Science Fiction can be fun and it can show us some of the terrain of the real world, even terrain over the time horizon, but it is not THE REAL WORLD. The real world has gotten more interesting since 9/11/1. The future ain't what it used to be.
An extremely interesting datum presented in an episode of FRONTLINE on PBS, called TRAIL OF A TERRORIST, is that Algerian terrorists attempted to hijack a French airliner on Christmas eve 1994. Their intention was to crash the plane in Paris, possibly the Eiffel Tower. This plot failed because the plane was on the ground and French commandos were able to retake it and kill the terrorists. They only killed seven passengers in the process.
A fairly superficial analysis of this incident would show that the defect was in attempting to hijack the plane on the ground. It is quite difficult to get French commandos aboard a plane traveling at 500 mph. The Federal Aviation Administration should have known about this. How did they spend 6 1/2 years not reinforcing the doors to cockpits and warning airline crews of hijackings for kamakaze attacks? Why has there been no mention of this anywhere but FRONTLINE? Since the Republicans take such delight in attacking Bill Clinton and his administration, why haven't they pointed out this failure during his watch? It is velly intelesting, but soooo shtupid. If you're paranoid choose your conspiracy.
The above paragraphs were written in July '02, it is now January '03. I have seen two more mentions on the boob tube of the Algerian terrorist flop in France, but still no discussion of FAA incomptence. Discussions on the internet seem to indicate there is some confusion over when the French figured out what the terrorists intended to do. When did the FAA find out?
Since we appear to be suffering from a bad joke of an ancient Chinese curse:
it is only fitting that I begin this reading list with the wisdom of ancient Chinese, though the wise know them as THE HAN. We may need their help in understanding the world.
From the beginning a misunderstanding needs to be corrected. Since Sun Tzu
comes from a non-European culture the meaning of the word WAR needs to be
clarified. In European culture WAR means armed conflict generally involving
death and destruction. Whereas Sun Tzu says, "To win without fighting is
best." This means outthinking your
would be enemy before any violence
begins. "The superior militarist foils enemies' plots; next best is to ruin
their alliances; next after that is to attack their armed forces; worst is to
besiege their cities." Sun Tzu's ideas can be applied to business or politics
or any conflict of interests. A better translation might be THE ART OF
CONFLICT MANAGEMENT & RESOLUTION, but that is rather verbose. How about THE ART
OF POWER GAMES?
MASTERING THE ART OF WAR consists of commentaries by two ancient Chinese leaders on THE ART OF WAR. They would understand the culture and social-psychology of the time far better than any contemporary scholar. This book is somewhat better than THE ART OF WAR itself. The American media is promoting a culture of stupidity at a time of increasing cultural and technological complexity. We need a different perspective.
As a point of possible interest there is a book, POWER by Adolf Berle. Berle was an advisor to Lyndon Johnson. I read it 30 years ago and only have vague memories of it but it makes an interesting European comparison to THE ART OF WAR.
Unfortunately this book is out of print, but if you can find it, it is worth the search. A promoter says, "The best account I have seen of how the system is rigged from maternity ward to beyond the grave to keep most of us broke" - Russell Baker. I don't know who Baker is but I still agree and I read this book 25 years ago. The wealth of a nation is the sum of the wealth of all of the individuals within the nation. The distribution of that wealth can be quite unequal however and the poorer citizens can be engaged in economic scrambling for the scraps. Since Sun Tzu said: "All warfare is based on deception." some people in the economic system want others to be ignorant. Hapgood can help level the playing field.
This book started my amateur interest in economics. I'm an electronics/computer geek by profession. I have read stuff by Galbraith, Friedman, Thurow, Sowell and some Marx and Smith and Samuelson, but this book by Hapgood I rank #1 without hesitation. Most economics books are pseudo-intellectual drivel making the simple appear complex. The professional economists are on the supply side. The schools teach economics from that perspective. The side of helping the rich get richer. Who hires economists? What do you expect?
David Hapgood tells you what is going on, but doesn't suggest personal strategies for dealing with the terrain of the economic battlefield. "On encircled ground devise strategems."-Sun Tzu. We are surrounded by corporations that have more information on most things than we do. We all need to know more about our brave new techno-world. These authors tell you how to do things by the book. Kill those corps.
