It’s interesting that the conservative economists keep harping on about their belief that the existence of a budget deficit causes uncertainty among private firms who are then reluctant to invest because they fear higher tax rates to pay back the deficit.
For Pete's sake! Can we just insist on improving the semantics of this debate?
We cannot win a debate by endorsing the broken semantics that started it in the 1st place!
This is like recruiting priests to atheism by constantly telling them that there is no God, there is no Devil, there is no Heaven, and that they won't go to Hell.
At the end of the day, we've only imprinted people with the very - semantically incorrect - terms which we've asked them to quit using!
Instead of reinforcing the misleading semantics by repeatedly endorsing their use, don't we have to CEASE, FOREVER, the habit of checking for audience comprehension AFTER THE FACT? That concept is an axiom of statistical process control.* When it comes to communication, an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of correction? There's tremendous hysteresis in communication loops. Once an audience is distracted, it takes twice as much effort to get 'em back on an adaptive track.
Is it so difficult to switch to some version of the following?
“Increased public self-investment causes citizen uncertainty and reluctance to invest for fear of higher tax rates?”
That frames the supposition consistently from the start, and eases the audience burden of comparing signal intent and signal reception. Tuned semantics makes it easier for audiences to follow the intended logic, not just the distracting semantics. As all propagandists do, this technique pre-loads the supposition, but selects to do so in a group ADAPTIVE direction, not just one advantageous to the propagandist.
We always have to fight communication tactics with communication tactics.
Just smooth the path for audiences to agree, and make it harder for them to DISAGREE.
When framed this or similar ways, more citizens will question the faulty premise we're trying to dislodge from their minds.
Our entire dilemma keeps coming back to the difference between conceptualizing and communicating, and the uncertainty in guaranteeing fidelity between intended and interpreted signals
In numeric coding, this task is universally recognized as critically important, an it is routinely addressed through techniques such as bitwise verification. The uncertainty in public communication, unfortunately, grows with audience diversification, and the conflicting demands of higher tempo vs defining-terms only increases as a function of population size and semantic drift. Yet, compared to other disciplines, policy discussion mostly ignores this critical issue!
Yet we neglect communication fidelity to our detriment.
The Tyranny of Words.
When framed this or similar ways, more citizens will question the faulty premise we're trying to dislodge from their minds.
Our entire dilemma keeps coming back to the difference between conceptualizing and communicating, and the uncertainty in guaranteeing fidelity between intended and interpreted signals
In numeric coding, this task is universally recognized as critically important, an it is routinely addressed through techniques such as bitwise verification. The uncertainty in public communication, unfortunately, grows with audience diversification, and the conflicting demands of higher tempo vs defining-terms only increases as a function of population size and semantic drift. Yet, compared to other disciplines, policy discussion mostly ignores this critical issue!
Yet we neglect communication fidelity to our detriment.
The Tyranny of Words.
Why on earth is such a fundamental topic SO systemically ignored? The problem was recognized and discussed at length by one of FDRs BrainTrust members, based on his experiences during the 1930s. Why on earth has his message been ignored as well as well as the concept of fiat currency?
What good are tools if we ignore methods for explaining tools and their use to citizens?
* Some readers will undoubtedly accuse me of being difficult to understand sometimes. I can live with it, if they can live with simply looking up terms they're not yet familiar with. The internet allows that latter task to be done in seconds nowadays.
What good are tools if we ignore methods for explaining tools and their use to citizens?
* Some readers will undoubtedly accuse me of being difficult to understand sometimes. I can live with it, if they can live with simply looking up terms they're not yet familiar with. The internet allows that latter task to be done in seconds nowadays.
Increased public self-investment removes uncertainty…neoclassical economics have it exactly backwards…in my view by design in order to maintain control of the system.
ReplyDeleteMatt might jump in here and say these guys aren't smart enough to execute such a nebulous plan and I tend to agree…puppets do not need to be smart or even aware they are being controlled by others.