What sick, wicked culture produced such people?

Sorry, guys ... I'm "Your Name" in the "hoi polloi" comment.

My name for what we're suffering from now is "progress" -- or rather the consequences of that very bad idea, which Chesterton defined very well as "belief in Providence, without belief in God," i.e. in contemporary terms, (a) the belief that houses always increase in value, the markets will always go up, and that we can, by hook or crook, grow our way out of any debt we ever incur, coupled with (b) the belief that there is no other purpose in life than to gratify our basest desires, right here, right now.

Given where "progress" has gotten us, I for one am not especially sanguine that our recent turn toward "progressive" politics is going to do us much good -- a sentiment for which ample evidence is offered by the Reverend's recent unveiling of an "economic team" made up mostly if not entirely by just the same people and the same sort of people who brought us where we find ourselves now.

I have yet to detect any substantive "change" of course in the Reverend's approach as opposed to what McCain's would have been or what Bush's has been for the past eight years or what Clinton's was the eight years before that.

I likewise have yet to be surprised by "hope" or by messiah-gasms up and down my legs or in my loins.

But I'm just bitter, no doubt. Or a racist. Maybe both.

We're just writing another chapter:

http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Madness-Crowds/dp/9562915700/

This is what happens when Wii games and Disney Princess junk is on sale. Wait until the financial meltdown happens - then what??

But what do we call it when Berkenstock clad 'journalists' on Young
St. and their affiliates worldwide carry out their own ego-driven version of same, only far more politely and destructively to the common good?

The New Yorker's "Anatomy of a Meltdown" is a must-read.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/01/081201fa_fact_cassidy

Scott - various soundbytes about his upcoming book, various chunks (repeatedly, as he was on more than one call) of what he said in the youtube clip above, that sometimes a cabbie can sum up what's wrong with us economically more succinctly than a talking head, that people are too apt to believe their stockbrokers without weighing whether the advice a stockbroker gives is really more in the client's best interests than in the stockbroker's best interests, and that he doesn't like to advise people because he doesn't like to be responsible for their disappointment if he turns out not to be correct -- all my paraphrasing, not direct quotes, of course.

Jen,

This is why you need to sit in the quiet car, so you don't have to listen to such nonsense. :)

Schiller talks of the shocking volatility in the financial markets, with the standard deviation at 5% in the past month (meaning swings of 800 points or more in a day -- up or down).

As he says, this surely is a mostly psychological phenomenon, because it's profoundly irrational. It's difficult-to-impossible to sail safely through the financial market over the long term when the waves are that high. You're going to get swamped, and when you do, you're going to take on a lot of water...and maybe sink.

But volatility in the 21st century is not just financial. We've also seen it in commodity prices this year, both food and oil, and we're seeing in climate indexes.

Those who question global warming will usually point out that climate has always varied, and not just seasonally, but epochally. Of course this is true. But what this analysis fails to mention is that the trend-line today clearly points towards warming, and, more alarming, the variations of drought and storm are becoming more severe.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_04/

We may look back on the second half of the 20th century as a demographically and politically tumultuous time, but a relatively placid era in terms of stock market and climate indexes. A scary thought.

Daniel - had there been a quiet car, that's where I would've planted myself at the departure point. However, there was NO quiet car on that train. Not sure if that's because I was taking a regional and not an Acela, or what...all I know was the conductor informed a few of us that there weren't any such thing on taht particular train. Sadly.

celticdragon,

As often as not -- and maybe *more* often than not -- the "pinstriped professionals" that Rod refers are good Democrats, not good Republicans.

They certainly gave much more of their money to support the Lightworker campaign than they did to support the McCain campaign.

I'm wondering where you think the Reverend's "economic team" came from.

Straight from the not-for-profit sphere?

Straight from doing charitable work?

Straight from serving soup in an almshouse?

I think not.

PS: It's also worth point out that the aforementioned "pinstriped professionals" share all of your secular progressive views -- views which are underwritten by, and which in turn merely serve to enable, precisely the economic paradigm with which you feign to disagree. This is but one of many reasons why these folks are Democrats as often as not.

I second both Alex and Michele above.

Augmenting Michele: Shiller meanders around a restatement of the obvious. Boom and bust history is replete with examples of group-think irrationality. And a ton of others had forecasted the current bust.

Augmenting Alex: A transparently capitalistic response to the crisis would be to allow the affected businesses to fail. But not only that, the situation would not have evolved to this point in the first place in a pure marketplace.

Because the underlying risk would have remained in the private sector where it belonged. Once risk could be transferred to the government, an endless do-loop of derivitization was initiated with almost infinite demand. Government offered itself up as the bottomless risk sink.

Once the music stopped on the real estate ponzi scheme, the player without a chair was the government. Surprise, surprise.

No government risk sink - no ponzi scheme. No ponzi scheme - no crisis. Unfortunately, we needed unfettered capitalism applied to the government enabled pathological real estate game years ago.

Ah come on, folks. Everyone knows this decline and fall of civilization as we know it is all the fault of them homerseckshuls gittin' hitched. It's unbridled seckshul libertinism that caused this death. Seckshul libertinism created this economic policy o' Shrub's. At least that's what many other threads have wanted us to believe, anyway.