"....exposed already existing American decline and predation in a way that, even to cynics, was hard to imagine just a year before. And this trend is only gonna ramp up in 2021..."
Here's a massive excerpt, but I think the key point is this one:
"...When I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, the Sapir-Whorf approach to linguistics was the standard. Benjamin Lee Whorf described how the vocabulary and semantics of language shape the way in which speakers conceptualize the world around them.
Anthropologist Robert Levy's 1960s studies of Tahitian suicide rates observed that they rose when unfortunate events made people sad. But their language had no word for "sad" or "depressed." They said "sick or "strange," and blamed themselves for the way they felt. Much like other vocabulary poor groups, they attributed their feelings of grief or frustration to demonic presence that seemed to be taking over their life. To describe this phenomenon, the linguist George Lakoff coined a term, hypocognition, to describe a condition in which the words or language that need to exist to frame an idea in a way which can lead to persuasive communication is either non-existent or ineffective." In his 2004 book, "Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate", he accuses libertarian free market doctrines of personal responsibility and the concept of "less government" as suffering from "massive hypocognition." Lacking appropriate economic concepts to understand what is making people poorer, the ideology of personal responsibility leads people to blame themselves for not being able to avoid being trapped in a system of debt peonage..."
I think that hits the nail on the head. Until people realise that they are in an "Orwellian Finance Matrix" (my new term for it LOL) I think your trend will continue to ramp up in 2021.
Happy New Year though!! 😉
__________________________________
Frederick Hayek called The Road to Serfdom in 1944 - as if neo-liberalism is not the road to neo-serfdom and debt peonage.
The academic curriculum has been hijacked to replace classical political economy with a seemingly de-politicized but actually pro-rentier ideology. Mathematical symbolism is given the sanctifying role once afforded by Latin. Aping the natural sciences, economists take refuge in abstruse modes of expression. The more complex the math, the more simplistic and banal the postulated relationships and conclusions tend to be. Most of the math refers to choices between different "menus" of goods and services, without much analysis of how these come to be produced, or the long-term economy-wide consequences of buying on credit instead of cash.
Economic theories that focus on the exchange of goods and services without discussing the means of acquiring control over wealth divert attention from examining what is most important in shaping the economy. Ultimately at issue is whether what economic jargon calls the "real" economy of production and consumption is more real than the claims of finance and property.
It is not possible to bail out the banks and somehow enable debtors to pay. One side or the other must lose. That is why the economic problem is ultimately one of insolvency, not merely temporary illiquidity. The major economic problem is whether the economy's debts should be downsized to reflect the ability to pay, or growth and living standards should be sacrificed to preserve the value of creditor claims.
=> The classical distinction between earned and unearned income.
There is false history as well as true history. Factual history rarely is the version promoted by the "victors" (or would-be victors the fight is not yet over). The same is true of economic theory. There is only one economic reality, so in principle there should be only one body of economic theory: reality economics. But special interests (today's victors) promote deception and outright exclusions in order to depict themselves as economic heroes, as if their predatory gains are those of society at large. Their self-congratulatory image characterizes what passes for mainstream economics.
Acting on behalf of financial, real estate and monopoly interests to defend deregulation and un-taxing of their gains, neoliberals have kidnapped the classical economists as part of their pantheon. They brag about Adam Smith, while diverting attention from what he and his classical followers actually said. Their rewriting of the history of economic thought treats Smith's critique of rentiers and debt financing as heresy.
For two centuries the classical economists fought against the vested rentier interests that survived from the post-Roman law codes and subsequent warlord feudalism. But progressive reform was aborted after World War 1. An anti-classical reaction began to emerge in the Gilded Age of the 1880s and 1890s, and gained strength after World War I ended the trend toward the socialization of industrial capitalism (e.g., public health and pensions, public investment in infrastructure and education) and the mobilization of banking for the purposes of financing industry, which had flowered most of all in Germany.
