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The Problem With Letting Academics Run the Economy
There is a common adage that “book learning” is not the same as “street smarts.” In the case of economics PhDs like Janet Yellen, we could adapt this to say that “theory” is not the same as “reality.”
Janet Yellen is a career academic. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Career academics play a critical role in terms of both research and teaching future generations of leaders.
However, unlike most career academics, Janet Yellen is in charge of the US economy. In this light, one has to ask aloud, “why would you put someone with absolutely zero experience in creating jobs, growing a business, lending money, hiring, firing, etc. in charge of the US economy.”
Has Yellen ever had to personally decide whether or not to expand a business? Has Yellen ever had to develop a marketing campaign to increase sales? Has she ever had to concern herself with employment benefits for her staff?
Let’s take the other component of the Fed’s work, the financial markets, into consideration. Has Yellen ever managed a portfolio of any significant size? Has she ever guided a trading team? Has she ever even run a bank? Has she ever had to unwind a bankrupt institution?
The answer to all of these is no. And yet, we’re supposed to entrust her to guide the economy. This would be like asking someone who has never even run a 5K but has read a lot of books on running to win the New York marathon.
We do not mean to pick on Yellen in particular. Indeed, she is not unique in her total lack of qualifications for the job of Fed Chair.
Bernanke was another career academic with next to no real world experience. We’ve since discovered that ALL of his theories on economics misguided. Indeed it is difficult to find a single economic metric that has improved since 2008 other than household net worth which has largely been driven by gains in the stock market.
1) The labor participation rate is virtually the same.
2) Median incomes have fallen.
3) Real unemployment (not the phony official number) is only marginally better.
4) Costs of living are significantly higher.
And yet, Bernanke spent over $4 trillion trying to prove his misguided theories. It was the single most expensive academic study ever performed. Unfortunately it punished billions of people (the Fed’s inflationary policies lead to record food prices which incited starvation and civil unrest globally).
Not once during the five year period between 2008 and 2013 when he retired, did Bernanke change course. Any normal person would have reconsidered their positions after $1 trillion or $2 trillion didn’t do the trick. The Arab spring, record high food prices, food stamp usage and the like would also have given most folks pause. Not Bernanke. And apparently not Yellen either (she was the Fed’s second in command for most of Bernanke’s tenure).
We all know how this will work out: another, even larger crisis is looming on the horizon. And this time around, the Fed has already used up virtually all of its ammo. When and how it will hit, no one knows. But the fact that a mere 10% drop in stock prices from RECORD HIGHS was enough to induce panic around the globe should tell you all you need to know about the fragility of the financial system.
Be warned…
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"This would be like asking someone who has never even run a 5K but has read a lot of books on running to win the New York marathon"
Edit:
This would be like asking someone who has never even run a 5K but has read a lot of books on running to win the New York marathon written by people who have never run a marathon and educated by people who have also never run a marathon.
You don't. But the Fed Chairman is not "in charge" of the US economy. The Fed exists to control the liquidity in the banking system, by setting the cost of borrowing reserves from the Central Bank. There isn't another job that prepares anyone for this job. So a career academic is just as good as anyone else for it.
Ah...no
TOTAL FUCKING DOUCHEBAGS, MOTHERFUCKING IDIOTS, ANTI-AMERICAN ASSHOLES, ARROGANT BOUGHT OFF CUNTS ARE RUNNING THE COUNTRY....
COME ON....SAY IT SAY IT SAY IT!!!
R.I.P. SAM KINNISON
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uqjznmTp80
Yellen is a just a PR man.Plain and simple and kinda looks like a hobbet. same gig as the krugster.
Man the world could sure use some staight up candor at times like these. Looks to me lots of folks wish they could but cant. yet
US Citizen, Press TV reporter dead in car crash near Syria 2 days after Turkey calls her a spy http://wtfrly.com/2014/10/20/us-citizen-press-tv-reporter-dead-in-car-cr...
