Monetary Policy and Metaphysics - How Economists Try to Naturalise Terrible and Disappear Into Their Own Theories

by Philip Pilkington, from Naked Capitalism

Metaphysics is a use of language that conveys no factual information, describes no logical relations nor gives precise constructions and yet is calculated to affect conduct.

– Joan Robinson

After the Reagan and Thatcher governments experimented with monetarism in the late-1970s and early-1980s, something fundamental changed in the way most economies in the world were managed. This era has become known to many as that of “neoliberalism” and is usually thought to be characterised by free-market dogmatism, a hostility to labour, financialisation and trade liberalisation.

All of this is true, of course, but it is not widely known outside of economic circles what changed in the minds of economists. After all, monetarism soon faded into the ether – a failed superstition. What replaced it was, in fact, a regime based on interest rate targeting. Economists and central bankers became generally suspicious of governments’ ability to manage their economies and instead invested heavily in the notion that independent central banks could do the job better.

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by John Hussman, Hussman Funds

In Memory of Zig Ziglar

I was 23 years old, walking through an office supply store, and the recording was just an impulse purchase. I pushed it into the cassette deck of my car, and he began in a cheerful voice:

“The name Howard Hill will probably ring a bell in the mind of some of you, but not all of you. Howard Hill was a good Alabama boy. He was an archer. Many people said that he was the greatest of all time… Now, I have never shot the bow and arrow professionally, but I am an instructor par excellence – that’s French, which means I’m really good. As a matter of fact, I am so good as an instructor of archery that I could spend 20 minutes with any man or woman in the audience this evening, and provided your eyesight is normal and your health is good, at the end of 20 minutes I would have you hitting the bulls-eye more consistently than Howard Hill could have hit it the best day of his life. Provided of course, that we first blindfolded Howard Hill – and then turned him around a few times so he would have no idea which direction he was facing. And you say ‘Why Ziglar, that’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. How in the world could a man hit a target he could not even see?’ That’s a pretty good question. Here’s one even better. How can you hit a target that you don’t even have? The question, my friends, is do you have your targets?”

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by Dirk Ehnts, Econoblog101

Former University of Chicago professor Ronald Coase has an article in the Harvard Business Review: Saving Economics from Economists. This is his concluding paragraph:

It is time to reengage the severely impoverished field of economics with the economy. Market economies springing up in China, India, Africa, and elsewhere herald a new era of entrepreneurship, and with it unprecedented opportunities for economists to study how the market economy gains its resilience in societies with cultural, institutional, and organizational diversities. But knowledge will come only if economics can be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economic system as it actually exists.

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by Fabius Maximus

Summary: Employment growth has been the slowest of any post-WW2 recovery. But a greater problem lies ahead — the robot revolution. The next wave of automation, affecting both manufacturing and the far larger population of service workers.  Here’s a status report on its early phase, already in motion.  At the end are links to other chapters.

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by Frank Li

My first ebook, "Saving America, Chinese Style", is out at Amazon.com! To learn more about it and to order, click here: Saving America, Chinese Style.

Although the platform of reading is Kindle, you can do it on your old-fashioned PC by choosing "Kinlde Cloud Reader" as the "delivery to" option or by downloading a free Kindle Reader.

In this article, I will show you the first several pages of the book ...

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