Monday, January 5, 2009

Epic Fail

Build-your-own-credibility:

Nice little piece on the bubbliness of the art market recently. (Hat tip--er . . . one of the many blogs I read. It's been that kind of a morning). For some reason, it puts me strongly in mind of the book I've been reading: The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace. Perhaps because both involve rich people spending outrageous sums of money on something that WE PROLES will never get close to. [My emphasis]
Megan is not a member of the proletariat. She is a fluffer for the obscenely rich people she's pretending are the only real rich people. Were Megan actually proletarian, she'd have class consciousness. Megan is not upper middle class, that sub-class no longer exists. She is lower upper class. I am too, for good and ill, and I'm very familiar with the vanity Megan is indulging here. She does not have unlimited wealth, therefore she is not rich. So long as someone else can afford a lifestyle she cannot, she is just a humble prole. Sure, she goes on frequent vacations, but she doesn't own vacation homes. Stupid asshole.
The reason this is epic is she's still not done.
... housing markets really did change, thanks to things like zoning and environmental regulations that dramatically slowed the pace and scope of new development on the coasts. Credit brokers really did get better at assessing credit risk. it's just that housing didn't get as difficult to build, or credit risk as easy to assess, as recent experience showed.
Because we overweight recent experience, we overshoot on the bubbles. But if we didn't overweight recent experience at all, it would take us 100 years to notice that FICO scores were pretty good--or that many treasured innovations in liberal governance hadn't actually caused society to implode.
Is there some way to make us weight only, always, the right things, to never go too far in rewriting what we know about the world? Somehow, I doubt it.
Her ideological comrades possibly didn't succeed in permanently crippling the world economy with their unbroken string of greed fueled fuck-ups, so the whole assumed oncoming wave of reregulation of the financial markets we all unfortunately depend upon is ultimately unnecessary. Just a few simple human mistakes and a bad egg or two. Nothing to see here, people, let's move along now. The show's over, let wise old Officer McArdle sort out who's to blame, not the unruly mob of people who've lost their jobs and/or life savings.
She's never going to admit she was wrong, because that would require self-examination and the capacity to admit mistakes in an unqualified sense. Instead, she'll keep convincing herself she was right the whole time and it was the folk screaming about the need to regulate who FORCED the markets to become giant Ponzi schemes. The UAW did it, not Greenspan.

4 comments:

Susan of Texas said...

Somehow I'm not surprised she's reading about the rich, in preparation for her future career as a second wife.

Parmenides said...

Oh God she really said that supply constraints produced the bubble. AAARGHHH (bangs head over and over on wall).

Jesus christ the easiest way to see that there was a bubble was to look at two numbers just two. Increase in number of people. Not there. Increase in median income and wealth. Not there. Thus a bubble fueled by credit. I noticed this shit in 2003 and was merely off by a couple of years of when it was going to blow up.

Anonymous said...

She whines that she voluntarily took a cut in income in order to become an economics "journalist," sacrificing the potential of her MBA to--what? inform what Ayn Rand would call "men" about economics--and wants to call herself a prole?

If she's kidding, it's not funny.
If she's not kidding, it's hilarious.

Anonymous said...

Jane is much like W. She is incapable of admitting error (for me the elephant in her particular room is always going to be her bloodthirsty cheerleading during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq), and she assumes that topics that don't happen to interest her (such as the lives of ordinary people) are unimportant.