This is a book no conspiracy theorist should be without. Maybe the next edition will offer an explaination for the FAA allowing 9/11 to occur. Was the United States founded by Freemasons? Why wasn't the Catholic church's crusade against the Cathars in southern France in my history book? I went to Catholic schools, they should have known. Henry Ford was right, "History is more or less bunk." Historians have an agenda and schools are propaganda machines. The last 50 pages of this book get too wierd, even for me. Maybe Jim is from Marrs. If you can handle this you may want to see, THE ULTIMATE FRONTIER by Eklal Kueshana.
I think this book is worth reading by all Americans, especially Black Americans. I will let these quotes speak for themselves.
In a NEWSWEEK essay (1-21-80), the scientist/writer Isaac Asimov wrote about the "cult of ignorance" in this country. He said, "The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant threat winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
"The education I received in the Black community was entirely different...from that of whites. Not only was my "training" not a challenge, it was discouraging. The major piece of information I absorbed after twelve years of public education was that I was a problem, inferior, ineducable and a victim."
"We need to understand that white world supremacy (racism) is a given fact of life and is not vanishing."
"...The worldview of Euro-Americans permeates Black life in ways that inhibit the majority of Blacks from functioning in their own best interests."
I have highlighted all of the above lines, and many more, in my copy of this book. The author says many things pertinent to Blacks coping with the American Way, but I think there is a problem with this book that displays what I consider to be part of the problem of coping. The author includes a list of 349 books which he must consider to be worth reading. At the rate of one book per week that is almost seven years of books, surely some of these books must contain more urgently needed information than others. No priorities or reviews are given for any books. The books are classified by Black and Non-Black writers and the authors are listed in alphabetical order. Fiction and non-fiction are mixed, if you are not familiar with the books then you can't know which are what. Alvin Tofler's FUTURE SHOCK could be a great title for a science fiction book but it is non-fiction. There are no books about technology which I think is a weak point among Black Americans. There are only two books relating to economics, a book on real estate by Dempsey Travis and THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 1990 by Dr. Ravi Batra which did not take the internet into account and may have been 13 years early.
I include this book, not because I agree with it, but because I disagree with it so much. It is educational in what it teaches about the stupidity of our current educational philosophy. William Bennet was advocating this book in 1988, so maybe that helps emphasize its wrongheadedness. Is this why we have gone down the tubes since then?
The cover boldly states, "WHAT EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO KNOW" and "Includes 5,000 essential names, phrases, dates and concepts." I have not counted the items but they take up 64 pages of the book. I'll take their word that there are at least 5,000. It is the importance of the items that are included and 'excluded' that are my primary objection to this book. First of all "planned obsolescence" is on page 196, that is Good, and I am surprised it made the cut. Sun Tzu's THE ART OF WAR did not make it even though it ranks among the oldest books in print on the planet. I assume it is the "cultural" business that disqualifies Sun Tzu. This book is throughly AmerAngloEurocentric.
The listing is in numerical and alphabetical order. I can only assume the universe is organized that way, in English of course. Cat is more important in English than gato in Spanish since it is nearer the beginning of the alphabet. This list could have been categorized by Science and Technology, History, Literature and Geography, etc. and alphabetized within each category. But NOoo, apparently the author expects people to look through the entire alphabetical list. The whole thing is a mess, typical liberal arts thinking. The dates are listed: 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-1865, 1914-1918, 1939-1945, 1984(title). There is no explanation with the dates except 'title' by 1984. That means nothing important happened in 1984 it is just the title of George Orwell's book. 1066 is the date of the Battle of Hastings and nothing of any importance happened on the planet before then. 1492 began the demise of the Indians, 1776 initiated the Revolutionary War, 1862-1865 was the Civil War, 1914-1918 was The Great War, which got renamed because of the sequel from 1939-1945. So according to this book only the dates of wars are worth remembering. The moon landing in 1969 isn't worthy of our attention, although there can never be another first moon landing. We can always have another war. Apollo and Apollo Program are in the list, but not Apollo 11. Apollo is some mythological god and the Apollo Program was the NASA project to get to the moon but it was Apollo 11 that put the pedal on the medal. Has anyone heard of Niel Armstrong? Wasn't he an actor in STAR TREK? STAR TREK made the list. Every Vulcan knows fiction is more cultural than reality.
