by
Mark Blyth
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[...] what economists call moral hazard is what normal people call trust. You cannot eliminate the former without destroying the capacity for generating the latter. Without some degree of rule ambiguity and norms of reciprocity, trust cannot emerge. The EU's political project was built on trust, not the elimination of moral hazard. That's why it worked. Its monetary project is based on opposite principles. Yet at the end of the day, how can you run an economy, especially a pan-European monetary economy, without trust as its basis? [...]
[...] in the absence of any significant liquidity-constraint, "when spending cuts are perceived as permanent, consumers anticipate a reduction in the tax burden and a permanent increase in their lifetime disposable income." This leads them to spend and invest more today because they perceive that "previously expected large tax increases will not be necessary in the future," which is especially true at higher rates of taxation. When such policies are followed in periods of "fiscal stress," the results are better because the signal that the cuts will be permanent is more credible. [...]
from Alesina and Ardanga's 1998 paper "Tales of Fiscal Adjustment". who tf thinks like this, please tell me
there's a similar one on p174: "Consumers with rational expectations are seen to calculate their lifetime consumption function based on the credibility of the signal to cut spending by the government, and they accurately incorporate these estimates into their private spending decisions."
[...] the German government's deliberate policy, designed to make the payment of reparations, especially after the French occupation of the Ruhr, all but impossible. [...] As Albrecht Ritschl put it succinctly, "Inflation proved to be a formidable weapon against reparations creditors, at least in the short run. It helped insulate Germany from the international slump of 190/21, improving her export position and fueling internal demand ... It also exploited Germany's remaining foreign creditors, largely neutral countries, by depreciating the paper mark reserves they had accumulated during the stabilization period ... Above all, it paralyzed the financial system that would have been needed to organize an orderly transfer of reparations."
The centerpiece of their July 1932 election propaganda, the Wirstchaftliches Sofortprogramm (the immediate economic program) laid out an alternative to austerity that looked an awful lot like the WTB plan. The pamphlet's first three points could not have been more anti-austerity: first, "unemployment causes poverty, employment creates prosperity"; second, "capital does not create jobs, jobs create capital"; and third, "unemployment benefits burden the economy but job creation simulates the economy." [...]
WTB plan = Keynesian, pro-job-creation plan
[...] the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, at it were, draining itself in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. [...]
[...] But on bright summer days, in particular, so evenly disposed a lustre lay over the whole of Barmouth Bay that the separate surfaces of sand and water, sea and land, earth and sky could no longer be distinguished. All forms and colours were dissolved in a pearl-grey haze; there were no contrasts, no shading any more, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely--I remember this well--it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity. [...]
[...] it was truly terrifying to see such emptiness open up a foot away from firm ground, to realize that there was no transition, only this dividing line, with ordinary life on one side and its unimaginable opposite on the other. The chasm into which no ray of light could penetrate [...]
I’ll start my story again, this time with family. Call it filial piety. I am the daughter of a capitalist; that is to say, my mother needed money to feel safe. I don’t hold this against her. She was raised Chinese in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1950s. I don’t intend to explain this further; if you know, you know. Okay, so money keeps you safe. The problem with that paradigm is that there is never enough and never too much. Oh, the fragrant promise of capital! And all the immigrants buy in. Buy into what? The idea that we can own something that isn’t even ours to begin with.
After all, this is America, where every November is a pilgrim play, a feast, a holiday for the supermarkets to make their fortunes off of canned pumpkin. America, where not even Google can answer the only question about real estate worth asking: Who does this land belong to?
“My guests!” said the host, now standing once more. There was another empty chair to his right. Who had been there? A man with a mustache or a woman with a braid. Someone with a gleaming emerald ring. I drank more wine. “You are far too polite!” the host said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of songbirds for you, and hundreds more waiting in the kitchen! Try the goldcrest. Try the warbler. Don’t leave until you’ve tasted the regent bowerbird. The Gouldian finches are purple, turquoise, black, and blue. How can you argue with that?” he said. “Enjoy them while you can because they’ll be gone before you know it.”
What the host meant is that we were running out of the birds not on the table but rather: on the Earth. True, just that morning we had lost the yellow-bellied gecko, the North American mountain lion, the Tunisian hunting rat, the African nutria, and the Japanese water rhinoceros. The week before went the spotted dolphin, the reddish arctic leopard, and the subterranean crow. It was a tragedy, but we were growing used to it every day. I sighed to think that I had never tasted any of them.
the first paragraph is pretty funny but the second kind of ruins it. spoils the punchline essentially
I’m sorry you’ve been falling into it. Nihilism is one of these words that has seeped into our everyday language, but people forget that Nietzsche’s nihilism diagnosis was a claim about the loss of transcendent values. It’s related to what we were just talking about. One of the ways Nietzsche defined nihilism is that it is what happens “when there is no Truth.” Modern secular people say they don’t believe in absolute Truth, but “there is no truth” is a truth claim. Instead, we have “my truth,” which doesn’t mean anything. It actually just means power—eventually “my truth” will come up against “your truth”—since there isn’t The Truth, all that is left is power. It’s the same with all of our other values. Now, we are subordinate to the market, which has infected every aspect of our lives: we are becoming timeless, placeless, history-less individuals, seeking the immediate fulfillment of our most base desires, scrambling for scraps of validation… We are nihilists. The Novelist is largely about trying to emerge from nihilism.
Earlier today Nicolette reminded me of an HTMLGIANT piece, where I kept saying how nothing is inherently good or bad… This is almost always just cope for living a shitty life. But tbh, I don’t know how much philosophy has helped me. I think “coming up against myself” enough to get humbled and then focusing on actions outside of my comfort zone—like prayer, nourishing friendships, lifting weights, trying to continually, incrementally change—helps more than anything. There are things we can only understand through the act; trying to understand everything beforehand doesn’t work. The Truth is not something you can just think or say. Truth does not belong to the Smarty-pants; it belongs to the fully alive human being, who increasingly conforms himself to Love.
the rest of the interview is a little disappointing cus it feels like a crude dismissal of politics but this is interesting