fact considered regulation of the market to be essential, which I've heard him discuss a number of times. Ferguson’s beef seems not be regulation itself, but the nature of it. In the Square and the Tower he makes the point that the regulation introduced after the GFC to prevent a reoccurrence amounted to 23,000 pages. He argues that it is counterproductive to expect people to understand and implement all that. I'd be interested in your opinion of Friedman, and Ferguson. Just on R&D, I have some scientists in the family and it is so ridiculously difficult to get funding. We produce the graduates with the skills, but make them beg for opportunity to practice. But it is obvious to anyone who bothered to look into the matter genuinely, that R&D pays off big time. Obviously not AUS, but the Apollo Program paid for itself 14x over.

Goodwin needs a safe place too. He's part of the group. My observation is that the stubbornness and inflexibility we perceive is the outer manifestation of an inability/unwillingness to admit errors, make corrections and move on because he feels unsafe to do so. Time to bend, Simon, and grow....

You mean they are in effect editing him for the downside. That’s interesting.

There's a difference between censorship and warnings re lack of facts. Trump simply lies; that deserves to be flagged.

Why not? Let me know where it fails; it is a work in progress...

I've been dying to write this somewhere, so I think here may as well do: Imagine you're on a packed plane at 35,000 feet. The captain comes on the PA and says, "Well, folks, there's a bomb on the plane. We don't know if it's in the baggage compartments or under someone's seat or maybe in an engine, but we know it's somewhere and we're going to find it." What would the reaction be? After a few minutes of panic, the captain comes back on and says, "Well, we're looking hard for the bomb, and if you'd like to contribute to the bomb-finding fund, get your credits cards out and the stewards will help you donate." Of course, many people give funds to this cause, about which they care passionately. There's one thing about it, however, that isn't right. The Captain is lying. He knows there is no bomb. What kind of man would do that? That's a good analogy for Trump's behavior since the election. He can't drain the swamp; he IS the swamp. That's his con. He can't give his supporters what they think he can, and he knows it. HIs supporters are good people with legitimate grievances. But Trump is taking advantage of them, not helping them. What they need is a govt that supports their greatest need: jobs. Neo-liberals aren't going to do that.... so its time for that to go....

That the media, in general, has moved is not in question, but I think it's mischaracterized to say it has moved to the left. Where it has moved is toward emotion, away from rationality. I don't mean fringe press, but stalwarts like the NY Times and the BBC.

Well, I didn't say it. But he doesn't represent the 70 million who voted for him, either. That's his con. I get why people support him. It can be easily divined in this piece in from the BBC today: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55081852 Take a look at the responses by Republicans toward the bottom of the page. Trump supporters, white working people in the main, are simply sick of having the finger pointed at them and told that they are racists, and that the disparities suffered by people who aren't white are down to their bigotry. And here, even though the evidence is plain, in article about Hispanics voting for Trump, that race really doesn't have much to do with it, even a man as intelligent and accomplished as Barack Obama doesn't get that. So who is going to step forward and bring the sides together? If Biden wants to do that, he'll simply need to find a way to give jobs to people, many of whom will be white. I think it can be done with investment in de-centralised energy production, de-centralised manufacturing (3D printing), distributed work practices and policies that drive up the cost of transportation. But there's the rub: the neo-liberals don't want to invest in anything.

