Necessary Mental Revisions of Reality

[peristaltor]

In my very early twenties -- the first year, in fact -- I was (as they say in the vernacular) shooting the shit with a friend over cheap beers. (Muscles, if you're curious, bleaknemesis, and near the Sprinker Rock.) My friend had made a tired joke. Though I try to avoid tired jokes myself, it was giddy enough or late enough or I had consumed beers enough to

Comments

[plantyhamchuk]

Very interesting - thanks for posting. In my media-gathering all too often I find the Austrian school touted as the only school worth noticing, the only one that is backed by evidence, etc. etc. The rich should be allowed to have the most money because they have the most experience with handling it, and incidents like Katrina where the poor were handed large sums of money and certain individuals were reported to have bought designer handbags as proof that the poor are too stupid to handle their own affairs having been made dependents by too many years of government welfare. What I haven't ever seen anybody do convincingly, EVER (maybe the book you're reading is different) is how policy A leads to result B. There's too many variables involved, with everyone wanting to claim that their theory leads to success and that anything wrong that happened was due to too much influence from another school of thought/policy/party/the guy that was in power before. Maybe the issue is that success is defined depending on where the author is standing, I don't know.

It's true that we're drawn to narrative, and humans will discount facts or other narratives that they simply don't care for (there's oodles of psych research that backs that up - we don't care much for cognitive dissonance). I'd never heard the story of the apple logo, I always just thought it was really pretty :)

[peristaltor]

Oh, this current book is very different from the usual econ blather, citing lots of examples where popular theory lacks or is contradicted by evidence, and "old" theories, by contrast, still appear remarkably robust.

The Austrian School especially seems to me filled with curmudgeonly old codgers and spoiled frat boys who all hate any form of collective governance and regulation with a scalding rage.