There is an example list on the back of the book: absolute zero; Alamo; Billy the Kid; carpetbagger; El Greco; Faust(title); gamma rays; Homestead Act; Iago; Icarus; jazz; lame duck; manna from heaven; nom de plume; penis envy; rococo; sea legs; tabula rasa; Valhalla; Waterloo, Battle of; Zeitgeist.
Absolute zero and gamma rays could have been put under a science/physics category, while penis envy, tabula rasa and zeitgeist could have gone under science/psychology. History would take Alamo; Billy the Kid; carpetbagger; Homestead Act; Waterloo, Battle of.
Another curious thing about this book is that Napolean is listed under Napolean Bonaparte not Bonaparte, Napolean while Benjamin Franklin is listed as Franklin, Benjamin. Out of curiosity I had to check George Washington and he is Washington, George. Hitler is listed by his last name also. What have historians done with Napolean and Alexander the Great that they get listed by their first names?
The list includes 'I.O.U.' and 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be.' Both of these entries relate to economics and accounting. The basic accounting equation is:
An IOU is an asset to the lender and a liability to the borrower, but the terms 'asset', 'liability' and 'net worth' are not in the list. This seems rather inconsistent. As though the culturally literate person is supposed to recognize the words but not understand their real significance. The terms 'computer' and 'mainframe' are in the list but 'John von Neumann' and 'von Neumann machine' are not. Computers in the home are a recent phenomenon in the culture. We are still waiting to see what effect they have on the culture. 'Albert Einstein' and 'Robert J. Oppenheimer' are in the list. Einstein and Oppenheimer were involved with the atomic bomb, but so was von Neumann. We now have von Neumann machines in our homes not Oppenheimer or Einstein machines. Every American family should now be able to do accounting on their von Neumann machine. Since this book doesn't convey how much one should understand about any of the terms in the list a person could pass for being culturally literate with a broad but shallow layer of memorization.
There is also an obvious religious bias in the list. Transubstantiation and immaculate conception are included but reincarnation, transmigration and kaballah are anathema, along with anathema. Mahatma Gandhi and Hinduism are in the list but since Gandhi was a Hindu, how can a person be literate without knowing that Hindus believe in transmigration or reincarnation? Considering that Origen, an early Christian theologian, argued the pre-existence of the soul but was not included, then early European history is counter-cultural. Enoch and Melchizedek are in the Christian Bible but THE BOOK OF ENOCH and THE BOOK OF THE SECRETS OF ENOCH have been dropped out of the Bible and the culture. According to the EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS Melchizedek was without father or mother so was his conception sufficiently immaculate? That should interest Christian culture but not this book. CULTURAL LITERACY is from 1988 so it can be excused from our recent quandry with Islam, but one has to wonder if a broader cultural perspective could have helped prevent the current situation in the first place. Know your adversary, know yourself and 66 of 100 battles can be avoided. - What Sun Tzu could have said. Maybe he did, it just depends on what you mean by battles. "To win without fighting is best." - Sun Tzu.
Knowledge can be organized and prioritized so it can be more easily and quickly acquired. This book does not attempt to do that. Of course if the objective is to make money "educating" children while keeping most of them ignorant and confused, and restricting the distribution of relevant knowledge to those approved by the existing power structure, then this book makes sense, in a "classism" kind of way. As long as you are not of member of the ignorant lower classes.
This is the longest review I have written, which may seem odd since I bash the book, but this is the kind of pseudo-intellectual drivel that demonstrates the usefulness of this website. To add insult to injury the preface to my book says there were 25 deletions from the previous edition. One of those deletions was "Occam's razor." Occam's razor is a method of analyzing problems which indicates that increased complexity tends to reduce the likelyhood of truth. This is an analytical process worthy of attention. Why would it be eliminated from the list? Why are Pooh-Bah, pell-mell and In vino veritas more important? Why have "reductio ad absurdum" but not "Occam's razor?" How absurdum. And Mr. Bennet promoted this book as a cure for what ails our educational system!? Ridiculous!
