Re:A libertarian socialist engineer solves the financial cri...
by joe_the_user on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @12:59AM
(#742883)
Agree,
The only thing the "everyone else's ideas are crap, let me start from my gut" approach has going for it is that it appeals to ... other people's guts.
A lot of economics is junk but a lot of it also involves some subtle thinking about problems where common sense often fails.
Indeed, one might even argue that the crisis came because there was already too much "technological" thinking and not enough thinking about the history of ... bubbles. LTCM was pretty close to the "engineering mindset" (at least the bad part) even if it was physicists running it and many actors (Alan Greenspan esp) viewed the market as a technology that would take care of everything.
-- Also, #7, right or wrong, "retroactive" law enforcement involves ... abandoning the rule of law. Again, if you study the history of places where that happens, you know that's a bad thing. So, no let's not let engineers or software engineers or mathematicians run the country, even though I'm in the last two groups...
The only thing the "everyone else's ideas are crap, let me start from my gut" approach has going for it is that it appeals to ... other people's guts.
A lot of economics is junk but a lot of it also involves some subtle thinking about problems where common sense often fails.
Indeed, one might even argue that the crisis came because there was already too much "technological" thinking and not enough thinking about the history of ... bubbles. LTCM was pretty close to the "engineering mindset" (at least the bad part) even if it was physicists running it and many actors (Alan Greenspan esp) viewed the market as a technology that would take care of everything.
-- Also, #7, right or wrong, "retroactive" law enforcement involves ... abandoning the rule of law. Again, if you study the history of places where that happens, you know that's a bad thing. So, no let's not let engineers or software engineers or mathematicians run the country, even though I'm in the last two groups...