Friday, March 13, 2009

Re: Animal Spirits

In response to this

You keep capitalizing "Animal Spirits" in a way that either stresses it as unique or mocks it (I'm not sure which.)
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From my perspective though you are treating as remarkable, something that is blindingly obvious. Humans ARE animals. We are capable of rationality but it is not our standard operational mode. The fact that we hold ANYTHING of value beyond what we can eat, drink or breathe is an artifact of our evolutionary history. Our historical fascination with precious metals in particular reveals that what we regard as valuable is entirely arbitrary and that there is no such thing as "intrinsic value"
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Why then should it be surprising that the health of our economy depends entirely on the mindset of its participants?
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I could expand on this and point out how our whole political system revolves around the notion that if we throw our money into a big enough pile so that counting it is no longer intuitive, when we then remove it again in manageble chunks, it feels like we've gotten something for nothing.
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We refer to the process as 'earmarking'
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The only arguments between the the two political parties is whether it's preferable to spend more than you collect or collect less than you spend.

1 comment:

wvng said...

Hi PaulD. wvng here. Just an fyi, I added your site to my blog roll - o maybe you'll get a few more hits. :-)