Stupidity

Cipolla’s 5 laws of stupidity

Attempting to explain why everything is going so poorly…

I disagree with the core thesis.  I don’t think it’s so much stupidity, though I’ll grant that there is a lot of it, rather, I believed it is self interested actors who exploit the work of others.  Game theory shows how this can lead to strong forces towards making the overall “good” worse, in favor of the gains for the few powerful exploiters.

I need to write an essay on this…

Michael Hudson explains history

Neoliberalism   is unsustainable 

Therefore it will eventually end

How?  And what might follow?

There is an economic alternative, of course. Looking over the sweep of ancient history, we can see that the main objective of ancient rulers from Babylonia to South Asia and East Asia was to prevent a mercantile and creditor oligarchy from reducing the population at large to clientage, debt bondage and serfdom. If the non-U.S. Eurasian world now follows this basic aim, it would be restoring the course of history to its pre-Western course. That would not be the end of history, but it would return to the non-Western world’s basic ideals of economic balance, justice and equity.

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U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall.

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The West, in its U.S. neoliberal iteration, seems to be repeating the pattern of Rome’s decline and fall. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the One Percent has always been the trajectory of Western civilization. It is a result of classical antiquity having taken a wrong track when Greece and Rome allowed the inexorable growth of debt, leading to the expropriation of much of the citizenry and reducing it to bondage to a land-owning creditor oligarchy.