WHY THE CRASH? — Part 1.
As I write, the stock market is flatlining, credit has seized up, no one seems to know what to do, and bad times seem in store. What caused it? Not what you think. Not, basically, greedy Wall...
View ArticleWHY THE CRASH? Part 2 ——NOT ENOUGH CONSUMPTION
SUCCESS REACHES ITS LIMITS In my previous post on the crisis, I claimed that we are suffering from too much savings and not enough consumption. The worldwide pool of money seeking growth investments is...
View ArticleWHY THE CRASH? Part 3—— MONEY, STANDARDIZED GOODS, ATTENTION AND LUXURIES
In the previous post, I pointed out that money is of great importance only when the world is dominated by standardized goods and services. One essential of standardization is that goods or services...
View ArticleWHY THE CRASH? —Part 4 BANKS, POSEURS, and HOMES
Having discussed the new strangeness of money as such, I will now turn the most money-dependent sector— finance. But before getting into details, let me make a point about banks and attention. Money...
View ArticleMoney’s Dream Life Gets Nightmarish — And Just Might Stay That Way
A couple of years ago, I pointed out that in some ways money was losing its hold on reality. Routine activities and producing things to which can be assigned some relatively stable amount of money now...
View ArticleDropping the Shopping in an Attention Economy and Its Challenge
In ancient Athens’s Agora, in medieval Venice’s Rialto neighborhood, and in small village market squares everywhere, the marketplace for ideas — that is where attention was exchanged —commingled with...
View ArticleMusings on Brad DeLong’s talk on the Financial Crisis
[Note: this is another entry in my attempt to make sense of the crash and see how it is tied to the Attention Economy. Some earlier entries are here, here, here, here and here.] I attended an...
View Article3 KINDS of MONEY: Industrial, Attention and Financial or From the BLANK...
To continue my study of the causes and possible cures of the meltdown, I want to discuss how there have seemed to be three different routes to making money. I do this in the context of my general...
View ArticleFinanciers help bring about decline and fall of money
In earlier posts I noted that even if “Wall Street” is temporarily saved and more carefully regulated, it will be difficult to prevent a meltdown similar to the current one from happening soon again....
View ArticleHow Did Krugman Miss So Much?
Paul Krugman in Sunday’s NYT has an article entitled “How Did Economists Get it so Wrong?” It’s fine as far as it goes, I think, but it misses so much, since it just focuses on financial economics. No...
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