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Guest Post: A Grand Unified Economic Theory?
Authored by Dambisa Moyo, originally posted at Project Syndicate,
Last month’s US government shutdown – the result of a partisan standoff in congressional budget negotiations – epitomizes the polarization that prevails in modern economic-policy debates.
On one side, John Maynard Keynes’s cohort argues that government intervention can help any economy grow its way out of crisis by spurring aggregate demand and, in turn, raising the employment rate. A country’s government, Keynesians contend, has the capacity – and responsibility – to solve many, if not all, of its economic problems.
On the opposite side, followers of the Austrian School of economic thought, especially the ideas of Friedrich Hayek, assert that limited government and free enterprise form the only viable path to liberty and prosperity. The market is the best arbiter of how to allocate scarce resources, and thus should serve as an economy’s main driver.
In recent years, this long-running debate has become increasingly contentious – and the costs of stalemate are mounting. In order to restore growth in developed economies, while sustaining strong GDP growth and reducing poverty in the developing world, a more unified approach to economic policymaking that draws from both traditions is needed.
Official responses to the global economic crisis highlight the interventionist model’s merits, proving that decisive government action can help to enhance efficiency and clear unbalanced markets, thereby protecting the economy from the demand shortfall caused by falling investment and rising unemployment. But the free market also has a crucial role to play, with longer-term, incentive-based policies catalyzing scientific and technological advancement – and thus boosting economies’ growth potential.
In determining how to promote innovation without sacrificing social protection, economists and policymakers should take a lesson from the field of physics. For nearly a century, physicists have attempted to merge the competing ideas of the field’s titans, including Wolfgang Pauli, the first physicist to predict the existence of neutrinos (the smallest particles of matter), and Albert Einstein, who explained the curvature of space-time. The so-called “theory of everything” would reconcile the inconceivably small with the unimaginably large, providing a comprehensive understanding of the universe’s physical properties.
Policymakers should be working to unite seemingly disparate theories to align policy decisions with the business cycle and the economy’s level of development. Such an approach should seek to protect economies from the destabilizing impacts of politically motivated policy changes, without impeding governments’ ability to correct dangerous imbalances. Officials must be at least as vigilant about reducing expenditure and withdrawing stimulus measures during periods of growth as they are inclined to introduce such policies during downturns.
To the extent that this approach reflects the view that policymaking is an art, not a science, that is a good thing: the world needs more flexibility in economic policymaking. But some might consider it a cause for concern, especially given growing suspicion of incentive-based economic policies in the wake of the global economic crisis.
Many blame the crisis on the decades-long ascendancy of a laissez faire approach to economic policymaking, and rightly credit government intervention with facilitating recovery. The tremendous economic success of countries like China, where hundreds of millions of people have escaped abject poverty in a single generation, has reinforced support for state-led systems.
In developed countries, too, many advocate a greater role for the state, in order to ensure that promised social benefits are delivered to rapidly aging populations. In fact, in many countries, the government’s capacity is already strained. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel has pointed out, though Europe is home to just 7% of the world’s population and produces 25% of the world’s wealth, it accounts for 50% of global welfare payments. When the United States is included, 11.5% of the global population receives 88% of the world’s welfare payments.
But relegating free-market principles to the past would simply create a new set of imbalances. Rather than allow extremists to continue to hijack economic-policy debates, policymakers must work to bridge competing schools of thought. Only then will productive discourse – the kind that does not end in government shutdown – be possible.
Keynes once wrote that he agreed with “almost all” of Hayek’s ideas. And Hayek found it “reassuring” to know that he and Keynes agreed “so completely.” This raises the question: What is really preventing economists and policymakers from devising – or even seeking – a unified theory of economics?
And if all that ignorance of credit's inevitable limit and to-ing and fro-ing made you nauseous... the following may help...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h97kbv4mbsc
"What is really preventing economists and policymakers from devising – or even seeking – a unified theory of economics?"
