Guest Post by The Zman
In the 1980’s, one of the great puzzles for conservatives was how left-wing economists could not bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious. The Soviet economic model was a failure in absolute terms, as well as relative terms. Even long after the Soviets collapsed, guys like Paul Krugman remained puzzled by the inability of the communist system to keep pace with the West. His answer was that the Soviets either lost their will or lacked the moral fiber to make revolutionary socialism work in the face of capitalist cynicism.
As Greg Cochran has pointed out, the failings of socialism were obvious to anyone willing to look at what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Once the Soviet Empire fell, it was undeniable, but economics never paid a price for being so wrong. In fact, the status of the field went up in the years following the Cold War. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz become something of a shaman to the ruling class, despite a miserable track record. He’s another guy who thinks the morality of socialism should make it work.
Now, part of this is something that John Derbyshire pointed out in his infamous review of Kevin McDonald’s book, The Culture of Critique. “Jews are awfully good at creating pseudosciences—elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” In fairness to John, he was summarizing what McDonald had written, but he largely agreed with the assertion. There’s a fair bit of this in economics, where smart Jews often play clever games arguing against observable reality.
That’s a fun point to make, but that’s not the reason for economists to be wildly wrong about so much, yet immune from criticism. By now, someone in the field should have pointed out that Joseph Stiglitz is a crank. Someone like Christine Romer, who was Obama’s top economist, was completely wrong about the effects of his stimulus plan, yet she was rewarded with a plum job in the academy. In most every field, even astrology, being that wrong is disqualifying. In the field of economics, it has no effect whatsoever.
Now, it is fun to mock economics, but it really should be a useful field and play a positive role in public policy debates. There are useful observations that come from the field, with regards to how people respond to various economic policies. In theory, the economics shop should provide objective analysis of government performance, policy proposals and basic data about the state of the economy. Government is about trade-offs and with regards to domestic policy, economics should provide the details of those trade-offs.
Of course, there are reasons for the field being a useless mess. One reason is that economics is not science. It is a basic set of immutable truths swimming in a sea of pointless analysis, clever models that mean nothing and wishful thinking. Then there is the fact that there is money to be made in putting your stamp on the polices of one party or the other. When Christine Romer was selected by Obama, it was the golden ticket to elite of the New Keynesian Economics cult. She and her husband are now senior clerics.
There’s something else that can be teased out of this phenomenon and that is the corrosive effect of democracy on objectivity. Democratic forms of government lack legitimacy, because they start with the assumption that anyone can hold any office within the system. No one is going to respect the office of legislator if the job can be won and held by anyone. Even in a republican form of government where you have to pass through a process to stand for office, the assumption is that anyone can enter the process.
Unlike other forms of government that can rely on the blessing of the religious authority, democracy inevitably obliterates any threat to itself. Christians like to believe that the decline in faith corresponds with the rise in public corruption, but it is the reverse. The spread of democracy is what drives the decline in faith. Everywhere democracy becomes ascendant, religion moves into decline. This is an observation Muslims have made, which is why they oppose democracy, and specifically American liberal democracy.
That need for moral authority is still there, so inevitably democratic system evolve a civic religion and before long a civic clerisy. This intellectual elite, supported by the political elite that control the democratic institutions give their blessing to the whims of the office holders. The role of economist is that of the court astrologer in Persia or Merlin in the court of King Arthur. They appear to be consulting hidden knowledge to find the correct policy answer, but they always end up endorsing whatever their patron desires.
The other side of this coin is there is no reason for the political class to attack their court magicians, even when they are completely wrong, because they will need them to bless the next set of polices. The worst thing that happens is what you see with Romer. Her and her husband have lifetime positions at an elite university. Stiglitz gets treated like the senior shaman by all sides of the political elite, because someone has to fill that role. It’s a lot like how the Catholic Church handles pedophile priests, when you think about it.
“The spread of democracy is what drives the decline in faith.” I would add drives the decline in civilization as well. Just look at what it’s done to Jefferson’s magnificent creation in the hundred years since it was force fed upon us by the evil predecessors of greenspan, rubin, krugman, clintons’, bushs’ and the like.
Human beings require faith in their lives the same way a fish needs water. We are the only animal species that creates it’s own reality based upon belief rather than the physical limitations of our environment. This system is so powerful that in order to function our ‘soul’- the part of us that is neither body, nor mind, but the sentient passenger that speaks to us when we have done something good or bad-demands that we acknowledge it’s existence. For almost all of human existence we have relied on one form of God or another to explain this manifest phenomenon. If we were simply animals with needs what could possibly explain the voice inside that says ‘No!’ when we are offered the opportunity to steal something that we need to feed ourselves? Why feel guilty for attempting to procreate with any available partner when we are married? These are the correct choices in the animal kingdom because it promotes survival and to survive is the prime directive. Humans are driven by a more complex set of drives that are frequently at odds with our physical survival and at times threaten it, yet they prevail as a motivating force.
Why?
