Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Much of what's wrong with economics is that economists have no incentive to mark their beliefs to market, so they don't. Beliefs are rewarded for their usefulness, which is not necessarily correlated with accuracy.

The beliefs of economists are self-reinforcing. If enough believe in the half fictional laws of economics, actors will behave in a manner consistent with those half fictional laws and thus those laws will appear to be real. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reflexivity.asp

And economists more often than not do what their corporate benefactors want them to do. Sure, Krugman bucks the system here and there. And Kreuger (sadly committed suicide last week) bucked it on minimum wage increases. But people like Larry Summers conveniently always find a business-friendly solution to every problem and magically advocate exclusively for neoliberal policies. I think Summers is so in the can for corporate benefactors that he'd argue that free trade helps manufacturing workers in the rust belt.

I just said to you that the right isn't listening. Saying it thinks it's unheard is not really responsive.

If A thinks B is ignoring him, why would A listen to B? That's not how people operate.

Not really sure what this has to do with anything we were just discussing. You went from what the right says about racism to how the right feels aggrieved, which is evergreen and true but also, so what?

The right and left do not understand why the other side feels aggrieved. What's behind the words is important.

In other words, they can understand racism but choose not to. That sounds familiar.

No. That's not what that says at all. What that says is that racism becomes part of a discussion of a million other things, which causes it to get lost in the conversation. Some of that is unintentional (24/7 media flooding everyone), some of it is intentional (right wingers making race part of a broader conversation about less important topics).

I'm not sure what this means, but you so profoundly lost me with this sentence that I refused to read the paragraph that followed on general principle.

http://achievethegreenberetway.com/d...ite-at-a-time/ The left will often bundle together a bunch of problems into a huge mass and raise them all at once, all at the same volume. "We need to fix X, XX, XXX, XXXX, and XXXXX" is overwhelming. If you instead say, "We need to fix X as a first priority, and secondarily, once that's being addressed, we need to address XX, then XXX, then XXXX," you've framed what you want in reasonable, digestible terms. You have a plan, as opposed to a drum circle.

eta: Did you bring up what the right says about racism because you think there's something others might learn from it? Initially I thought that was your point, but in this point you seemed to backtrack away from suggesting there is anything interesting to be learned from the wingers other than that they feel aggrieved at being richer and more politically powerful than the rest of the country, and use that to justify selfishness. Ecclesiastes 1:9.

What I hoped to convey is that the right wing can be moved toward a more enlightened understanding of racism and the need to recognize and address it. As I said, this can be done through a door opened by libertarians and, oddly, the Kochs, and Rick Santorum (early advocate of letting ex-felons* vote).

Comprehensive justice reform, and examination of out entire "penal culture" which jails a higher percentage of citizens than any other nation, necessarily includes a blunt and ugly conversation on systemic racism. And right now, there's an appetite for reform of this on the right. But if this issue is raised among a million others, if a candidate fails to state that this is the most important issue right next to our rapidly changing labor market and economy, and if it gets lumped into a broader conversation about valid but much less significant grievances, the opportunity will be missed.

And white America had better wake up on this issue, because our penal industry, and our law n' order right wingers, are aiming their net at poor whites. There's a huge push to find ways to "control" the obsolete white people who commit a lot of petty crimes. The only reason "broken windows" isn't being applied in rural America is because additional law enforcement needed to implement it requires high tax increases. But the law n' order pricks will find a way around that. They always do.

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* Law n' order sorts use "felons." Bullshit. Once you've served your sentence, you're an ex-felon. That's the whole idea of rehabilitative punishment.