The economy, bubbles, and the tragedy of the commons
The current economic crisis exhibits characteristics that illustrate the tragedy of the commons:
“The Tragedy of the Commons” is an influential article written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968. The article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even where it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen.
Central to Hardin’s article is a metaphor of herders sharing a common parcel of land (the commons), on which they are all entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin’s view, it is in each herder’s interest to put as many cows as possible onto the land, even if the commons is damaged as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from the additional cows, while the damage to the commons is shared by the entire group.
Subprime mortgages began with Congressional acts that ordered banks to make bad loans in order to bring housing opportunities to the poor. But, although we can blame that for opening the door to the practice, the mortgages made under Congressional fiat were but a small percentage of the final total of bad real estate paper. Over time, mortgage companies and other lenders ran amok with the notion. Ultimately, the toxic paper was spread throughout our entire financial system.
Why? Why did so many people violate the most obvious standards of prudence, and endanger us all?
It’s the tragedy of the commons, stupid: there was money to be made from these loans in the era of ever-ascending housing prices that constituted the real estate bubble. The lenders and borrowers involved in such loans not only profited from the rising housing prices, but they also helped fuel them. And all homeowners liked seeing the value of their homes increase, especially those who took out second mortgages counting on that figure to remain the same or to continue to go up. Many people seemed to benefit.
In the short run, that is—although in this case, the “short run” lasted many years. Those involved in the deals were betting either that housing prices would never come down (a truly insane assumption, but it seems that many otherwise rational people convinced themselves it was true),—or that, when the decline did happen, they themselves would still have come out ahead.
What was ignored was that, despite individual benefit, such gains would be temporary for most. The fact that the risk was so thoroughly spread throughout the entire financial sector that it poisoned everything was either not understood, or ignored. In addition, even among those who did see a downturn coming in a general sense, most did not foresee that there would not necessarily be enough warning when the bubble burst to get out safely.
After all, that’s the nature of bubbles—they get larger and larger, and while that is happening, their outer surfaces become thinner and thinner, stretched finally to the breaking point.
Where exactly will that breaking point be? Hard to predict, but when it happens it happens suddenly and dramatically. Poof! The bubble is gone, and all that’s left behind is a tiny bit of slimy foam.
[NOTE: And don’t think government can rectify the situation. Not only does Congress lack the tools to foresee and correct the problems, but it is an excellent example of the tragedy of the commons in action.]
The amazing thing to me is that anyone still takes the efficient market hypothesis seriously.
I presume that it was introduced to provide an intellectual fig leaf for economists to use calculus, but when the deviations of perceptions from reality are not infinitesimal but gargantuan, and remain so over an extended period, can the economic functions fairly be said to be differentiable and continuous over the relevant interval? Doesn’t look like it to me.
The Tragedy of the Commons indeed illustrates the fallacy that human beings will be good stewards of public assets regardless of what they say. It is not a negative reflection on the efficient market theory at all as Occam’s Beard’s post seems to imply . Since people are driven by self-interest rather than the public good, they tend to take much better care of their own assets rather than those that they can “beg, borrow, or steal from the community”. If people can find a way to use or abuse public assets to their advantage they will. How this relates to the current economic crisis is only common sense. The first person to the community well will suck up all the water and the rest of the community just has to fend for themselves. Think bailouts.
The lesson is clearly that common assets need to be kept to an absolute minimum and that limits must be set on their use.
It wasn’t just our financial system either. The rest of the world was involved, especially Europe, and not just in our bad loans. They had their own tricks.
In Ireland there was a popular no-downpayment 110% mortgage. The homebuyer paid nothing and received 10% of the house value. That’s as crazy as anything we had in the US.
“Tragedy of the Commons” indeed….
Nothing with the word “Public” in it is worth a damned:
Public land vs Private land
Public restroom vs private restroom.
Publicly owned Banks vs Privately held banks
I’m sure you can come up with many more examples..
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were buying up many of the mortgage securities, and everyone knew they were backed by the government even though officials constantly stated that wasn’t necessarily the case. For years this was openly discussed Thus the bets on mortgages were seen as a no-lose proposition, and that’s why they got so monstrously big. Mortgages securities were seen as safe as treasuries for the purposes of investing because of this implied government backing.
