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Comments Posted By Sposton

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Balancing Incentives…

I do understand what economic incentives are and their importance. I don’t disagree either with you or Stiglitz. All I am saying is there is more wrong with our economy than incentives. This would become readily apparent once we’d solve the problem of incentives, which we are unlikely to solve any time soon anyway.

» Posted By Sposton On February 20, 2011 @ 6:14 pm

I’ve recently watched a series of videos of Joseph Stiglitz in a lecture at The University of Queensland titled “Who Sank The Global Economy?” which I highly recommend to all.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Joseph+Stiglitz%3A+Who+Sank+The+Global+Economy%3F&aq=f

At the end of part 5 and continuing to part 6 an ecological economist Richard Sanders poses an excellent question which professor Stiglitz basically ignores in his response. I’ve found that quite puzzling. 😉

» Posted By Sposton On February 20, 2011 @ 10:23 am

I respect Professor Stiglitz and his opinion but I find him pretty conventional (not willing to be overly critical). Perhaps he looks radical when compared to Wall Street agents around Obama. 😉

My point is not that skewed incentives were not a problem but that even with the best incentives our financial sector is no longer capable of serving this country.

The main function of our financial sector is the efficient allocation of capital. Better incentives would help but even with perfect incentives we would soon enough encounter the next “bottleneck”.

Our corporations are guided with best ROI for their shareholders. What do we do when the best ROI is to be found in China and India and not in this country? Those perfect incentives would still choose the wrong investments viewed from the standpoint of society.

The single most important factor for our troubles is the fact that our economic elites interests have diverged from the interests of the rest of us. Even perfect incentives will not solve this problem.

» Posted By Sposton On February 20, 2011 @ 9:48 am

Very thoughtful and well put.

The capacity of a system is the capacity of the bottleneck. It is true that wrong incentives appear to be the cause of much of that what had gone wrong but I am afraid that upon eliminating this “bottleneck” we would find another, and then another,… There is more wrong with our system than skewed incentives.

» Posted By Sposton On February 19, 2011 @ 9:42 pm

Edumacation

Thank you.

We do ourselves no favor when we indiscriminately support governmental spending. We must distinguish between what is beneficial spending from societal standpoint and that which is detrimental. Most of the military-industrial-complex spending is incredibly wasteful and damaging, and so is all other corporate welfare.

In our capitalist system it is absolutely essential that the government does considerable transfer of wealth from few to many because the economic forces alone do not distribute wealth sufficiently to sustain a healthy economic demand. Instead, our system is one colossal mechanism of transferring wealth from many to few. US corporations are sitting on over $2 trillion and financier have as much money as they wish for their parasitic casino-like betting activity.

One of our structural economic impediments is exactly the ever diminishing economic demand. That is why all this austerity measures of cutting back on social spending and public investment is totally counterproductive and insane. This is the time to cut socially useless spending and transfer it domestic public investment in new energy economy and in such a way that it boosts the economic demand and eases the unconscionable poverty our system is creating.

We are witnessing a destruction of historical significance, from which we may never recover.

» Posted By Sposton On February 18, 2011 @ 2:06 pm

We used to have our own American School of Economics which treated public investment as the fourth economic factor (classical economics insist there are three – labor (humans), land (nature) and capital).

I believe it is correct to consider public investment as an absolutely necessary ingredient of any modern economy and functioning society. The neoclassical economics has made itself a servant of 1% of the population. Economics and politics subservient to the capitalist class lead to an utter destruction of society, exactly what we are witnessing all around us.

Our scarcity is totally artificial but we have hard time understanding why because modern economics dogma has managed to surround us the way fish is surrounded by water. We, just like fish, just float without understanding enough the smelly medium in which we are forced to navigate.

I’ve recently read Karl Polanyi’s “Great Transformation” which I highly recommend to all of you. It is absolutely essential reading to understanding of what is happening around us.

» Posted By Sposton On February 18, 2011 @ 1:36 pm

From a union worker family standpoint…

There are many reasons for this. Tea Party types often come from areas which had benefited by flight of American corporations southward from more unionized North and Midwest. The rationalization for job migration was overly high union wages and inflexible rules. The beneficiaries were the non-unionized labor. Of course, American corporation did not stop there, they kept the same process going by offshoring those same jobs but the rationalization myths endure bolstered by relentless corporate propaganda through the corporately owned American media.

The other factor is actually caused by decaying union movement. American trade unions desperately tried to purged socialists from their ranks. In this they have largely succeeded but the result was a permanent loss of the heart of union movement which has since gone into a permanent decline. Unions collaborated with capitalist imperial project and the results have been devastating.

Read “AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?” by Kim Scipes. It is an eye opener.

» Posted By Sposton On February 15, 2011 @ 9:00 am

Stupid is as Stupid Polls

The ignorance is bad but there is one thing that is even worse and that is the illusion of knowledge and the usual certitude that accompanies it. 😉

“The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” Daniel J. Boorstin in “The Discoverers”

» Posted By Sposton On February 15, 2011 @ 9:15 am