February 2012 – Page 2

Discontents with Modern Economic Theory

I’ve rambled and wrote before on this topic, but I need to say it again: Modern economic theory is baseless bullshit.

As a philosophy major I like to pride myself on being able to look beyond the obvious, beyond what’s presented prima facie, identify shortcomings of any claims, and ask the tough, pertinent questions. That being said, I’ve spent a lot of time as an undergraduate studying economics and finance and researching the shortcomings of the various economic assumptions built into the economic theory, their models and methods, and the policy decisions stemming from them, and I find that the vast majority of it is unfounded speculative assumptions.

Fundamentally, modern economic theory is not scientific. It is pseudoscience. While not the first person to call bullshit on the neo-classical economic theorists, Imre Lakatos did a fine job making explicit the shortcomings of their neo-classical claims in the seventies along with his colleague Spiro Latsis in their paper Situational Determinism. This shed light on the flimsy assumptions grounding their theories and encouraged other economists, as well as academics from other fields such as psychology, to revise many of their assumptions in favor of a more holistic, organic, and biological representation of economics, resembling a more accurate ecology of evolving human interaction. These minds produced what we now know as behavioral economics, institutional economics, environmental economics, and the most promising and nascent of all, evolutionary economics.

I’m researching a thesis topic for a macroeconomic policy seminar class so I can write a twenty-five page paper that examines and suggests macroeconomic policy. I decided that I’m going to get radical about this paper. I’m tired of holding my tongue when we sit around semicircle in class dithering on about these abstract relationships concerning abstract entities while we posit our way out of real or hypothetical economic problems with totally ad-hoc assumptions revolving around contemporary fiscal and monetary policy. It’s all bullshit.

Economists are bullshit. They are modern day bishops that instruct the quivering masses how the will of god should allot the gold reserves pinched from the pockets of these people, but in this case we have economists who, divinely ordained via their institutional accolades, instruct the blind herd according to the will of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Which, like god, doesn’t exist.

So I’m trying to figure out a paper topic while using some tact. I’m not trying to offend and piss off my professor who, may I add, is one of the most highly respected professors at Vanderbilt, and one time economics adviser to Reagan.

So…my paper topic. There are a ton of areas I want to address. Most importantly I want to ensure that my research retains a Political liberalism framework like the one inherent to our democratic constitution. I’m not sure this is possible, however, without introducing statism. Whatever the case, I don’t think economics and political ideology can even be dealt with separately, so I’ll at least try. Some of my ideas involve discussing to formation and nature of:

Investment: Speculation and bubbles- Prevention policies
New Value-added Market Creation, Expansion, and development
Capital accumulation: concentration and centralization
Manufacturing v. Service industries as value adding enterprises
State Capitalism and Free Market Capitalism
Market Failures & Financial Regulation– Intervention Policies: Why consistently in the finance industry?
Credit and Debt markets: their dangers and shortcomings
Economics Schools and their policies: Mainstream economics v Austrian School v Modern Monetary Theorists (Neo-charlatan’s) v Market monetarists
Challenge the scientific validity of neoclassical economic models, methods, assumptions and their policies
Challenge the validity of Milton Friedman’s Economic theories, including his Free Market Hypothesis. (Also Keynes. And perhaps examine, compare, and contrast with that evil called “Marxism”)
Examine modern consumer theory, value theory, theory of productivity: Suggest alternative paradigms and their policies

Anyway. I have other things to do, quizzes to take, reading to finish. More thoughts later.

Problems Don’t Exist.

Passion is powerful. You can’t be all thought, all machine, calculated and cool. You need warmth, fire, some fuel to spread your light. But I despise drama. Drama is unnecessary theatrics. It is passion with problems. Problematized passion. It takes good genuine energy and creates problems rather than solutions. People who attract drama feel insignificant without it. They lack an ability to exist in tranquility. It’s almost as if they think that drama gives their life character, somehow makes them strong or resilient for persisting through these problems, problems they create within abstract of their mind. They take a perfectly good life, and instead of applying their passion, their life force and energy to synthesizing new solutions, they problematize a good thing. Of course they talk like they don’t like the drama, like it weighs on them, like a millstone they carry with them. They are constantly talking about the day when they don’t have so many problems. They are the first ones to talk about discarding this laboring load and equally quick to point out how badly they want to set it down and dispel the drama, but they continue talking, thinking, seething about their problems, adding potency to their diluted delusion.

Problems do not exist. There. I said it. Problems are only problems when you identify them as problems. Before they are identified, we accept circumstance and situation, absolving that that’s just the way things are, for better or worse. Perhaps it is a skill to be able to identify problems, to label things are deficient, broken, and I bet it takes a critically inquiring eye to do this. But where do you draw the line?

