Having studied biology for years before ever paying attention to economics, I immediately wondered where the heck orthodox economists get their many, strange ideas.
Nothing made sense until something plausible dawned on me:
Orthodox MacroEconomics is an extension of Aristocratic "Court Politics"
and is at heart a management theory for how an upper class can best rule "the masses."
To me, that explains nearly everything about orthodox macroeconomics and its inane list of things that human behavior "should" include. It's an unfortunate set of vague myths blindly promulgated by groups as diverse as aristocrats, property owners, cattle herders, and capitalists. Meanwhile, we always knew that human behavior can evolve as fast as new contexts arrive (at least so far). There's a fundamental dichotomy here. Peasant reality is that we have zero predictive power. We only know that recombination on all levels works, with few bounds.
What are the implications? A rare, honest person states one aspect of the obvious.
Well, that, and also partly because too many dimwit escaped serfs only want to be Aristocrats themselves, if given the chance. Doh!
Meanwhile, as always:
Aggregate degrees of freedom are a function first of aggregate inter-dependencies - which grow factorially with system growth - PLUS any changes in external context, which may or may not change at seemingly fixed or unpredictable rates, but always change nevertheless.
Orthodox macro-economics has become an increasingly impossible yoke to live with. This is one parasitic baby we'd do well to throw out with the accumulating bathwater.
Aristocracy is DeadSo why is orthodox macroeconomics still kicking us while it holds us down? We're only down because we're LETTING a dead-man-walking hold us down.
Well, that, and also partly because too many dimwit escaped serfs only want to be Aristocrats themselves, if given the chance. Doh!
Meanwhile, as always:
Actual Human Behavior Makes A Mockery Of Orthodox Economic Models
... (but Rulers Don't Care To Notice)Ya think? So there's yet another another flaw in orthodox economics: the presumption that emerging aggregate outcomes should be logical? Really? Why doesn't this invalidate the entire field? There's a seemingly obvious answer.
"Thaler began to keep a list of things that people did that made a mockery of economic models of rational choice."Well, that's yet another indicator that orthodox macro-economics grew out of aristocratic politics, not tribal common sense based on trial-&-error progress.
"Logic" is just a body of perceived patterns, which we use when trying to extrapolate from past experiences to future predictions.Biology, chemistry, physics, etc, etc have amply proven that the past order of any system does NOT predict all of it's future options.
Aggregate degrees of freedom are a function first of aggregate inter-dependencies - which grow factorially with system growth - PLUS any changes in external context, which may or may not change at seemingly fixed or unpredictable rates, but always change nevertheless.
Orthodox macro-economics has become an increasingly impossible yoke to live with. This is one parasitic baby we'd do well to throw out with the accumulating bathwater.
Call it "Marie's Dilemma":
It’s also explained by the hold that the conventional wisdom has in ANY society. E.g. if you’re brought up in a society where everyone spends all day building multi million ton pyramids to bury dead kings and queens in (i.e. ancient Egypt) and someone suggested pyramids were a waste of time, 99% of the population would regard them as a nutter.
ReplyDeleteThat's called Institutional Momentum by sociologists, and Phenotypic Persistence by biologists & System Theory folks.
ReplyDeleteEither way, the RATE of changing institutions/bureaucracies/phenotypes (their minimal half-life) is what defines the Adaptive Rate of entities, including human cultures.
We can be the Greenland Vikings, or we can be the Inuit.
"Context Nomads" used to go anywhere and become anything in 2 generations. For 100K years. What's happened to us?
Will we even know our grandkids? Will they know of us ... and anything except quaint, obsolete oddities?
oops; meant "as anything except quaint, obsolete oddities?"
ReplyDelete"Let them work at McDonald's "
ReplyDeleteThat's not working anymore either Roger they are in trouble.... cant make money with a "Dollar Menu".... rsp
Right, Ralph. They'd be thinking of all the beer parties they'd be missing.
ReplyDeleteRight, Roger. You are making the same connection that Marx did about bourgeois society being an interaction of feudal society. He held that just as the kings aristocrats had become obsolete and in the process of being replaced, the same thing would happen with the grand acquisitors that replaced them. He focuses on the mode of property ownership, property being the accumulated surplus to which current rent flows and increases. Whoever owns and controls the accumulated surplus holds the power in a society rather than the society itself in popular sovereignty.
ReplyDeleteSo change this a "revolution" is necessary to bring it about, altho not necessarily a rebellion when liberal democracy is in place and it is possible to accomplish this at the ballot box.
People in old "pass through" economies knew all this implicitly.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that it is mainly the growth of supra-tribal population size that has caused tribal cultures to collide so frequently, and tribal methods to be dismembered.
We're still struggling to scale-up old tribal methods. So far, we're not inventing new methods fast enough to keep ahead of our population growth.
We're going through a cultural "growth-spurt," and necessarily getting clumsier before we can grow new cultural circuits allowing us to regain and further extend aggregate agility.
We need to focus on methods now.