Conventional Wisdom Comeback

[marmar]

from the Working Life blog:



Conventional Wisdom Comeback

by Jonathan Tasini
Thursday 11 of March, 2010


Conventional wisdom--along with a great dose of greed and blind faith in a failed economic model--caused the immediate economic crisis we are still deeply mired in. Every day, brings another does of conventional wisdom. Here is one from The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. household wealth fell by $14 trillion during the recession, sapping confidence and holding back consumer spending. Now, it is staging a comeback...

Household net worth plummeted during the recession thanks to sharp declines in real estate and financial assets such as stocks, falling to a low of $48.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2009.

The massive decline knocked out a key support for consumer spending at a time when labor market and credit conditions were worsening rapidly. Monthly consumer spending fell as much as 2% last May compared with the prior year—the worst reading of the recession—after posting gains of more than 7% during the boom.

The conventional wisdom will look at any rise in the stock market and/or any signs of life in the housing market as a sign things are improving. But, that is a conventional wisdom at the immediate reality and is ignorant of a 30-year crisis. Until we have an honest debate in the country--which we are not having--about the roots of the three-decade long slide in wages, we will only kick down the road--again--a reckoning with a failed economic model.

We can't let that happen.


http://www.workinglife.org/blogs/view_post.php?content_id=14751

[existentialist]

1. I agree

It's like these supposed leaders, who are schooled in a theory of economic thought that does not recognize its own limitations, and recognizes nothing said school of economic thought does not predict, and has not read Frederick Allen Lewis's Only Yesterday, or Lord Action on the corrupting and blinding nature of power, or even the parts of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nation that are currently out of favor, really believes what it wants to believe, and calls those beliefs "reality."

Bullshit.

In a larger sense they are ignorant bullies leading a herd of sheep.


Neither you nor I am among those sheep.


That doesn't give us much power to try to turn things around, but we are not completely alone.

[HillbillyBob]

2. We still feel alone and we are reduced to spending only just what we have to

We had a problem with our well this week. Luckily it turned out to be a problem I could fix with materials on hand...it really sux to know that if it had been the pump we could not come up with the 3-400 $ cost for the replacement pump. We would have had to do the job ourselves since hiriing it done would be out of the question..and that is not the only thing that is broken here on the farm that we now cannot afford to fix.