I think this does a very good job of explaining the current economic situation and possible solutions to get back to a secure place, financially speaking.
Re: executive summary?elengulMarch 20 2009, 12:53:27 UTC
Well, very, very basically ... the current economic crisis is a lot worse then people think it is, there is no quick way back to the economic prosperity that we had before, and going back to a system that depended on bubbles boosting the economy is a bad thing anyways, so we should move forward.
As pneumatik indicates below, the piece is written very much from a liberal point of view. While I agree with his assessment in it's entirety, I don't believe his framing of the problem is inherently liberal, but his solution ... very liberal.
To be fair, I don't think his framing of the problem itself is inherently partisan. What he says as far as that goes I think makes a lot of sense.
His solution is definitely liberal, and I tend to agree with that way of economic thinking, so I really liked the article and would love to see it implemented.
I agree, though. The article couldn't be less neutral without being horribly silly. Though, he does make the point that he thinks this problem falls outside of everyone's economic models, and trying to take a middle-of-the-road path with an extreme problem is likely to not fix the problem. I'm not sure I agree with that in all instances, or even necessarily in this instance, but it's an interesting thing to think about.
"We're taking this Trillion Dollars and paying off the people's credit card debt and mortgages starting at 9a, do yourself a favor and cut up all of your credit cards except for one, don't do it again, 401K's and stock losses will be taken care of asap, show us what you lost." (statement put out at 10am)
and then the next day start rounding up all of the bastards that got us into this mess and take everything they have.
But that would actually fix the problem instead of creating a new society of the destitute rely on Patron Caesar in Washington to marginally keep them fed on the dole.
The author was claiming that a free market does not efficiently allocate resources. I'm open to hear evidence-based argument about basically anything, but he's claiming something that has been accepted as true for a century, if not longer. Certainly every effort to allocate resources in a way other than a free market has not produced a stronger economy than comparable free markets, and there are examples of countries switching to free markets from other systems and then experiencing faster growth.
As far as how the current crisis happen, the people managing the money had too much to gain and too little to lose if the deals they made went bad. The people who were are risk were the financial company's shareholders, and those people didn't try to limit the big betting on risky mortgages. Some regulation here would could have limited the total risk from mortgage failures, but they would have just found some other goose laying fools-gold eggs.
I believe that, when they say normal, they mean for the reader to consider the state of the economy before the housing bubble burst and shit started going wrong as normal.
The bubble was more bizarre than what we have now. We had skyrocketing costs of everything with stagnant wages -- that just can't happen in a market economy without some serious nonsense going on somewhere. I can't believe that's what the author of the article would consider normal.
The author wants me to support X Y and Z because he claims that doing X Y and Z will get us to normal. But logically before I can support X Y and Z with the author I have to first know what normal is and then decide if I want to go there. Then I can decide if X Y and Z will be effective in getting us there.
Imagine you're in a public bathroom and you see "for a good time call 555-1234" etched on the wall. Do you agree with the author of that statement?
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As pneumatik indicates below, the piece is written very much from a liberal point of view. While I agree with his assessment in it's entirety, I don't believe his framing of the problem is inherently liberal, but his solution ... very liberal.
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His solution is definitely liberal, and I tend to agree with that way of economic thinking, so I really liked the article and would love to see it implemented.
I agree, though. The article couldn't be less neutral without being horribly silly. Though, he does make the point that he thinks this problem falls outside of everyone's economic models, and trying to take a middle-of-the-road path with an extreme problem is likely to not fix the problem. I'm not sure I agree with that in all instances, or even necessarily in this instance, but it's an interesting thing to think about.
Reply
"We're taking this Trillion Dollars and paying off the people's credit card debt and mortgages starting at 9a, do yourself a favor and cut up all of your credit cards except for one, don't do it again, 401K's and stock losses will be taken care of asap, show us what you lost." (statement put out at 10am)
and then the next day start rounding up all of the bastards that got us into this mess and take everything they have.
But that would actually fix the problem instead of creating a new society of the destitute rely on Patron Caesar in Washington to marginally keep them fed on the dole.
Reply
As far as how the current crisis happen, the people managing the money had too much to gain and too little to lose if the deals they made went bad. The people who were are risk were the financial company's shareholders, and those people didn't try to limit the big betting on risky mortgages. Some regulation here would could have limited the total risk from mortgage failures, but they would have just found some other goose laying fools-gold eggs.
Reply
Reply
Reply
The author wants me to support X Y and Z because he claims that doing X Y and Z will get us to normal. But logically before I can support X Y and Z with the author I have to first know what normal is and then decide if I want to go there. Then I can decide if X Y and Z will be effective in getting us there.
Imagine you're in a public bathroom and you see "for a good time call 555-1234" etched on the wall. Do you agree with the author of that statement?
Reply
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