Quoth the generous Gene:
>Apologies, Rob, for misspelling your name.
No worries, Gene! (*The Advocate* did far worse with the name the day I got
my first first-grade goal against mighty Ulverstone in the Northern
Tasmanian Soccer League - now THAT hurt!) Dunno if I want my name attached
to this unfolding mess, though. Wouldn't be fair, anyway - sure, I'm
blessed with a particularly bleak apprehension of my world, but where would
my depressive crisis-mongering be without the guidance of:
*the Coyle 'competing-natural-monopolies?-phooey' thesis,
*the Perelman 'instability-of-markets-especially-in-an-information-economy'
thesis,
*the Henwood 'capital-markets?-phooey' thesis,
*the Devine 'three-bears-of-the-apocalypse' thesis,
*the 'deLong-Froomkin commoditised-information' thesis,
*the Schwartz-Sawicky
'you-don't-need-value-theory-to-see-the-world's-fucked' thesis,
*the Walker
'how-can-you-say-the-economy's-healthy-when-everyone's-working-their-lives-a
way?' thesis,
*the Murray
'an-economic-law's-a-law-only-as-long-as-the-institutional-power-that-sustai
ns-it-lasts' thesis,
*the Burgess-Phillips 'hierarchical-dependency' thesis,
*the Rosenberg 'hegemon-dependent-compradors-impoverish-the-local' thesis,
*the Nilsson
'ya-can't-count-productivity-much-less-base-your-monetary-policy-on-it'
thesis,
*the Diaz-Alvarez 'IT-productivity-doesn't-help-anyway' thesis,
*the Dorman-Pawlett-Rosser 'lotsa-micros-do-not-a-macro-make' thesis,
*the Blau 'micro's-stuffed-anyway' thesis,
*the Hanly 'growth-via-immiseration-via-growth' thesis,
*the Keaney
'capitalism-trying-to-protect-itself-in-crisis-approximates-fascism' thesis,
*the Philion 'China's-fucked-too' thesis,
*the Hoover 'don't-build-models-without-looking-at-the-real-thing-first'
thesis,
*the Brown 'Lenin-was-actually-always-on-about-today' thesis,
*the Cox 'Mao-was-actually-always-on-about-today' thesis, and
*the Proyect 'I-was-actually-always-on-about-today' thesis,
We're none of us emotionally well, mate ...
'Course, we could all be wrong. That's a long list of knowledgeable boys,
and we mustn't forget the Fuhurashi "Overconfidence may decrease with
competence, but other studies show that it increases with knowledgeability;
that is, the more specialized information you have about something, the more
likely you are to be overconfident in your judgments about it.
Overconfidence also tends to rise with the complexity of the problem. This
means that experts reasoning about difficult matters--doctors, engineers,
financial analysts, academics, even the pope when he is not speaking ex
cathedra--are apt to be seriously overconfident in the validity of their
conclusions" thesis.
> ... I should have written more about the weaknesses evident in the US
economy.
Maybe it's time we all had a go at that, eh? Record corporate defaulting
... structural current account deficit ... nervous greenback-supporting
money thinking about returning home ... IT profits down ... Asia creaking
volubly again ... residential debt at record levels ... gee, maybe Greenspan
is actually gonna have a real-world economic problem to face in a week or
two. Reckon he might emulate Ozzie's noble swimmers and come a brave second
...
Cheers,
Rob.
