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Dear David, Poirot, Shadow & Squeers,

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I see you have been talking about me during my absence.

I confess that I am indeed a philistine when it comes to academic pursuit, having ceased all formal education just prior to my fourteenth birthday.

But don't worry, I'll forgive you for that.

I won't bore you with the details of my rough-and-ready life in the bush. Though I enjoyed it, I am still a bit frustrated I was never able to realise my childhood dream of becoming a drover.

We all get frustrated at times and I'm not surprised a lot of economists are frustrated at the moment. Human behaviour is pretty difficult to pin down. I have a lot of sympathy for them as I do for meteorologists.

I doubt that either of them has the means of identifying, capturing and weighing up all the variables on an ongoing basis. Perhaps they will one day but they obviously still have a long way to go.

They may have more success concentrating on the purely local level but even that seems fairly hazardous. I have in mind the story of those Canadian Indians who continued in the tradition of their ancestors, teaching their young boys how to build wooden fishing boats, not knowing that European settlers were building a dam several hundred miles up-stream to divert the river to their farm lands.

Despite the difficulties, constant frustration and ridicule they must endure, I am not aware of any viable alternatives to the scientific methods they employ in their respective disciplines.

Perhaps you will agree that given the state of the art of present day meteorology, economics and the humanities, we are all more or less in the same boat - just like those Canadian Indian tribes.

Hopefully, even a philistine from Queensland's Darling Downs like me may not be completely out of his depth when discussing such matters.

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Nick,

'There are none so blind as those who will not see', ...... in the face of any and all evidence and attempts at rational persuasion to the contrary,

Actually I could say that of you. Economics does not predict that everything will be wonderful, Economics actually predicts that common resources such as forests, fisheries, etc would be depleted unless a value is attached to them and enforced. The rainforests that are being depleted today are in countries that have no enforcement, and where individuals see profit in stripping the land.

Common goods, need to be provided or protected by governments. This is a well establish economic principle. That it is not applied universally does not mean that the economics has failed, rather that the governments have.

All the chicken littles that are running around predicting the end of civilisation as we know it seem to be continually disappointed, as the global economy continues to thrive and drag more people out of poverty.

Banjo Paterson,

Why would you think I/we were referring to you as an example of a "philistine"?

As far as I can glean from your postings, you constantly seek meaning and to understand.

Banjo Paterson,

I'm afraid by your own account you don't qualify for Mathew Arnold's category of "philistinism"; you're of the "populace", the salt of the earth--at least according to your childhood idyll.

SM:
"All the chicken littles that are running around predicting the end of civilisation as we know it seem to be continually disappointed, as the global economy continues to thrive and drag more people out of poverty".

I'm not sure you can say it's "thriving"--and neither is the planet upon which it has thrived hitherto--it's just lurching from one crisis to another, and perpetual economic crises also invoke geo-political crises. Creative destruction is precisely the parable Banjo conjures above, and it begets resentment. All cultural/natural stability is gone, sold down river; is it any wonder the West is so hated by so many, even its own? David G's nuclear war is a logical extrapolation of the "realist" paradigm (a nightmare) we've created.
Things are always unthinkable until they happen--like 9/11.
But you just go on promoting your best of all possible worlds.

SM, you really do need to do a bit more reading beyond the propaganda spouted by the Australian and the Economist, and your neoclassical economics textbooks. While you accuse me and others of knowing nothing of economics, it could clearly be said of you that you know nothing of political economy. Your latest post is so naive as to be laughable. The global capitalist economy works as an integrated system. Yes, governments set the frameworks in which corporations act (the same corporations responsible for rampant deforestation, etc - but they are of course driven forward by the profit imperative), but corporations and financial institutions have become so powerful that the democratic process in most countries is a sham, replaced by plutocracy. Governments make important decisions based on the profit interests of corporations. The land-grabbing phenomenon (http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4479-grain-releases-data-set-with-over-400-global-land-grabs) is only the latest in a very long line.

And as for the claim that the global capitalist economy is the saviour of humanity because it continues to lift people out of poverty - it's all relative, and it could all go pear-shaped very quickly. In fact, it has, and it is. Have you forgotten September 2008? In the aftermath of that hundreds of millions were plunged into poverty, and that trend continues today. Have you read anything about Greece recently? Spain? Portugal? Ireland? Guatemala? Mexico? More and more people are sinking into poverty in the US, where average wages have stagnated or gone backwards since 1980. The global capitalist economy is working mainly for the uber-rich, people like Gina Reinhart. If you want to continue to serve as a mouth-piece for them in this forum, be my guest, but don't expect to be taken seriously

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Dear Poirot & Squeers,

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Thank you for your kind words. It is comforting to learn that I do not qualify for Mathew Arnold's category of "philistinism" (whatever that may be - it doesn't sound too good).

I didn't qualify as a drover either but there can't be too many of them left these days. Most seem to have been replaced by road train drivers. I guess the young kids have had to adapt their dreams accordingly.

Apparently my childhood dreams have become extinct. I'll probably soon be joining the pterodactyls and brontosauruses singing ghostly, prehistoric choruses.

The Canadian Indian parable, however, as Squeers rightly suggests, is still relevant. Here is an example.

I somewhat shamefully recall participating in a debate on the blog of my French philosopher friend, Michel Onfray, in 2007, when a female debater innocently enquired what effect I thought the American economic depression would have on Europe.

Not having previously heard any suggestion of a looming economic depression in the US, I hurriedly checked all possible sources of economic information on the web and casually replied, in the habitual macho style that characterises me in such circumstances, that the concerns in the US related to the bursting of a real estate bubble which, apparently, was under control. I added that it was not expected to have any major effect on the US economy and that there was absolutely no risk of it affecting Europe.

I was simply repeating what the world's best economists, including all the Nobel prize winners, were saying at the time (cf., the elders of those Canadian Indian tribes).

None of them had seen the antics the financial engineers had been up to, craftily transforming real estate debt into negotiable mortgage-backed securities and stealthily mixing them into a toxic cocktail with other securities so that they could not be detected.

Nor had they seen the final mixture being traded to all the major European banks and financial institutions like snake oil.

We poor "Indians" had no way of knowing that somebody was busy sealing our death warrant several thousand miles "upstream".

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