Saturday, January 1, 2011

NYRs


Last year, I decided my posts were too long and I'd try to make'm shorter. That worked out okay.

This year... I intend to keep up the daily posting as long as I can manage it.

I want to be more explicit more often, especially to make my conclusions explicit.

I want to be clear about solving-the-crisis versus solving-the-causes-of-the-crisis.

And I want to be a little more personal in my posts. Don't know if I'm saying that quite right... My friend Greg says "arguments need to be less mathematical and more moral." I was a math major in school, and I think graphs are great, so my first reaction to Greg's thought was Not a chance. But my posts are evolving. It's not really a conscious decision, not a resolution. But I see it happening and I'm trying to be aware of it.

I still have to figure out if what I mean by "personal" and what Greg means by "moral" are similar or not... :)

2 comments:

Greg said...

I think you are using personal the way I'm using moral.

These arguments need to have an emotional attachment. They need to feel right. Emotion is what hooks us to a concept and then we find ways to explain this emotional attachment with more objective data.

Johnathan Haidt, a psychologist did a study trying to get at what defined a conservative and a liberal. It was quite interesting. He concluded that one large difference is in the methods used to persuade. Conservatives tend to persuade your heart while liberals try to persuade your mind. I think this is why conservatives have dominated the economic conversations by appealing to inflation fears and cries of socialism.

Until we can persuade people that, as you say so well, the problems we see ARE the result of our economic policies which urge us to all go into debt AND that we cannot reduce our debt and the govt reduce their debt at the same time, we will not have the populist push to get the changes we need.

Greg said...

Also, I found this audio piece over at Cullen Roches "Pragmatic Capitalism". Its Mosler, Randall Wray and a guy named Mike Norman in a roundtable, pretty good.


http://pragcap.com/mmt-roundtable-discussion

Its about an hour long


Enjoy