On Dec 12 2007, 4:27 pm, Matthias Warkus <War...@students.uni-
marburg.de> wrote:
> dwight.thi...@gmail.com schrieb:
>
>
>
> > On Dec 12, 12:26 pm, Matthias Warkus <War...@students.uni-marburg.de>
> > wrote:
> >> dwight.thi...@gmail.com schrieb:
>
> >>> Well, it seems like the news everywhere is bad, economically
> >>> speaking. The recurrent theme seems to be greed at the top, leading
> >>> to massive financial instability.
> >> Yes? Are you sure there is a causal relationship there? Why?
>
> > No, I'm not sure. I'm just going by what the funny papers say. The
> > narrative in the U.S. goes that wages for the middle class have
> > remained stagnant for going on thirty years, that various coping
> > mechanisms have come into play - more than one wage earner per
> > household, longer hours, extracting liquidity from financial assets
> > (such as housing), that those mechanisms have reached their limits,
> > that the gains have gone overwhelmingly to a very few people at the
> > top, that that those same people have done quite well for themselves
> > in any of a number of financially suspect transactions, the latest
> > being the subprime crisis, which has bled over to dicey risk
> > instruments and banks taking on far more risky portfolios than they
> > could rationally assume, etc.
>
> I still don't see how financial instability is being caused by greed.

Neither do I, it is much more complex than that. My take is that it
has a hell of a lot more to do with our current fiat money system. In
the late 19th century while we were on a commodity (gold) standard we
still had business cycles but generally short and not very destructive
or disruptive of long term growth.




>
> >>> Is it possible that complex technological civilizations are unable to
> >>> bear the cost of an elite upper class for very long? I don't mean
> >>> that there can't be a few relatively wealthy or very, very, wealthy
> >>> individuals, but it seems that having the top one tenth of one percent
> >>> of the population owning fifty percent of everything, and the upper
> >>> ten percent owning 95% of everything might for very good economic
> >>> reasons inevitably lead to collapse.
> >> Well, for most of human history, that's been the case for most of
> >> mankind. There were some rather stable societies where a minuscule
> >> stratum of aristocrats owned pretty much everything, including most of
> >> the population.
>
> > But those were not technologically advanced civilizations.
>
> The difference being?


I as a technologist am endlessly amused by non-technologist thinking
that being a member of a technologically advanced society somehow
makes them "better" than others or that the technological ability of
other persons in their society makes differences in all kinds of
things that have nothing whatever to do with technology directly.

Example the idea that "advanced" societies do not (or should not)
execute criminals. I think it is more a case of a poor society cannot
afford to warehouse serious criminals for life, while a very wealthy
(because of high technology) can afford not only that but to make many
acts criminal and warehouse people (to the tune of several % of the
population) who do them where a poorer society would have to choose
other options (execution, or decriminalization) I am speaking of the
drug war.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 12:02:39 -0800 (PST), Alfred Montestruc
<montestruc@gmail.com> wrote:

>>
>> I still don't see how financial instability is being caused by greed.
>
>Neither do I, it is much more complex than that. My take is that it
>has a hell of a lot more to do with our current fiat money system. In
>the late 19th century while we were on a commodity (gold) standard we
>still had business cycles but generally short and not very destructive
>or disruptive of long term growth.

Isn't that rather a restricted timeframe? Simply being in the
culmination of the Industrial Revolution would be enough to ensure
that long term growth wouldn't be disrupted.

On Feb 10, 4:05 pm, David Johnston <da...@block.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 12:02:39 -0800 (PST), AlfredMontestruc
>
> <montest...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> I still don't see how financial instability is being caused by greed.
>
> >Neither do I, it is much more complex than that. My take is that it
> >has a hell of a lot more to do with our current fiat money system. In
> >the late 19th century while we were on a commodity (gold) standard we
> >still had business cycles but generally short and not very destructive
> >or disruptive of long term growth.
>
> Isn't that rather a restricted timeframe?

No


> Simply being in the
> culmination of the Industrial Revolution

Culmination?? What makes you think it is over?


The industrial revolution has been going on since the 18th century,
and during the 19th century the USA and UK we never had any bad
business cycles that can be honestly compared to the great depression
which happened soon after we went to the federal reserve system and by
many economists has been tightly tied to very bad monetary policy of
the FED that could not have happened under a pure hard money system.
In fact many of the actions taken by FDR ( making the ownership of
gold illegal for example) made the situation much worse.



> would be enough to ensure
> that long term growth wouldn't be disrupted.

No disruption more that 1-2 years in the 19th century that was not
associated with war, and we have the great depression in the 20th
lasting from 1929 through the start of WWII in late 1941, about 12
years and the economy contracted a hell of a lot.

Get a grip man, the proximity of the start of the Federal Reserve
System, and the confiscation of gold in time to the Great Depression,
and the fact that the Great Depression is the measure of economic
downturns, is not an indicator that fiat money systems "work".

"Alfred Montestruc" <montestruc@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:e341a4f1-28db-4440-9000-a34136800aff@i7g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> On Feb 10, 4:05 pm, David Johnston <da...@block.net> wrote:
>> On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 12:02:39 -0800 (PST), AlfredMontestruc

>> Simply being in the
>> culmination of the Industrial Revolution
>
> Culmination?? What makes you think it is over?

Many people do speak of the post-industrial era, the technology revolution
and all that. It is at least arguable.

> The industrial revolution has been going on since the 18th century,
> and during the 19th century the USA and UK we never had any bad
> business cycles that can be honestly compared to the great depression
> which happened soon after we went to the federal reserve system and by
> many economists has been tightly tied to very bad monetary policy of
> the FED that could not have happened under a pure hard money system.
> In fact many of the actions taken by FDR ( making the ownership of
> gold illegal for example) made the situation much worse.

You might be making the false assumption that since A followed B that B
caused A. That dawn followed the rooster crowing does not mean that the
rooster crowing caused the sunrise.


>> would be enough to ensure
>> that long term growth wouldn't be disrupted.
>
> No disruption more that 1-2 years in the 19th century that was not
> associated with war, and we have the great depression in the 20th
> lasting from 1929 through the start of WWII in late 1941, about 12
> years and the economy contracted a hell of a lot.
>
> Get a grip man, the proximity of the start of the Federal Reserve
> System, and the confiscation of gold in time to the Great Depression,
> and the fact that the Great Depression is the measure of economic
> downturns, is not an indicator that fiat money systems "work".

Neither is it an indicator that it doesn't. Yes, bad fiscal and monetary
policy can muck things up, but that can occur on any standard. A standard -
gold or something else - simply prevents any good or bad mucking about in
one particular area, management of the money supply.

The one big strike against a standard is that with something like gold, it
does not allow for an expansion of the money supply that should accompany an
expanding economy.