We have been informed that the current web-base [US Department of Defence] instruction course asks, as one of its multiple-choice questions, "which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?" To answer correctly, the examinee must select "protests."
What cannot be sustained is any hegemonic claim that globalisation theory is either adequate as it stands, capable of integrated development into an adequate theory, or superior to the theories which it has displaced.
.. we face a choice between a body of theory which, no matter how analytically coherent, unfortunately fails to explain the basi facts, and another group of theories that do offer an account of the most basic trends we can actually observe, the scientific choice seems clear to me; to make progress we have first to return to the abandoned theories that do in fact explain the facts, and ask ourselves how and why they achieve it, and whether their explanations and concepts can form an element of a new, and superior theory.
Back then [the 1980s and 1990s] many politicians, unions and workers also fell for the "lump of labour" fallacy, which suggests that there is a fixed amount of work to be done at any given time, available for slicing up and sharing out according to policymakers’ will.As longtime Sandwichman followers know, the alleged fallacy is a canard, one that the Economist trotted out 17 times between 1993 and 2005, giving rise to the following satire, composed entirely from sentences from the magazine:
the flipside of failure is opportunity ... the failure of certain chains and restaurants has created opportunities for other eating establishments to expand. Restaurant growth in any kind of economy is expensive, but it's cheaper for chains to convert existing restaurants than to build them from the ground up. Thanks to the closing of various eateries nationwide, expansion for rising chains has been less expensive … It would be impossible to calculate, but it's likely that the creation of the Hummer brand (and the factories necessary to build it) from scratch would have cost many multiples of the $500 million that Sichuan paid GM for Hummer. The Chinese company will now be able to grow on the relative cheap, and as GM announced at the time of the deal, its purchase means that 3,000 U.S.-based jobs will be saved. All of these stories are in no way meant to minimize the pain of losing one's house, job or business. Still, these stories do remind us that just as the human body frequently heals itself during times of illness, the economy is ultimately comprised of self-interested individuals who, if left alone, will work in order to improve their individual financial situations. In that sense, the answer to our sagging economy today is not more government intervention, but instead a humble federal government that will sit back and let the economy heal itself. The flipside of economic failure is economic opportunity, and it's time for Washington to get out of the way so that individuals can turn misfortune into opportunity.
That's quite a conclusion based off five anecdotal examples. Indeed, as a macroeconomic prediction, it's not even clear what it means. What would a "humble federal government" do, exactly? Shut down the stimulus projects so a couple million more people end up unemployed and a couple million other people can buy their possessions at fire sale prices? Shut down the system of financial supports which are currently sustaining a weakened lending market? Should they have held back from Detroit's collapse so that the assets of the various companies were simply liquidated, along with what was left of the Rust Belt's economy? Should they cut off economic aid to the states so infrastructure literally crumbles? I want specifics! The idea that government should get out of the way because Panera has taken over eight of Bennigan's former locations beggars belief. At the end of the day, it will be a resuscitation of household spending and business expansion that restarts our economic growth. But for now, both have fallen through the floor, with terrible consequences for both individuals and businesses. What little demand exists is being substantially kept afloat by the massive intervention of the federal government. At this moment, federal spending does not exist in competition with household spending. It's one of the last forces sustaining it. Indeed, the idea that the economy will heal itself if the government only steps out of the way is exactly the thinking that led to the deep recession of 1937. What a pity those lessons haven't been better learned.
There is the dubious kind of "profit" that exports two-dollar wheat and gets in exchange a Dust Bowl.We may assume that most predictions put forward in 1937, like those of other years, would now be worth recalling only as examples of fallibility. But at least one prediction published in that year has since come to seem exceedingly perspicacious. It appeared in a book by Kenneth Burke, a literary critic:
Among the sciences, there is one little fellow named Ecology, and in time we shall pay him more attention. He teaches us that the total economy of this planet cannot be guided by an efficient rationale of exploitation alone, but that the exploiting part must itself eventually suffer if it too greatly disturbs the balance of the whole (as big beasts would starve, if they succeeded in catching all the little beasts that are their prey their very lack of efficiency in the exploitation of their ability as hunters thus acting as efficiency on a higher level, where considerations of balance count for more than consideration of one tracked purposiveness).In her article, "'One little fellow named Ecology': Ecological Rhetoric in Kenneth Burke's Attitudes toward History." [2004]), Marika Seigel points out that Burke's awareness of ecology in 1937 was by no means unique or idiosyncratic. There was, as Burke himself capitalized in his footnote, a Dust Bowl going on and being reported dramatically in the popular press. Consider, for instance, the following montage of images from The New Republic, The Nation, News-week and Paul B. Sears's Deserts on the March. This 'mere sequence' of images, cited in Seigel's article, composes a compelling narrative: scene, characters, back-story, moral.
A black or yellow copper-brown cloud pokes its ugly head over the horizon. It rises slowly at first, then swiftly. It marches angrily, blotting out the world as it comes. Children scurry like chickens to their mother's wing. With a howl the storm burst upon us. The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face. People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk.It takes grit to live in this country.
Three men and a woman are seated around a dust-caked lamp, on their faces grotesque masks of wet cloth. The children have been put to bed with towels tucked under their heads. My host greets us: "It takes grit to live in this country."
Two-dollar wheat during the war lured growers farther and farther into the West. The deeper they went, the dryer they found the country. Gang-plows ripped and chopped sage brush and the hardy native grasses. The roots of these plants had been the straw in the brick of the Great Plains' soil. When they were destroyed the soil crumbled. Each year's ploughing left a raw surface exposed to the winds.
No work of ignorance or malice is this but the inevitable result of a system which has ever encouraged immediate efficiency without regard to ultimate consequences.
