Trickle-down theory once again proven wrong

[dogears]

Not even are consumers (people) really bad at making rational choices individually, the neoliberal assumption that they do the right thing in the aggregate (which will be better for everybody) is also not based on fact.

But this doesn’t address the question. Are you suggesting people are incapable of economic self-governance?

If so, then there should be other people in charge to “help” them do the “right” thing?

Who are these people who will be in charge?  How are they selected? By popular vote?

Why would people vote in aggregate for people to “help” (read: make) them do what they don’t want to do individually?

 

[JohnRoberts]

But this doesn’t address the question. Are you suggesting people are incapable of economic self-governance?

If so, then there should be other people in charge to “help” them do the “right” thing?

Who are these people who will be in charge?  How are they selected? By popular vote?

Why would people vote in aggregate for people to “help” (read: make) them do what they don’t want to do individually?

Troublemaker...  ;D ;D ;D

Human nature is complicated with a dark side. Our founders attempted to compensate for that in their design of our government.

So far we are still moving forward centuries later, but the envelope is being ***tested.  8)

JR

***That envelope was tested far more strenuously by our civil war, so this is a relative cake walk. 

 

[living sounds]

But this doesn’t address the question. Are you suggesting people are incapable of economic self-governance?

If so, then there should be other people in charge to “help” them do the “right” thing?

Who are these people who will be in charge?  How are they selected? By popular vote?

Why would people vote in aggregate for people to “help” (read: make) them do what they don’t want to do individually?

Who are these people? Well, they are experts, of course. They are not in charge, but they advice on the basis of scientific evidence. Laws are then passed based on their expertise. Seat belts are mandatory now, since they prevent a large number of traffic deaths and since people are (or at least at the time the laws were passed were) incapable of understanding the basics of risk assesment when it comes to driving a car. We are not hard wired for it, in the same way we are not hard wired for making long-term economic decisions. So the money for your pension gets automatically deducted from your pay and put into a pension fund. Problem solved.

The world today has become so complex that nobody can by themselves decide, so experts are essential. Anyone thinking they are  cleverer than the experts is simply delusional.

Now the more lopsided income and wealth is distributed, the more expert opionion can be bought, distorted and falsified to fit the agenda of interest groups, one of the reasons why less inequality is so desireable. We live in a time where many scientists have to beg for money to be able to carry on their studies, since these studies don't serve the interests of industries to make a quick buck in the short-term.

You know, I could go on and on and on about the bad consequences of neoliberalism, but I'll leave it at that.

All of this should be self-evident, since it is playing itself out across many functioning democracies every day.

 

[dogears]

So you don’t believe people are capable of economic self governance, but should defer to experts.

Who picks the experts? The same people too stupid to manage their own life?

If people are too inept to understand and manage their financial affairs, can we really trust them to vote? Safer not to, I imagine.

If scientists and experts are good for safety and economics, political scientist and experts should simply decide our laws too, don’t you think?

 

[living sounds]

We all defer to experts all the time. It's no longer possible to do without them. While it is certainly possible for certain people to make an informed decision based on expert advice in certain cases, we simply do not have the time, the means, the capabilities to do all do it most of the time.

And let's face it, many people are simply not capable of making informed decisions. Heck, you currently have a President who is blatently incapable (aides are required to dumb down complex problems into cartoons for him, since he lacks the attention span / intellectual curiosity for anything difficult).

This is just the reality of it.

As I wrote before, neoliberals are operating from a flawed perspective of a fully rational, informed entity making decisions. But in reality we are shaped by evolution to do certain things our reward system favors, and these are at odds with what we actually should do. And we definitely didn't evolve for a fully-fledged consumer economy catering to our every need. So people choose sugary drinks, SUVs and Kardashians.

A market left to itself selects for short-term gain and creates externalities. The ship steers in the wrong direction. This should be self-evident to everyone by now. And it is not sustainable. Political and economical instability are the consequence. The next financial crisis may well be the end to capitalism as we know it. I'd rather safe it and transform it into something viable. Again, this happened before in the US in the 1930s-40s.

 

[dogears]

You're dancing around the issue my friend. Yes, we defer to experts as individuals. We also often ignore them. It doesn't seem right to me to consign our liberty to experts. It seems even worse to force other people to do so against their will.

And let's face it, many people are simply not capable of making informed decisions.

Are you arguing against democracy? Or perhaps only unlimited franchise?

As I wrote before, neoliberals are operating from a flawed perspective of a fully rational, informed entity making decisions.

Actually this is just not true. You should read more modern economists such as Minsky. You don't have to be a socialist to understand that markets are not perfectly efficient.

And however imperfect markets may be, historically it has always been more efficient than a planned or command economy. This is a simple fact.

So people choose sugary drinks, SUVs and Kardashians.

Are you suggesting that they should not be able to?

See, like I said earlier - behind every claim of "let's temper unregulated capitalism" lurks a person who really just wants to use the power of the state to impose their aims on others. It's fundamentally opposed to freedom and mutual respect for your fellow man. You don't believe that others are capable of enjoying the benefits of mutual free exchange, of freedom itself. But you don't apply this to yourself.

If you really believed what you were saying, you'd put yourself in some kind of submission to experts and curtail your own liberty, "for your own good". But it's always other people who are irrational, incapable, short term thinkers. Tsk.

 

[JohnRoberts]

We all defer to experts all the time. It's no longer possible to do without them. While it is certainly possible for certain people to make an informed decision based on expert advice in certain cases, we simply do not have the time, the means, the capabilities to do all do it most of the time.

And let's face it, many people are simply not capable of making informed decisions. Heck, you currently have a President who is blatently incapable (aides are required to dumb down complex problems into cartoons for him, since he lacks the attention span / intellectual curiosity for anything difficult).

