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"if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy." That's exactly what I'm saying. If you ignore all the crazy, the stuff that's left was stuff that almo

by api 11y ago

"if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy." That's exactly what I'm saying. If you ignore all the crazy, the stuff that's left was stuff that almost nobody else was saying: that there was some kind of "conspiracy" to implement a total surveillance state (PRISM and friends, and location-aware phones), that in the future the middle class was going to be destroyed and the world enslaved to the service of a tiny elite (the "sharing economy" of non-employees with no benefits), fascism is coming back (too many examples to list), corporations with shadowy "deep state" links will rule the Earth (TPP), etc. Remember that this was in the post-cold-war 1990s when everything was getting better, a rising tide would lift all boats, and freedom was going to ring. This was before 9/11, the great housing hyperinflation, the 2008 crash and the great stagnation, or our experiment at bringing democracy to Iraq ended with ISIS. Polite establishment intellectuals weren't saying those things. Only crazies were, and the crazies were largely right. Maybe they were bat shit crazy about the underlying mechanisms, but they were right about where things were going. IMHO a lot of conspiracy nuts are actually very perceptive and intelligent. They've got good pattern recognition circuits going. The problem is that they've got poor epistemology. They're not very careful thinkers, and they're often a bit uneducated and inexperienced about how the world really works. As a result they tend to force-fit their observations and extrapolations onto silly cartoonish models of how the world works. The observations are correct, but the models are not. This is coupled with the fact that being loony outsiders, they have no reputation or political street cred to protect. They don't have to care about offending their superiors because they have none, and they aren't afraid of damaging their reputation because there's nowhere to go but up from 'fringe lunatic.' As a result, they can tell the truth insofar as they can point out trends nobody else wants to look at. According to Pravda grain production is only going up! Just replace the word "conspiracy" with "emergent behavior in a complex system" and re-read all that stuff. There is no Illuminati, but there is an "old boy network" where favors are traded for favors and corruption breeds. There is no New World Order per se, but there is a complex global economic system full of paradoxes and feedback loops and perverse incentives that behaves very much like one, and we do have corporations so big and complex and entrenched they're almost like a model of what a hostile AI would be like. Put these things together and you get everything the nutters write about minus the funny hats and secret societies. Then again... http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wal...

tedunangst 11y ago
> the middle class was going to be destroyed and the world enslaved to the service of a tiny elite wait. is this an example of a good theory or a crazy one?
- mirimir 11y ago
  > The flip side of these trends at the top of the wealth ladder is the erosion of wealth among the middle class and the poor. There is a widespread public view across American society that a key structural change in the U.S. economy since the 1920s is the rise of middle-class wealth, in particular because of the development of pensions and the rise in home ownership rates. But our results show that while the share of wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families did gradually increase from 15 percent in the 1920s to a peak of 36 percent in the mid-1980, it then dramatically declined. By 2012, the bottom 90 percent collectively owns only 23 percent of total U.S. wealth, about as much as in 1940 (see Figure 2.)[0] > The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.[1] [0] http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states/ http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-inequal... [1] http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    Probably a case where choosing ones words carefully helps. If you told me in the 90s "wealth inequality will increase" I probably would believe you. If you had told me "the world will be enslaved" I would have been skeptical. Saying that you were right all along because, while you said the latter, you really meant the former, sounds like retconning.

by api 11y ago

tedunangst 11y ago

> the middle class was going to be destroyed and the world enslaved to the service of a tiny elite wait. is this an example of a good theory or a crazy one?

mirimir 11y ago
> The flip side of these trends at the top of the wealth ladder is the erosion of wealth among the middle class and the poor. There is a widespread public view across American society that a key structural change in the U.S. economy since the 1920s is the rise of middle-class wealth, in particular because of the development of pensions and the rise in home ownership rates. But our results show that while the share of wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families did gradually increase from 15 percent in the 1920s to a peak of 36 percent in the mid-1980, it then dramatically declined. By 2012, the bottom 90 percent collectively owns only 23 percent of total U.S. wealth, about as much as in 1940 (see Figure 2.)[0] > The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.[1] [0] http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states/ http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-inequal... [1] http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Probably a case where choosing ones words carefully helps. If you told me in the 90s "wealth inequality will increase" I probably would believe you. If you had told me "the world will be enslaved" I would have been skeptical. Saying that you were right all along because, while you said the latter, you really meant the former, sounds like retconning.