THE TYRANNY OF REASON
What reason?
Lost me at
"Janet Yellen is a career academic. This is not necessarily a bad thing"
The Problem With Letting Academics Run the Economy=The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. There. That was too easy.
Bankers and business men, in this era of unprosecuted fraud, are just a bad idea. It is not necessary to know how to run a business to run an economy. The rule of supply and demand does not require one open a store. Stable economy doesn't require much at all; it is stopping the deregulation, aberrant and shadey business deals (monopolies and unfair practices). I say, we have nothing to lose at this point, bring them on in and give them the job. Salvage is all that is left, those in charge must be having a good laugh at the display we are providing them. Ban Harvard/Yale graduates if you want to get anywhere close to saving your country.
In my latest blog I wrote about Say's law, Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction and Keynesian aggregate supply aggregate demand. I combined them and talked about the pseudo science of economics.
Economists seem like scientists but they are not. Their theories never stand up to rational experimentation and observation.
You can read it here; http://incapp.org/blog/?p=2392
Some time ago I wrote an article that said we should expect dismal job creation to continue. To those touting recent a lower unemployment rate as proof the economy is on the mend I point to the large numbers of Americans who have dropped from the work force. Few people in Washington have ever had the responsibility of having to meet a payroll or run a business and this is why they continue to screw small business into the ground.
Over the last several decades a "bigger is better" mentality that often yields huge competitive advantages to larger firms has taken hold. This business model also contains several flaws and is unbalanced. It tends to suck all the air out of the room killing its competition and using them as its primary fuel for growth. If people do not produce and earn money they cannot consume or pay taxes. More on the subject of how these making the rules are destroying our ecomomy in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-reason-dismal-job-creation-will.html
my life experiences has been, people with 100's of thousands of dollars in education, have their phd's and what ever and are geting paid by the govt. are losers.
they don't fit into an american lifestyle, most people with phd's are working in the market place, and don't feel the need to control everyone around them.
yellens no different than obama, they were selected to be the carnival barkers, and take orders, but you can publicly look powerful.
easy money = good credit scores
.
serve your masters
That's what attracts them in the first place--easy money. Add in non-accountablility and guaranteed perks and you have a tick. Like all parasites, they attract their friends to the feeding station. "Career academic" is a cover story. Obama was said to be a brilliant professor of Constitutional law--does he strike anyone as smart? His friend who spent time with the Weathermen destroying property is another academic--what has he produced to improve education? Soros went to LSE--would you hire him as a business advisor? Both Bush presidents went to Yale--what did that get us? Just because they attended or graduated from a fancy school doesn't make them smart. It makes them well connected.
They get lost in :
https://www.academia.edu/8872647/Non-Aristotelian_Universes
Another question to ask is, “How did idiots and bandits gain control of the Federal Reserve – the “guardian” of the reserve currency of the world?” Why should we ask this? It’s because during Dec of 2007, the Fed unnecessarily and consciously sold $25 billion of US Treasury securities which obliterated bank reserves of the American banking system and, simultaneously, caused issued FR notes to become less than completely collateralized; this led to a condition 14 months later when the dollar was only 54% collateralized. (Issued paper dollars are collateralized by US Treasury securities as paper currency used to be collateralized by gold.) And, no one noticed this aspect of the FR’s role in precipitating the financial debacle that brought financial markets around the globe to their knees.
With 6 (going on 7) years of near zero interest rates, the Fed has created an economic environment that has been/is extremely friendly to mal investments; and they must be corrected before the economy can return to what it was before zero rates. And, that doesn’t even get close to fixing the economy: mal investments fostered during the Great Depression have never been corrected; they were papered over by artificial stimulation of WWii (and murder of 10-20 million young white males).
All that we have to do now is redress grievances that have accumulated for more than 80-100 years.
But, so what? All that matters now is that there is no way to stop the storm that thunders on the horizon; and that you stand to profit from the inauguration of the next dark age…
But there is one thing you over looked. I mean, what good is it if you don’t have the health and physical condition of a teenager to enjoy your profits?