Because human beings have become a form of domestic livestock, partially directed by our own path, but also directed by other species that require our protection. By becoming a domesticated species we entered into a new line of adaptation- stable societies that remain rooted to place rather than as wandering clans made up of offspring and progenitors who seek resources where they find them. We learned how to create sustenance despite seasonal cycles, how to remain in locations permanently that should have exhausted available resources and to actually improve the long term viability of those environments to become useful and productive year round. It was that shift in our behavior that likely created the soul as a modifier and limiter to our animal drives. To explain it we either created gods or God and used that exterior motivator to help us understand why we should limit the much deeper, older and more pressing drives of our animal nature- so that we could continue to enjoy the bounty provided by living domesticated existences as societies by not being excluded.
Therein lies our present dilemma.
A powerful set of gods or God himself served as a check and reinforcement of our developing soul/conscience until it could serve itself through wisdom and self control. As anyone who has ever raised a child can tell you, it is a skill rather than an inherited trait and it must be developed under the guidance and tutelage of those who are older and wiser and exhibit the kind of self-control that leads to a stable society. The only way to insure it is to have a proxy for God or gods on hand throughout our development and maturation process, namely parents.
Our current society- for whatever reason- decided that stable two parent and extended generational family units were fungible with any form of “parenting” be it single motherhood, repeated reformation of family structure through divorce and remarriage, village style rearing as exhibited in inner cities and even foster and surrogate families or homosexual unions as if they were in fact the same thing as the form of family that has been in existence as long as we have been a species. Add to this the move towards and human centered society that has abandoned the gods/God almost wholesale in less than a century and you have the explanation for 90% of our problems.
The voice hasn’t gone away- the conscience/soul/God- only it’s source. Hence the desperate need of those who no longer have been raised in stable households who no longer believe in God to understand what is causing that voice inside their head and why they are so fundamentally disquieted by anyone whose understanding of the world and approach to living is at odds with their own. The State and the ones who control it’s power are absolutely aware of this reality and have done everything possible to manipulate it in order to become- in their view- managers/herders, human farmers of a livestock that is not that much different than cows, pigs or sheep. They understand that the most powerful tool that they have to maintain control is to rely on the much older and powerful drives of survival; food, shelter, sex and comfort. And so they have have supplanted the religion of the gods/God with the religion of The State wherein man himself is the soul, where this conscience is interchangeable with our mind/emotions and it’s soul purpose is to be fed, protected from the elements, sheltered, sated sexually and entertained in the time between those activities.
Anyone who tries to minimize the effects of conscience, of ideas like right and wrong, and to replace them with similar though completely contradictory concepts like laws and compliance to public perception is either ignorant of the reality of humanity and it’s adaptive course or very aware and manipulating that reality to their own ends.
The people you see in WalMart riding in heavy-duty baby carriages to shop for even more empty calories and pharmaceutical remedies for their existential woes are the same as the crowds of people clawing at the doors of the Supreme Court, tears of anguish rolling down their cheeks. They are starving for something that they cannot quite fathom, their hunger is deeper and more profound than that of a shipwreck survivor and the only solace they have, the only means of speaking back to the voice inside is not an appeal to God, but a petulant demand to the only parent they have every known, Uncle Sugar/The State
It’s all so easy to understand if we could only have the tiniest bit of perspective or if we knew even the smallest shred of factual reality concerning our origins and history, but as we have seen history is something that if it offends can be pulled down from it’s pedestal and smelted and our origins hidden in a web of lies by those who understand quite well how we function and how to control the livestock under their control.
“It’s all so easy to understand if we could only have the tiniest bit of perspective or if we knew even the smallest shred of factual reality concerning our origins and history…”
Job 31:35-36 KJV… “Oh that one would hear me! behold, my desire is, that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it upon my shoulder, and bind it as a crown to me.”
It’s a good day to be a platform reader!
The Economist that warned against the Fiat Currency are like Joseph McCarthy (warned that Communist were controlling the State Department and Hollywood); John L Casey (Cold Sun) and Robert Felix (warned that an Ice Age is next not Global Warming); Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (warned that the government, corporations, media, universities, churches etc were being taken over by New Age Cultural Communist); David Wilkerson and Dimitri Duduman (warned that God would remove His Hand of Grace from America if she did not repent).
They were all right.
“It’s a lot like how the Catholic Church handles pedophile priests, when you think about it”. Yes, and also the many pedophile jewish rabbis and the many protestant and many baptist child molesters. The Catholic Church does not hold a monopoly on crimes against children and others…
Let’s not forget the despicable practice of jewish “mohels” who give the newly-circumcised infant a “blow job” after the circumcision is completed.
Sick…
The entire system as it’s currently established relies on one thing and one thing only. An endless supply of cheap dough provided by the Fed. The government is only a candy dish for this dough.
A government based on hard money would have to be minimally 50% smaller than this one, and likely 80% smaller.
You nailed it. Keynes was lionized because the modern welfare state needed a high priest
Nicely done Zman. I have to admit that I didn’t think I would be interested but after HSF’s comment and post, I realize that this is a very good article. I do agree that they are phenomenally stupid and to cover up their own stupidity they lie through their teeth. They don’t even believe that banks need to be included in their silly little models of the economy. Try Steve Keen. He, at least, realizes that banks are a part of the economy.