I really wish American hadn't been consistently ruled by fossil fuel morons and had instead listened to James Hansen in 1988.
Oh man the rich people hated the Limits to Growth.
Even though our world trajectories looks quite similar to one of their collapse scenarios.
@alienghic Yep, the rich people, and even worse, their apologists. The economist whose paper trashed LTG (disingenuously & inaccurately) went on to win the Nobel Prize & teach at Harvard! Neoclassical Economics virtually dismisses any effects of AGW on "the economy!"
And yes! How many people today realize that we are living in a collapse scenario?
I've noticed that economists who write excuses for why the rich should be rich get showered with a great deal of money and press coverage.
@alienghic Exactly! And the scale is almost inconceivable! Academic economics is virtually captured by believers in the Neoclassical paradigm. Dissenting views are typically banished.
And who do politicians listen to? You guessed it! And they're "Climate Change Doesn't Matter"-ing us into oblivion...
Sometime when you have an hour, Prof Steve Keen, a "heterodox" economist, is worth a listen:
If you follow Simon Clark at all, he’s done a video on the climate denialism in that era. Professor Keen is mistaken in one sense about Nordhaus by depicting him as suffering a case of bad model.
Nordhaus worked for science denial lobbyists. In other words, he’s a paid assasin. He’s paid to deceive people. This is the greatest fault. I lay at Keen’s feet is that he argues this is some sort of academic game over truth when the topic is moral malignancy.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @alienghic Not familiar with Simon Clark; mind posting the link to that video?
I get the impression that Prof Keen is intently focused on economics per se. (Full disclosure: I have been attending his online seminar courses for three years.) I believe his belief that Neoclassical econ is akin to a cult is sincere.
The way I would describe Neo classical/ liberal economics is that it’s less a cult than a deliberate political ideology to legitimize totalitarian rule by wealth.
Economic and political power are inseparable, as is freedom and equality.
The main issue to answer with regard to economics is the balance of power. Where the means of exchange flows in the economy. Where scarcity is created in order to exploit. Everything else is Engineering
If you enjoy watching or listening to podcasts, you can’t beat also picking up
“what is politics?” You know you have the right channel with Eurythmics riffand Alfred E. Neuman.
The channel creator background is anthropology, specifically social anthropology. He brings clarity to politics.
The other reading I would recommend is from anthropology
“ hierarchy of the forest” by Boehm
eminently readable and to the point
You might like his clarity. He has a number of early episodes that directly talk about the muddled nature of left versus right. I think the episode is titled wurbs.
I got a question for you because Steve Keen is on record saying that he would prefer as a matter of policy to have inflation between 3 1/2 to 5% in order to “increase the velocity of money”
Has he ever in his class explained how this higher inflation is going to be deployed?
The two major sources of inflation would be production constraint, or more money added to the economy.
..
Furthermore, he is economic models stratified the economy into four representative agents:
Government finance business and labor.
And one of the chief findings of his career, going back to to I want to say 2017 was a conclusion that money tends to aggregate in the financial sector. Yet, if you look at the real economy, you know the thing he talks about, clearly billionaires and corporations are aggregating the line share of money
And the other thing I would ask you is that given everything you’ve learned if I said if I were to tax economic participants in order to cause them to spend money versus inflicting any level of inflation would you understand given everything you’ve been taught that there’s a difference between taxing and inflation in terms of the money supply?
Because I consider myself very familiar with his work, I consider a lot of it definitive, but I have a problem with a lot that he says
Well, to speak briefly on the work of cultural anthropologists. Hierarchy can only establish itself by convincing people that a compromise needs to be made, and it is necessary to find an enemy or an out group to depend against or pillage.
It’s necessary be to human psychology because the unique aspect of humanity is collective action, that is egalitarianism, which is directly defined as an inverted dominance hierarchy. The rank and file dictate the limits of authority.
Daniel Swain
Diane
Power_to_the_People (he/him)
GhostOnTheHalfShell