That is, you forgot to reduce your biological age.
If you’ll follow my health regimen, you can reduce your biological age as much as 50 years – as I have done.
My health regimen involves no actors, no cosmetics, no wishful thinking; instead, I support it with real action. I’ve had many former pro and college players tell me that if I played competitive ball at the level of a major college, I would “wreck” or “lead” the league and hit “0.700”. Players at this level range around the age of 20; I’m 70 years of age. Who else on the planet can do that? Why do they say that? Perhaps, it’s the fact that I’m currently putting on a show hitting 117-121 mph pitches (of 25 pitches, I routinely hit 15-20 into fair territory); major league hitters can hardly match my numbers.. as they struggle to hit 95 mph pitches. Go to YouTube, search “1668-85” for verification; it will lead you to a web page that explains my regimen in some detail.
I don’t promise to make anyone a professional athlete, or more beautiful… just give them the health and physical condition of what they should have had as a teenager.
This article is off base. The only thing Yellen runs is the "printing press", and the trucks that deliver the "freshly printed" straight to the banksters. I woulldn't call that anywhere close to running an economy.
It seems silly to me to describe the superficial circumstances that the public face of an established system was an academic, as that, therefore, academics are running the economy. The economy actually runs as systems of organized lies operating robberies, in which the best organized gang of criminals control the government, and always have, with the only changes being who happened to be the best organized gangs of criminals which were doing that from time to time. Some academics were selected to be the public faces that could perform as the best professional liars and hypocrites as the figureheads of the established systems. The roles of the approved and promoted academics is to spout the kinds of bullshit which are approved of by the covert government, which devolved along the lines of who was historically best at being dishonest and backing that up with violence. Since those approved academics are going to deliberately ignore all of the most important social facts, what they actually have to say approaches interplanetary levels of LIES BY OMISSION.
The basic problem with triumphant systems of political economy based on enforced frauds is the longer term paradoxes, which develop their contradictions at an exponentially accelerating rate, that lies which become socially successful because they are effectively backed up with violence still continue to be lies. Intellectual mercenaries, who are promoted in order to promote the approved bullshit social stories, are gradually driven before the winds of increasing social insanities, towards severe social storms, due to the ways that no amount of violence used to back up lies ever makes those lies become true, but only makes that society become more criminally insane overall.
The deeper problems with these paradoxical ways that intellectual mercenaries have proportionately successful personal careers, depending upon the degree to which they skillfully operate the crucial LIES BY OMISSION regarding the social facts, is that they must necessarily do that more and more ... Of course, since everyone else was proportionately successful within society to the degree that they were able to also operate inside of the established systems of lies backed by violence, there is almost nobody else who is going to call them on that, and certainly not on any sufficiently deeper levels of realities which matter.
Human realities are always necessarily systems of lies operating robberies, which paradoxically become more socially successful by doing so. That develops quite the intense paradox that social pyramid systems have worked themselves into! Since social success is based on backing up lies with violence, promoting more radical truths is about the most unsuccessful thing one could do. The careers of the best professional liars and immaculate hypocrites advance, because their tasks are to provide better lies, while they can simply coast on the work of others who provide better violence to back that up.
Most of the comments above offered more insight that the original article. However, it follows from understanding that the real world IS controlled by enforced frauds, that more radical truth about IT does not make any difference. The figurehead of the Fed stands on top of the shoulders of several generations of the best organized crime capturing control over the American government.
Making things actually "better" requires facing the profound paradox that the only realistic way that could happen is through better organized crime controlling the government, which was the biggest form of organized crime. How can one imagine the Head of the Fed publicly stating the social facts that the entire system is based on the enforced frauds of private banks making the public "money" supply out of nothing as debts? How can one imagine the Head of the Fed stating the crucial social facts that the system they operate is one of sophisticated social slavery, whereby that debt slavery has developed at an exponentially accelerating rate to generate numbers which have become debt insanities?