Problems are not problems. Drama is not drama. These are facets of life. Contrary to the clamoring chorus of capitalist commercialism, our life does not need to be problematic and dramatic to be glorious and grand. They profiteer off such knave propensities for ease, for life without suffering. They drain you of your liquid wealth and welling life as you train to maintain and gain a greater sense of self, a sense of self complete with all the accessories they sell your squeaking soul. But your soul needs no oil. Let the soul, that broken squealing soul, scream, let it scream and burst forth in melody, let it create harmony with other squeaky souls. Do not oil. Warm yourself with its friction, these triturations of life. Soon your stridulating soul will begin to warble and transform into a beautiful hum, a harmonious vibration that echoes across cold chambers where copious copies of silent, gunky souls reside, soiled and slow from the years of feeble fabricated fixes. There is nothing wrong with your soul. You are perfect as a diamond is flawed, stronger than all the universal forces and extraterrestrial elements, pressed and latticed in structural perfectitude, lined with innumerable inclusions and trace elements that straddle its knitted bonds, strontium and nitrogen, rubidium and barium, adding to the refracting flash that douses the senses when you allow transparency and light to work their way within you and shine forth.

Problems do not exist. They are in your mind. If there were no mind to observe, no eye to see, there would be no problems to probe. Overcoming yourself is a task which has no end. The road up a mountain is the same road down it. Do not confuse your life’s task, your journey. Do not tire yourself with the trifling pursuits of climbing the insurmountable where barren cliffs and cleft rifts and ice tips are all that waits you. Go instead down the road, where momentum is your friend, and follow the valley where the streams merge with rivers and gather into looming pools and luscious lakes and lead to opulent oceans that provide cooling relief under the dense shade of living vegetation. Go where there is life.

Problems do not exist. Life begins in consciousness. Life is not simply physical minutia, else the moons and marbling spheres and stars and solar systems be living. Life is not simply movement. It is purely imagination. No mind exists apart from the life giving force of their imagination. Our eyes cannot capture meaning. That is reserved for our minds. Do not forfeit your mind and believe your eyes. Do not let your ears consume the drunken speech of other grey minds, their crannies and crevasses all canvassed in web, caught in a tangle of dense delusion, of smog that blocks the breathing flue, changing flowing channels into choking chimneys, and strangulating the stronghold of being.

Problems do not exist. They are created, by us, to achieve ends, fabricated ends, short sighted ends, poor hallow ends. Until we believe that our means are greater than our ends, we will fail to dream, fail to see opportunity where there is challenge. Our lives will encapsulate a silent storm of tears, sleeting, frozen over from lack of warmth, from lack of friction with the world, lack of authentic abrasion that causes aural ambage.

Problems do not exist. People sell you problems, don’t sell yourself problems. Don’t add insult to injury and do the job that capitalism, commercial advertising, has perfected. Problems. Everyone wants you to believe that there is a problem free life– that can be achieved by means they can provide if you forfeit a small payment in price, a small piece of your time, a fraction of your wage. We will provide you the happiness, the comfort, the pleasure, the distress-free existence if you pay for it. But this is a lie. There are no problems. And the people who buy into the problems die poor, poor in pocket and poor in spirit. They failed to save, failed to build, collect and create. They diluted themselves with the quick fixes, the shabby solutions that clutter their consciousness, until they are wrapped in flax linnens and preserved in a perfect state of lifelessness.

Problems do not exist. What exists is desire for power, power over circumstance, power over passion, power over thoughts. These people die a slave. They never learned to revolt, never embraced the chaos, the flowing flux that embodies a living life, and rebel as a self-sustaining individual, perfectly punctual in the moment. Defining and confining, constraining and restraining.

Problems do not exist. Mind exists. When our mind identifies a problem with some thing, it is not the thing that changes, but our mind, our relation to that thing. Our mind is eternal, but our attention is finite. We cannot allow ourselves to be preoccupied with any thought or feeling that does not deliver grandeur to house of being, or fails to cleanse our doors of perception. We have one life, one spectacle, a single show, a solemn act to perform. We must choose the words that echo into the ears of eternity with heart, with care. We cannot think our way out of a state of being, a dramatic scene of tragedy, we can act our way out, only feel ourselves into another line, continue playing a developing role to an ambivalent audience.

There are no problems. There is fate. There are ends. There are expectations: faulty suspensions, wry calculations, aslant anticipations. Properly viewed, problems are merely stepping stones that carry you through life.

Anyway.

I believe that love for a subject, passionate unrequited love, is the only way to let yourself gain any appreciable acquaintance, since love is selfless devotion. But I’m not sure we can love people before we love ourselves. We love the me we see in thee.

Tsap

Many people like to look at the timely world in a forward fashion, with their gaze pressed upon the horizon of new experience, their eyes unfolding new sensation, enveloping new consciousness, and they watch it bloom and expand into carpets of rolling memory. But I’m not sure how much I like this configuration of time and our relation to it.