"The bible" for those people who have heard of the mind-expanding, psychedelic aspects of advanced physics, but who have no mathematical or technical background. In the clearest language possible, it covers quantum physics and relativity theory from their inceptions to the present, without equations, and without the "scientific mentality" that has put off so many people from reading about physics.
Buying a house is the largest investment most of us will ever make, and one of the riskiest. Professional house inspector George Hoffman has written a simple, clear, and cheerful guide that eliminates much of the risk. Armed with this book, a prospective home buyer can judge every important feature of a house from foundation to wiring to plumbing to roofing. If you pay rent you are screwed because you get no Net Worth for your money, but don't screw yourself with a bad house.
What happened in 1957? The Russians put up sputnik. I turned 5. The first Integrated Circuit was being worked on. Vance Packard came out with this book. "In this book you'll discover a world of psychology professors turned merchandisers. You will learn how they operate, what they know about you and your neighbors, and how they are using that knowledge to sell you cake mixes, cigarettes, cars, soaps, and even ideas."
My, how the world has changed since I was five years old! The cars don't go any faster, but they have gone through a lot of model changes. They can try the psycho-manipulation techniques through your computer via the internet. You can use your VCR to tape programs and skip commercials and save 25% of your time. A recent edition of THE ECONOMIST says only 4% of Americans use VCRs to skip commercials. 8 hours of TV can contain 2 hours of commercials. 2 hours per week at $5 per hour is $500 per year. More than enough for a GOOD VCR. Sounds economical to me. That's six days of hours awake. There has to be something better to do with six days of your life than watch commercials. The psycho-techno-economic wargame goes on. GET THE BEAT!
Now that the Middle-East has flared up again maybe a little review and general theory would be helpful. This book is from 1969 and talks about Nasser and the '67 war. Countries may be thought of as players but countries don't make decisions, people do. The leaders are players but they must deal with the social-psychology of their populace, possibly by TRYING to manipulate it.
1. Each player wants not so much to win as to avoid loss.
2. All players have no objective except to keep The Game going.
3. The alternative to the Game of Nations is war.
The problem with this book is that is doesn't discuss the possibility that there may be players in the game that are trying to cause wars. The poor arms merchants need to make a living too.
These books deal with the social-psychology of money, wealth and economics. The schools are designed to psychologically condition children to be subservient to authority and create a class structured society. The kids don't know what's going on. You will find similar ideas in a more academic style in the book, THE POWER ELITE. We need to SAVE our kids from the schools.
In RICH DAD, POOR DAD Kiyosaki talks about buying a Porshe and his wife buying a Mercedes, but he never says anything about depreciation of automobiles. This is odd since he claims we should understand accounting to manage our personal finances. Sylvia Porter in her MONEY BOOK talked about loosing 50% depreciation in two years on a new car way back in 1975, but Sylvia didn't try to teach accounting in her 1000+ page book. Books about personal finance are very strange, each author just gives you some of the pieces.
years of history on all the continents-a short history of everything about
everybody. The origins of empires, religion, writing, crops, and guns are all
here. By at last providing a convincing explanation for the differing
developments of human societies on different continents, the book demolishes
the grounds for racist theories of history. Its account of how the modern
world was formed is full of lessons for our own future." - Paul Ehrlich,
Stanford
"Fascinating..." - Bill Gates
Can't argue with Bill. He might crash my computer, more often.
This book doesn't say much about economic power games. 70% of the men that fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War didn't come from slave owning families. Why did they go to war? How can you analyze history without understanding why people risk their lives in military power games? Especially if it doesn't serve their personal interests. The conquistadors pictured on this cover were going for the gold.
"Oh the games people play now, every night and every day now, never meaning
what they say now, never saying what they mean."