Anglo-American banking practice emerged as the norm, in alliance with real estate and monopolies instead of the formerly expected triad of industrial capitalism, banking and government. The struggle between what seemed to be the waves of the future, "state socialism" and Marxian socialism, were swept aside by a financialized rentier economy. With it came a new set of economic concepts and definitions, whose aim was to deaden resistance to what is now a full-blown Counter-Enlightenment.
The victorious rentier interests recognize that as long as they can capture the minds of politicians and the public to shape how people view the economy's dynamics, there is no need to spend money bribing or fighting them. As long as the One Percent can control the educational curriculum to teach that we are at "The End of History" and that "There Is No Alternative" (TINA), they will deprive voters of the ability to conceptualize an alternative (see hypocognition below). They promote the idea that austerity and the economic polarization that goes with it - are our epoch's natural destiny, not a reversal of civil society's forward momentum.
It is not necessary to re-invent the wheel to replace the current malaise with a more realistic analysis. My economic model aims to lay the groundwork for creating a more realistic accounting format for national income and product accounts by excluding the burden of rentier overhead from "product." Rent is income without product, "empty" price without value. When unearned income is paid to the finance, investment and real estate sector and monopolies, it is at the expense of wages, industrial profits and taxes.
This book therefore is meant as an antidote, starting with a renovation of the language used to describe how our economy works (or doesn't work). The A to Z entries in the vocabulary section illustrate this distinction from the historical and political as well as methodological standpoint
=> Hypocognizant democracy: our newest political oxymoron
When I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, the Sapir-Whorf approach to linguistics was the standard. Benjamin Lee Whorf described how the vocabulary and semantics of language shape the way in which speakers conceptualize the world around them.
Anthropologist Robert Levy's 1960s studies of Tahitian suicide rates observed that they rose when unfortunate events made people sad. But their language had no word for "sad" or "depressed." They said "sick or "strange," and blamed themselves for the way they felt. Much like other vocabulary poor groups, they attributed their feelings of grief or frustration to demonic presence that seemed to be taking over their life. To describe this phenomenon, the linguist George Lakoff coined a term, hypocognition, to describe a condition in which the words or language that need to exist to frame an idea in a way which can lead to persuasive communication is either non-existent or ineffective." In his 2004 book, "Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate", he accuses libertarian free market doctrines of personal responsibility and the concept of "less government" as suffering from "massive hypocognition." Lacking appropriate economic concepts to understand what is making people poorer, the ideology of personal responsibility leads people to blame themselves for not being able to avoid being trapped in a system of debt peonage.
The following A-to-Z guide aims at providing the vocabulary and concepts for a more effective diagnosis of today's economic (and by extension, psychological) depression, by thinking in terms of compound interest, debt peonage, rentier conomics, unearned income, zero-sum activities and economic parasitism. Without such concepts in the forefront of one's mind, today's neoliberalized economies are prone to succumb to the virus of Orwellian Doublespeak.
did you see the McWhorter/Pinker discussion of Sapir-Whorf? McW says it was debunked.
on the issue of economics, misdirected "individualism" and the therapeutic state: James Hillman deconstructed the whole mess (based on reading the interview with Hillman in Scott London's web site years ago.)
Hillman makes a lot of sense in that interview...for example:
"...Hillman: I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world..."
That's interesting about Whorf...I went and took a quick look...and stumbled upon this gem:
"...One big problem with the original Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stems from the idea that if a person's language has no word for a particular concept, then that person would not be able to understand that concept, which is untrue.
Language doesn't necessarily control humans' ability to reason or have an emotional response to something or some idea. For example, take the German word sturmfrei, which essentially is the feeling when you have the whole house to yourself because your parents or roommates are away. Just because English doesn't have a single word for the idea doesn't mean that Americans can't understand the concept..."
Happy New Year Yasha and Evgenia!!
thank you katherine! happy new year to you, too. oh and to john!
Great comment Yasha:
"....exposed already existing American decline and predation in a way that, even to cynics, was hard to imagine just a year before. And this trend is only gonna ramp up in 2021..."
