Lacking All Conviction: exploring the future from the center

It seems to me that some factor or combination of factors, by they structural/macroeconomic, tax policy related, or other, have had in recent decades the effect of disproportionately rewarding a class of ultra-rich people who happened to be more politically progressive than the previous generation's billionaires. My main piece evidence for these trends is the increase of self-made billionaires, and decrease in inherited wealth among the Forbes 400 over recent years, as documented by  Forbes . It stands to reason that the more self-made prominent billionaires you have, the less relative power inheritance billionaires have, who will tend to be relatively more conservative. This tendency may be shown in recent studies such as " Stealth Politics by US Billionaires ", which attempts to document the political leanings of those at the very top of the economic hierarchy. I thought it was an interesting hypothesis, and one that may predict significant political and social i...

If Trump wins, I will know who to blame. Not the people who vote for him, the downtrodden victims of his charismatic authoritarian personality, but economists and politicians who enable each other to shape our lives with disregard for human dignity. Those who have been treating human beings as mere variables, who, like any other variable, exist only within equations where productivity is the goal. In economic practice, these variables do not become human again until increased productivity is mathematically guaranteed. This is a mistake. Observe this Capuchin monkey reacting angrily to inequitable treatment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg Now imagine millions of much smarter and stronger primates slowly coming to terms with the scale of economic inequality in America today. This should be a primary, not secondary, concern of economists and especially politicians.  The belief that human beings are capable of withstanding unlimited indignities and hardships, of adap...

How the hell should I know? A perpetual dilemma of economics is the lack of certainty about what is signal and what is noise, in terms of policy and effect, and we are in a sense blinded by this lack of predictive power of economic models. Thus there will continue to be great risks entailed by every possible policy path that we could take. A suitable metaphor is that we are jogging on a cliffside path, and we need to find our way without falling, but our senses won't tell us that we've found the edge for sure until we start to fall. The only way I can think to survive such a scenario is to have some mechanism to catch ourselves once we begin to fall  and this, I believe, is why the most economically successful countries have central banks that are willing to step in and lift their industries out of free-fall. This safety feature, I believe, is a very powerful tool that an economy can use in order to experiment with different policies in a situation where models lack predictive ...