Every human being is a psychologist. Some are much better than others and many can become better with study. Ever since Freud in the 1890's the human mind has been under serious scrutiny. How this knowledge is used and distributed affects the future of society. Transactional Analysis, TA, is a way of analyzing human behavior and interaction, it is even applicable to child rearing. We need to break the cycle of generational incompetence.
"Happy childhood" notwithstanding, most of us are living out the NOT OK feelings of a defenseless CHILD wholly dependent on OK others for stroking and care. By the third year of life, says Dr. Harris, most of us have made the unconscious decision I'M NOT OK - YOU'RE OK. This negative Life Position, shared by successful and unsuccessful people alike, contaminates our rational ADULT potential - leaving us vulnerable to the inappropriate, emotional reactions of our CHILD and the uncritical learned behavior programmed into our PARENT.
Lucifer on the couch: "The devil made me do it Sigmund, honest. I'd swear on a Bible if it wouldn't burst into flames."
From the book: "A predominant characteristic of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection."---- "Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault....They project their evil onto the world."
"If you're going to tell a lie, tell a BIG LIE" - Adolf Hitler
Did you know that Henry Ford received the highest award that Germany can give to a non-German in July 1938? Hitler was in power then. Wonder Why?
"You can't know the whole story of the Third Reich, the true nature of Nazism, or the chilling connection between money, power, and terror in the 20th century, until you know WHO FINANCED HITLER. James Pool, author of the explosive Hitler and His Secret Partners: Contributions, Loot and Rewards, 1933-1945, unravels the covert financial web that Hitler spun across Europe and around the globe to bankroll his dream of world dominion."
Saddam buys weapons from the Germans and the French. American taxpayers pay to blow them up. The Saudi government is billions of dollars in debt!? TO WHO? They should be rolling in oil money after all these years. That is one of the reasons Saudi disidents are opposed to their government and its US backing. Computer networks make it so much easier to move money around now, and harder to track. Who is financing who to do what? And why?
"This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us."
This book is about the results of the economic power game. If you compare this book to RICH DAD, POOR DAD it is obvious that most of these people were taught to be loosers. Even the auditor/accountant, who should understand money and wealth, doesn't have a direction for his economic efforts, it's just a job for the money.
"By denying evil we do harm. By denying darkness we obscure the light. Over a period of almost two millenia, the Christian Church has oppressed and brutalized millions of individuals in an attempt to control and contain spirituality. THE DARK SIDE OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY reveals in painstaking detail the tragedies, sorrows and injustices inflicted upon humanity by the Church. This expose is a compelling and passionate cry for human dignity and spiritual freedom."
"The ideas of economists and social philosophers shape actions and events even when we are unaware of their sources. They have had a decisive influence on the great rush of change and revolution through which the world has passed in the last two hundred years.
Professor Galbraith traces these ideas and their consequences from Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer, through Marx and Lenin, to Keynes and on to concepts and events that gave shape to the Cold War, the modern corporation, the struggles of the Third World and the problems of modern urban society."
This is a great book, and video series, for a historical perspective of economic thinking and blows away Milton Friedman's FREE TO CHOOSE, but it doesn't mention accounting, pollution, depreciation, planned obsolescence or game theory. A chess board on the cover and no mention of GAME THEORY?! How ODD!
THOU SHALT BE SICK SO I CAN MAKE A BUCK
"The big drug companies don't want to market anything for which they can't get
a patent. The reason is that other companies could also make the product and
the ensuing competition would cause the price and profit margins to be very
low. That means that all patent protected drugs are essentially "designer
chemicals", not natural substances.
So, a low profit margin on medicines from natural sources is the reason the drug companies don't want you or your doctor to know about those medicines."
"It is no exaggeration to call this one of the most important contributions to the history of the frontier ever published. Reading this indictment...will leave the fairminded reader with a sense of shame - plus a shock of recognition."
I recently saw another book about the Indians (not Native Americans) which stated that the estimates of the pre-Columbian North American population ranged from 2 million to 18 million. I find it curious that there isn't enough interest to get more precise figures than that.