I like to think that, rather than looking forward into the unknown with the past floating in a dry haze behind us, we are actually facing the past, with our back pressed against a dimly lit future.

I like to think that we walk backwards through life, and this is a more accurate way of representing it, is it not? We cannot see what lies before us until it is already there, under our feet. Our gaze extends, not towards the future, but forever into the past. That is where eternity lies, after all, in our minds, the historical annals of our sensual experience, the tombs of fabricated memory, of associated feeling and dissociated thought. We take steps, feeble, trembling steps, into the unknown, feeling precariously, toeing every pebble and crevasse underfoot, bumping along here and there into the unfamiliar. Every parchment of new sensation is written over top great works in progress. We become contradicting stories, never ending narratives.

Our past is our best indication of the future. If we took no time exploring our past we’d be ill equipped to face the future. You just can’t run into darkness with aimless abandon without fail. You need to keep your sight on the light so you don’t lose yourself. The past is the only reservoir of light that can be of any aid, the lighthouse of life. But we often forget that. We often believe we’re on a new frontier, that our technology has somehow allowed us to transcend our basic impulses, our primal urges, our barbaric desires, our calamitous caprice, our vague vagaries, our sybaritic sensations that wind through our bodies and seep through our pores, into our gestures, and electrify the swinging swoon of destructive fiery passion, and pour through our mouth and into the ears of each successive embryonic mind.

Seething and breathing

Chomping and stomping

Crematorium and sanatorium

Places for the faces

Dread for the dead

Lovely lilacs

We live in the past. We must learn to recreate the past, to fashion it according to our imagination. Use the past as fodder for thought. The fantastical lives with the past, not in the future.

Fid

Words are like capsules of feeling. When properly strung together they become pearls that you wear in your mind so that the light of experience reflects and refracts into a brilliant rainbow of color, decorating and illuminating your inner chambers of thought.

Confidence is attractive. Why? I believe it has something to do with appearing genuine. I know that’s a load of crap, cause being confident or being genuine doesn’t guarantee one or the other, but I believe we like to think it does. When you aren’t confident, there’s uncertainty. And people become uncertain about their impression of you. People like control. They like a world and people they can count on. If you aren’t confident, you probably can’t be counted on.

I’m not saying everyone should be confident… but yea, yea I am. Fake it. I believe you should be confident about your shortcomings, about your limits, about your lack of understanding, about you strengths, and so on and so forth. Be confident where you stand. Be confident that you may be wrong. Confidence manifests as assertion, as declaration. It’s important to project yourself onto the world, every facet and flaw and gem of glory you possess. That’s the only way to truly know yourself. That’s the only way to truly be yourself. And as you gain confidence, you gain a greater sense of being. And you begin to incarnate an ever evolving life that effloresces in time.

Moments and modes. My roommates use these words to describe what appears to be my various desultory states of being. I change modes, overturn ethics and morals, undermine and contradict myself. For the moral man, this behavior appears inconsistent, untrustworthy. But I don’t think I could ever trust myself, my thoughts and conclusions, if it were any other way. I like to think that adopting different modes allows for the advent of new perspective. The only way you gain perspective, I believe, is if you change some variables, like values or the weight or significance you give to certain entities and activities and events in your experience.

Some of my modes include prioritizing writing, introversion, reading, an antipathy for socializing and culture. Others include the opposite, where action without much forethought is prized, where people and relationships are put on a pedestal. And still other modes include a mentality of pure success and domination, a lack of empathy and care for others that fail to aid my journey of achivement. But there is a spectrum.

People can be bland. (I can be bland, that’s why I feel like I can make that statement) Maybe adopting these modes all the time makes for unpredictability, but isn’t that life? We try to control, control, control. Which is nice in some modes. But you really can’t embrace the idiosyncratic fluctuations of colorful experience when you’re in complete control. Your control, the premise for your control, is that the future will be like the past. But that certainly isn’t the case. And additionally, that mentality doesn’t allow for the variegation of change to work its way into your life so that growth can take place.

I was going to say more, but whatever I was thinking escaped me.

So this semester I’ve been on the domination streak. Not much thinking, and it’s been feeling great. Lifting six days a week. I weigh 195lbs now at roughly 15% bodyfat. Not shabby. Feeling all nordic and vikingish. Getting strong. Doing my work. Taking 18 hours. Working 15 hours (or struggling to work 15 hours). I’ve been allotting time for socializing and pleasure. I’ve been practicing my guitar quite a bit, and even formed a little jam band with my roommates. We have a drum set in our dining room now. It provides a nice, Nashvillian decorative touch.

I actually have a lot that I could write about. It doesn’t ever occur to me until I begin writing, then it just starts pouring out. I have class. Write more at a future date.