“The underlying problem is that the ones in charge don’t understand human nature. They they don’t understand people, they don’t understand themselves, and think economics is something unrelated to what makes people people tick.”
~rb.Luff
I suspect that if you could go back in time and confront the Federal Reserve on their lack of abyssal planning, the knee-jerk justification for it would be very similar to the current justification for Obama’s vocal and continual support of the Stimulus package—namely, that the economy works on unquestioning Faith. The Stimulus will work as long as people believe it will work, the math be damned. We can’t make an Abyssal Plan because doing so will cause it to manifest.
They seem to think that the economy is a form of Consensus Reality, and nothing more. While you can point to economic bubbles (such as Tech in the 90s, or Tulip Mania in the 1600s) as an example of this, all bubbles share a common feature—eventually cold, hard, deterministic reality came crashing in to lay the smack down.
Refusing to plan for economic abysses seems on par with the driver of a car not asking his passengers to buckle up, because he doesn’t want to jinx himself and get into an accident.
While it is true that people hate to think about the abyssal scenario (lord knows, I never do in my own life) there is one branch of government which does a great job of it—the military. I’d wager they even have contingency plans for an intra-NATO war. I see no reason you couldn’t find a bunch of Economists who would take a morbid glee in planning for an apocalypse.
“The underlying problem is that the ones in charge don’t understand human nature. They they don’t understand people, they don’t understand themselves, and think economics is something unrelated to what makes people people tick.” ~rb.Luff
I suspect that if you could go back in time and confront the Federal Reserve on their lack of abyssal planning, the knee-jerk justification for it would be very similar to the current justification for Obama’s vocal and continual support of the Stimulus package—namely, that the economy works on unquestioning Faith. The Stimulus will work as long as people believe it will work, the math be damned. We can’t make an Abyssal Plan because doing so will cause it to manifest.
They seem to think that the economy is a form of Consensus Reality, and nothing more. While you can point to economic bubbles (such as Tech in the 90s, or Tulip Mania in the 1600s) as an example of this, all bubbles share a common feature—eventually cold, hard, deterministic reality came crashing in to lay the smack down.
Refusing to plan for economic abysses seems on par with the driver of a car not asking his passengers to buckle up, because he doesn’t want to jinx himself and get into an accident.
While it is true that people hate to think about the abyssal scenario (lord knows, I never do in my own life) there is one branch of government which does a great job of it—the military. I’d wager they even have contingency plans for an intra-NATO war. I see no reason you couldn’t find a bunch of Economists who would take a morbid glee in planning for an apocalypse.