Economics

[sandwich_bird]

Okay, different topic, but still economics-related. On a scale on 1 to 10, how naive is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project

(1 being "slightly", 10 being "completely detached from reality".)

Naive in what way? The general premise to me is fine but they never go into the specifics. I feel like they just throw around big words and build maquettes without ever answering the question of how all of this will be done.

[Hellgrinder]

Just in their belief that Earth has infinite resources, and that by instantly switching to this so-called "Resource-Based Economy" will automatically solve all problems.

[sandwich_bird]

Just in their belief that Earth has infinite resources, and that by instantly switching to this so-called "Resource-Based Economy" will automatically solve all problems.

Well, to their defense, hydro and solar power are ''infinite'' and their whole idea of resource-based economy would, in a general sense, solve a lot of problem but... again they don't say how any of this will be done specifically. How will we switch to this system? What are the proofs that this system will work and is superior? For a society that supposedly promote science and technology, I feel like we're missing a lot of information. Their website is more commercial than educative too.

[TheEconomist]

Watched a fourty minute video on it. As predicted, it boils down mostly to a laundry list of complaints that everyone has, some abstract ways to possibly remedy a few select indicators (not causes or results), and some incredibly dull simplifications of the course of human history. Good ideas and good intentions, but everyone has those and its easy to spout them. Competition with the real world is much more complex or we would've solved these problems already.

Oh and there was some gross misunderstandings of genetics and behavioral psychology (sorry Fresco, all humans are not the same and none of them will ever be morally perfect) as is to be expected by a pie-in-the-sky documentary based around the ideas of a mechanical engineer turned poet/philosopher. Hate to shit on the hard work of people with all the good intentions but I see nothing here that won't result in the same things as any number of social experiments in the 60's and 70's. I really hope they publish some more concrete information though. Debating the merits of socialism, capitalism, and whatever else gets pretty dull after a while since, when you boil down to it, they're not really all that different when compared with some of the more interesting ideas one could come up with if the entire system were scrapped.

However, ultimately, if there's one thing revolutions have taught us is that doing away with all previous institutions (no matter how corrupt) can be far worse than just making incremental improvement to imperfect systems even if it takes hundreds of years.

[TheEconomist]

Also, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/201...8E172A&gwt=pay

Probably the world's most popular Keynesian economist thinks China done gone too far with their Keynesianness. Probably getting time to make movies. IIRC, some posters here were interested in these developments a year or so ago. Took a long time but maybe its here.

[Nissa]

People talk a lot about Keynes...what's his deal?

Heh, the only economic stuff I have an understanding of is basic macro and communism's faults.

[TheEconomist]

Been trying the last couple of days to come up with a proper response. Typed a few walls of text that just didn't feel right. There's no way to explain Keynesianism without going WAAAAY in-depth otherwise it can be easily confused with things that Keynes was very much against, such as central planning and socialism/communism.

So, I'll just cheap out and use the Wikipedia definition.

Keynesian economics is the view that in the short run, especially during recessions, economic output is strongly influenced by aggregate demand (total spending in the economy). In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy; instead, it is influenced by a host of factors and sometimes behaves erratically, affecting production, employment, and inflation.

Basically, he says that you stimulate an economy to keep it performing at peak productive capacity whereas Hayek/Austrian economics says that you must let the unproductive parts of the economy live or die on their own assuming they aren't already tampered with by an entity such as the government and is under the laws of supply and demand, i.e. not education, healthcare, etc.

[Nissa]

Ah, I was reading a book about a former communist who debated with Keynes himself, so that's what threw me off.

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Ah, I was reading a book about a former communist who debated with Keynes himself, so that's what threw me off.

[TheEconomist]

Yeah, that was Hayek. He was a Communist, then started to actually see what Communism led to, then became one of the strictest fundamentalists to ever pick up the pen.

Keynes was no Socialist or Communist, but people feared that his centrally planned emergency aid for the economy would lead to these things.

[Nissa]

Yeah, that was Hayek. He was a Communist, then started to actually see what Communism led to, then became one of the strictest fundamentalists to ever pick up the pen.

Keynes was no Socialist or Communist, but people feared that his centrally planned emergency aid for the economy would lead to these things.

No, I was actually reading Eugen Loebl, author of My Mind on Trial. He accidentally met Keynes in a hotel once, and started talking crap about Keynesian economics before he knew who it was.