Because we have been divided and conquered. The people who profit from the current system know us quite well. Bernays figured out how to sell French cheese to Americans. Americans think cheese is dead. The French think cheese is alive. French tried to sell cheese in America and failed, with Americans preferring cheese flavored crap. Bernays came up with the idea of putting more exotic French cheese in ziplock-type bags and sales went through the roof. Same cheese, different packaging. Fox and MSNBC are both owned by giant corporations who set out to divide us. Same for WSJ and NYT. The Red Team and Blue Teams are specifically set up to divide us while they both pursue the same basic agenda. Everything they do is focus grouped. We are sold politics and ideology using Bernays' techniques of appealing to our base instincts and beliefs. They figure out which words will resonate with each teammember. Every day we are sold a bill of goods and we are divided and nothing changes.
You're describing the old school Fabian Socialist meme. Barry never misses an opportunity to divide the country along class, race or gender. He unites in misery, division and classification, it's all he knows. So what's your suggestion for "change" from this centrally planned nightmare? Barack is not Trayvon sweetie.
Thanks for proving my point. Socialism = evil. Obama = Trayvon. Blue Team = division. The whole point of my post was to point out that the Red Team/Blue Team division is the problem, and here you come back with "Blue Team bad." Sure as fuck worked on you.
Give yourself a star. Socialism = evil. It's not red or right, team playa, it's right or wrong.
Yes, binary thought is the answer to why we cannot change things. You nailed it. Then again, I suppose you were not intending to be ironic.
Your choice of "changes" has been fckng humanity over for a long time now Lola. Ultimately every choice we make is binary. btw -I would love to nail you.
Socialism disincentivizes people. I can see that we feed people and not let them starve but incentives not to work such as free health care or heavily subsidized healthcare and all the other freebies available bring out the inherent laziness and anti community behavior in a large percentage of the population.
the elites trying to "divide and conquer" is a meme of leftists trying to convince peopke like me that more government and more taxes is good thing.
Maybe it is partly true, but i reject socialist solutions. How about you, Mr Rand, unite with rightwing populists if you are so concerned with divide and conquer. Or does "uniting" mean us right wing populists libertarians have to give up our ideas? Lol
Socialism also includes interstate highways, county roads, airports, NASA (GPS), etc. And I voted for Ron Paul (wrote him in on my FL ballot). I don't agree with all of his ideas, but I supported him for President precisely because he is the kind of reset we need. Don't let the creepy whispering one mislead you. That one is a Team player through and through. Pure ideology is an answer to nothing other than continued division. Demonization of "isms" and grouping together welfare for takers with roads for commerce. It's that very way of thinking that got us into this mess.
That is another argument. If I dont believe the government should grow larger and redistribute income even more than it does already, then I want to live in Somalia, according to "redistributors," if you dont like to use "isms"
I am cool with interstate highways. I bet private industry could probably give us GPS cheaper and the money saved could be allOcated elsewhere
You are one of the few who sees that there is not a "right" or "wrong" answer. That's my whole point. I have said repeatedly that I believe in smaller government. I voted for RP because he wants to massively decrease the MIC, get rid of NSA, end the nanny state, and otherwise reset our whole concept of government, but not get rid of it. RP goes too far in my view in his trust of the pure free market, but I voted for him anyway. Most ideologues would never vote for a candidate with whom they agree on many points but disagree with others, which is why we find ourselves here. They vote instead for people who promise them everything and deliver nothing. Reagan would be a good example.
Do you even hear yourself? You say you voted for Ron Paul? Just yesterday you blasted libertarians as buffoons for reading Ayn Rand.
Actually Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul have some things in common and are willing to work together in their common interests.
If Mr let them eatRand wants to make welfare and SNAP people work for their money and accept a norplant for the duration of dependency then I could support welfare in that circumstance
Lots of fuckin trash on the road. Get to work ho's
If you work for "the money" it's not welfare, right? maybe I'm a little dense. It doesn't really matter who you support at this point. Maybe who you supported will matter later, who knows?
