by Metatone
Sun Sep 23rd, 2012 at 06:21:53 PM EST
I've written about Learned Helplessness in our current political ideologies, but The Yorkshire Ranter has blogged a far more cogent description:
Economic reality is yesterday's political choice » The Yorkshire Ranter
Economics is an agenda-setting system. Here's a working example - Noah Smith engaging Robert Gordon (who is in his turn drinking from the poisoned well of Tyler Cowan). Gordon's big idea is that y'know how things aren't so great? Well, they're always going to be awful, so there's nothing can be done about it! And therefore, we don't need to discuss any action and shut up.
He argues this for the following reasons. One, he thinks technological progress is slowing down. Two, he thinks the US labour force won't grow as fast as it did. Three, educational attainment has "plateaued", based on the OECD PISA comparison. Four, high income inequality means structurally weak demand from the "consumer" (aka labour) sector. Five, globalisation. Six, the environment. Seven, "debt" of whatever sort.
Well, the first of these is an arguable proposition. Personally, I can think of plenty of people who are convinced that technical progress is accelerating, others who think it is slowing down, and still others who think (like David Harvey) that it is illusory or even undesirable. I would argue that both the declinist and Kurzweil-ist views are wrong for the same reason: they are both exercises in cherry-picking the data. Singularitarians love computing and sometimes genetics, because both fields give you an instant optimism hit. Declinists prefer to pick problems that remain unsolved and projects that failed, because that's what their prior assumptions are set to. Both views are dependent on prior value judgments.
But I have a more subtle and useful critique. Economists tend to think technology is exogenous. Historians of technology couldn't disagree more. In their view, technical progress happens through learning-by-doing. This has an important corollary - you learn nothing by being unemployed except that it sucks, and a set of survival strategies that aren't much use except in the context of being on the dole. Technology is, in part, endogenous, and therefore it is influenced by macroeconomic policy.
Go read it all, it's essential reading.
