
We need to be wary of narratives of economic catastrophe - jonbaer
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-we-need-to-be-wary-of-narratives-of-economic-catastrophe
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ausbah
I feel like in our attempt to predict the next recession we'll inadvertently
end up causing one / cause it to occur earlier, but maybe that's just
inevitable

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purplethinking
I'd say the opposite. As long as everyone remains vigilant and looking for
catastrophe in every shadow we should be less likely to have another 2008
sneak up on us.

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rchaud
What makes you think you or I have any say in this?

Recessions happen naturally as part of the business cycle, but are exacerbated
by risky practices at major financial institutions that take on insanely
leveraged bets in order to churn out a tiny profit that when summed up,
becomes a huge profit.

The problem is that when average people go to political representatives to
push for regulation of the markets, they are drowned out by corporate
lobbyists who fill reps' pockets and fill the airwaves talking about and
"class envy" and "socialist takeover".

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cylinder
Naturally? Is it a law of physics?

Where did this idea of recessions being required come from? Business cycle is
a reflection of human psychology. It's possible for that to change.

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themark
I have noticed the words recession and housing crash in the news a lot lately.
It is almost as if some people are hoping for it.

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hevi_jos
That is because some people are hoping for it, in particular, home buyers.

If the price os something goes too high, it is a good thing that it goes down
to levels in which they are affordable again for those that need it for living
on them and not for speculating.

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api
We need to be wary of _narratives_.

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FabHK
Well, narratives are enormously powerful. We need to be wary of false
narratives; it might well be that we must employ narratives to communicate
with everyone that doesn't have the time, patience, or otherwise capacity to
dig through statistics and do a proper analysis.

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ThomPete
All narratives are false sooner or later. I think that's the parents' point.

No narrative last forever. The globalist narrative for instance is now finding
it's limited.

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danmaz74
It's a long but worthwhile reading; a TL;DR for those who don't have the time:
excessive optimism and excessive pessimism are both bad for us; we need to go
back to building narratives that include complex solutions for complex
global(ised) problems, which is something that we were able to do in the past
- after all, we went through much worse periods (eg the 1930s, WWII) and the
World didn't end.

Personal comment: I can relate very much to this, but I also find that
building those complex narratives - or even finding them - is incredibly
difficult. I don't know how much this difficulty is related to the new media
landscape (especially social media), but the net effect is that, apparently,
only simple solutions (which will never work) seem to be gaining steam.

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dhh2106
+1

It's hard to build up to complex solutions when we (society, broadly defined)
seem unable to agree on the basic facts.

I don't know for sure if the past was better or worse when it came to
reporting the truth. Given the limited number of news outlets, radio stations
and tv stations historically, there were at least a limited set of reporting
to agree on (independent of the accuracy of that reporting). This was probably
very helpful in enabling more complex solutions.

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douglaswlance
The problem is that both sides of any big issue think they have the "facts"
and refuse to compromise or engage with the facts from the other side.

The list of objective facts regarding any major issue is short. The list of
subjective facts is infinite. When anyone can blast the world with their
subjective facts, the objective facts are lost in the noise.

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vkou
If economics were a hard science, then we could focus on the objective facts.

It's not one, though.

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dsfyu404ed
If the science was hard then then we'd just abuse statistics and anecdotes
(like we do to promote gun control and deny climate change).

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MikeTaylor
As a Brit, I find it weird to see an article about economic catastrophe that
doesn't even mention Brexit: the world's first self-inflicted economic
omnicatastroshambles.

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ThomPete
Probably because it would fall in the too extreme negative narrative.

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sveme
What brings you to this assessment? Your gut feeling? Just came across this:
[https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1087425506931294209](https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1087425506931294209)
today, that would be pretty serious indeed for a country that relies on so
much imported food.

Edit: Ah, sneak edit. Carry on.

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ThomPete
The fact that other countries manage to be outside the EU and do just fine.

This kind of catastrophist thinking is exactly the wrong way to think about
things.

Yes it has conequences some negative and some positive. The world will go on.

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sveme
I agree, the world will carry on. It's just a very heavy systemic shock
switching your economic system from one set of conditions to a completely
different set of conditions, from one day to another. So the question is: is
the benefit greater than the cost? I'm pretty sure that the voters have not
received the necessary information to really assess this question.

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dsfyu404ed
So? There's plenty of money to be lost for the people who depended too much on
the specific conditions of the old system and plenty of money to be gained by
people who are in a position to exploit the conditions of the new system. It
might not be a net wash but the net effect will probably not be as extreme
(positive or negative) as either side is saying.