See that is the problem you retards can not even keep a straight line of thought without getting fucking lost, and you still have the balls to blame some of us for the woes of the world while you are running around pointing guns in our faces like the douchebags that you are....
Why do you discriminate so much? Why does your ego demand that everyone live in your ant colony run by your rules?
Let everyone be free from your hive mentality. Neither you nor any of your kind are gods - more like precursors to a Borg Collective.
Oh, just a reminder, anything useful produced by government can be done better, and with more variety, by the free market.
What you and your ilk fail to understand is that we will always live by someone's rules. Look at history. But keep preaching your unicorn view of reality and watch as the oligarchs take over the world while you engage in black and white thinking appropriate to Freshman class philosophy.
My point is that as long as you and your ilk believe that way "we will always live by someone's rules", whoever is in charge of the Human Ant Colony.
You can dump your black and white thinking bullshit. Everybody thinks differently and should be free to do so as long as they do not aggress against others. Otherwise, we would certainly end up as a Borg Collective.
Nice rhetoric. To demonstrate how absurd it is, let's pretend you were talking about the slavery issue shortly before slavery was abolished (as many were):
"What you and your ilk fail to realize is that the black people will always be slaves, look at history."
Many people probably said just that, but they were wrong.
"Pure ideology is an answer to nothing other than continued division"
Sounds like something the idiots who ruined the economy in Atlas Shrugged would have said.
Maybe there's never a right or wrong, a red or blue, or whatever, answer. Maybe my path is different from yours. Maybe our paths conflict. So what? There's no such thing as a centrally planned solution to conflicting paths. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to see that a central "solution" can only result in the oppression of all those governed by it.
edit: I find no fault with this contributors' musings. I find no revelation in it either. Just sayin', why the low ratings?
That's the problem with our modern western perception of moral equivalence. Past lessons are all blurred into sameness. Maybe there is no right or wrong path, maybe we all rediscover it for ourselves, over and over and over again through the ages. Maybe, a centrally planned solution is not the problem. Who knows? Even if "central planners" have tried to plan humanitys' course before and failed, it's not going to stop us from trying again.
Yeap, those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. But, I have to ask, who is the "us" you refer to in the last sentence?
us cultured meeces dressed in human clothing, you know, the "developed" meeces, we always go for the same cheese in the same meece trap.
There's nothing wrong with central planning so long as you have an option to opt out. If I don't like the Walmart management, I don't have to work for Walmart or buy anything from them. That is when central planning is fine. When it is not fine is when you are forced to comply with it, and such is the case with every government on the planet.
Most politicians have law degrees, and both the words "politician" and "lawyer" are almost dirty words. Coincidence? I think not. I think it has more to do with the fact that people don't like being lied to, stolen from, raped, or murdered, and that these things tend to follow in the wake of those two professions. Look up how many people have been estimated to have died as a result of "democide".
What a person should do is mind their own business. One person's set of beliefs may seem rational and good to them but be completely stupid and evil to others.
They only have them because somewhere at some time, those beliefs promoted one or more of their ancestor's survival in some way. Well la-di-da, that gives them the right to force their beliefs on everyone else.
People should keep their personal beliefs in their personal space inside their personal head.
Anus, I've sometimes thought you were an anus (takes one to know one) but on this particular point we agree completely.
Well I'm an atheist, (p)anarchist, avenist, anti-death, aspie asshole. And I'm for the common man when he's not under the the influence of the horribly addictive deadly drug called government. What's not to like?
Thanks, also.
I'm a deist, but that shouldn't divide us. I appreciate where you're coming from. I thought I might be an atheist, or even an agnostic for awhile, but then I realized that the fucking idiots (not directed at you) I'm surrounded by could not have created the absolutely wonderful, dynamic, and ultimately, multi-variate world I live in.
