Mark Blyth's Economics - How We Got Here and Where We Go

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Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with his thinking on things he's always seemed incredibly lucid and for as much as I considered myself something of an economic conservative I see where there's a lot here that needs to be examined and I'm still taking it in because there's a lot here, a lot of it is new to me, and I want to do the math in my head to make sure I'm actually following it properly.

I know we also have a few people here who's interest or career paths are economics and I'd be curious to hear what their take is on his analysis and where they'd agree or disagree with his estimates.

The first video is his explaining three different economic models we've had, the first over the 19th century and earlier, the second from the late 1940's onward, the third from the late 1970's and early 80's till now, and the fourth being at least a partial pendulum swing back to the second albeit different in shape and form. The second is a range of suggestions he's made as far as what kinds of problems are occurring and what kinds of options make sense for resolving them.

A few of the meso things he noted that were on people's suggestion list (he thought there were somewhat small potatoes but still part of the solution) were coops and ESOPs. That's fit my own observations for as many times as I've seen board of directors and shareholders run company into the ground with quarterly profits uber alis thinking. He also considered certain kinds of NGO's to establish digital trusts for holding and managing user privacy rights and payments as well as considering some of what's been done with bonds in Japan to get aging assets and young debt squared away (in Japan's case it involved issuing bonds).

There seem to be a lot of good ideas here but I still see the one thing brought up that I want to learn more about - ie. the difference between how Federal Reserve debt really works from household debt. I hear it rinsed and repeated that the Fed can print away and it's not an issue but I can't imagine either that there are no vulnerabilities to that approach, which makes me wonder if MMT might be as ballsy and risky as it looks if, say, we get to $50 trillion in debt or lose something like the petro dollar.

I'm bumping this.

I get that it's a total close to 3 hours, just that for as many people who like to claim they know things about economics this is an important lecture series to look at and stake some well thought out agreements and/or disagreements on.

He just did a revamp of his Global Trumpism lecture in July:

Hey techstep - I've been watching his talks since you pointed him out to me some months ago, and he's really good at explaining these things .... in the original post, you say you're an economic conservative - I was wondering: what do you mean by that? -

I'm asking because conservative parties all over the world seem to be economic neoliberalists. (and not in favour of environmental protection, or, conservation, if you will) ... so ... yeah, I'm not sure what you mean by the phrase.

My orientation on that is starting to melt down a bit, and it's partly because I think the terminology, the American political sense really seems to be a dupe or exoteric language.

Before, meaning before 2010 and maybe a bit after when I hadn't really thought about where things were yet or hadn't really seen anything I could with certainty link to the 2008 bailouts, I would have said that I was against the sort of frivolous social spending of the sort that didn't solve problems, simply gave political parties a check mark, and as far as I saw it at the time were hazardous forms of spending because they'd quite often either just inflate the debt or steal money from something less glamorous or things people didn't understand as well that would have massive downstream consequences - ie. I just saw it as political avarice and game-playing.

As of right now I'm starting to really get a sense of just how bad things are in terms of neoliberalism having been a bald excuse for the very top companies and something like the 1000th of 1% to make a killing on their returns, a half truth with some validity was that they were helping the developing world move toward first world standards and there's also the climate claim that once a country's per capita income reaches something like $5,000 per year or higher it means people aren't fighting for their lives and they have enough income to actually care about the environment, deforestation, global warming, etc.. All of that is true, however it's increasingly clear that the neoliberals really could have cared less for the most part, that these were just pleasant byproducts, and where they're clearly demonstrating how little they care is the current first world, the economic and social straights we're headed toward, and how little has been done to try and smooth the difference of such large outbound wealth transfers.

Needless to say if that last part keeps going in the same direction the western world is likely to vote in authoritarians because they'll no longer be comfortable enough to vote their values or principles, they'll be voting what they perceive as survival and that's often a point where people are fine with foregoing some freedoms. That would mean that the former first-world would take significant steps backward in terms of human rights, most likely along with that significant steps backward environmentally, and the countries who championed neoliberalism and the idea of stabilizing the world through helping the developing world will be too much of a mess to continue overseeing such a project.

At this point I really don't know where I see myself because I'd be all for UBI or a 'freedom dividend'. If we're only letting people be successful, on a sociological level, and have the right to procreate if they've just about sheered off almost everything about their humanity to become work and profession automations then that's what they'll be raising as children and we'll see massive disruptions of future society as we're simply raising bumper crops of mercenaries. It's bad for the future, bad for economic and social stability, it's like taking corporate myopia, freebasing it, and smoking it out of a glass pipe for decades and not expecting that to blow up.