The Tragedy of the Commons does not explain this financial catastrophe — it is a factor in every market. this was an unusually corrupt market precisely because of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
NeoCon and Victor Davis Hanson are the best two voices I’ve found to explain this housing debacle. Now how likely will ‘The One’ take responsibility on behalf of his party for helping to create this economic tsunami….lol
Stark, sorry I wasn’t clear. I don’t think that the tragedy of the commons is related to EMH. My post was a non sequitur rant about something that has always bothered me about economics.
Gray,
Good one!
Occam, I think, states what many of us in the investment community truly believe: that markets are often not efficient, but over the long run they can be within a band of efficient pricing. And that long run includes price corrections, which many people do insanely ignore at their own peril. I happen to subscribe to the weak version of the EMH. My investment philosophy is to find inefficiently priced assets within the industries I follow, do my research on them well, and present my ideas to the portfolio manager.
I saw this real estate and housing bubble on the horizon many years ago, which is why when my wife and I bought our first (and new) home we sought one that was at least $20K less than what the realtor said we were qualified for. And then we put 20% down. Many, many people we know pushed the envelope by buying the limit and putting no money down. Bad move, I think.
Successful investing actually requires that you make decisions based on rational motives, discipline, and research. You get into trouble when you get greedy.
Finally, socialism fails because it assumes something about human beings that is simply not true at all. Time after time it has been proven to be the case, and yet the true believers keep on saying that “next time we’ll get it right!”
CNBC had a good documentary on the origins of the mortgage and credit crisis, called House of Cards. The causes of the mess are many and intricately woven together and there is no one villain.
Each player was operating under pressure from their own environment, pressure that was seemingly inescapable and overwhelming. Each player, Wall Street, mortgage brokers, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, the banking community, investors both domestic and international, home buyers, Congress, the Federal Reserve, the SEC, each one operated under pressure from their respective cultures and each one contributed to the atmoshere of pressure on other players.
Many had moments of unease and doubt but the prevailing mores of their environments made it easy to put aside their doubts and continue with standard operation procedures. Rewards were given to people who excelled playing by the market rules, not those who went against the tide.
It is most frightening part of this global economy, the immense size of it, the fierce forces that build up and flow with the movement of many trillion dollars worth of wealth and debt, with nothing controlling it but it’s own nature. A nature that no one on earth understands.
You are right that nothing that government does can really get a handle on this tsunami. At least not now and not soon. Government thinking and structure is 19th century in it’s orientation. It will take much more time and more pain before the best minds to conceive of the strategies for this millenial catastrophe.
And yet….. even today the Obama administration is pushing ANOTHER bailout package in the tens of billions to pay all these people’s mortgages!!
Where is all this money coming from?? (a rhetorical question) Just wait for the hyperinflation as all this trillion+ cash is printed by the government with no real value behind it. I can’t think of a more perfect scenario to ruin the entire economic structure of the US than what the Democrats are doing in the last 4 weeks. And all the “masses” can say is “but the President is going to pay my mortgage for me! how great is that?!”
As always so many in the government try to tell us things are rocket science when they are not. I don’t know if this is to try to convince the public the problem is so complex no one could see all the possibilities of failure (in other words – to cover their posteriors) or to set us up for another boondoggle. I believe it is a combination of both.
Now I am sure there are some here that will disagree with me but there were only two reasons. Social engineering (which is really just power grabbing) and greed. The social engineering came from the government initially forcing the banks to lower their credit standards for specific groups of people. The greed part came in all the rest of the way down the line (from the banks to investment banks to individual investors) who saw big dollar signs when the government (through Fannie and Freddie) said they would guarantee the loans. You can spend a lot of time filling in the details but they are just details.
This subject always seems to bring to mind Ayn Rand’s play “The Night of January 16th” Based somewhat on the life of Ivar Krueger – “the Match King”
OH I did misspeak – there was a third reason – and the biggest one of all – STUPIDITY.
