Experts On Astrology

This post was inspired by one by Ryan Grim. Although long, you really should read it in its entirety – after you’ve finished mine.

Although the inspiration came from another source, you will find that this topic has long been of interest to me. Despite the title, the subject actually concerns another pseudo science, economics.

While I realize that economics is accurately termed the dismal science, please hang in here with me. The post will provide a little perspective to a topic that is of importance to you.

I was fortunate. My professor in Economics 101 at UCLA told us that, if you took everything that the general populace thought they knew about economics and reversed it, you would be right 60% of the time. He was wrong, of course. More likely, you would be correct closer to 80% of the time.

On my own, I discovered a corollary to that. If you take what economists believe and reverse it, you will be right almost 100% of the time. Economics is not sufficiently developed to be seriously considered an academic discipline.

At the time I had no interest in going beyond an introductory course in the subject. I had no idea that I would, 15 years later, be forced to work for a graduate degree in International Economics.

Graduate schools are ranked on various criteria. An important one is how many of its graduates go to work in the field of their degree. Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies was the very top in its field. However, the Department of State had, at that time, hired no significant numbers in twenty years.

Whatever your major interest, international economics was required. They figured a degree in that would provide the opportunity for jobs at the World Bank, multinational corporations and such. This would not hurt their ranking.

Unfortunately, my lack of respect for economics carried over from those aforementioned undergraduate days. I posited questions to every economics professor and working economist I encountered. My particular favorite had to do with ‘The Law of Supply and Demand.”

In 1973 we experienced the first oil embargo. There were relatively few options available then for customers to change to smaller, more fuel efficient automobiles. In 1974 and 1975 car sales dropped significantly. At the same time, car prices increased faster than at any period during my lifetime. Supply and demand didn’t seem to be working.

Most of the professors and economists were stumped for an answer. One professor responded that since we had only three manufacturers (not technically correct) there was no free market. He claimed that the basic assumptions of economics were based on a free market. Okay.

A free market requires lots of suppliers and lots of consumers. There must be enough so that no buyer or seller can control the market. His assertion that a free market did not exist was true. But, knowing that any good and dedicated ideologue has a ready answer for every obvious and expected criticism, I had purposely set up a two-stage argument.

I had stated that car prices had risen more in 1974-5 than in any other years during my lifetime. I countered that the greatest percentage increase in prices had been slightly before my lifetime, 1930-1. You may recall from history that coincided with the beginnings of the Great Depression. Those were not good years for people trying to sell cars.

At that time, there were more than 180 automobile manufacturers in this country. Although not a perfect free market, it certainly came close enough for our purposes. That stumped even the professor who had an excuse for part one.

If even the most basic tenets of economics could be shown to be untrue, how much faith should we put into the more esoteric ones?

Ryan Grim’s post centers on the control that the Federal Reserve has over economic discourse in this country. He easily makes his point. Alan Greenspan ruled the Fed. Alan Greenspan was a close friend of Ayn Rand and a devotee of her discredited, pretentious, greed-based gospel.

By giving consulting positions to editors and editorial board members of all the leading publications in the field and a variety of other means, Alan ensured opposing viewpoints would not get published. Remember, this is the same Alan Greenspan who admitted to the Congress last Fall that he was shocked by our present economic meltdown because it brought into question every tenet upon which his entire career was based.

As Ryan states, “Publishing in top journals is, like in any discipline, the key to getting tenure. Indeed, pursuing tenure ironically requires a kind of fealty to the dominant economic ideology that is the precise opposite of the purpose of tenure, which is to protect academics who present oppositional perspectives.”

It is a closed system. It is a system that made me forego pursuit of a doctorate in international relations. I went to graduate school with the intention of teaching. Any such aspirations would have been curtailed absent tenure. It should not be necessary to remind the regular readers that the kindest thing one might call me is iconoclast. I would never get published.

In any event, Alan continues to be treated as the demigod of the field. His acolytes hold the top economic policy positions in the present administration and at the Fed. One cannot get a responsible policy position without buying into the simpleminded errors upon which this school of thought is based.

However wrong this idiotic ideology has proven to be, Obama feels constrained to reappoint Ben Bernanke. There is no need for a Federal Reserve if the goal is to have a rational economy. That is an awfully big if. Because of the monopoly this cabal has over economic thought, Obama likely doesn’t question the stars of that blighted clique.

If Obama does have any reservations, he is further checked by the argument that Wall Street would react badly to any real change in economic leadership. That is based on the fallacy that Wall Street is the economy; that it is something more than a collection of casinos.

If you feel the need for advice from someone who has no idea what they are talking about, economists and astrologers meet that criterion. I recommend basing your choice on alphabetical order.

Tagged as: astrology, automobile, ayn rand, bernanke, car, casino, corporation, depression, Economics, fed, federal reserve, free market, greenspan, ideologue, johns hopkins, multinational, professor, ryan grim, sais, state department, supply and demand, ucla, wall street, world bank