Obviously, the Head of the Fed MUST continue to do their best to bullshit about everything, while more and more deliberately ignoring all of the most important social facts. Their training as an academic was honing their skills to do that, and they were promoted to their position because it was expected that they were the best available person who could continue to operate the established enforced frauds.
On deeper levels, the basic problems are that money is measurement backed by murder, because all private property is claims backed by coercion. The whole social system is NECESSARILY organized lies operating robberies. All production is controlled by the production of destruction. However, that production of destruction was most successfully done as covertly as possible, through deceits and treachery. Civilization is necessarily operating as a general energy system, which corresponds to the application of the principles and methods of organized crime. The death controls back up the debt controls, and must necessarily do so. However, those who were the best at doing that were necessarily the best at deliberately denying those social facts. Thus, the only genuinely better resolutions to the real problems must be better organized crime, but the nature of better organized crime is extremely problematic. All past, present, and future human realities were, are, and will be, organized lies operating robberies, because perceiving human realities is to perceive the entropic pumping of energy. The paradoxes of academics operating those systems is that they must do so through highly developed systems of lies and hypocrisies, which insights they must continue to deliberately deny and disregard as much as possible, while what they say is the kind of bullshit which the established systems approve of.
WHO IS GOING TO PAY THE INTELLECTUALS? Being able to be paid requires that one is operating inside of systems of organized lies operating robberies, or else there would exist no monetary system directing an economy through which to get paid. At the present time, the biggest gangsters are the banksters, who indirectly dominated the academic institutions, to develop and pick the mercenary intellectuals who will operate other social institutions. The crux of the political processes are their feedback loops through the funding of politics, which have looped around and around long enough to produce the basic systems of enforced frauds which are the current foundation of the established political economy.
By and large, there is no publicly significant opposition that is not controlled by the imperatives that they must be "practical" by operating successfully within the established systems. Therefore, all the controlled opposition are also professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, similar to those who run the established systems. The dilemma that the most successful death controls are done through the maximum deceits and treacheries is at the heart of the existence of the Federal Reserve Board, and therefore, symbolized by its figureheads. That dilemma exists due to the basic nature of how human systems must necessarily operate, as self-referential energy systems, which is how and why we ended up living in a Bizarro Mirror World, where everything appears to be as proportionately backwards and distorted as it could possibly be.
Facing the social facts that governments are the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gang of criminals, who operate through legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, requires facing that must necessarily be the case, and any realistic solutions would still have to operate within that reality. However, that reality also was the reason for how and why those systems ended up being enforced frauds, which are defended and advanced by professional liars and hypocrites, which will not publicly admit to facing those basic social facts.
RM - Your brain must be twice as big as your head, appreciate your posts and starting to understand them slowly but surely lol.
How do you sleep at night, with the stuff running through your head, you must be cratering at the bottom of the rabbit hole with Neo!
LostandFound, I do tend to occassionally have very bad nightmares!
Not only do Yellen and Bernanke not have any real world experience ...nor tested their academic theories to see if they actually work (all of Bernankes are proven failures the world over, see Japan etc)...but they don't even ask businesses their opinions on policy options
they live in Ivory Towers chewing magic mushroom cakes and talk out of their a** on every single topic
When I first went into construction I ran into a professor who taught construction and had started building his own house. He was doing the work himself but was not able to finish the project because it was to complicated and over engineered. In the end he had to sell the home half finished.
Some are born ethical , others have ethics thrust upon them
See
https://www.academia.edu/8871698/Ebola_and_Money
Janet she fixing the Dow and the oil and the bonds, Janet she making it all good, so me so happy with Janet still, for now, kind of, until it all goes blooie, then she bad cow.
An addendum to my prior post which discusses the fantasy utopian bubble Progressives and Janet Yellen live in.