Yes, of course, Andrew Cloward and Francis Fox Piven
came up with their strategy in 1966 anticipating this
crisis to draw us away from the real root cause, the
tragedy of the commons. And Saul Alinsky has no
connection with Obama or Clinton. Now it is clear.
Ceterum autem censeo, Obama esse delendum.
What happened in the real estate market was that it became like an overheated stock market. The problem with that is that almost all real estate is encumbered with debt or as some like to put it – “other people’s money.”
Imagine what the stock market would be like if all investors had borrowed 80% of the money they were buying stocks with. Very few people would be able or willing to hold on in a market downturn. The ups would be exagerated and the downs would even more exagerated.
The real estate market is not intended to be a market with a lot of risk in it. Homes are bought (or should be) to be lived in. Home ownership is supposed to be a stable part of our society that contributes to the welfare and stability of communities. Financing the purchase of a home is usually a family’s largest financial decision and should be made on a very conservative basis. Just
the opposite occurred during this bubble. People started to speculate on houses just like leveraged stock investors in the stock market. The interesting thing is that it worked for a while. And it was abetted by the government pressuring banks to be easier with loans, which then allowed/encouraged mortgage brokers who, in the really hot markets (California, Arizona, Las Vegas, and Florida), began making loans to anyone who applied because they could sell them to the securities consolidators on Wall St.
I know a couple who, from 2000 to 2007,owned a series of homes on which they made money. To their credit they were not buying these homes with borrowed money. They would buy a home, move in, fix it up, and resell it at a profit all in a matter of months. They bought a house in early 2008, which they have not been able to sell at a profit, so they are sitting tight until the market gets back on its feet. Unfortunately, many people tried to do this with borrowed money and overextended themselves because they got greedy and bought more than one house at a time.
Some people tried to buy too much house, some did not really qualify for the house they bought, and some people used the equity in their house to support a rich life style through second and third mortgages. These people were not speculators, they made bad decisions or were allowed to get in over their heads by unscrupulous mortgage brokers.
Let us not forget the role of homebuilders in this whole mess. Most of them had been pretty cautious before the bubble began. Many had been hurt badly in the S&L crisis. But even they caught the fever and were building houses as if demand would never end. That’s one reason there is so much inventory still out there. It’ll take time for that inventory to be reduced to normal levels.
POTUS Obama’s plan may help some people stay in their houses and reduce the gross number of foreclosures. It isn’t a quick fix, however. It’s just going to take time for the inventories to be worked off. One thing that might help with the getting more foreclosures off the market would be to suspend the capital gains tax for the next five years for investors who buy foreclosed homes and turn them into rentals.
I see. It was a load of bullocks.
Gray nailed it with public restrooms. Think public housing. Now think public nation.
http://www.floppingaces.net/2009/02/18/bill-clinton-approves-of-rolling-back-his-welfare-reform-of-96/
Here’s a bubble for you. The new Welfare bubble. Let’s all get on that gravy train!!!
Mitsu can keep his head in the sand… The funding approach is different and rewards dependency.
Dependency for me. Dependency for thee.
Dependency for Lee.
A market allowed to operate with only constraints to inhibit fraud is efficient. The housing market was not such a market given all the government meddling. But the reason so many banks, Wall Street brainiacs and excess-home owers are clamoring for the bailouts is that they fear the market is about to get efficient all over them leaving them in the ditch and making way for another crop of financial geniuses. Until that happens, we’re all going to be stuck in the tragedy of the commons.
Nothing in the efficient market theory denies the possibility of wild swings due to human hubris, just that left alone the efficient median will prevail over the long term.
And now, of course, they’re gonna beat up on Milton Friedman, because he’s right (God rest his soul). Since he’s right, he must be made wrong, and his reputation destroyed. I mean, since we’re going the opposite way and all.
There is no pattern, OK? It just look like there is.
Wanna get pissed at yourself for not paying attention? Go to you tube and look up old Ronald Reagan speeches. There is one from the early sixties where he was stumping for Goldwater basically, but man is it powerful. And dead nuts on. Foresight and crystal vision. The left has been running this nation a long time. The right poked through a couple times here and there, but the left always pushed it back. Don’t worry, comrades, at least we’ll all be equally miserable.
