Unplesant rumor

Labor liquidation 101

At some point will all of this Enron style financial ""wizardry"" cause currency to collapse and all hell to break loose in the USA?

Wouldn't the collapse of currency be the ONE THING capable of starting an actual civil war in this country?

When currency collapses you get memorable pictures of people trading a whole wheelbarrow full of worthless cash for one lousy loaf of bread. It has happened before.

We've had too much big government for way too long. Government is by it's very nature, mismanagement. Big government is just bigger mismanagement. Truth, justice, open government and financial responsibility have been subverted too much for too long.

Covering up water contamination "for our own good"? Such extensive dishonesty about finances? Didn't we learn from the Enron and Katrina fiascos?

Is the US banking industry the next incarnation of Enron? Some kind of giant w**re scamming constantly?

If we avoid the calamity, will we learn or just keep pushing it and making the inevitable even worse?

Nope.

If the Iraq war won't do it, after our experience in Vietnam, probably nothing will.

For different reasons.

Probably not enough, in this case.

Not nearly as bad as Sears, Roebuck.

'Time for regime change, all right.

Some did.

Investment banking might fit that description. d8-)

Who is this "we"? Most people don't even know what money is, or what Adam Smith was talking about in _The Wealth of Nations_. How do you expect "we" to learn anything about how the world really works?

Hope that the next generation gets a better education.

Adam Smith started it, but John Nash proved him wrong.

When is THAT going to trickle down to the market place?

Richard

I wasn't thinking about theories of competition so much as theories about wealth: Smith's section on "the progress of opulence." He didn't think much of gold, or his metaphor for it, copper pots, as a measure of a nation's wealth. The fact that the presidential candidates are playing populist games with trade restrictions -- most particularly the language they use to describe it -- reflects the fact that most people don't get it. They get the downside but they can't see the upside; nor are they equipped to find the right balance and to ameliorate the downside, because they don't understand it.

Yet these same people, collectively, are all in a dither about the state of our economy.

Regarding game theory and equilibrium theories finding their way into popular education: when pigs fly.

But that leaves us stuck with greed gus grabbing all he can (any way he can) for himself - and at the same time reducing the value of what he gets (and what we ALL have). It's probably past the point of diminishing returns now.

But you are probably all too right - again.

It's very disheartening, Ed. That so many smart people can be so damned dumb.

Richard

.....

Well, somebody has certaintly been working at it...(last paragraph)

See:

Cooperative Game theory

In game theory, the Nash equilibrium (named after John Forbes Nash, who proposed it) is a solution concept of a game involving two or more players, in which no player has anything to gain by changing only his or her own strategy unilaterally.

If each player has chosen a strategy and no player can benefit by changing his or her strategy while the other players keep theirs unchanged, then the current set of strategy choices and the corresponding payoffs constitute a Nash equilibrium.

Stated simply, Amy and Bill are in Nash equilibrium if Amy is making the best decision she can, taking into account Bill's decision, and Bill is making the best decision he can, taking into account Amy's decision.

Likewise, many players are in Nash equilibrium if each one is making the best decision that they can, taking into account the decisions of the others. However, Nash equilibrium does not necessarily mean the best cumulative payoff for all the players involved; in many cases all the players might improve their payoffs if they could somehow agree on strategies different from the Nash equilibrium (eg. competing businessmen forming a cartel in order to increase their profits).

It does, if people ignore what Smith actually analyzed and proposed. His comment about the "guiding hand" is generally misunderstood -- he said, basically, that the guiding hand *may* keep greed from benefitting only the greedy one, not that it necessarily *does*. And he believed that government had to be wary of greed. Finally, he believed that people should be taxed according to their ability to pay; in other words, he favored a progressive income tax:

"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

The point being not that Smith was the oracle, but that his principles were based on a balanced view of how men really behave, and how unfettered trade and business, while the engine of prosperity, can also run amok. The ersatz anarchists and mindless laissez-faire types tend to miss that part of the basic capitalist theories that they think they are promoting.

IMO, smart people are good for ideas and information. They're not necessarily any better than the rest of us for making judgments about good and bad.

-- Ed Huntress

In this case I don't think it's a matter of the government not being any good but instead it's a matter of a government that doesn't believe in regulating business. Because this government is for allowing the markets to operate without government interference, the markets are expected to work out any problems without any outside help. It's not supposed to need any help because the "market" is supposedly able to solve all problems as long as government gets off it's back. I think it's clear now that letting the "invisible hand" of the market handle things without the government's intervention is a failure. The really stupid thing about this realization is that everyone but the ignorant and the far right wing free market utopians have known since 1929 that letting the market run the show all by itself is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, it seems we have to keep repeating this mistake like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Every time you let republican business people in positions of power they run right out and make this mistake again as if they have no concept of what went on before they were born. I guess they don't, having taken nothing in college except business classes.

Hawke