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logo    Brain-bound Orthodox Thinking


George Orwell ("Politics and the English Language") claims that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. Careless language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts. But writing in a dialect of orthodoxy corrupts thought processes just as surely as ungrammatical constructions and slovenly chosen diction. Worse still, the language used in the ordinary lives of people in professions based on an orthodox view can constrain thought processes so that thinking in an alternate dialect becomes impossible. Language is, after all, the medium of thought, and ideology is often the path to disaster since ideologues seem incapable of even considering the possibility of being wrong. The econospeach of orthodox free-market economics is an example of such a language debasing dialect.

Look at these simple examples:

We are told that Americans save too little. But the American economy makes saving impossible. The word save in the English language has a distinct meaning: it means to protect something from danger of loss, injury, or destruction. I can save minute screws salvaged from a broken device (the kind of screws which are virtually impossible to buy) by putting them in a jar and putting the jar in a secure place. Given some unusual event, these screws will still be there a month, a year, a decade later. But I can't do that with an American dollar. Put it under your mattress today and a year later its value will have diminished to perhaps fifty cents. Fiat money cannot be saved, because it has no intrinsic value. So how has the word save come to be used? Our economy fosters language such as, Buy a refrigerator during this weeks sale and SAVE 25%. But that's not saving, is it? Have you heard about the woman who returned from shopping and told her husband, "I bought a dress and saved 15%, a blouse and saved 20%, shoes and saved 50%. I would have even saved more but I ran out of money." In this sense, Americans are the world's greatest savers.

Since we can't save, were told to invest. But investing is subject to a hoard of risks. Invest your money and lose your shirt is not an unknown event. Invest doesn't mean what invest means in the English language. Look it up! When an economist tells us to invest our money, he means wager.

And what do we invest in? Securities, of course, which are anything but secure.

What about the dialect of the market. When the market tumbles, we are told it has made a correction. Why aren't we told that it has made an error when it rises? In the English language, only mistakes can be corrected. If the word correction were used properly in relation to the market, the entire marked would have to be described as one gigantic error.

Then there are the abstractions. GNP, GDP, Core Inflation, Employment Rate, Per-capita Income--absolutely none of which have any real meaning. Ask any head of household what the rise/fall in GNP or Core Inflation has done for him/her and the response you get may be merely a blank stare. This econospeach has no real meaning; otherwise, it would have an effect that people recognized.

The upshot is that no one can think clearly in econospeach. As the blogger at Econospeak has written, ". . . Feldstein . . . demonstrated how clever economists, armed with sophisticated mathematical and statistical techniques, along with the help of well-trained graduate assistants, are capable of manipulating models to get whatever results they desire. As economists like to joke, that if you torture the data long enough they will confess." So, although economists such as Feldstein can give their work the appearance of scientific precision, their work must necessarily remain suspect.

Two economists, Massimo Guidolin and Elizabeth A. La Jeunesse, working at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, have published a paper that could only have been written by people whose thinking has been entirely constrained by the econospeach of their profession. Their paper, titled, "The Decline in the U.S. Personal Saving Rate: Is It Real and Is It a Puzzle?" (http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/07/11/Guidolin.pdf) claims that it is a puzzle. They write, "Although we have reviewed a number of concurring explanations that have been proposed for the declining propensity of U.S. households to save, it seems that (sometimes on logical grounds, in other occasions on an empirical level) such theories remain insufficient to explain the entire magnitude of the recent transformation of the United States into a nation of spendthrifts. (Italics mine.) In this sense, the U.S. personal saving rate remains a puzzle." Only brain-bound economists could have written such drivel. Had they gone out and spoken to heads of households they would have found out that the failure to save results from insufficient income.

All sorts of practices carried out by business, government, and the FED have created this situation. The people who can't save had nothing to do with it. Illegal immigration, offshoring, depressed wages, poorly regulated banking policies which allowed the mass marketing of easy-to-get but impossible-to-repay credit, and real inflation (forget the meaningless core), especially for items with little elasticity such as medical care, fuel, and food have made it difficult for many heads of households to make ends meet month after month. As the comic said, "every time I think I'm going to make ends meet, they move the ends." And unfortunately, the ends are getting further apart. The economists who have sold this system to our political and business leaders are solely responsible for not only the so-called saving rate but also all of the other economic problems our nation faces.

To call America a nation of spendthrifts is to reveal the bias that it's never the system but the character of the people that's at fault. It is the same bias that claims that homosexuality, homelessness, and countless other vices are the result of character flaws, and the fact that a plethora of data exists that prove that this bias is false, the attraction of the bias always overwhelms the evidence in brain-bound thinkers.

America is failing as a nation. The economy is failing once again, the government is failing to support the people, the judicial system is failing, the educational system is failing, the infrastructure is failing, the medical system is failing, the fabric of society is being torn; yet, no one questions the orthodox ideologies responsible for this situation. It is said that Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Such insanity is the legacy of every orthodoxy, including free-market economics. (11/9/2007)