Bill Clinton, rolling back the welfare reform of 1996,
huh!
Just breathing the rarified air of the economists
on this blog makes me dizzy! They are so masterful!
I’ll paraphrase Harry Truman, a dem who fought communism, ‘Give me a one armed economist so I’ll
never have to hear him say, On the other hand’.
There couldn’t possibly be political motives underlying
this nightmare? Recommended study… the first French
Republic, the Paris Commune, Stalin and the Ukrainian
famine, the Great Leap Forward in China, and for the
Global Warming folks, have a look at Trofim Lysenko,
a buddy of Joe Stalin. Compare and contrast Lysenko
with Al Gore. Or the Bolsheviks in the Weimar Republic. Yeah, that would work, Weimar from 1919
to 1933?
This analysis confuses cause and effect, as have all the “remedies” that have been implemented.Greenspan and his Fed created a dollar deflation(ie dollar too strong) beginning in late 1996 that a year later, led to the collapse of a string of South east Asian economies who all tied their currency to the dollar.A year later, in 1998, Russia defaulted for the same reasons, and oil went to $12 a barrel.The only place to make money were the NASDAQ stocks, and they had a blowoff we’ve never seen before.
Until…..another blowoff was created from the wreckage of the rubble from the dot com debacle and assorted telecom bankruptcies.The dollar index went from 125 to as low 71 this past July in what is a dollar inflation.There is a terrible price to pay for oil going from $25 a barrel to $145.That wild swing encouraged investors to pile into hard assets, real estate,commodities,basic materials and the like, and bid up foreign stock markets, like China.Japan and Europe are suffering the effects of their own currency deflations as their paper became grossly overvalued.
The moral here is that the Fed and the Treasury set the price for the dollar and it effects every market in the world, and when it gets either too strong, or too weak, pain will follow.It will lag, but things get crushed as they cannot avoid the adjustment process that happens to markets under a wildly fluctuating currency.
Fannie and Freddie’s problems are but symptoms of mismanagement, but only with a major inflation, that ruins mortgage lenders, creates housing bubbles, and eliminates venerable Wall St banks, can all of this mess have happened with such force.
This is a Made in DC problem and the culprits are still drawing a paycheck and offering up their solutions to the mess they created.Inflations can be stopped with pro growth tax cuts…to soak up the money by creating a demand for it via increased output.This is not a deflation at all, though it shares many of the same traits as an inflation.It can’t be when gold is at $950 an ounce.Until the Fed drive the dollar up to the 95 level or more will we see some relief from their mighty failures.
I don’t think they were a small percentage. I understand that that’s what is claimed, but I don’t buy it.
For example, it was pointed out that many of the lenders were not banks. what were they–small lenders who obtained loans from banks. Although the bank wasn’t at the point of the lending, it was really the one lending the money, and the government push still applied to them.
Love the article. As every legislator knows you have to wait at least 10 years to see the effect of almost any federal legislation. The Community Restoration Act created incentives and Americans acted on those incentives. It shielded risk takers from accountability and further encouraged risk taking. Why then were we surprised that an unsustainable bubble developed? The interesting thing here now is that we’re bailing out the risk takers. What is their incentive not to continue to act in the same manner?
Truth is truth and freedom, and accountability, prevent these kinds of things.
The tragedy of the Commons is real to a certain extent. The flaw in the model is that the people feeding their cows on the commons eventually grow wise, develop a system for controlling use of the commons and by common consent enforce it to preserve their future (ie a constitution ratified by the people). Dangers here too.
Thanks. Love the blog. Feel free to drop by mine sometime. I’d love your comments as I’m just learning. conservativegrange.blogspot.com.
DCM
The next bubble to burst surely has to be our control freak government. Talk about unsustainable.
“The next bubble to burst surely has to be our control freak government. Talk about unsustainable.”
