Sunday, November 2, 2014

20-Episode, High Profile Short Films On Economics, Touted By Newsweek ... Falls Short of Reality. Hurts More Than It Helps.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)


I shudder to imagine it's plot ... but haven't seen them all yet. So we can hope for the best.

Maybe an animated film on Control Fraud will follow? :)

And then one on Boyd, Deming, Shewhart ... and even Wallace & Darwin ...?

And then? Planck, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Kepler ... and Imhotep? :)

These topics are all inter-related ... by much more than comedy. It's just that nearly every single specialist doesn't "believe" that they are, or that THEY could use even more perspective.

Every single "discipline" is, by definition, an application of Neo-Liberal thinking that in fact degrades systemic coordination. Ya gotta wonder what a Cross-Fit CULTURE would briefly look like (another Renaissance?). One featuring Liberal Education? One that is NOT just a mob of Neo-Liberally educated specialists in distributed silos, each the supposed center of it's own, parallel universe?


(Stav Ziv, Newsweek)

Morgan Spurlock, who produced the McDonald's documentary Super Size Me is undertaking a daunting task: making a series of short documentaries about economics and the related issues that are effecting our lives. He has a host of big-name entertainment people participating. GEI hopes to be able to make the films available on-site in the not-too-distant future.
 
(hat tip John Lounsbury, www.econintersect.com)

Why is there little or no teaching of distributed control & Democracy as fused subjects?

As soon as you say "distributed control" of aggregate navigation ... you're already stating the task of a tribe, or an aggregate or an electorate navigating overall context.

It's amazing how much is separately known in policy-politics fields, & in engineering-biomechanics-biology fields .... that is NOT allowed to interact!

What a waste. We could easily make all students aware of this by age 10.



7 comments:

Roger Erickson said...

Well, the 1st episode, Cave-o-Nomics, isn't gonna help.

It just repeats the same Neo-Classic mantra of economics = barter of static assets.

Roger Erickson said...

ok, the incredibly sweet alpaca episode also basically .... well, it sucks,

Roger Erickson said...

ok, it just gets worse

supposedly, banks get free currency from the Fed, and are supposed to lend it out ... to people. Instead [supposedly] banks lend that free $ back to the issuing Gov, at a profitable margin.

This whole film series is doing more harm than good.

It doesn't mention credit, currency or (white collar) criminology

it doesn't really grasp the key utility of a currency (i.e., innovation in distributed - coordinating - transaction chains)

it doesn't mention the difference between static and dynamic assets ...

and it completely flops on topics such as inflation, taxation, banking reserves, and the whole [arbitrary] purpose of Treasury Securities.

Roger Erickson said...

The following is astounding! I keep forgetting that today's challenges are actually very old ones. We just actively distract most citizens from the obvious.

“Boltzmann had a tremendous admiration for Darwin and he wished to extend Darwinism from biological to cultural evolution. IN FACT, HE CONSIDERED BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION AS ONE AND THE SAME THINGS. ... In short, cultural evolution was a physical process taking place in the brain. Boltzmann included ethics in the ideas which developed in this fashion ...”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Boltzmann

Seems obvious today, but apparently not to the bulk of our unwashed masses

Matt Franko said...

Its like they are "religious" Roger..

Just think of the beau coup USD balances they obtained and how they were wasted on this garbage....

Peter Pan said...

I gave Tom a preview two weeks ago, and his take on the 'money' shorts was succinct.

hog said...

This series is featured on the TYT youtube page and this is where I first came across it.
No surprise there as it's in line with the conservative economics Cenk spouts, despite masquerading as a progressive.