I'm in the camp of intelligent design. I dunno how it happened, or how it went so wrong- I just know I didn't create myself.
If anything, I think of time as the creator.
(It appears that the probably paid trolls have you, LetThemEatRand, on their priority list of those to automatically vote down?)
It's all Bullshit!!!
Yep. So, my advice to you is the same as my father's advice to me: pick a level of bullshit you can live with and stick to it.
That attitude was maybe more workable, back then, NoDebt. However, now we are much more obviously under an exponentially increasing level of bullshit, which makes it practically impossible to pick a level you could live with anymore.
"For nearly a century, physicists have attempted to merge the competing ideas". Hardly an endorsement, and that is in the tight logical, physical world, not the emotional, people oriented economic world.
Plus, Doesn't this assume that economics is a science?
What I see is two circle jerks going on, each with different hands. How are you going to reconcile that? No Hands?
There is a simple solution: leave other people alone, they're not your property.
Wha-huhhhhh??
Wednesday humor?
Government, all and any, are nothing more than a cabal of people using a monopoly, they hope, of violence to steal and kill all within their domain. Any and all beliefs otherwise, especially after over 6,000 years of human history, is foolish at best.
Slightly over 6,000 years. I hate science and reason.
True enough kchrisc, however, I would put your view inside of this context:
EVERYONE has some power to rob, and power to kill to back that up. Governments were the result of selection pressures operating through human conflicts to develop the social organizations that were the best at doing that, then and there. Warfare was a response to chronic political problems which are inherent in the nature of all life. Warfare was the development of the principles and methods of organized crime on a larger scale. That development of the powers of the biggest bullies went way back before human beings evolved. Governments were necessarily the biggest organized gangs of criminals, that were controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals, in any place and time. The ruling classes did NOT create the chronic political problems, they merely developed a set of solutions which benefited them. The THEORY of democracies operating through the rule of law is still the best THEORY about how to handle the fact that EVERYONE has the power to rob and kill, and that human beings necessarily operate as robbers in their environment. Therefore, the last 6,000 or so years of Neolithic Civilization did NOT create the chronic political problems, and there are no good solutions which can be based upon deliberately ignoring that those chronic political problems will always exist.
ummmmmmm. "because the bankruptcy Detroit wasn't good enough"? i mean these folks are the brainiacs...why don't they tell us? they're the ones who got straight A's, went to MIT and have given us "Quantitative Easing." What does "it" actually mean...IN PRACTICE. I mean "this ain't lab work anymore" and all i've been trying to do is understand the difference between theory ("no we are not monetizing the debt") and practice ("the point is that jobs aren't being created in sufficient quantity, we want to create inflation, i've never even heard of modern portfolio theory nor do I even know what it means when to spend ten billion on a project only to discover it to be "stranded" or "uneconomic.") http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E
Austrian Economics is the only 'school' that really reveals the workings of man's economic activities. All other 'schools' are nothing more than apologists and propagandists for power. Examples include: Keynes, Greeanspan, Bernake, Krugman, etc.
Not that I am saying that anyone should agree with me, but most people have been exposed/taught Keynesian economics and should at least expose themselves to the "other side."
The problem is not what Keynes wrote, but how it has been perverted (sic) for expropriation or pork politics.
Keynes in his original thesis suggested that Government should be only THE LAST RESORT, and that persistant use of Tax conduits to warp Demand will lead to economic scarring in both industries dependant on Government largese to cover their own structural deficits & malinvestment for ego projects vs. real-return IRR.You can crank out all the goods in the world, even invent a damn Fusion reactor but it won't mean shit if people lack the knowledge and purchasing power to actually use the damn thing. He even sourced 'new energy projects' in his lectures as a case study in where plouging gobs of kapital will permantly screw up both the consumption habits of people and how they view Government. Go figure (How's the Ethanol subsidies working out for MENA food inflation and gasolines prices these days ? lol).
