Paul Krugman in Sunday’s NYT has an article entitled “How Did Economists Get it so Wrong?” It’s fine as far as it goes, I think, but it misses so much, since it just focuses on financial economics. No mention of the growing wealth inequality in the US and its effects, such as forcing people to buy on credit, or using their homes a piggy banks (as long as the price was supposedly rising). No mention […]
[Note: this is another entry in my attempt to make sense of the crash and see how it is tied to the Attention Economy. Some earlier entries are here, here, here, here and here.] I attended an informative, thought-provoking and amusing talk by Prof. Brad DeLong of UC Berkeley on Tuesday on the financial crisis “of 2007-2009” (he expects the crisis to have diminished by the end of this year). (The talk was part of […]
SUCCESS REACHES ITS LIMITS In my previous post on the crisis, I claimed that we are suffering from too much savings and not enough consumption. The worldwide pool of money seeking growth investments is too large to be sensibly invested in any sort of production or service-providing corporation. The reason for that is that consumption is just too low, and is not likely to be able to rise to the levels needed to sustain such […]
Friendship might be defined as a state of more-or-less mutual attention paying. From little acts of attention, including times when you just are together, talking, walking, or engaging in some joint activity your minds get into sync so that you can align easily (that is pay attention) to what the other is saying or doing, feeling or thinking. Long friendship makes attention all that much easier and full. No wonder people clamor for friends, and […]
Paul Salomone has posted some interesting and I think valid comments about social justice in an Attention Economy. The issue is how do we go about equalizing what has become most important — attention from others. In an economy based on material things and money, governments have certain powers to help equalize things, even though with varying problems and difficulties. They can offer welfare, social security, require a decent minimum wage and provide various public […]