UVAgrad-I haven’t read Greenspan’s book. If we go into a bad slump, we will certainly have cause to revisit his mismanagement of the real estate bubble and his unwillingness to regulate the mortgage industry

Have you read Greenspan’s Age of Turbulence? Curious to hear your reaction. Also would love to hear you reflect on the popular opinion that he will be revealed as perpetrating the worst economic crimes in our country’s history. I confess, I need a sherpa to lead me to that conclusion.

what the free-riders don’t get is to have a
fiat global currency.

until such a time as there is a competing
fiat currency, views of the US economy
segemented out from global trading partners
are neither instructive, nor informative.

merchantilism is not sustainable over
millenial time frames.

also, stats about school outcome ranking
are misleading in the extreme as they are
a bundle of results including immigrant
ESL children….

I, for one, am happy to send green rectangles
for oil, goods, or anything anybody wants to
send here from somewhere else…

also, I welcome any who want to come and
add to the human capital….which comes in
droves.

btw: no need to be an economic doomsayer
to obviate the need for change in the political
arena.

fantastic post. I’ve been extremely sensitive to advertising since I was in my teens. and what you’re saying about the hamster-wheel middle-class certainly hits home for me. Although I’ve been saying that madison avenue trend creators have been knowingly at it for much longer than just recent memory. ((( for instance, The time I opened a Rolling Stone to see a two page add that was all racks of flannel shirts in the period following Nirvana’s huge explosion into the MTV world. I went to see Nirvana when they came through town that year, sure. But I stood in the bleachers for half the show and shouted “TV babies” at the top of my lungs in homage to Matt Dillon’s character’s last line in Drug Store Cowboy. )))

Advertisers have been covertly guiding the spending habits of people for a long time now, bringing some of the prophecies of the Matrix’s “human battery” into existence right beneath our noses. They create a trend, encourage people to pour dollars into the merch, stock the walmart and collect. Its one thing when you convince a gullible lower-middle-class to part with its dollars over pointless junk, but what really gets me, is the banality of the experience. Empty, meaningless, pointless stupid ideas are being put into people’s heads, in place of actual thoughts. That drives me crazy to no end. For gods sakes, if some people need to be told what to think about, the least we could do would be to give them something artistic or just plane useful to put in their heads. But no, the privilege has been abused and the trust violated by advertisers.

Sounds a little dour, but I’m trying to be dramatic for effect. I’m from the midwest, and that is what my experience of growing up there was like. Turn on the food network and everyone is glued to the screen as if by magical incantation; TV babies.

anyway, nuff beating a dead meme. Like others, I came here by way of boingboing. You’re stuff is great reading. I’ll try to keep up.