Void_Reader

joined 1 year ago
 
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sure, real economists don't explicitly hold those views. But the kinds of metrics and models liberal economists are fond of using basically lead to that flowchart.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I appreciate you trying to answer a question in good faith, but you're conflating 'liberal' with 'vaguely left-leaning', and none of what you've said makes any sense outside of current US political 'discourse' where 'Liberal' means 'slightly left-wing'. 

What you describe as liberal economics is closer to Keynsianism or Social Democracy. 

In economics, the 'Liberal' school of thought is generally against regulation and interference in the market, seeing it as being 'self-regulating'. In economic terms, Reagan and Thatcher were Liberals - hence them being associated with 'Neoliberalism'. 

The whole thing you said about Capitalism tending towards monopoly is actually a very Marxist/Socialist idea - Liberal economic theory tends to argue that monopolies form because of government and that they wouldn't occur in a truly free market (although its more nuanced than that, there's major disagreements over 'Natural Monopolies' etc. within the Liberal school). Source: look up any Liberal economist/thinker and their view on monopolies. E.g Friedman, J.S Mill.

Capitalism being an economic system doesn't make it apolitical. 'In theory' Liberalism and Capitalism are very very closely intertwined, it's not implicit, it's absolutely explicit if you read any Liberal political or economic theory. 

Economics is inherently political.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/#Libe Sections 3 and 4 of this are a decent starting point.

Also the idea of slightly changing our voting systems as the way to drive change is quite hilarious. Sure, moving away from FPTP would probably help a bit, but it's not like countries with other systems are doing fine. These issues are more fundamental. And historically, fundamental change has never occured through small technical adjustments to political systems.

 

Read this book recently, just putting it out there in case anyone hasn't come across it yet: http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ There's a lot of useful stuff there, the basic idea is to enable people to develop basic technologies from scratch, a 'quick-start guide' to a technological civilisation.

The website also has some interesting prepping ideas on it, e.g the 'apocalypse-proof kindle'

It also occurred to me while reading it: good quality education in a resilient society would allow people to reproduce something like this. Yet despite almost 2 decades of formal education, a lot of it was completely new to me.

Would have been nice if Dartnell put up the whole book for free on his website but I guess he needs to make a living. It is, however, available for free on archive.org and also z-lib.