Stupidity and violence

[Skoob]

I voted "disagree" because I feel that non-violent people are higher evolved than those who believe in justifiable violence.

They (the higher evolved folks) are open to cultural and lifestyle differences and are just more tolerant. And they also have a greater sense of empathy.

You can be really dumb while still posessing these qualities.

Conversely, you can be highly intelligent and still have no compassion at all.

[Borodog]

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His great insight was to realize that since he and the rest of the British Aristocracy (Lord Keynes) were in debt up to their eyeballs, deflation would be extraordinarily bad for he and the other Landed Dandies (but not most regular people). Hence, give governments an excuse to print money ad infinitum, and be among the first in line with one's hands out.

[/ QUOTE ] Deflation would have been bad for them as well, at least under capitalism, because it will lead to a further decrease in aggregate demand as people lose their main incentive to produce, spiraling the country further into depression.

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This is simply wrong. People lose the incentive to produce the things that people have realized they do not have the savings to consume. I.e., malinvestments have to be liquidated. Factors of production have to be shifted away from producing unprofitable things that consumers don't want back to the profitable things that consumers do want.

Handwaving voodoo entities like "aggregate demand" are [censored]. There is no such thing as aggregate demand. There is only demand by individuals for individual products. To presume that people will stop consuming, which is the essence of the so-called "liquidity trap" "downward spiral" in the "aggregate demand" theory is ludicrous. People consume. To consume they must produce. The problem comes in for heavily debt-leveraged aristocrats and industrialists when the economy reveals that they have heavily invested their debt into producing the wrong things according to, as always, the consumers.


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I know you don't like empirical evidence, but for those who do:

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Ben Bernanke and Harold James, in a paper called "The Gold Standard, Deflation, and Financial Crisis in the Great Depression: An International Comparison" published in 1991 (NBER working paper version here), noted that 13 other countries besides the U.K. had decided to abandon their currencies' gold parity in 1931. Bernanke and James' data for the average growth rate of industrial production for these countries (plotted in the top panel above) was positive in every year from 1932 on. Countries that stayed on gold, by contrast, experienced an average output decline of 15% in 1932. The U.S. abandoned gold in 1933, after which its dramatic recovery immediately began. The same happened after Italy dropped the gold standard in 1934, and for Belgium when it went off in 1935. On the other hand, the three countries that stuck with gold through 1936 (France, Netherlands, and Poland) saw a 6% drop in industrial production in 1935, while the rest of the world was experiencing solid growth.

[/ QUOTE ] From this short essay

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As always, I have no problem with empirical evidence. All I require is that it is correctly analyzed. Bernanke's analysis is a joke. The US never saw any "dramatic recovery" until after the end of World War Two, in 1946, with the (long overdue) rollback of much, although not enough, of the disastrous New Deal legislation.

Even at the height of mid-Depression production in 1937, the FDR-orchestrated heavily cartellized US economy had not reached pre-crash levels of productivity, and this modest "recovery" was followed immeditaely by another deep crash, the only time in history that a deep economic crash followed on the heels of the previous one without any appreciable "boom" period in between.

All of this is of course already in the link I already provided, had you bothered to read it.