Long Run Phillips Curve And Rational Expectations

a septon on what is passed on as modern economic theory (as I was taught in econ grad school)

Catastrophizing

Of course it would be silly to deny that we at least try to be rational. There are rationalist aspects to what we do. Human beings are at least partly motivated by selfish interest. But this very narrow view of human nature has actually created a kind of poor society in the sense of everything being reduced to monetary value. Now people are asking why we need subjects like anthropology or history of art or sociology when all we need is making money. That makes for a very poor society. You are seeing arguments that we should commercialise the BBC so that they can make more things that people can watch without realising that the BBC is the envy of the world for its ability to produce very high quality cultural programmes. So that kind of worldview has made societies very poor in terms of cultural diversity and things like that. But more importantly it’s created this society where being bad, if you like, is considered something good or even being clever. You are actually a sucker if you don’t cheat. Once you begin to understand the world in this very narrow, impoverished way then you will create a society which is actually very inefficient. Then you will have to say well everyone’s out to cheat and promote their own self-interest so we have to monitor everyone all the time, and then who’s going to monitor the monitors? We have to hire monitors who can monitor the monitors and so on and so on. Society becomes very inefficient not to speak of being very unpleasant.