During those periods of growth, and when G should not be needed the G should be kept to a minimum in the GNP (GDP didn't exist yet) and I & S should be the key drivers for L's consumption. If G does anything it's only role should be as a kickstarter, with immediate repayment for projects where there is zero immediate economic revenues, such as National Railroads / Infrastructure vs. Regional cartels and more importantly building a warchest of Funds or SWF for when shit hits the fan. IMF and by extension World Bank is exactly this, a policy instrument to be only used for when countries are on the occam razor of nationalist redistribution or blowout debts due to rampant government ego building.
That last sentence did not sit well with Keynsian public policy schools which did not like the whole aspect that their mighty policy wonk work must sit on the shelf for 90% of business cycles. So they just assumed that the market is in constant economic turmoil, and government must be constantly in a state of intervention. Thus giving them relevance & so, the cottage industry of Keynsian schools was born post-1940.
And so, here we are.
Heynes & Hayek both agreed that
1. 90% of the market forces are best used to build themselves up & learn from mistakes on their own.
2. Flow is inferior to Stock of Confidence which is itself based on the very simple fact that transparency in capital & corporate governance is the biggest thing going for the Capital Markets. Take that away ? and it's just a pure shit show.
What they disagreed on:
1. Hayek was fine with watching the whole thing burn down. If sufficent personal savings are set aside, assuming all Labour is optimized, then the people should naturally be able to pick up the pieces and restart the system again without a government telling them how to restart trade & value add services.20/20 hindsight says that not all AFL-CIO employees are smart enough to NOT be holding a diversified basket of 5% gold, 20% A-bonds, 40% index, rest = yield. Let alone be competent enough to save enough for their registered Pay-Go retirement plans.
2. Keynes, having seen the fun that was the Jewish polgroms & spectacular collapses in East Indian and MENA stock bubbles in the 1890-1920's disagreed that if the market corrected 40%, people would rather revert to mob mentality with feudal structures vs. a mercantalist state. Way easier to blame a bunch of guys in suits vs. explaining to a bunch of squibs that investing in 300x P/E companies was NOT sound market strategy. At least that was his opinion to his death. A dead currency is far better than a dead nation, or a nation where half of the nutjobs decide to scapegoat the other half for all the problems every 30 years. The guy also ran a fund for a few years, including having the Queen's trust fund as an LP client. So he also had that going for him in getting his view out.
Since no government was not too keen on letting market forces do their thing; when market forces in the mainstream media were at the time calling for rabid labour organization (and plenty of lamp post hangings), it seems Keynes supply side offered them the best idea at the time.
So here we are:
New theory would need to
1. Figure out why people need to get financially educated. Clearly throwing big boobs and sound board funnies inbetween stock charts did not really help anyone become more educated. Neither did wire rooms along Buttonwood square.
2. How to educate people in a way that they are actually invested in financial education with the same passion as a bunch of 4-channers spend on Perez Hilton or Call of Duty 10. Making the stock market more like a video game definitly did nothing to improve market price discovery (lol HFT, zero trade comissions and high margin's).
3. Ensure that the modern IMF (whatever that becomes ex-USD reserve base) actually stays as a power battery for big problems. Like, in those rare circumstances that a BRIC crisis threatens to blow up the world system ie. 1998. Everything else ? That's a provincial matter. Currency needs to be locked down, like markets the cheat codes can't be used to evade responsibility for bad fiscal policy or special projects such as the Clintonian Homes for Everyone adventure.
4. Figure out a way to restructure economics to be a reactionary discipline similar to Medicine and less like a policy haven for failed mathmaticians.
5. Throwing Equity, PIK and option instruments out as an evil system would be disengenious to their concept. Their use, and misuse however is a big problem. However, how does one tell a propeller head their 20 years of quant math is too dangerous for simple TSLA tweeters ? Without an NWO no less.
meh, back to the lolcats. Maybe Zombie McNamara can fix the mess.
