Comment by mallowfram
9 hours ago
Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing. The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate
> Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
Is this meant to be post-modern? Whatever you feel about wealth, wealthier citizens overall are happier and have a better quality of life. Do you think people are clamouring to immigrate to the West for the weather?
> I have no relationship with politics
LMFAO. Dress it up all you want. You're either ideological or you aren't, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You're free to criticize Capitalism and/or Liberalism, but in doing so you can't pretend you believe in nothing that can be defined in political terms.
> Rosenberg quote
Economics doesn't try to predict what policymakers and irrational actors do. But it's generally good at forecasting some effects from changes along specific dimensions; if it wasn't, microeconomics and central banking wouldn't matter. If the interest rate increases 10 points overnight, what happens - nothing?