It inspired me to take a closer look at a book one of the regulars mentioned a while back (I think): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34150000-j-is-for-junk-economics
Here's a massive excerpt, but I think the key point is this one:
"...When I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, the Sapir-Whorf approach to linguistics was the standard. Benjamin Lee Whorf described how the vocabulary and semantics of language shape the way in which speakers conceptualize the world around them.
Anthropologist Robert Levy's 1960s studies of Tahitian suicide rates observed that they rose when unfortunate events made people sad. But their language had no word for "sad" or "depressed." They said "sick or "strange," and blamed themselves for the way they felt. Much like other vocabulary poor groups, they attributed their feelings of grief or frustration to demonic presence that seemed to be taking over their life. To describe this phenomenon, the linguist George Lakoff coined a term, hypocognition, to describe a condition in which the words or language that need to exist to frame an idea in a way which can lead to persuasive communication is either non-existent or ineffective." In his 2004 book, "Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate", he accuses libertarian free market doctrines of personal responsibility and the concept of "less government" as suffering from "massive hypocognition." Lacking appropriate economic concepts to understand what is making people poorer, the ideology of personal responsibility leads people to blame themselves for not being able to avoid being trapped in a system of debt peonage..."
I think that hits the nail on the head. Until people realise that they are in an "Orwellian Finance Matrix" (my new term for it LOL) I think your trend will continue to ramp up in 2021.
Happy New Year though!! 😉
__________________________________
Frederick Hayek called The Road to Serfdom in 1944 - as if neo-liberalism is not the road to neo-serfdom and debt peonage.
The academic curriculum has been hijacked to replace classical political economy with a seemingly de-politicized but actually pro-rentier ideology. Mathematical symbolism is given the sanctifying role once afforded by Latin. Aping the natural sciences, economists take refuge in abstruse modes of expression. The more complex the math, the more simplistic and banal the postulated relationships and conclusions tend to be. Most of the math refers to choices between different "menus" of goods and services, without much analysis of how these come to be produced, or the long-term economy-wide consequences of buying on credit instead of cash.
Economic theories that focus on the exchange of goods and services without discussing the means of acquiring control over wealth divert attention from examining what is most important in shaping the economy. Ultimately at issue is whether what economic jargon calls the "real" economy of production and consumption is more real than the claims of finance and property.
It is not possible to bail out the banks and somehow enable debtors to pay. One side or the other must lose. That is why the economic problem is ultimately one of insolvency, not merely temporary illiquidity. The major economic problem is whether the economy's debts should be downsized to reflect the ability to pay, or growth and living standards should be sacrificed to preserve the value of creditor claims.
=> The classical distinction between earned and unearned income.
There is false history as well as true history. Factual history rarely is the version promoted by the "victors" (or would-be victors the fight is not yet over). The same is true of economic theory. There is only one economic reality, so in principle there should be only one body of economic theory: reality economics. But special interests (today's victors) promote deception and outright exclusions in order to depict themselves as economic heroes, as if their predatory gains are those of society at large. Their self-congratulatory image characterizes what passes for mainstream economics.
Acting on behalf of financial, real estate and monopoly interests to defend deregulation and un-taxing of their gains, neoliberals have kidnapped the classical economists as part of their pantheon. They brag about Adam Smith, while diverting attention from what he and his classical followers actually said. Their rewriting of the history of economic thought treats Smith's critique of rentiers and debt financing as heresy.
For two centuries the classical economists fought against the vested rentier interests that survived from the post-Roman law codes and subsequent warlord feudalism. But progressive reform was aborted after World War 1. An anti-classical reaction began to emerge in the Gilded Age of the 1880s and 1890s, and gained strength after World War I ended the trend toward the socialization of industrial capitalism (e.g., public health and pensions, public investment in infrastructure and education) and the mobilization of banking for the purposes of financing industry, which had flowered most of all in Germany.