Scope Obama. A problem arises. He gives a speech. To Obama, the problem is solved because, to academicians like him, words count, but actions don't.
Obama is not a man of action (or of inaction, for that matter); rather, he is a man of words creating a narrative which he and his enablers in the MSM attempt to make reality. Like all postmodernists, Obama believes that reality is morphable via, in his case, a compelling narrative. With narratives, truth or lies matter not. What matters is actualizing the Vision of the Anointed.
Sure, thoughts and words do matter, but actions matter as much, if not more. When I took Economics in college nearly a half-century ago, I had no personal experience with business. Sure, I had had jobs but none of them taught me how business worked. It took 4 jobs and 8 or 9 years experience post-college and post-Army to understand what the fuck Economics was. If I took Econ then, abstract economics concepts would have leapt of the page because I could relate them to the real world.
IMO, A pure academic background without real world experience is like electricity with only a positive or negative pole: Nothing flows. It's merely symptomatic of a constipated mind.
Math and highest-level Physics can be 100% cerebral; economics can't be.
Yellen is qualified according to the owners of the NY Fed for the same basic reason Stan Fischer is. They help all the right people....
Dual-citizen nominee's lifetime benefit to Israel comes at a heavy cost to America
From one of the loudest acedemics from the hallowed pages of the RollingStoned
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-defense-of-obama-20141008
What a surprise that the RS supports Obozo
and his policies. Much like SNL, these outlets
r supported by the Hollywood-NY-DC mob to
spew out liberal, drivel to the 18-30 demographic
just out of indoctrination college. "WM need not apply"
Military are trained to fight the previous war .
Academicians are trained to defend the previous theory .
The only way to break the paradigm is losing or auto-cannibalism .
The problem here is not scarcity , but plentitude .
The tools of scarcity are insufficient to distribute the surplus.
See
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2011/10/paradigm-of-plenty.html
This is a problem that surfaced before with ATP and Mitochondria .
See how Nature handled Plenty :
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2010/01/atp-as-neurotransmitter.html
"Janet Yellen is a career academic. This is not necessarily a bad thing."
No, it is necessarily a bad thing. As an analogy (good but not perfect), let's take Progressivism.
95-98% of Hollywood and university professors are liberals. Why? Well, let's examine their milieus.
Hollywood is fantasy; ergo, liberals love fantasy; ie, not reality. Similarly, academia is not the real world; ergo, liberals love utopias. Thus, fantasy utopias are the province of liberals (aka, Progressives).
Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias". No, asshole, fantasy utopias are exclusively the domain of liberals.
Last data point: Obama wrote 2 autobiographies whose intent was not to faithfully record history but to establish a narrative. Another name for 'narrative' is 'fantasy'.
Unfortunately, if one inhabits fantasy utopias for too long, reality becomes irrelevant. Reality vets utopian fantasy policies, and deems them successes or failures. Progressive are immune to this feedback. If other utopian fantasy Progressives agree cerebrally that a policy is a good one, it is a good one, hang whether or not it works in the real world.
We need to be saved from the academics. We should pass a constitutional amendment that everyone elected as President, or to Congress, or appointed to the Supreme Court, must have had a private sector job transporting Port-a-Potties.
William F Buckley once said that he'd choose the first 400 names in the telephone directyory to run the country rather than the Faculty at Harvard. Never a truer word. Academics suffer from two huge shortcomings: They think they're omniscient, and the less experience of real life the worse they are....and second despite proclaiming the virtues of open investigation they're the most closed-minded f*ckers on the face of the planet.
Very true.
Gentlemen,
..... Lets be honest about this (& maybe non PC).... it's not being an academic that's the problem, as discussed on so many media outlets, IT'S THAT THE FED RESERVE IS RUN BY A BUNCH OF ZIONIST-J-People, who have no allegance to this country, control most of the washington politicians, and do their acts deliberately and full well know the consequences... and they continue to do it anyway..... and BTW this is not an anti-Sem comment since these ashkenazi's are not hebrews (& most are finally acknowledge that fact now)..... so lets skip the PC crap and acknowledge the problem at the root cause....
