Kuran

EMU

Doom on Wall Street

Don't Confuse Me With the Facts by John Mauldin

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What is it that people don’t understand about the trade deficit?
It’s not rocket science. The Current Account Deficit is over $800 billion a year.
Everyone agrees that the current trade imbalances are unsustainable and will probably trigger major economic disruptions that will thrust us towards a global recession.
It’s madness.
Mike Whitney, April 11, 2007


The Vision Thing

- Why people don't understand

Click for more info about the Tower

This page is not about The Eiffel Tower - the picture is just to illustrate a construction, in this case a tower, but The Vision Thing is that an idea, like Economics or EMU, is an intellectual construction.

If some important part of the construction of the Eiffel Tower is faulty, the whole thing will collapse. It is, or should be, the same thing about an intellectual construction, if some part is shown to be faulty, the whole construction will, or rather should, collapse.

What I have hard to understand is why many people seem not to understand that, if some part of the intecllectual underpinnings of, let us say EMU, or the stock market in the US (july 1999), is faulty, you have to draw the obvious conclusion, that it will collapse.

By that I do not mean only the obious, that the stock market bubble or EMU will in fact collapse, sooner or later, but also that the "idea-construction" should collapse immediately in the mind of the thinking person.

Many seem to see only a number of arguments for, let us say, a pegged exchange rate, when the propositions in fact are parts of a hierarchial intellectual structure.

So even if you can convince them that a proposition is wrong, they still think that "the other arguments" are good enough.

But all persons are not real intellectuals. Instead they are what I have called "parrot intellectuals" - clever enough to listen to a few words and capable of saying them again, and again, at the appropriate moments.

The reason that people will not draw obvious conclusions is hard and important to understand. To find out the reasons I think you should read Timur Kuran.

His book in swedish is available at City University Press

Författare: Timur Kuran Tryckår: 1999 Bindning: Häftad ISBN: 9175620979
Ratioinstitutet


First posted on the Internet 99-07-26


Denna artikel är, tycker jag, en av mina bästa - klicka här för fler av mina bästa opus.

This article, I think, is one of my best. For more of My Best Articles, - click here- in english.


See also:
The paradigm concept


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