@space_cadet @blogdiva I have been thinking for a while that economics *could* actually be a useful area of study IF and ONLY IF it were based on actual observation like actual sciences.

As it is though, economics is more like a long-term right wing push poll.

NO THAT'S A LIE @billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet physics has always been extremely abstract. don't drink the koolaid that numbers are tangible things. this has never been true yet i have lived long enough to know when this propaganda was being pushed across universities in the US: my point of reference was coming in 1986 to NYU from UPR to finish my economics degree. at UPR i studied with a variety of professors trained in EU, BR, MX. here, they were UC wannabes.

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outside of counting fingers and toes, numbers and mathematical equations are just that. they are nothing more than ideas represented with a different semantics.

the neoliberal obsession with "semantics << numbers" comes down to academia's version of a satanic panic with semiology/semiotics and, more pointedly, Derrida's work.

why do you think Bannon latched on to the word "deconstruction" to completely subvert it's meaning & praxis?
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@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet

back at UPR had one professor who had graduated at UC and was the expert in microeconomics and GFD it was one of the most awful and most mindnumbingly stupid, completely ahistorical and devoid of actual legal/policy/social context i had to go thru.

maybe it's because i knew how the sausage of economic policy was made back in the day in PRico (thru my dad's work) i found the whole definition of micro/macro a wanker's exercise.

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@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet

oikonomia means household but also the management of "making house" & living.

philology is what binds all the "big minds" of the 18-19th centuries and, of course, linguistics was one of the first domains attacked by neoliberals, the Kochs in particular, when they decided to reform USA universities from the inside out.

Yves Smith's book was a sigh of relief. i was gaslit out of economics in the 1980s & couldn't articulate why til i read her book
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@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet

Smith's book explains why i was in disbelief during Econ classes at NYU. neoliberals have subverted the whole idea of the management of making house and living.

economics wasn't meant to be the study of scarcity.

economics was meant to be the study of how we manage what we have to "make house"; to live comfortably in place.

it's not just about the numbers of making a living. it's literally about how to manage our CONTEXTS of time, people, place. 🧵

@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet

BTW if you understand the fundamental dynamics of economics you will then understand why we use the words HUSBAND/WIFE, and even more to the point, ESPOSO/ESPOSA (in Spanish but similar variations in Romance languages) for describing the fundamental social relationship of "making house"; FAMILY/FAMILIA.

Familiae not only comes from farming but means house slave. and you get that meaning in Spanish as esposo/a means handcuffs.

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@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet

so the most basic of economic relationships that most fascist neoliberal, Supply Side Jesus followers, wax poetically about is one of literal enslavement: both economic and reproductive. husband is the purveyor of the genetic material that will impregnate the empty vessel of a wife to ensure their properties and wealth "stay in the family".

you can't rend one of the most basic economic relationships only with numbers.

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@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet

but this is the kind of shit that neoliberals set out to subvert by funding economics departments across the USA and forcing complete rewriting of economics books and curricula with said funding.

go find an Econ 101 book from the 1970s and compare it to something form the late 80s or 90s. it's eyeopening.

economics as management of scarcity is the fundamental LIE neoliberals forced upon the discipline; to fit their dystopian narratives 🧵

@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet

because by re-defining life as a scarcity, they can re-write all economic activities as solely useful if they are exploitative, extractive and purely transactional; aka FINANCIAL.

there was a time when FINANCE was subsumed as a branch of ECONOMICS. literally, Reaganomics and the Koch'ing of academia changed that. it flipped things because all what the death of cult of extractive relations wants is the complete financialization of life.

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@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet

and just so y'all understand how pervasive their quest has been, CREDIT REPORTS had been banned after abolition in Puerto Rico because they were a tool of slavery for centuries.

Reagan sued to have OUR LAWS against financial servitude rescinded in the early 1980s. soon after credit reports were not only everywhere but normalized.

look up the Technocratic Movement (of which Musk's gdad was a leader) and you'll see why credit reports exist today. 🧵

@billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet