Looking back on the economic collapse
The recession officially began seven years ago this month, which makes it a good time to look back and assess the damage. The carnage is impressive.
To start with the top-line numbers, we have already lost almost $10.5 trillion in output because of the downturn. This is the value of the goods and services that could have been produced over the last seven years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), but were not because of all the people thrown out of work by the recession.
To put this figure in context, it comes to more than $33,000 per person in the United States, or $132,000 for a family of four. There are a lot of people in Washington who have been yelling about the cost of the food stamp program. But the amount of money we lost because of the recession is almost 140 times the current annual budget for that program.
For another comparison, the government looks to lose about $500 million on the loan guarantees it made to Solyndra, a start-up solar-energy company that received stimulus money and later went bankrupt, to the guffaws of conservatives. The money lost because of the recession is 21,000 times what taxpayers lost on Solyndra. If we spent an hour yelling about Solyndra and we wanted our yelling time to be proportional to the amount of money lost, if we started on Jan. 1, 2015, we would have to be yelling about the recession around the clock until May 24, 2017. And this doesn’t even count the roughly $2 trillion in annual losses from the downturn for the rest of the decade that are implied by current CBO projections.
For more of this article, look here.
(Some months ago, before I was wrongfully terminated, I did research on the annual cost of welfare and compared it to what the criminal financial people cost taxpayers in 2008. This research was motivated by my old boss's frequent complaints about how much the "lazy welfare bums" are costing taxpayers. I observed that if he is so angry with those who receive welfare, he must be beyond furious with the criminal bankers, since their hubris cost taxpayers significantly more. I shared the numbers with him, and informed him that it would take over 550 years for welfare fraud to cost us what the criminal bankers cost us--and I didn't even break out the corporate welfare fraud that comprises a significant percentage of all welfare fraud. He had no response to this, and just walked away. Matters economic seem to be beyond the ken of those whose politics trend far right...)
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how people who are financially "comfortable" work so relentlessly to vilify and denigrate those of us who are struggling.
For example, directly because of my wrongful termination, I have to find a way to get more propane in my propane tank, because my unemployment simply will not cover such a large outlay of cash. Going to the local charity venues is daunting, and embarrassing, but will inevitably be my only solution. Furthermore, I am recovering from pneumonia, and the least effort exhausts me. I have to keep reminding myself, "this too shall pass." The man behind my wrongful termination used to routinely make disparaging remarks about my financial situation. He obviously didn't think it was inhumane to wrongfully terminate me the day before we went on Thanksgiving break. (And, this guy pretends to be a "Christian."
There are hundreds of thousands of unemployed older Americans who are in much worse straits than I. Wouldn't it have been amazing if those who are "comfortable" decided to "give" Christmas presents to those in need, rather than to their equally comfortable children and friends? According to everything I've read, that would be the "Christian" thing to do...
Hard to get past that.
Feynman in a commencement lecture at CalTech talked about science and progress. (Something that progressives revel in.)
In doing good science, he said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."
Oddly, most people I know--right, left, center--are of the exactly contrary opinion. They believe themselves the hardest person to fool. "Momma didn't raise no fool" is precisely wrong.
For many, the default hypothesis for economics is that we get high levels of technology and economic growth, high levels of economic equality and prosperity, as a matter of nature. It's just what happens whenever there's no interference. It's like saying "peace" is the natural state of man. It's all very early-Rousseauian. Even Rousseau managed to get past his foolishness, even if it took years.
When you look out over human history and the full range of human geography, you find that lifespans are typically short, levels of technology low with nearly zero economic growth, large boom and bust cycles, and you only get "economic equality" when, pretty much, everybody's is close to zero. Unfortunately, since our scale is from 1-10 and those societies are all at 1 or less, those inequalities seem pretty trifling and we pronounce such society as more egalitarian because from our outsider POV and ways of measuring things they must have been. Momma didn't raise no fool.
However, they've still resolved ways, often bloody, of dealing with social inequality. If between communities, there were feuds that had economic resolutions, and wars that levelled the playing field in terms of territory, accumulated wealth, and population. One Tamil social custom that the British (and Mughals) fought for years before exterminating it involved having a wealthy family buy a child from a poor family; after raising him as their own for years, the rich family would then sacrifice the child. It reduced the economic burden on the poor family and redistributed a large percentage of the wealth from the rich family. The sacrifice was seen as a social good by the community, and the outcome of social and economic inequality was straightforward: While limiting loss of life, the money was redistributed while causing financial and emotional grief to the wealthy family. This helped maintain social order and reduce economic inequality, which prevented more widespread bloodshed.
Feynman wasn't a fool, at least not in some ways. (Of course, the most impressive kind of foolishness is precisely that which we think of as wisdom, esp. wisdom that makes us better than them. We codify methods of dealing with that particular kind of idiocy, that way of not fooling ourselves, as critical thinking, but then most self-styled critical thinkers studiously avoid applying that technology to themselves. Because we all believe that "momma didn't raise no fool."
(I suppose I could thank you for the inadvertent knr...)