Utopian solutions never work. Check out venezuela.
You clearly dont understand the insurance function of derivatives and how they can lower volatility.
Dont blame derivatives for a problem that is so much larger, government monopolization of the money supply and suppressing interest rates to the point where excess and unpayable debt built up and capital was grossly misallicated.
Official responses to the global economic crisis highlight the interventionist model’s merits?
Pat them on the back for a crisis they mostly manufactured and are currently doing their best to perpetuate? Too much debt is the problem? They added more debt. Too much currency debasement? They followed it up with more debasement. Too much deficit spending? Moar. I don't get why people are still searching for a perfect economic system in a world of imperfect people anyways.
It's already proven to be extremely difficult to come up with a grand unified theory in the hard-sciences (well-mathematically-defined) like quantum physics and general relativity [if it's possible at all -- we don't yet have a unified theory in physics], let alone in economics [which has to be based at least in part on human psychology, which almost has to be more difficult to precisely formulate, I would think].
This video just about formulates the situation as precisely mathematically [and as well] as I have seen done anywhere else.
What a socialist. I pulled out the key comments.
"Many blame the crisis on the decades-long ascendancy of a laissez faire approach to economic policymaking, and rightly credit government intervention with facilitating recovery."
WHAT BULLSHIT!
Governments create moral hazard in banking and finance then blame laissez faire economics?
Then the government gets to take credit for fixing distortions that government policy caused?
I want some of whatever dude is smoking. Gotta be good shit.
I hate to admit it on ZH, but I agree somewhat, if not more so.
If it was really "laissez faire"; what was all of that stuff being done by the FHA, HUD, ACORN, Fannie, Freddy, Et. al.? Don't try to convince me that trying to subsidize home ownership [among certain favored groups] hasn't contributed to the mess.
Didn't allowing the biggest banks to re-securitize and re-sell the same toxic mortgage-debt, instead of being sued for not making the toxic mortgage loans in the first place, only make things much worse than they would have been otherwise?
And if you think one level higher than just MBS you can see that government suppression and monopolization of the interest rate for the last 30 years caused excess debt everwhere and grossly misallocated capital, not just in MBS but everwhere, thus proving once again the Austrian Theory of the credit cycle and recessions. This one on steroids.
FIFY - Unless anyone in here wants to claim a majority of borrowers didn't take advantage of the interest deduction available for income taxes while mortgaging their home... Then you have to realize this is subsidization of home ownership and certainly led to more people mortgaging than saving to buy outright. The part where poor people had the poison carrot put within their reach only came after all the rest of the middle class had been suckered into mortgaging a home (please note, I didn't say "buying" a home) to keep the ponzi going a little longer.
The free market works with what it's got. In this case it has corrupt bankers and politicians and miss/un-educated consumers who won't stand up for their rights against the plutocracy, who then work to try impose their ideals on others i.e. - everyone should mortgage a home, not realizing what the plutocracy has in store for them. Free markets co-exist with government intervention. It is a feedback loop that just works with the inputs it is given.
The author is lost in space. Oh, the piece is written by "Dambisa Moyo". Maybe that explains it, but doesn't explain why Tyler would post such horse$#!+.
"Dambisa," to put it simply enough for you to understand, Keynes is full of $#!+ and Adam Smith, Von Mises, Hayek and Rothbard accurately describe how only individual liberty, constitutionally-limited government and free enterprise economics achieve prosperity. You don't "unify" diametrically opposed theories, only one of which is correct.
To get un-clueless, start by watching "Overview of America" on YouTube and reading "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat. Then, when you grow up, start reading ZeroHedge.
Lol. Tylers like to troll their own blog every once in a while to rile us up
pseudo partisan standoff in congressional budget negotiations
There, fixed it for ya.
Yep. They all like to spend and enlarge the government.
