American Way of Life

Another one of my posts on blog Cafe Hayek:

My main argument is this; The world is nonlinear, in all aspects of science we are hitting this boundary, as we ask better questions now and have more data, we are learning how to simplify, approximate and try to provide solutions in this world.

While we improve our analytic skills, it pays (literally in economics) to know what you don’t know. In all these cases, the wisdom of the crowd, which itself is a “massive” problem solver, always knows best. It’s like you have a concurrent number crunching machine with 300 million nodes (the population of US). That is what classical liberalism is all about. Only this machine can hope to provide a glimpse of the future. Hell, it can decide the future by just voting on it by its wallet.

SO, as our math gets better, perhaps we will know how to allocate resources using some central mechanism. But to think we can do that NOW given the current state of science, especially the dismal state of economics science today, is absolutely ridicolous. So, let the crowd-solver to solve the equation, I say.

Plus, following on Drucker, Toffler’s thinking:

The industrial machine is fighting a huge turf war through economy. The giant sucking sound is these people losing big time. They tried to impose a way life, the so-called “American Way Of Life” that posits you own a house in suburbia, must drive a car to get there, and of course, put gas in that car to drive, for which, don’t you worry, we will bomb anyone and anything that will stay in the way.

This is no economics. This is power games played IN SPITE OF economics. What was Community Reinvestment Act all about? Where is market there - which was one of the major sources of crisis. FED; another one.

Lots of issues are intertwined here - not all of which is discussed in the “mass” media. I do laugh at the fools though labeling “xyz era is over” pointing to Reaganism and such. They all seem to have forgotten how that era started: Keynes models could NOT predict inflation and unemployment could increase at the same time. Enter Hayek, and we have the last 30 years’ growth DESPITE industrial interests who tried to skim off of the growth. Now, they are losing even THAT honey, and they will lose big. With the economy as knowledge based and complex as it is today, NOONE can hope to direct it in some way or another, efficiency in the market is just too great for that, and it will blow in your face. And it did.

Let’s hope Obama sees that once he is done with his populist “anger” schtick.