I’d never thought about this quite as clearly as you put it, and it has crystalised some thoughts re Trump for me. No wonder so many of his supporters feel alienated; they really have lost their political power. Course, the greater problem is that Trump is a conman: he can’t deliver what his supporters think he can. But that’s another point. Interesting read. I was struck initially by the timing, 1971. I might as well take the opportunity to briefly lay out my version of recent economic history and see if it chimes with yours: The postwar boom ended in the late sixties. The US went off the gold standard in response, but what followed was the stagnation of the 70’s. Reagan and Thatcher couldn’t accept that the post-war boom had ended, and so deregulated the banks and busted the unions and ushered in the era of debt-as-the-answer-to-every-problem and Hawke, Keating and Jeff and most of the rest of the West and some others followed along with their ‘service-based economies.’ Then, despite it proving itself to be a fatally flawed idea, the western democracies have just kept delaying the inevitable by responding to every debt-induced criss with yet more debt. In other words, we’ve just kept on borrowing from a future that never arrives. Can’t say it hasn’t been good; as Pinker notes, things have never been better. Certainly, if you like your coffee fancy (as I do), there are no shortage of places to get one, and the world is awash with supercars and other luxury goods. Problem is, the debt-driven model isn’t sustainable, and all there’s no way around that fact. But back to Powell. I sense a kind of paranoia there. Were these enemies of capitalism really enemies, or merely educated folk who acknowledged capitalism’s faults? The difference in perception is pivotal. Surely, he identifies some real enemies in Marxists. Brutally ironic that the West is the only place where Marxism still has credence. I think of Marxism loosely as an ideology which defines society in terms of groups pitted against each other in a struggle for domination, which I think is bollocks to begin with, and which history has proven is very dangerous. Turned out that tens of millions in USSR and China turned out to have belonged to the wrong group, and in Kampuchea, it included anyone with soft hands or glasses. In fact, as the Gulag Archipelgo makes plain, anyone could belong to the doomed group. All it took was someone who knew your name have their testicles stood on by a GRU man. Everyone spoke up then. It wasn’t difficult to fill the quotas. One of the few to escape that hell, Nadezdha Mandelstam summed up it up best: “We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.” —Hope Abandoned Chilling. Interesting how Powell’s ideas about the universities have just backfired spectacularly. Rather than neutering opposition to capitalism, privatisation has empowered it by lowering standards that have allowed mediocre intellects to thrive. There were good reasons that universities were for intellectual elites. Now they’re staffed by people who can’t see past race and gender and financial resources to see the human. I, of course, belong to the worst group of all: middle-class, white, educated males. Me and my brethren of the Patriarchy. We’ve been dominant, though apparently the positives of modern western society have come about not because of the efforts of dead white men, but in spite of it. Couldn’t have been very dominant then, I would have thought, but then rationality has been one of the major casualties of the identity wars. My reading of history lays the responsibility for the prosperity of the last 200 years largely at the feet of humanists who emerged from Protestantism eschewing the metaphysical claptrap of Christianity, but with the work ethic and concern for people intact. They harnessed rationality to achieve objectivity (science) and used it to better people’s lives the best way they could. If you’re interested, Tom Holland’s Dominion, and Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower and Civilisation: The West and the Rest give good accounts of how it worked. But then, if the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and Classical Liberalism were driven by ideas that were essentially Christian, why is it that so many neo-liberals are Evangelicals? Why has christian thought turned so hard to the right? Why is the left the harbour of orthordoxy and dogma in the name of caring for the oppressed, formerly the place of Christianity? Why do both sides think that massive debt is the way forward? Why are the rationalist humanists centrists classical liberals so powerless to attract widespread support? How can they change this? Oh…. just noted that Biden wants Janet Yellen as Sec of Treasury. Seems the debt ceiling will be raised any day now….

Curious: Is it more likely to get us the player that fills our needs? I assume the wing or speedy HBF is what we're looking for...

This seems to me to be the biggest con of the neo-con era. They say they're all about getting out there and developing and building things and productivity, but they don't want to invest in anything. But there needs to be a role for government, as you say. Education and healthcare and energy are too important to leave to the market. The universities have become degree mills (well, not quite), and the students are customers. Standards have plummeted. Unis have become harbours for mediocrity. Just on that.... I took part in the entrance examinations for the uni I work at - one that is racing to embrace the modern western fee-paying model. In the training, it was made clear that nobody - NOBODY - was to fail, and that if someone did, it would be on us. I wasn't involved in any teaching; this was simply observing the behavior of the students in the exam and picking up on any attempts to cheat, then grading two short answer questions. Every customer was to be allowed into the store... There has to be a middle ground. I think what we need is a disaster. I don't wish it upon us, but there's nothing like a disaster to unite people. Stories of the Blitz are fascinating in this regard. The joy of sharing a tomato with someone in an underground tunnel while your house is blown to bits above.... and then once the war was over, back to the same old grasping. We need to realize that we're in this together. I can't see another way to unite people other than to collectively confront a common threat. In the 80's the banks were de-regulated. Do we need to go back on that to manage debt creation, and if so, to what extent?

The big question is, are they the same people...???

He says he's always been called "Egg."

TMac? Petty? Or is Tomlinson the man for the moment....?