dimelab dimelab: shrinking the gap between talk and action.

conscious Topic in The Credit Debacle Catalog

conscious choice (1); false consciousness (1).

Electric Politics Mon 2010-03-22 14:06 EDT

False Consciousness

...Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation has written an interesting refutation of...an almost universal popular assumption in the United States that this country is much more entrepreneurial and individualistic than the purportedly lazy, pension-sponging socialists of Old Europe. Yet U.S. small business development is at the bottom of the heap of the OECD countries. Once again, our flattering self image is so wildly at variance with reality it verges on schizophrenia...Lynn argues that a key inflection point in government policy towards small business came in 1981, when the Reagan administration essentially stopped enforcing anti-monopoly and small business-protection statutes....

Electric Politics; false consciousness.

Steve Keen's Debtwatch Sun 2009-08-30 20:48 EDT

Debtwatch No. 38: The GFC--Pothole or Mountain?

``The Marxian view is that capitalistic economies are inherently unstable and that excessive accumulation of capital will lead to increasingly severe economic crises. Growth theory, which has proved to be empirically successful, says this is not true.'' wrote Economics Nobel Prize winner Edward C. Prescott. Prescott also claimed ``the Great Depression was a conscious choice by American workers to enjoy more leisure, in response to unspecified changes in the labour market'' Apparently debt played no role. The capitalistic economy is stable, and absent some change in technology or the rules of the economic game, the [...]

38; Debtwatch; GFC; Mountain; Potholes; Steve Keen's Debtwatch.