I am not an economist, though I once stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.
Joking aside, I did study International Economics as a part of my studies in International Law and Diplomacy in the late 1960's. But the core of my academic background was political science and history.
It was a time when public disputes centered around issues of war and peace, civil rights, women's rights, not about economics. Among academic economists there were some eccentric scholars calling for a return to the gold standard and some calling for flexible exchange rates. But in general, there was a widespread Keynesian consensus.
At that time, we had fixed exchange rates under the international payments system established at Bretton Woods near the end of World War II and designed (by Keynes) mainly to ensure economic recovery of both winners and losers of that conflict. Internationally, we had a gold-exchange standard and issues of "balance of payments" were described in terms of gold flow among nations.
It was a period of economic prosperity for both management and labor, with CEO's earning about 30 to 40 times the wages of the lowest paid employees. Pension benefits were fixed. Workers were responsible for doing their jobs and management took care of pensions and other benefits.
That all changed in the 1970's. Nixon abolished the gold exchange standard and the US adopted flexible exchange rates. Companies switched to "defined contribution" pensions rather than "defined benefit" pensions. After Nixon, the Federal Government began stripping away the financial controls that had maintained financial stability for more than three decades.
I recently decided to read up on current economic thinking. In the days of the internet, there is no better way to follow the discourse than to read economist's blogs.
I have had to learn or relearn such things as liquidity preference, propensity to consume, propensity to save, the problems of the zero bound, and IS and LM curves.
I also have learned the difference between "saltwater economists" [a school to which I adhere] and "freshwater economists." And it has become clear that when communicating with each other, economists can be a very sarcastic bunch of scholars.
Mark Thoma, a professor of economics at University of Oregon, recently started a thread on his blog dealing with Investment Saving/Liquidity preference Money supply issues. The discussion veered into the issue of "confidence" and the lack of clarity as to what the term means.
One participant, identified as "stunney," contributed the following:
Sunday, June 19, 2011 at 11:36 A
The reference, of course, is to George Orwell's novel 1984.
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I think that among not just billionaires, but multimillionaires in general, confidence is pretty high right now. In particular, they're confident that the financial crisis will be borne by the lower echelons, and that capitalism is being made safer and safer for unbridled rapacity.
They're also confident a large reserve army of unemployed labor will persist for a long time, ensuring that downward pressure on wages will not be relieved by any silly jobs program or other needed public investment
Their confidence that the massive military/industrial/national security expenditures of recent decades will continue is high.
Plutocratic confidence that trade agreements will be focused on making it as easy as possible to ruthlessly exploit cheap labor oversees without having to worry about workplace safety or environmental nonsense, while cracking down on foreign competitors via enforcement of intellectual property claims, whining about state subsidies, or whining about competitors' non-compliance with US regulatory standards.
Finally, they're confident that the socialistic insanity of Social Security, Medicare, and other forms of coddling US citizens will be progressively dismantled so that the richest can slave-drive the rest with utter abandon and, indeed, get them to vote for ever more savage forms of their own enslavement, abasement, degradation, and pauperization.
"Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future...
http://youtu.be/-YXWl6i2GBg
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!