people are sums of their influences, reagan included.
he was an actor, so he was paid to act. not think.

his perspective was of that of someone who benefited greatly from the gilded age of pax americana, so his views reflected that. Nothing started with HIM.
But as a spokesperson for fucking yourself and voting against your own interests, he was incredibly sincere.

"The Gilded Age is back. Welcome to the plutocracy."

Now now, there's no need for fking profanity.

If you're shoveling manure for 10 dollars, and some government official takes 5 dollars "to help people" every time you get paid, how hard will you be shoveling manure tomorrow?

This left-wringer class envy warfare can't work forever.

>> ^StukaFox:

>> ^quantumushroom:
Let people keep more of their own EARNED money and good things happen. Blindly give money to government and they urinate it away.


Because life for the underclass was so good in the Gilded Age.
You really are a fucking tool, you know that?

>> ^quantumushroom:

Let people keep more of their own EARNED money and good things happen. Blindly give money to government and they urinate it away.



Because life for the underclass was so good in the Gilded Age.

You really are a fucking tool, you know that?

I think there have been major social upheavals every 30 years or so in human society ever since the industrial revolution (1864 - Civil War, 1900 - Gilded Age, 1930 - Great Depression/WWII, 1960 - Civil Rights/Vietnam, 1980 - Ronald Reagan/Monetarist revolution, 2000's Iraq/Great Recession). I think we're seeing another upheaval now, I just hope it won't get quite so bad as some of the others in my list -- I hope we're going to end up comparing the 2010's more to the 1960's than the 1930's or 1860's. I suspect I'll live through one more major upheaval, assuming my lifespan ends up being somewhat average, and assuming the rate of social change isn't accelerating.

There's a part of me that thinks Kurzweil is right about a Singularity coming -- that the rate of technological advancement will speed up exponentially, and exceed our wildest expectations. I think there's a nonzero chance I'll live long enough to see the start of such a thing, but I think it could just as easily be a century or two away, and not decades.

I do think environmental issues are going to become a massive, unmistakable concern sooner rather than later. I don't think it will be the end of humanity or anything like that, but I suspect we're going to have to either rapidly retool our economy once people snap out of denial, or have a big economic crash coupled with major crop shortages and famine, and then rapidly retool our economy. I would even argue that environmental issues have played a nontrivial role in the current economic hardship, and that the time has come to really start enacting plans for moving away from fossil fuels, and start looking into more medium-to-long term issues like biodiversity and fresh water supply.

As for the freak globe-spanning natural disasters, there's no way to know about those. They could as easily happen tomorrow as they could a couple million years from now. Hopefully those will wait until post-Singularity when we'll be better equipped to deal with something like that...

Let me clarify what I meant by "Great Depression style." I was mostly meaning a general recession that coincides with a series of bank runs, along with liquidity issues.

I'd be interested to see some hard economic data that went back to the 1600's. Personally, I think pre-industrial revolution economic data is not terribly relevant to the modern economy, but certainly economic crises did happen before there was a United States too (tulipmania being a favorite example).

I'm not sure what baseline you would use to call the growth of the economy between the 1940's and 1970's bad, certainly in the US it was a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity, and we didn't have a destroyed industrial base to rebuild.

After the 1970's, and in particular, post-Carter, America took a huge right turn on its policies across the board. Lots of things changed about the economy, and the philosophy driving economic policy. I'd argue that in essence, it was a massive push to return things to the way they were before the Great Depression and all the economic and political reform that it had spurred.

What did we get as a result? A new Gilded Age, and a new Great Depression.

But that's almost a tangent. If you're going to declare that the housing bubble is in some way primarily caused by (or made dangerous by) the Fed's expansionary monetary policy in the early 2000's, what is it that Greenspan should have done differently? Contract the money supply before a recovery began? Never cut rates in response to the crisis? It seems to me that monetary policy is the wrong tool for the job if what you really want is for people to properly price risk.

Maybe making money tight would indeed have slowed both bubbles, but it's a bit like chemotherapy; you're fighting the cancer by killing off all your body's fast-growing cells. It helps with the cancer, but it does lots of collateral damage in healthy areas too. Without more targeted treatment, it can be a bad idea.

In my view, the more targeted treatment would have been regulation. The market managed to make a system of trusts and obligations so complex that no one was able to accurately judge risk, and built itself a naturally-occurring ponzi scheme. Government could have kept things more transparent by regulating CDOs and CDSs, but it didn't because the people whose job it was to regulate the industry were all people who'd been chosen specifically for their disdain of regulating anything.

To me the instability we're seeing in recent decades has more to do with deregulation, and a cultural predisposition for searching for fast, easy money instead of trying to really create value, not some sort of issue with monetary policy.