And ( to my ear ) the always reliable Dean Baker addresses "the money thing" in "Rigged". Scott Sumner has also written at length on the subject.
There are two mandates to the Fed - price stability and ( Humphrey-Hawkins ) employment. With the exception of the Greenspan era pre-2000, Fed policy has set employment in the back seat.
Because "Inflation BAAAAD!" ( in the manner of Phil Hartman's Frankenstein's monster ).
So we have 2% growth targets that we undershoot and low growth. The population has adapted in ways described in Tyler Cowen's "The Complacent Class".
I dunno. I think that at least globalization - as in the easily agreed on definition of globalization - is declining. After all, the various China seas seem to be becoming a Chinese lake, if we can project the construction of sand islands some.
Automation is both already in full sway and at the same time, the remaining things to be automated seem out of reach - not of the technologists, but of the leadership class. But we can't give the techies status enough to do it right :) It is also anything but clear that automation should displace labor necessarily, at least over a long enough time line.
"Inflation is, everywhere, a monetary phenomenon." - Milton Friedman.
I don't think that what Conservatives call "the destruction of the nuclear family" is the goal, but that the models in use don't work to keep Dad jobs available. The nuclear family will most likely evolve out anyway, because we can't even hit low (2%) Fed growth targets. At any rate, Dean Baker, "Rigged", yadda yadda.
Real professional soldiers come from the Service Academies and while they're different from Gates & Zuckerberg, they are among our nations finest people, at least when hubris doesn't get 'em.
It's not myth, it's narrative. Antebellum slavery and Jim Crow were narratives[1]. Even worse, they're narratives based on phrenological "science".
[1] see also a novel "The Klansman", the Word of that narrative made flesh and into "Birth of a Nation" , i which the modern movie was born.
Sacrificing individual agency to mythic protections has a name. It's collectivism. And it takes quite the storyteller to kill that sort of story.
The housing crisis? "Housing never goes down." Vietnam? "The domino theory." Manifest Destiny? "Go West, young man."
The problem is that we're adapted to narrative as our principle means of information exchange. So we try to construct counter-narratives. Those work just about as well.
Can anyone shed light on why so many Stoic societies/clubs seem to be essentially religious? The Stoics I have read do not seem to be particularly religious nor of any particular creed - some were polytheist, some were monotheist, some seem to nearly be agnostic or atheist.
Those are slowly being identified as artifacts of trauma[1], at least the pathological cases are. SO imagine how prevalent they were in the Classical world.
[1]] I don't hold that un-self-aware people are pathological...
And thank you for your thoughts as well. Your last sentence caps it; what I am saying is that there is a broken tool in the toolbox - we should be able to make profit an ethical value - as an estimator of how much good we do on the world - but because accounting practices don't isolate rents ( SFAIK ) from consumer surplus, then that makes profitability a shakier ethical metric.
But yes - the ethics of a company are a serious part of the architecture. Good ethics are of self-interest even more than they are a collective good.
All those things are much easier to use as values than profit, since profit may include some fairly innocent or some fairly egregious rent-seeking. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that - but with one caution - one must still be "competitive".
The problem is that what we mark down on the books as profit may or may not actually reflect any social benefit to the larger society through the mechanism of consumer surplus.
This state of affairs means that any discussion on profit may or may not be all that coherent because we would have to clarify if we mean rent-profit or consumer-surplus-profit.
"consumer-surplus-profit" is a signal to do more. "rent-profit" means you're not both doing good while doing well.
This is a much larger point than designing a corporate architecture. This goes to how we evaluate ethical behavior.
There are two mandates to the Fed - price stability and ( Humphrey-Hawkins ) employment. With the exception of the Greenspan era pre-2000, Fed policy has set employment in the back seat.
Because "Inflation BAAAAD!" ( in the manner of Phil Hartman's Frankenstein's monster ).
So we have 2% growth targets that we undershoot and low growth. The population has adapted in ways described in Tyler Cowen's "The Complacent Class".