3 ms·
It only works the first time you try it. Afterward, everyone with a stake in the country's direction realizes that having a technocrat who shares your views an
by gamble 16y ago
It only works the first time you try it.
Afterward, everyone with a stake in the country's direction realizes that having a technocrat who shares your views and has personal access to the administration is a great way to influence policy. The money spigot opens, and pretty soon having the 'right' opinion is far better for your career than independence. Survivor bias eventually ensures that the technocracy is dominated by people with the 'right' opinion.
And that's when you'll know that your country has achieved parity with the United States.
- rbanffy 16y ago> It only works the first time you try it. Once for every generation. Don't overestimate people's ability to remember. Besides, if you do it correctly, you only need to do it once. I don't trust the current favorite candidate to keep doing it right, BTW.
- joe_the_user 16y agoNo, It really only works once. Just like the New Deal only worked once and now every scam just claims it's the New, New Deal. Sure, the populace might have a memory of a generation but the technocrats have a longer memory and after first success, the next effort is dogged by the realization, "look what I'm going to get, look who I get to be..." (as the gp said, it's the careers of the technocrats one has to look at). I say this looking at the horrible, awful fail of the current president, a fail of what could have been the renewal of the country but by this very mechanism was fore-ordained to be a lurid catastrophe. Roosevelt sold out a lot to Wall Street too, btw, he just had a clean enough start to make his approach work. Really, These deals only work once per country...
- TGJ 16y agoThe New Deal never worked but oddly enough, it's trying to happen again. Bad deals happen over and over. The ones that work, the ones that require effort only happen once. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonge...
- jj_aa 16y agoMore accurately, some of the New Deal (deposit insurance, fiscal & monetary expansion, leaving the gold standard) worked, but some of it hurt. The fact that many countries suffered for just as long and worse, if not longer, without analogous policies makes me wary of the authors' modeling. > Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found. That wouldn't have been around 1939-45 or so, would it?
- dsspence 16y agoWhat part of the New Deal is 'oddly' happening again? $300 billion of the $862 billion dollar stimulus were either tax cuts or credits. Here is a link seemingly debunking that guise of an academic study: http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=10644 http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=10644 Fair warning it might cause cognitive dissonance.