Indeed, "policymaking is an art, not a science," because it is based on being able to operate through lying about what is happening, in order for those liars to enjoy their relative social success. The REAL history has been the money system based upon the murder system. Warfare was the oldest and best developed social science, but paradoxically so, because success in warfare depended up backing up deceits with destruction. The economic systems were constructed on the foundations of the systems which were selected to survive through the crucible of conflicts in warfare. Therefore, the REAL history was civilization built on successful deceits in their murder systems, upon which was built the successful frauds in the monetary systems.
The most successful economists are typically a special brand of professional liar and immaculate hypocrites, whose kinds of bullshit are favoured by the biggest bullies, who were benefiting from the established systems of organized lies, operating organized robberies. The governments, controlled by the banksters, have created an economic system which has become more than 99% based on legalized lies, backed by legalized violence. I agree that "economists and policymakers should take a lesson from the field of physics." However, what that means is that economics needs to go through a profound series of paradigm shifts, the general of nature of which was explained in the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn. Of course, in the real world, that is practically impossible, since EVERYTHING IS BASED ON TRIUMPHANT LIES, WHICH DO NOT WANT MORE TRUTH REVEALED.
IF economics was to be a rational science, which could be reconciled with other sciences, then it would have to approach human civilizations as energy systems. HOWEVER, when one actually does that, it becomes clearer WHY civilizations were controlled by the people who were the best at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence, and therefore, WHY all the most socially successful economists promote bullshit social stories which are approved by the ruling classes. IF economics was to become a more rational science, then it would develop political economy in a way that fits inside human ecology. Of course, that IS already the case, however, again, to restate the points in the first paragraph above, the central concepts in human ecology are about the death controls operated through the murder systems, i.e., through warfare and militarism. Since success in warfare depended upon deceits, the REAL situation was that human civilizations operated through the maximum possible deceits, which was WHY we ended up with a monetary system based on the maximum possible frauds.
That is the context in which I frame my answer to the question "What is really preventing economists and policymakers from devising – or even seeking – a unified theory of economics?" The basic fact is that there are combined money/murder systems, in which the money has no meaning without the murder to back it up. Therefore, MONEY IS MEASUREMENT BACKED BY MURDER. Since the most socially successful economists operate within the frame of reference that was constructed through thousands of years of the biggest bullies' bullshit social stories becoming dominate, and they continue to only be successful to the degree to which they continue to operate within that frame of reference, it is extremely doubtful that any of them are going to go through the kind of intellectual scientific revolution in economics, which would enable it to perceive itself as an energy system. That is reinforced by the ways that the currently accepted understanding of energy systems has also been a victim of the triumph of the biggest bullies' in the past, which was expressed in many ways, including the insertion of an arbitrary minus sign into the entropy equations in thermodynamics and information theory.
The problems we face are extremely difficult to imagine any possible practical solutions for, since our civilization is already almost totally dominated and controlled by a long history of triumphant deceits and frauds, which are presumed to be good things, and defended, while they are explained in slightly different ways by the currently recognized schools of economics, that ALL still operate within the same basic frame of reference, which is based on deliberately ignoring the ecological situation, and especially deliberately ignoring the ways that death controls back up the debt controls. Therefore, we have the current situation of runaway debt slavery, developing numbers which have become debt insanities. The only real resolutions of those problems are going to be based on how the death control systems change in the future. At present, it looks like the runaway debt insanity is going to eventually cause death insanities. That is especially probable because there is almost nobody who was successful within the established systems who is willing and able to go through sufficient paradigm shifts in order to recognize that.
Progress in basic sciences like physics, through a series of profound paradigm shifts, mostly which resulted in developing better unitary mechanisms in order to understand natural laws better, which then resulted in better technologies, which actually worked, have been channeled through the already established social pyramid systems, to result in becoming trillions of times more capable and powerful, at being more dishonest, and backing that up with more violence. Therefore, we have relatively recently developed a globalized Neolithic Civilization, which has manifested as electronic frauds, backed by atomic bombs.
