Read this post and see if you can refute any of the gazillion contentions. http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/from-the-unbelievable-to-the-passe/?singlepage=true
This was brilliant. Oh, and Dr. Tisdall, if I didn't google him and find out that he's a scholar at the Hoover Institution (an excellent think tank at Stanford), then the picture to the right could almost convince me that it's you writing under a pseudonym (there is a certain resemblance).
I am most interested, however, by this contention:
"The strange thing is that none of this has been quite factored into fossilized metrics that supposedly quantify the standard of living, poverty rates, GDP, etc. In the grocery line not long ago, two teens were chatting in Spanish to relatives by iPhone in distant Mexico. Are they impoverished or enjoying a privilege exclusive to royalty just forty years ago? Today’s Kia is more comfortable and electronically sophisticated than the Rolls and Bentley of just 20 years ago — and available to drive off to anyone with a credit card for the down payment. Surely, our social and political barometers of success and failure have simply not caught up to the technological revolution, more like horse-and-buggy calibrations trying to quantify gasoline engines."
He has an excellent point in that the ceaseless deflation in tech leads to real values that are starkly at odds with previous costs; so that the quality-of-life is not well measured by per capita GDP (thus our standards of poverty are similarly faulty). But then, we run into the obstacle of how does one quantify value, and not just for say, a specific product, but across an entire economy?
He also is a modern echo of Hayek in the 4th section. But one part I feel like he misses is that largely this desire to help the other not only occurs because of guilt, but because of a feeling of intellectual superiority--almost paternalism. Nowhere is this more evident among Exeter Democrats, who I find to be very intelligent in class or in the dorms, but too ready to decide what's best for other people in this way.
This was brilliant. Oh, and Dr. Tisdall, if I didn't google him and find out that he's a scholar at the Hoover Institution (an excellent think tank at Stanford), then the picture to the right could almost convince me that it's you writing under a pseudonym (there is a certain resemblance).
ReplyDeleteI am most interested, however, by this contention:
"The strange thing is that none of this has been quite factored into fossilized metrics that supposedly quantify the standard of living, poverty rates, GDP, etc. In the grocery line not long ago, two teens were chatting in Spanish to relatives by iPhone in distant Mexico. Are they impoverished or enjoying a privilege exclusive to royalty just forty years ago? Today’s Kia is more comfortable and electronically sophisticated than the Rolls and Bentley of just 20 years ago — and available to drive off to anyone with a credit card for the down payment. Surely, our social and political barometers of success and failure have simply not caught up to the technological revolution, more like horse-and-buggy calibrations trying to quantify gasoline engines."
He has an excellent point in that the ceaseless deflation in tech leads to real values that are starkly at odds with previous costs; so that the quality-of-life is not well measured by per capita GDP (thus our standards of poverty are similarly faulty). But then, we run into the obstacle of how does one quantify value, and not just for say, a specific product, but across an entire economy?
He also is a modern echo of Hayek in the 4th section. But one part I feel like he misses is that largely this desire to help the other not only occurs because of guilt, but because of a feeling of intellectual superiority--almost paternalism. Nowhere is this more evident among Exeter Democrats, who I find to be very intelligent in class or in the dorms, but too ready to decide what's best for other people in this way.