"An admirable survey...I haven't read a more relevant book in years." - John Kenneth Galbraith
From Trojan horses to Mylai massacres, the Misanthropes In Authority often have brains that are Missing In Action. The populace and other populaces have to deal with the results of the errors of the mighty. I guess the bottom line is: How do we keep the maladroit from becoming the mighty?
And now for something completely wierd. Let's try searching for the truth among the lying, to see if we can better cope with dying.
"In a book that will fascinate skeptics and supporters alike, award-winning journalist Tom Shroder reveals one of the astonishing, untold stories of our time. It is the story of thousands of young children who speak of remembering previous lives. They provide detailed, accurate, and emotionally laden information about people who died before they were born, people they claim they once were. Dr. Ian Stevenson, the distinguished scholar who holds an endowed professorship at the University of Virgnia, has been traveling the world for 37 years to investigate and document more than 2000 of these phenomenal cases. Despite voluminous and meticulously detailed scholarly reports, and the respect of an enthusiastic group of colleagues, Professor Stevenson's life's work has until now remained unknown to the world at large."
What that quote doesn't mention is, the previous lives are so recent that people who knew the deceased can still be found and the memories of previous lives can be corroborated.
This book is from 1959. There was no talk of holes in the ozone layer. There was no talk of global warming. The word pollution is not listed in the index. You can find "planned obsolescence" though. Galbraith says: "...as long as we do not inquire how the demand for the products...is contrived and sustained...as in the automobile industry...discovering changes that can be advertised...to devise selling points...to accelerate "planned obsolescence"... to allocate research resources to what...are the least important things."
The affluent society has become the effluent society. People like Galbraith and Vance Packard were telling us where we were headed back in the 50's. 70,000,000 cars were manufactured in the 50's and American consumers have probably trashed around 300,000,000 automobiles by now. What happened to the depreciation of all of those cars? They got added to GNP when they were purchased, they should have been subtracted from somewhere when they got trashed. If you check most Econ books it looks like most of our economics professors don't know what Galbraith knew 10 years before the moon landing.
There is one thing about this book that bugs me though. The book is 250 pages long yet the author keeps referring to it as an essay. Every ten pages, this essay, this essay. These academic types write too much, don't know what an essay is anymore.
WHAT! Another magazine? This site is going to the dogs or bulls or bears or something.
I have gone to a smaller picture because the .gifs are taking up too much space so you can't read the date. It is January 30th 1999. TWO YEARS before the actual dot.com CRASH! How could THE ECONOMIST see it coming two years in advance yet so many people were caught off gaurd?
Page 3 says: "Electronic commerce will undoubtedly be a huge success, and the Internet's future development will be vast. But that cannot justify today's Internet share valuations: leader, page 17; the sales, the competition and the lunacy, pages 23-25"
Page 17 says: "...today's pioneering Internet companies are unlikely ever to earn the vast profits needed to justify their current share prices...add internet shares to the long list of industrial assets...that have come spectacularly crashing to earth."
Is $3,000,000,000,000, THREE TRILLION DOLLARS spectacular? Damn straight!
Since inertia makes the world go round the place will continue spinning regardless of what happens to the stock market. We mere mortals will have to deal with the money, the technology and the economists. I have yet to hear any economists say that accounting and personal finance should be mandatory in high school so I assume they want most of us to be dumber than economists. Since they don't say anything about the depreciation of all the cars purchased by us poor dumb consumers, I wonder what they know about technology. That doesn't mean that everything they say is meaningless. I have read that Karl Marx read THE ECONOMIST. Shumpeter said that MARX was a very learned man. Sometimes you have to read between the lines. When the EXPERTS are selective with the truth, occasionally you can interpolate what they leave out.
A few months ago Vance Packard was mentioned in an issue but it said he was wrong, though not exactly about what. Packard isn't so well known these days that he needs to be publicly refuted. If he was wrong why bring him up? Was this some kind of Freudian slip? Vance Packard wrote the following controversial books: THE NAKED SOCIETY, THE PYRAMID CLIMBERS, THE STATUS SEEKERS, THE WASTE MAKERS and THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS. The last is about the advertising business. In 1957 there were no big screen color TVs with surround sound and subwoofers. How much more psychologically effective are television commercials today? We have obese children. Deep dish pizza looks really good on a 40" color screen. I don't recall ever seeing an article about psychological manipulation via TV in THE ECONOMIST, but SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN did one on television addiction. The world is a big complex place, it is impossible to see the whole picture, even on a big screen TV. If experts are leaving out what they must know then how does the average man keep from getting screwed?
