Saturday, June 8, 2013

School's out for summer

It's pretty clear I need to scale back my efforts here at real economics. I am weary and NEED something like a sabbatical.  Grinding out a reasonably coherent post every day is a lot of work.  But lately, I have also been playing nursing assistant to a partner who broke her right arm near her shoulder.  So now the work load in my life is becoming a threat to my health—and I have four stents in my heart already.  If someone else was making me work this hard, I would be organizing a revolution.

Don't worry.  I am not going anywhere.  If there is an interesting story, I will be sure to cover it.  But I am not going to try to get a post up every day.  I have proved I am a good Protestant—now I am going to try to be more reasonable.

I also have Producer Class projects that need doing.  This house we moved into last summer is cute, has beautiful trees, and a large expansive lawn that was obviously well-tended by the previous owner.  Unfortunately, it has the weather protecting qualities of a tent.  It a long way from hopeless, but it is also a long way from energy efficiency.  Besides, construction projects like this are good for the thought processes.  I am hoping designing and executing some weatherization strategies will recharge the old brain.

But the big change is that I want to write about what the people who can build better societies need to do politically to get us out of the current cesspool of ignorance and corruption that seems to prevent us from accomplishing those tasks necessary for survival.  I don't intend to re-invent the wheel so this effort will borrow heavily from the strategies employed by the Non-Partisan League in the second half of the 1910s.  Think NPL manifesto meets TED presentation.  I have a pretty good start on this project but now I need the time and energy to finish it.  I'll probably post some progress reports as they become relevant.

Wish me luck.  And if you have any suggestions for my NPL / Producer Class "manifesto," please send me an email or add a comment to this post.

7 comments:

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    1. Love to talk with you about your project. Anyone who understands Veblen is OK in my book. Send me an email at: jonathan at elegant-technology dot com

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  2. I have little insight into economics other than to notice that there appear to be two separate species of humans. This species difference is between the 1% who have no interest in producing, limiting access to, buying or selling trinkets and the trinket culture of the 99% who limit access to, produce, buy and sell them...And the identity clashing of wealth, class and culture (leavened with race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, education) is it seems to me in furtherance of the 99% limiting access to, production, buying and selling of trinkets... Objection! I can hear it already..Surely you do not include as trinkets food, water, air, safe housing, personal freedoms? The necessities of life are not trinkets!! Outrageous!!! And of course they are not---except to those in the refugee camps in places like Darfur and Sudan and to the Masai Tribesmen.....To them a bowl of water and their own ancestral lands are now an extravagance....a trinket...

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    1. I think you noticed something the vast majority of economists miss. Let me know if this awareness makes you happy. I know it makes me furious.

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  3. Hello again!
    Mr. Larson, I hope you would comprehend my absence on the blog in next few weeks because I'm colledge student and I have a lot work yet to do. I have to pass several not-so-easy exams at "Leisure class faculty" - (Faculty of political science). But, on the other side I can promiss you that you will recieve e-mail until the end of june, at most. In the e-mail will be complete description of the new ideas along with my drawnings of processes of economic reproduction and how the changes I propose can affect it. Those drawnings are quite simple but, I think, so obvious.

    All the best,

    Đ.M.

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  5. fyi -
    http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/05/like-a-wasting-disease-neoliberals-libertarians-the-right-are-eating-away-societys-connective-tissue-part-1.html#more-5519

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