This is just the reality of it.

As I wrote before, neoliberals are operating from a flawed perspective of a fully rational, informed entity making decisions. But in reality we are shaped by evolution to do certain things our reward system favors, and these are at odds with what we actually should do. And we definitely didn't evolve for a fully-fledged consumer economy catering to our every need. So people choose sugary drinks, SUVs and Kardashians.

A market left to itself selects for short-term gain and creates externalities. The ship steers in the wrong direction. This should be self-evident to everyone by now. And it is not sustainable. Political and economical instability are the consequence. The next financial crisis may well be the end to capitalism as we know it. I'd rather safe it and transform it into something viable. Again, this happened before in the US in the 1930s-40s.

Too much conjecture to unpack so I won't.

We need to question everything, the experts have been wrong before.

If you believe the government will make better decisions than you, about you, for you that may be correct (for you). I do not believe that.  :

This is the classic argument made by Hayek and other economists opposing over reliance on government central planning to make personal decisions for us. How can they possibly know what everybody wants/needs?

Capitalism is flawed, but head and shoulders better than any other economic system so far, as history has demonstrated in some cases multiple times. Capitalism and wealth are much too easy targets for politicians to attack to gain influence (there will always be more poor people than wealthy by definition). We have seen this simple political calculus before.

Predictions about the demise of western economic systems seems premature, while the central bankers still have not unwound all the extraordinary measures begun after 2007-8 collapse of banking/credit. When that tide of liquidity finally goes out we will see who isn't wearing trunks. 

Recessions used to be expected routine parts of the economic cycle's ebb and flow. A mild recession is actually virtuous to remove dead wood (weak companies) and make the larger economy more productive. Now since 2007-8 we fear even the mention of recession, expecting another huge scary event. The inverted yield curve predicted a mild recession some time in the near future, but the central bankers have manipulated interest rates to suppress that indicator. Not healthy IMO for the long term.

For many young people, even working in the financial industry, the last decade is their entire historical reference, but this is far from a typical economic cycle. This too will pass, like some bad street food...  8)

JR 

 

[living sounds]

Reality will catch up with neoliberal ideology. Left to their own devices individuals will work towards their own destruction (tragedy of the commons).  There's a looming catastrophe of biblical proportions awaiting us if we follow this path, either war or ecological (a tipping point in the acidification of the oceans looks like a real possibility in the not too distant future, long before NY is under water).

I've said this before, but no system works without rules and without feedback mechanisms to make it stable. Unregulated media (everybody is allowed to lie) leads to misinformed people making bad decisions, we see that play itself out very well.

I am not argueing for authoritarian rule at all BTW, I am advocating for a system that puts the science first and incentivises mutually benefitial behaviour and aims to educate people to make the right decisions. I'm not sure totally unrestricted free speech is really a good idea, after Nazi Germany we banned certain speech to prevent it from happening again. Often ideological frameworks like Libertarianism are too simple and don't take into account how human nature operates.

Or another example, if you think it is an attack on liberty if government makes sure that insurance companies cannot sell useless insurance to people you only look at one side of the issue. The other side is the suffering and disruption caused to multiple people and society at large. The financial crisis or the savings and loan crisis caused by neoliberal policies are instrumental to understand the danger of this one-sided view.

You may believe "there is no such thing as a society",  but that science clearly tells us otherwise.

And free will? It's a great concept to lead your everyday life, but from the scientific point of view there is currently no evidence to infer that brain processing does not follow deterministic pathways like everything else in the macro (non-quantum) world.

I don't see much point in carrying on here, since we won't suceed in convincing one another, will we?

 

[Matador]

I don't see much point in carrying on here, since we won't suceed in convincing one another, will we?

A strange game.  The only winning move is not to play.  ;D

 

[dogears]

I am not argueing for authoritarian rule at all BTW, I am advocating for a system that puts the science first and incentivises mutually benefitial behaviour and aims to educate people to make the right decisions. I'm not sure totally unrestricted free speech is really a good idea, after Nazi Germany we banned certain speech to prevent it from happening again. Often ideological frameworks like Libertarianism are too simple and don't take into account how human nature operates.

I’m not arguing for an authoritarian state. <<Goes on to describe authoritarian state>>. Haha.

You just described the Soviet Union. Cognitive dissonance is a helluva drug.

Look it isn’t that your aims are bad. They’re the same aims everyone has. Everyone wants good information. In a free society people are free to choose what they will believe - and then people have to convince others what is true, and right, and best. In your society some unnamed expert will decide, empowered by some unknown means of selection, by the same people who you don’t trust to decide by themselves. I fail to see how the aggregated thoughts of people you think are incapable of self governance will be of any more use than their individual ones. It seems like you’re willing to go with the wisdom of crowds in voting but not markers. This is very contradictory.

You’re making a passionate case against individual freedom. If you think it’s such a good idea, you go first. Always other people need to be told what’s right, what’s reasonable, what is rational, what’s best. Never content to let others simply be - or to let others tell you what is right, what is reasonable, what is rational, what is best.

 

[JohnRoberts]

A strange game.  The only winning move is not to play.  ;D

Another concern about the tsunami of fake news associated with elections is to make people distrust "all" news.  Having more visible fact checkers, bragging about how many fake stories they gonged can make people even less trustful of news veracity...

They are playing 3D chess in our heads...  :  Get off my yard, and out of my head.  8)

JR

 

[boji]

It doesn't seem right to me to consign our liberty to experts.

News media has become so conflicting and noisy that whole sections of 'reality' need to be quantized and offloaded to even be parsed.  It will be the lag time of that processing and where we choose the offload to occur that informs our sense of liberty.

Gates just gave Musk a few billion to code the entirety of a human brain onto a server farm. What will that brain simulation need to feel a sense of liberty?