I actually studied economics in college... but I always preferred the simplicity of F. A. Hayek and Henry Hazlitt. The real lesson of economics is one that is often forgotten in the field today: there are no shortcuts, and everything is scarce. Trade-offs are a part of life.
The promise of the technocracy is a managed society in which scarcity, pain, loneliness, ignorance, crime, inequality, etc. can all be managed - smoothed out of the picture, somehow - and minimized by our educated professionals. That hasn't really turned out to be the case.
In response to every one of these problems we find the same tendency: create academic abstractions (based upon imperfect understanding and moral intuitions) and then try to impose them on reality, using the bureaucracy. If things improve, great. If they don't, the contradictions and the growing problems are ignored. Technocrats prefer to focus on things that they feel comfortable with, which tend to be issues that are framed in familiar ways and solutions that follow their rote schemes.
I'm no economist, but I scoff a bit when professionals pontificate about tariffs or finance or neo-Keynesian fiscal policy or A.I. If you KNEW what you were talking about (I think) - that is, if your professional training equipped you with a full and workable picture of these issues - we wouldn't have the problems we're having. How many economists predicted the 2008 financial crisis? Or the full effects of NAFTA?
Here's an idea: educations are of limited value. Tools are of limited applicability. Theories are necessarily flawed and incomplete. Rather than telling everyone what the shape of reality is, try listening to people, and keeping an open mind. This will erode your institutional power and reduce your professional status... but that's going to happen anyway.
You don't need to be a social scientist to see the cracks in the edifice.
Yep. Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" on one hand, in high school, and scattered political pundit claims on the radio on one particular "economic" matter or another were all the "formal" education I had on "economics."
What seems far more important, as you say, and which is also why Aristotle didn't think anyone should do philosophy before they were 30, is life experience. Lots of things make sense on a whiteboard that don't survive first contact with a nail gun.
The need to have people doing physical work is far more obvious when you're doing it than when you're a Marxist professor taking grant money from the establishment to write about heteronormative intersectional tariff policies effect on the interest rate.
I actually studied economics in college... but I always preferred the simplicity of F. A. Hayek and Henry Hazlitt. The real lesson of economics is one that is often forgotten in the field today: there are no shortcuts, and everything is scarce. Trade-offs are a part of life.
The promise of the technocracy is a managed society in which scarcity, pain, loneliness, ignorance, crime, inequality, etc. can all be managed - smoothed out of the picture, somehow - and minimized by our educated professionals. That hasn't really turned out to be the case.
In response to every one of these problems we find the same tendency: create academic abstractions (based upon imperfect understanding and moral intuitions) and then try to impose them on reality, using the bureaucracy. If things improve, great. If they don't, the contradictions and the growing problems are ignored. Technocrats prefer to focus on things that they feel comfortable with, which tend to be issues that are framed in familiar ways and solutions that follow their rote schemes.
I'm no economist, but I scoff a bit when professionals pontificate about tariffs or finance or neo-Keynesian fiscal policy or A.I. If you KNEW what you were talking about (I think) - that is, if your professional training equipped you with a full and workable picture of these issues - we wouldn't have the problems we're having. How many economists predicted the 2008 financial crisis? Or the full effects of NAFTA?
Here's an idea: educations are of limited value. Tools are of limited applicability. Theories are necessarily flawed and incomplete. Rather than telling everyone what the shape of reality is, try listening to people, and keeping an open mind. This will erode your institutional power and reduce your professional status... but that's going to happen anyway.
You don't need to be a social scientist to see the cracks in the edifice.
Yep. Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" on one hand, in high school, and scattered political pundit claims on the radio on one particular "economic" matter or another were all the "formal" education I had on "economics."
What seems far more important, as you say, and which is also why Aristotle didn't think anyone should do philosophy before they were 30, is life experience. Lots of things make sense on a whiteboard that don't survive first contact with a nail gun.
The need to have people doing physical work is far more obvious when you're doing it than when you're a Marxist professor taking grant money from the establishment to write about heteronormative intersectional tariff policies effect on the interest rate.