Arabs and Chinese just cannot get their heads around how Amercia has let itself become ruled by a tribe of people whose loyalties are mixed ,,,,at best.
QE programs are a zero sum policy over time. Initially, zirp increases economic activity w higher home prices but savers are screwed. Now home prices have peaked yes the savers are screwed. Combined with automation and outsourcing, 1 full time job is reported over the year as 3 part time jobs. Wait until the new pricing for Obamacare hits after the elections and Christmas buying will be down. Two of my 3 children work 2/3 part time jobs and have no saving or future, both w college degrees. They are paying nearly all their disposable income for healthcare.
When I was fresh out of college 30+ years ago; I was paying nearly all of my disposable income for cars (fun, but stupid); beer (fun *and* smart); and women (fun, but stupid). *Zero* of my money was going to healthcare, as it cost my employer $150 per month for a top of the line plan, which was irrelevant, as I consumed *zero* healthcare.
Tell them to pay the fine and save the $6,000 in premiums for the $6,000 deductible. Unless they come down with cancer in the next 10 years, they won't spend more than $6,000 in a year anyway - and if that happens, money is the least of their worries.
People with no savings (assets) have nothing to insure.
Why are they paying for healthcare? They are young and should be healthy.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice, there is....
B.S. article
The economy is run by those who own and/or head the big corporations.
The implied "solution" to have those who profited by the rigged system put "more" in charge is bogus.
The problem is not "academics" per se, but the beliefs and loyalties of the vetted academics chosen to publically administer the system.
One will not see, for example, an Ellen Brown appointed to head the Treasury department,
or a Noam Chomsky to be Secretary of State.
I agree, the cream didn't rise to the top. The intellectuals who were given the clear path to upward mobility did great with it. Trouble is that academics gets corrupted like anyone else, just less so on other levels.
Chomsky and Brown are statists. It's just a deeper look inside their theories to discover the little fucking devil in the details.
This just tells us you haven't read much by either. Statists?
come... come on, man.
See this:
http://www.primitivism.com/chomsky.htm
[citation] Reading through his many books and interviews, one looks in vain for the anarchist, or for any thorough critique. When asked point-blank, "Are governments inherently bad?" his reply is no. He is critical of government policies, not government itself, motivated by his "duty as a citizen." The constant refrain in his work is a plea for democracy: "real democracy," "real participation," "active involvement," and the like.
His goal is for "a significant degree of democratization," not the replacement of political rule by a condition of no rule called anarchy.
...
His focus, almost exclusively, has been on U.S. foreign policy, a narrowness that would exert a conservative influence even for a radical thinker. If urging increased involvement in politics goes against the potentially subversive tide toward less and less involvement, Chomsky's emphasis on statecraft itself gravitates toward acceptance of states. And completely ignoring key areas (such as nature and women, to mention only two), makes him less relevant still.
You are right, Bioscale, which is why Chomsky is most cited by other academics. Like Einstein, who was a creative genius when young, but became an old fuddy-duddy when older, Chomsky's original genius has become debased to being mostly an obstacle to future genius.
Not sure about that, I prefer geniuses like Rothbard or Hoppe whose ideas are much clearer.
I am referring to Chomsky's contributions to basic linguistics. He did for linguistics something like what Mendeleev did when putting together the periodic table of chemical elements. Those were his days of creative genius, which gave him solid tenure, which enabled him to become an academic who was critical of the ways that social power worked through language. However, in my view, the older he got, the more stuck in a rut he became. What he has to say now I find still scholarly, but otherwise pretty well useless.
Duffy, they are statists. Anyone who promotes the use of government is a statist.
Colleges and Universities are rife with tenured statists, all funded by big corporations, governments and tax cheating foundations. Clean house or have it cleaned for you. Your choice, for now.