Anglo-American banking practice emerged as the norm, in alliance with real estate and monopolies instead of the formerly expected triad of industrial capitalism, banking and government. The struggle between what seemed to be the waves of the future, "state socialism" and Marxian socialism, were swept aside by a financialized rentier economy. With it came a new set of economic concepts and definitions, whose aim was to deaden resistance to what is now a full-blown Counter-Enlightenment.
The victorious rentier interests recognize that as long as they can capture the minds of politicians and the public to shape how people view the economy's dynamics, there is no need to spend money bribing or fighting them. As long as the One Percent can control the educational curriculum to teach that we are at "The End of History" and that "There Is No Alternative" (TINA), they will deprive voters of the ability to conceptualize an alternative (see hypocognition below). They promote the idea that austerity and the economic polarization that goes with it - are our epoch's natural destiny, not a reversal of civil society's forward momentum.
It is not necessary to re-invent the wheel to replace the current malaise with a more realistic analysis. My economic model aims to lay the groundwork for creating a more realistic accounting format for national income and product accounts by excluding the burden of rentier overhead from "product." Rent is income without product, "empty" price without value. When unearned income is paid to the finance, investment and real estate sector and monopolies, it is at the expense of wages, industrial profits and taxes.
This book therefore is meant as an antidote, starting with a renovation of the language used to describe how our economy works (or doesn't work). The A to Z entries in the vocabulary section illustrate this distinction from the historical and political as well as methodological standpoint
=> Hypocognizant democracy: our newest political oxymoron
When I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, the Sapir-Whorf approach to linguistics was the standard. Benjamin Lee Whorf described how the vocabulary and semantics of language shape the way in which speakers conceptualize the world around them.
Anthropologist Robert Levy's 1960s studies of Tahitian suicide rates observed that they rose when unfortunate events made people sad. But their language had no word for "sad" or "depressed." They said "sick or "strange," and blamed themselves for the way they felt. Much like other vocabulary poor groups, they attributed their feelings of grief or frustration to demonic presence that seemed to be taking over their life. To describe this phenomenon, the linguist George Lakoff coined a term, hypocognition, to describe a condition in which the words or language that need to exist to frame an idea in a way which can lead to persuasive communication is either non-existent or ineffective." In his 2004 book, "Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate", he accuses libertarian free market doctrines of personal responsibility and the concept of "less government" as suffering from "massive hypocognition." Lacking appropriate economic concepts to understand what is making people poorer, the ideology of personal responsibility leads people to blame themselves for not being able to avoid being trapped in a system of debt peonage.
The following A-to-Z guide aims at providing the vocabulary and concepts for a more effective diagnosis of today's economic (and by extension, psychological) depression, by thinking in terms of compound interest, debt peonage, rentier conomics, unearned income, zero-sum activities and economic parasitism. Without such concepts in the forefront of one's mind, today's neoliberalized economies are prone to succumb to the virus of Orwellian Doublespeak.
--//--
did you see the McWhorter/Pinker discussion of Sapir-Whorf? McW says it was debunked.
on the issue of economics, misdirected "individualism" and the therapeutic state: James Hillman deconstructed the whole mess (based on reading the interview with Hillman in Scott London's web site years ago.)
Hillman makes a lot of sense in that interview...for example:
"...Hillman: I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world..."
Wise words, methinks.
That's interesting about Whorf...I went and took a quick look...and stumbled upon this gem:
"...One big problem with the original Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stems from the idea that if a person's language has no word for a particular concept, then that person would not be able to understand that concept, which is untrue.
Language doesn't necessarily control humans' ability to reason or have an emotional response to something or some idea. For example, take the German word sturmfrei, which essentially is the feeling when you have the whole house to yourself because your parents or roommates are away. Just because English doesn't have a single word for the idea doesn't mean that Americans can't understand the concept..."
Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/sapir-whorf-hypothesis-1691924
We'll have to ask Yasha if there are words in Russian that non-Russian speakers cannot conceptualise 😉