In that context, the relatively trivial "polarization that prevails in modern economic-policy debates" is almost nothing compared to the deeper irreconcilable social polarization that is accumulating, to produce problems that are trillions of times worse than anything which has ever existed before in known human history. That is especially acute since almost everyone who operates within the current paradigms of "economics," including both the more successful mainstream economists, who most advance the bullshit theories that the biggest bullies most approve of, as well as the controlled opposition alternative economists, who offer slightly different perspectives, that still remain within the same frame of reference, are BOTH practically guaranteed to continue to deliberately ignore everything that I have written above.
It should be obvious that economics ought to be understood within ecology, and that the laws of economics ought to be a subset of evolutionary ecology. It should be obvious that human civilization are energy systems, which should be understood in ways which are consistent with all other energy systems. HOWEVER, actually doing that reveals WHY human civilization is controlled by the most dishonest and violent people, and therefore, WHY human civilization is actually based upon the maximum possible deceits and frauds, which can be socially sustained, through the history of force backed frauds.
At the present time, those paradoxes are so severe that the most probable futures are that human beings' relative progress in sciences such as physics, will still NOT be followed in politics, which means that human civilization shall continue to use technologies that are trillions of times more powerful and capable in ways that are increasingly insane, self-destructive madness. It is an open question, at the present time, whether the understanding of political economy could make sufficiently profound breakthrough paradigm shifts to enable the human experiment to continue to advance, rather than cause its own psychotic breakdowns. The quintessential problem is whether or not enough human beings could make greater use of information, and therefore, develop higher consciousness about themselves, and especially about how and why they actually developed their currently existing money/murder systems, whereby their debt controls depend upon their death controls. Since all of that is actually being done now through the maximum possible deceits and frauds, and all of the most successful people operating within those systems are the best professional liars and immaculate hypocrites regarding what they are doing, the current prospects for sufficient breakthrough paradigm shifts in economics look extremely dismal at the present time.
There is no doubt in my mind that everything that I have said above will continue to be deliberately ignored by those people who are currently successful within the established systems. Nobody who is anybody within the world of economics, politics, or the mass media, etc., will pay any attention to what I have outlined above, which is why it appears relatively useless to bother to write this. The established systems are based on the exponential growth of deceits and frauds, wherein almost everyone who benefited from doing that in the past are relatively the least able and willing to face the facts that such exponential growth can not continue forever, but rather, some new human ecology must evolve, somehow, in one way or another, sooner or later. Since our actual human ecology evolved on the foundation of the maximum possible deceits and frauds, the kinds of intellectual scientific breakthroughs which are apparently necessary in domains like economics, politics, and militarism, are about as practically impossible to have in any good ways as one can possibly imagine!
>What is really preventing economists and policymakers from devising – or even seeking – a unified theory of economics?
Because if they had to have a consistent policy, they couldn't steal anywhere near as effectively as they do.
the problem is government.
the sooner people get over their cognitive dissonance and realise it the better off we all will be.
if you want to fix the economy, get the government out of money and banking.
there is simple solutions to our problems the policy makers are working to blind us from this not fix our problems.
Since the repeal of Glass Steagal under Billary Clinton - Governemnt = money and banking.... and vice versa.
Dambisa Moyo - whether or not that is your real name.....fuck off.
"Last month’s US government shutdown – the result of a partisan standoff in congressional budget negotiations – epitomizes the polarization that prevails in modern economic-policy debates."
The only "stand off" was that Obama would not delay the implementation of ObamaCare. Seems like the Cruz missle was very correct. What part of "ceiling" as a line in the sand don't you get?
I really love how Lame Stream media has reported that fact. There is no "polarization" ... there are those who want to continue to grow / receive Governemnt $$ / debt, and those who would rather individuals get to determine how their $$ are spent.