I think Melkor posted the first part of this rap video. This video is about the debate between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich A. Hayek. The world economic system is based on the Keynesian economic model. This website has a fifteen minute video on Keynes.
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes
"For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals." Hayek
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I like those two quotes. It reminds me of when people say, "I don't like to talk about politics," or,"I don't like to talk about economics." I want to tell those people that they underestimate how much the intellectual elite and the political elite have an influence on their day to day routine.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I like those quotes. Those philosophers think a lot of themselves if they think that their words (or some earlier philosophers' words) kicked different economic systems into gear. I'd have to grant that the socialistic economic systems (none of which have lasted any lenght of time and all have ended or are ending in failure) were instigated by Marx and his successors, but not the traditional economic systems: hunter-gatherer, agrarian, feudal, capitalist: you know, the systems that actually have survived and worked for great lengths of time. Contrary to what Keynes is quoted as saying, it was practical, smart, hard working men who came up with the different economic systems (pre-Marx) without being told by a philosopher what to think. And to repeat, the one general system that was told to us by philosophers has been shown to be a gigantic failure.
ReplyDeleteIt would be as if Isaac Newton told an archer that, because he described the physics of the action, the archer is able to aim his arrow correctly to hit the target. No, Isaac just described how what someone was already doing worked.
ReplyDeleteBud-D, I agree with what you are saying. I agree most intellictuals are dangerous and not very intelligent. Thomas Sowell talks about the two types of knowledge in "A Conflict Of Visions". There is the systemic rationality and articulated rationality. Systemic being the knowlege held by millions of people that has been gained through experience and then there is the knowlegde that can be articulated by so called smart people sitting in some chair pontificating.
ReplyDeleteBut what I gather from the quote above is that most people simply don't think on a deep level and don't really know why they hold the most basic beliefs that they do. Whether because they are too busy with day-to-day life--just living life-- or what not. Intellectuals and philosophers for better or worse have a profound impact on what most people believe. Marxist political and economic thought is very prevelant in our society and most people are unawre of where it came from. I would say that from what I have heard from both Bud-D and Toejamm, their most basically held belifes come from sources that you may not be aware of. Of course I am also influecenced by these people. The examination of ideals and where they came from is very telling. Also look at the goals of the people who orginitated these ideals.
I do agree with you and ToeJamm, that most people don't deeply comprehend the reasons they hold the values they do. Particularly, as you say, the ~socialist economic/political thought imprinted on them by schools from Kindergarten through college.
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