The democrats have ascended on the wings of voter registration fraud, campaign finance fraud, and obfuscation of Obama’s personal history. They have pushed the envelope by successfully manipulating passage of the single largest spending bill and expansion of a politicized government bureaucracy, a thousand plus page document that had to require months to craft, but was then rushed thru the legislature in mere days, and most of the legislators didn’t even read it… Now there is the census issue, more talk about a new Fairness Doctrine, extending even into the internet. Locking up the judiciary, politically, would almost complete the program. A massive gun control-registration program has the potential to begin the disarming of their political opponents, but of course the criminal culture will, as always, be armed and invisible. The Democrat Party has certainly crossed well over the line… One would have to be naive to think that they wouldn’t use police state tactics, intimidation and violence, to hold on to their cravenly sought power. The top dems, their foundations and working groups are heavy recipients of muslim oil based financial support and donations. They did everything possible to sabotage the Iraq war effort. For a while there will be a feigned effort in Afghanistan, before capitulation there. Israel is being set up for betrayal. The financial bubble, via massive deficit spending may be deliberately being staged to orchestrate a hyper-inflation which could enable greater police state control when it’s ravages create the conditions for public rioting. Just look at the players, from Dean to Pelosi, to Obama and his adoring masses, if you take off your blinders, it’s no exaggeration to suggest that these people even look crazed. It’s America’s Cultural Revolution grounded in the fantasy of the “Commons”. This government bubble could take a century to recover from, if ever…
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After digging through quite a number of your blog entries: how many well informed threads one can find here! How many clarifying statements! If it’s not in the article – which quite often are articulate and just great – you find it in the commentaries. You created a gem!
There is a prevalent lack of understanding the economic machine. If that wouldn’t be the case, much of the utopianism would simply starve.
Thomas Sowell is a fine address for economics 101 and a man of common sense – couldn’t he be linked here somewhere?
The Acton Institute talks about entrepreneurship pretty inspiring: perhaps you could link to sources like that for inspiration and insight … perhaps people could share which teachers gave them a broader horizon on those matters … and by telling us what thought and idea parted the clouds … .
David: Welcome! Glad you like the blog. As for Sowell, see this and this (you can do a search here for any topic or word—see the “search” box on the right sidebar).
was my post from last night deleted?
Check this out –
Smelling a RAT LOOK WHAT GOT SLIPPED INTO THE PORKULUS BILL!
The provision, which attracted virtually no attention in the debate over the 1,073-page stimulus bill, creates something called the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board – the RAT Board, as it’s known by the few insiders who are aware of it. The board would oversee the in-house watchdogs, known as inspectors general, whose job is to independently investigate allegations of wrongdoing at various federal agencies…. First, let’s ask ourselves how this stimulates the economy. Why include this in an emergency stimulus bill when it has nothing to do with stimulus or economics? ….
How did it get into Porkulus? Grassley says it wasn’t in the original bill passed in the Senate, and it suddenly appeared in the conference version. No one has claimed ownership of the RAT Board yet…
Putting IGs under Nancy Pelosi’s thumb eliminates transparency and accountability, and calling it an Accountability and Transparency Board is a grim joke. It’s simply a mechanism to shut down potentially embarrassing (or worse) IG investigations while commanding others against political foes. Read the rest at HotAir.com
Well!
Perhaps the revolution WILL be televised after all.
FredHjr hits one of the important points: markets are ultimately efficient – they can’t be anything else – but this can take years, decades, to pound fake money to the ground. And even then, it often takes someone actually kicking the door in, no matter how rotted it is.
And perceptive observers can often see the collapse but cannot say when. Let me add another difficulty to the housing market which many have warned about, but we are still waiting for the other shoe to drop: retiring Boomers are going to want smaller, cheaper houses, and the rising generations have many fewer children. The downward pressure on the price of bigger houses has got to hit someday, but everyone hopes that they sell just before that.
Don,
To answer your question about who the real bad boys of lending were you have to watch CNBC’s program, “House of Cards.” It is very well summarized by Spoot earler in these comments.
The mortgage brokers in California, Las vegas, Arizona, and Florida got their money from Wall St. Bear Stearns, Lehmann Brothers, Merill Lynch, and many others were buying the mortgages to package into first, Mortgage Backed Securities (MBSs), but later into Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). The CDOs were much more complex and varied because they contained not only mortgages but auto loans, corporate bonds, and credit card debt. The money to Wall St. was coming from insurance companies, pension funds, government entities, hedge funds, banks, and others who wanted to buy debt that , because it was rated investment grade, could be locked away for the income flow until the debts were all paid off. That copious supply of money was what fueled the credit bubble.
