Thanks. Sounds interesting. I’ll google it, or would be interested in hearing more from you.

Danny L. McDaniel
Lafayette, Indiana

Now you beging to understand why I have another blog called Economic Dreams – Nightmares. The lastest Post there is titled “Financial Armageddon.”

Non-mainstream economists from several camps have been sounding alarms for quite some time. Mainstreamers though, are sure that we are quite comfortably working along a fundamentally sound path of growth and development, with but minor speed bumps ahead.

: “How the market economy shapes our destiny”

Oh yes: here we are, living in an age in which economic growth is the only reasonable way.

The article below shows, quite persuasively, that the economy grows exponentially. The author – Dr. Chris Martenson (an economist) – feels pretty certain that an economic crash landing is inevitable.

http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/martenson/2007/0108.html

“We have parabolic money on a spherical planet. The former demands perpetual growth while the latter has definitive boundaries. Which will win?

What will happen when a system that must grow can’t? How will an economic paradigm so steeped in the necessity of expansion that economists unflinchingly use the term ‘negative growth’, suddenly evolve into an entirely new system? If compound interest based monetary systems have a fatal math problem, what will banks do if they can’t charge interest? And what shall we replace them with?

Since I’ve never read a single word on the subject, I suspect there’s even less interest in exploring this subject by our ‘leaders’ than there is in being honest about our collective $53 trillion federal shortfall.

I am convinced that our monetary system’s encounter with natural and/or mathematical limits will be anything but smooth, possibly fatal, and I have placed my bets accordingly. It seems that our money system is thoroughly incompatible with natural laws and limits and therefore destined to fail. ”

~ Dr. Chris Martenson

As to “overload,” “too much,” and feeling uncomfortable, try some of these:

Neil Postman. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, (which is built from):

Aldous Huxley. Brave New World Revisited (non-fiction)

Robert Kegan. In Over Our Heads: Mental Demands of Modern Life

Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

I wish I was sitting in my office so that I could look across the shelves and find a few more to recommend on this ever-more-gloomy subject.

Sort of related is:

Andrew Bard Schmookler. The Illusion of Choice: How the Market Economy Shapes Our Destiny

John: “I think you’re right about good scientists. In fact, keeping their work in perspective, keeping the macro in sight, should probably go into the definition of “good” here. ”

- —

This is true. But these days, every scientist (and especially social scientists) who takes an interest in the bigger picture, is bound to realize that the combination of all and everything is seriously out of bounds. The bigger picture has become too sensitive. People, societies, cultures, and countries are finding it hard to cope, even with the social scientist’s most basic points of view. It is instinct!

The bigger picture has, from a social, cultural, psychological, political, economic and ethical perspective, become “too much”. – People don’t want to hear about it. Politicians and corporate executives don’t want to be confronted with it. Some people go into hiding, while other people seek and destroy.

Any honest (an important value, that: honesty) social scientist will have to come up with macro analysis that are likely to make people feel a lot of feel too much … so to speak … nothing can be more problematic than a thesis that makes the reader feel … uh! …

Feelings are unprofessional. A social scientist producing holistic thesises aimed at saying something useful about the state of affairs, fall straight into this trap. If he’s seriously gifted, honest and truthful, he is also bound to come up with analysis that make people feel a bit weird (I don’t know just how to put it?).

I believe that I’m going to have to just inform people that the Age of Information Overload is here, and that it is going to remain with us for a while. There’s bad information everywhere, and everybody’s starting to feel uncomfortable. It is going to be interesting to experience the psycho-social outcome of this. As people (and scientists, leading politicians and economists, as well as astrologers, priests, punks, freaks and witches) start to see things in perspective here, there is no saying what the group instincts are going to prompt us all to feel. And do.

Oh, don’t even think about it, okay. :[

As it’s going to make you feel.

*Some* of the economists out there will completely agree with the article. (the greens, ecos-, gaians, etc.) But others will stick to the kinds of rationalizations I mentioned. I only scratched the surface of some of Julian Simon’s arguments, for example. But they were clever enough that his followers are not easily convinced they’re wrong. I’ll get around to a whole post on him one of these days. There’s a good chapter on him in Brian Czech’s book, Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train. (see links on front page)

But I agree about KISS. I’m trying to remind myself that as interesting as it can be to dig into theoretical details, there are some really basic points to be made. And they need to spread far and wide if there is to be real hope of large scale positive action.
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I’m with you on preserving people’s rights. I know an earlier commenter mentioned the idea of paying people to be sterilized. And that does raise some serious concerns. But at the same time I do like the spirit of brainstorming it reflected. Given that the idea was that it was voluntary, it seems to me to bring up more an issue of social engineering than rights per se. (as you mentioned, it will be the poor who end up sterilized under that scenario.) Either way, though, it’s problematic to say the least.
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I think you’re right about good scientists. In fact, keeping their work in perspective, keeping the macro in sight, should probably go into the definition of “good” here. One problem, I think, is that the media often over-interpret a study’s results and feeds the public an inaccurate picture. I mean, if a newspaper article says something like, “Study finds no harm from genetically modified food,” what do people think? In reality it’s likely a study of one subspecies of corn, and the measure of “harm” was one tiny variable which was examined. But from the title, a lot of people get the impression there’s no problem, in general, with genetically modified food.

“[It] contributes to fragmentation by the very methodology of focusing on a part of nature, isolating it, controlling all outside forces and measuring the result. In the process, we acquire powerful insights into the properties of that fragment, but this is gained at the expense of the rhythms, cycles and patterns that are crucial to our understanding….”

I agree with Dr. Suzuki. Dr. Feeney will probably note the similarities with this topic and poker (for those of you who don’t know, Feeney was an expert poker player and author.)

Poker theorists, too, isolate problems to help solve them. But the best of us understand that is just a start, not the end. I am not a scientist, but I will confidently assert, *good* scientists do not study the micro and make sweeping conclusions about the macro.

Ross

“David was born in Vancouver, BC in 1936. During World War II, at the age of six, he was interned with his family in a camp in BC.”

Seemingly unrelated to this blog. But is it? There are often proposals to limit people’s rights to solve our problems. “Pay people to be sterilized?”, for example.

I hope this point isn’t lost in this very important debate.

We can solve this without further depleting our rights.

Ross

I think this article was awesome. Whoever referred you to Dr. Suzuki is pretty nifty.

There is one problem, though. The economists and others who have previously responded to your past articles really have been eliminated. So you may lose some debate. Their game is up. They have been revealed. No equation, acronym, or theoretic mumbo-jumbo can save them. KISS: Bullshit walks.

Good job, John.

Ross