The Trap - What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom

[Bandidoz]

Hmmm... I'm starting to suspect that you are an American. You took the program at face value and did not perceive the subtle and hilarious ironies sprouting like mad from every single sequence.

The real problem I had with that episode is that it presented "game theory" in a far too simplistic and incorrect manner. An "American" would have just accepted the argument as presented by the programme, so there's something wrong with your logic there.

Last night's episode was more coherent although the detail still feels somewhat disconnected from the summary.

Also, in the news there's yet another example of "selection by computer" with young doctors not being able to get the jobs they want.

[Keela]

Social mobility has now ground to a halt. The stark fact is, children of rich families today are much more likely to live and die rich than in the recent past. While children from poor families are more likely to live and die poor. The country has become more rigid and stratified than at any time since the 2nd world war.

That's because the Grammar Schools were abolished. If you were clever enough to pass the 11+ or the 13+ or the 16+ you could get a good academic education and go to university no matter what your background. And grants helped if your parents couldn't afford it.

If you weren't academic you got a good technical education and then got a job or an apprenticeship. Now if you aren't academic, you get bored at school, play truant and as many do, turn to crime and/or drugs.

Our present wonderful socialist education system ensures everyone receives the same educational chance. To succeed in a dumbed down academic system that tries to ensure no failures or fail completely. The top 10% and the bottom 10%, in many cases, just get bored silly. What a waste!!

Over here we still (for the moment) have our grammar schools and the 11+ (really 10 plus - only one of my kids had turned 11 when they sat it) it's now called the "Transfer Test"

And yes I agree that academic selection allowed brighter kids from less advantaged backgrounds to make it to a school suited to their ability. And consequently for them to achieve the grades required for Uni.

Now (well shortly - once we loose academic selection here) we will follow Mainland UK and go to postcode selections. No chance now for the bright from socially disadvantaged areas to move in new circles. They are tied to the local comprehensive... and all that that entails.

[GD]

Just finished it. Better than last weeks, a bit slow at the beginning (a little annoying how it has to cover the previous episode for about the 1st 20 mins, but there you go). A great quote at the end - only 2 groups actually behave how the theory predicts - economists and psychopaths! How unsurprising.

[edit] Also the bit at the beginning where Curtis speaks as if class divisions have suddenly returned as if they had gone away in the first place was a bit annoying IMO, and detracts from otherwise good work.

[SILVERHARP2]

I didn't like the cause and effect wrt the new class system. A more reasonable view is that technology favours educated people compared to unskilled and semi skilled individuals. Also the gov. abilty to tax the rich has dimished due to the ability of people and companies to move offshore.

[Miss Madam]

A great quote at the end - only 2 groups actually behave how the theory predicts - economists and psychopaths! How unsurprising.

They count them as 2 distinct groups?

[EmptyBee]

I confess to being rather disappointed in the last episode of The Trap. Curtis seems to take at face value the ideologies central to the propaganda myths of neo-conservatism and free market neo-liberalism; i.e. that these are misguided ideals that tragically collide with reality when implemented as policy, be it in tearing down trade barriers and privatisation as in post-Soviet Russia or post-Saddam Iraq, or in 'bringing democracy to the Middle East'. This seems to me to be a shockingly naive view of history.

There is another view of history that seems to me to be rather more satisfactory; that the neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy are merely propaganda; a mask of virtue to conceal naked self-interest. Self-interest is after all the basis of the game-theory view of international relations as practised since the Cold War. The alternative is to assume that these people actually believe their own propaganda, a view which I frankly find even more terrifying than the alternative.

A third alternative perhaps is that our leaders are engaged in doublethink - simultaneously pursuing selfish goals by whatever means necessary while justifying their decisions in ideological terms. I think this is possible, and not entirely incompatible with a world view that espouses the pursuit of self-interest as the best means to further the 'greater good'. However given the repeated failure of these policies to deliver the 'greater good' I can't help come to the conclusion that their repetition meets the definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

So are our leaders stupid, evil or insane? I'm still not quite sure.

[stumuz]

Emptybee wrote;
repeated failure of these policies to deliver the 'greater good'

What is the greater good?

[GD]

What is the greater good?

Good question - gets to the heart of the question of "what is the point of economics?"

The simple view is to improve the well-being of all involved.

[stumuz]

GD wrote;
The simple view is to improve the well-being of all involved.

Would that involve equaling up or down?

[GD]

Not equalling at all. Simply moving upward so to speak.

[stumuz]

So is that everyone moving upward including the Duke of Westminster?

[GD]

Yeah, maybe, whatever. That's not entirely the point. The point is supposedly poverty - short, nasty and brutish lives.

In the property thread, you said:

In a market economy there is one uncomfortable truth which politicians or anyone else rarely mentions, you must have relatively poorer members for the system to work. If we were all Bill Gates the system would collapse.

This is hardly a secret at all, and is not supposed to even matter (in fact if we were all Bill Gates, the impact would be such that a loaf of bread would cost about ?1000 - or you get my drift). What I'm alluding to here is the famous phrase by JFK which is that "a rising tide lifts all the boats". But evidently it does not. In other words something is so fundamentally wrong with economics that it doesn't do what it's actually supposed to.

That is, of course, on the face of it. Do a tiny amount of digging and a whole other world appears - that which EmptyBee scratched the surface of ^^ above ^^.

[EmptyBee]

What is the greater good?

I'm talking about the ability of free market idealism to actually generate wealth rather than simply generate profits. Contrary to popular belief in this country they're not actually the same thing.

I'm no economist, but it seems to me that there are two significant aspects to consider when evaluating whether a policy benefits society as a whole.

I would say that economic policies should balance two goals - to generate wealth on one hand and to deliver economic security and stability on the other.

The trouble with free market idealism is that it has repeatedly proven that it's far more successful in transferring wealth to corporations and their investors in a form of economic vampirism than in actually generating wealth and jobs through investment.

In the last few decades this process has become internationalised through the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, and the results have been predictable. Where markets have been liberalised wealth has been plundered, living standards have plummeted, economic security has been non-existent and the gulf between rich and poor has widened (or remained wide where it was already).

The effect of free market idealism in the West is tempered by the fact that our economies are the final destination for much of the wealth plundered in the developing world, beneficiaries of a form of economic neo-colonialism.

Another series by Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set covers the rise of free market idealism in Britain and the US in the 70's and 80's and its results.

(Watch The Mayfair Set here)

Judge them by their fruits.

[kenneal - lagger]

The trouble with free market idealism is that it has repeatedly proven that it's far more successful in transferring wealth to corporations and their investors in a form of economic vampirism than in actually generating wealth and jobs through investment.

In the last few decades this process has become internationalised through the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, and the results have been predictable. Where markets have been liberalised wealth has been plundered, living standards have plummeted, economic security has been non-existent and the gulf between rich and poor has widened (or remained wide where it was already).

That's because the World Bank, WTO etc are run by US business people for the benefit of US corporations. It's the US Empire without the hassles of an occupying force. The US nominates people from their major corporations to run these world organisations and, surprisingly, they run them for their own benefit!

[Bandidoz]

Curtis finally got on topic.

I thought it was quite interesting how our leaders (and their "economics gurus") conducted a series of social engineering experiments, as well as Reagan's "war on terror" in the 1980s. Just goes to show how short peoples memories are.