The “gun slinging” mortgage brokers in the hot real estate markets were loaning money to anyone who could fill out and application and identify a property they wanted to buy. They literally did not care if the borrowers were sound. The mortgage brokers were making big money and selling the loans to Wall St. as fast as they could make them. Banks were part of the problem, but Wall St. and their idea of securitizing debt was what turned this into a credit bubble.
Speaking of “bubbles”, has anyone given thought to comparing these strange mortgage practices that resulted in the current burst bubble and how money was made by simply shifting paperwork back and forth between institutions, and the growing fad of “carbon credits” and the firms springing up everywhere that deal in them?
I don’t believe the carbon credit scam will ever approach the magnitude of the current housing problems, but I do think it is heading for it’s own little *pop* sooner rather than later….
Finally, we have a first hand account from 3 wizened old hags who were first hand witnesses to the writing of the stimulus package!
Their detailed account follows (with apologizies to Billy Shakespeare):
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
Double, double, toil and trouble
Something wicked this way comes.
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing.
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
Double, double, toil and trouble
Something wicked this way comes.
In the cauldron boil and bake,
Fillet of a fenny snake,
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf.
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
Something wicked this way comes.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
What’s going on in baseball with the steroids, is an exellent example of “the tragedy of the commons”.
Thanks theo for an exellent post.
BTW – let’s hope the scandall has not touched our beloved red sox.
“I don’t believe the carbon credit scam will ever approach the magnitude of the current housing problems, but …”
Don’t underestimate the danger we are in, the Dems are manipulating events so fast now that it amazes me that I’m starting to believe now that my own conspiratorial theories are actually quite plausible. I’m not sure yet to what extent the Dems are deliberately criminal traitors, or are simply megalomaniac morons with normal IQ’s. From Drudge, at this moment:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/19/healthscience/19epa.php
Another one, representing the complete disenfranchisement of approx. 48%+/- of the voting American public in the new executive branch:
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/labor/obama-and-michelle-ask-progressive-groups-for-help-driving-white-house-agenda/
Perfected democrat,
Just checked the article. Exactly how long can a moderate centrist segment of society hold and maintain a balance in this nation between the ideological left and right?
A lot of the stability of this nation is attributable to neither the far left or the far right gaining too much power, with the middle vacillating between the two on any given issue and maintaining a strange natural balance of power.
The arguments I hear on the right are generally those of persuasion. The philosophical and ideological ideas have some seriously factual underpinnings, and the thrust of statements are generally to educate and bring people knowingly into the fold of the right. I generally don’t see attempts to either mislead or dupe the public.
The tactics – I can’t describe what I read as any sort of argument – of the left appears to be to mislead the middle in order to get as much of the leftist agenda in place as possible while they have complete power.
This approach is consistent with what I’ve seen elsewhere from the left.
Regarding the “echo chambers” they are trying to create, have these geniuses given any thought as to what is going to happen if they end up deluding themselves and becoming out of touch with the middle/mainstream because they are only talking to each other and those that agree with them while ignoring all voices of opposition?
Their “echo chamber” could end up being nothing so much as a pair of ear plugs shutting them away from the larger world and it’s reactions.
Their “echo chamber” could?
Academia now IS their echo chamber. Postmodernism
has done it’s nasty work like an acid on the cultural
heritage of the western world. Don’t think you are going
to use reason to pull them back. The acid works against
reason.
Scottie is right. Those of us who are refugees from the Far Left, as I am, know that there were people on that side who believed in a thorough ethics of expediency. Which meant that it was o.k. to deceive the credulous people in the Middle Muddle in order to gain power.
Which they have done.
And now they are using the power that they are likely to only have for 2-4 years to ram through everything they’ve wanted since even before Reagan was POTUS.
Investors are saying with their actions that they have no faith in this crew. Stocks are fantastically cheap and great value right now, but because the environment going forward is so shitty no one wants to commit. Even Bill Clinton paid attention to what investors were saying in the equities and bond markets.
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