There is a very telling paragraph in the December 18th 1999 issue, in an article titled RETHINKING THINKING. It says:
"Finally, who can deny that people often become EMOTIONAL, cutting off their noses to spite their faces. One of the psychologists' favorite experiments is the "ultimatum game" in which one player, the proposer, is given a sum of money, say $10, and offers some portion of it to the other player, the responder. The responder can either accept the offer, in which case he gets the sum offered and the proposer gets the rest, or reject the offer in which case both players get nothing. In experiments, very low offers (less than 20% of the total sum) are often rejected, even though it is rational for the responder to accept any offer (even one cent!) which the proposer makes. And yet responders seem to reject offers out of sheer indignation at being made to accept such a small proportion of the whole sum, and they seem to get more satisfaction from taking revenge on the proposer than in maximizing their own financial gain. Mr Spock would be appalled if a Vulcan made this mistake."
This paragraph amazes me every time I read it. The author is talking about $10. TEN DOLLARS! The first year's depreciation on a new $20,000 car will be around $5,000 but this genius expects people to get excited about $10 or ONE CENT. I have walked by one cent on the sidewalk because it wasn't worth my time and effort to pick it up. If I were the responder and was offered less than $4.50 I would refuse. I have VETO POWER. The proposer knows this. He knows I know this. If he can live without $5.50 then I can live without $4.50. The economics profession is trying to convince us that it is LOGICAL to put up with BS. The economics profession is on the supply side. The demand side is supposed to be dumb and desperate. Economists are paid to rationalize the economic power game and justify the majority of us being loosers and getting screwed.
OH YEAH! Dot.com, Enron, Worldcom, we did get screwed.
I bet Mr. Spock would have a hard time not laughing. He might even phaser some economists.
Of course Mirror Spock would torture them first. You are familiar with the MIRROR, MIRROR episode of the original STAR TREK? The Vulcan version of Ming the Merciless.
A television series called COMMANDING HEIGHTS has aired on PBS. It claims to be about globalization at the turn of the century. It begins talking about the competition between the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek. It is quite interesting and has interviews of Hayek, Galbraith, Milton Friedman and Jeffery Sachs. Galbraith is a disciple of Keynes and Friedman a devotee of Hayek. Keynes is portrayed as a central planning control freak while Hayek believed in the forces of the FREE market. This series comes across as a slightly subtle propaganda piece for market forces.
The interesting things about propganda are the information and perspectives that are left out. Hayek is portrayed as an underdog against Keynes who is finally and justifiably triumphant. They are "the two most important economists of the age." There is no mention of John von Neumann who came up with game theory in 1944, two years before Keynes' death. John von Neumann was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century who just happened to dabble in economics. Hayek didn't come up with anything to put him in the same league with Keynes and von Neumann, but von Neumann has been disappeared from the public mind in economics and computers. Galbraith talked about planned obsolescence 10 years before the moon landing but there is no mention of it in this series. From the game theory perspective, planned obsolescence could be viewed as a way to keep workers running on a treadmill. A "squirrel cage society" as Galbraith said. If everyone knew accounting how would that affect the globalized economic power game? There was no mention of teaching everyone accounting in the series. 700 year olde fifth grade arithmatic, how hard can it be?
A very curious thing about this series is that it refers to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, which triggered World War I, as a "terrorist" act. I have heard and read about this incident on numerous occasions but never before as an act of terrorism. I researched it in my 1985 Encyclopedia Britannica and the assassination is attributed to "revolutionary nationalism." The act was a precise murder of a single individual not random, indescriminate killing. It seems that since 9/11/1 history is being reinterpreted to encourage our paranoia about terrorism.
An interesting historical datum is that the first Nobel prize in economics was given in 1969, the year of the moon landing. Typical human progress, one step forward, two steps back.