Insiders rig markets to their proprietary advantage.
Economists rig statistics and modelling to suit their blinkered and highly selective views of reality.
The "dismal" in the Dismal Science has alternative dictionary definitions that are nearer the truth of the alleged science it describes. The Free Dictionary offers "characterized by ineptitude, dullness, or a lack of merit" and "obsolete dreadful; disastrous", for example. Economics is not a science as such. It may have links to scientific disciplines like behaviouralism while it frequently uses and abuses statistical techniques and Black Box Technologies (Bbts) but economics is a multi-disciplinary macro/micro guesstimate of our global reality. When faced with the multi-layered complexities of a global financial system, economists seek, primarily, inside information but otherwise fall back on Bbts and econometrics and other tools that, in inexperienced hands, can produce illusory correlations and anomalies. Even when valid as part of a trading portfolio, Bbts depend on the inputs and, hence, are heavily dependent on the individual training up the software also undertaking the same analysis using more traditional non-linear mathematics and regressions. Vitally, this individual also should still be undertaking the analysis in long-hand, so to speak - it is only by trawling through the data yourself that you develop a feel for the market microstructure and without such micro-holistics, one cannot expect to be training one's Bbts to anything like the optimal degree. Econometrics is even sillier - mathematicians try and produce progressively more obtuse solutions to a rational reality that simply does not exist while the irrationality, lack of market efficiency, the insider trading, the corruption, the behaviouralism that underpins the real reality is beyond both their comprehension and, consequently, their models.
But where economists really show their true colours is in the marketing of their fake statistics. Disinformation is rife in media, in governmental despatches and official statistics. But it is more odiously utilised in areas like developmental economics.
Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is one such ruse. PPP is a method of using the long-run equilibrium exchange rate of two currencies to equalize the currencies' purchasing power. It is based on the law of one price, the idea that, in an efficient market, identical goods must have only one price. A simple example of PPP for non-economists would be the Big Mac Index published quarterly in The Economist which compares the price of a food product made out of leftover bits of cow in different countries in order to determine whether currencies are under or overvalued. PPP is massive for the world economic overseers as it is the only measure which doesn't show the plight of the global underclass to be worsening over the last quarter of a century. The ability to purchase a few lower tier first world products does not represent economic freedom. For people of the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs), having coca cola pushed onto you at a vaguely affordable price, if you don't eat that is, is not liberty. If the global economic system is unable or unwilling to provide a sustainable system for the populations at the sharp end of this rat race then there has to be a freedom of movement to allow the disenfranchised to seek a better future elsewhere meritocratically. Both xenophobia and the realities of PPP make this a journey of peril. If you survive the boat passage and the attentions of the security practitioners who protect our gated countries, you will find that your currency doesn't buy your slaughtered animal remains quite so cheaply anymore and you suddenly realise that there is no escape other than to the bottom of another countries economic system where illegal employment (with associated lack of worker's rights) and the black market become the ghettoised reality. Yet, PPP allows us all that nice warm glow of thinking that the highly abusive system that is shareholder capitalism might actually be delivering some benefits to the bottom of the pile in a suitably laudable trickledown effect. There are numerous more minor issues relating to PPP too. Statistical reliability depends on identical products being available globally and you don't find too many Lexus Hybrid Drives in Somalia. Additionally, comparing standards of living using the PPP method implicitly assumes that the real value placed on goods is the same in different countries. In reality, what is considered a luxury in one culture could be considered a necessity in another. Furthermore, as a little cluster bomb of globalisation, the system imposes itself on the local environment using standard divide and rule tactics to produce the few abusers and the masses of the abused. Income inequalities are parallelled by inequalities in rights as a business elite controls a disenfranchised and enslaved population - think Thaksin Shinawatra. And as a final welcome to this globalised system, the path to the summit is steeper and longer than ever with global income inequalities (measured in any other manner other than PPP) reveal an increasing gap between the have's and the have-nothing's. A further example of the lunacy of PPP has been posted here previously - the size of the Chinese economy will surpass America in 2027 in reality; in PPP-land, it has done so this year. This must be news to the peasants of inland China.
And they have the fucking cheek to call this reality!?
To quote Professor Sheataj Singh: "It is obvious what the attraction is here for western conglomerates.The key thing that India has to offer the global economy is some of the world's cheapest labour, and this is the saddest thing of all the horrors that arise from Delhi's 15,000 inadequately regulated garment factories, some of which are among the worst sweatshops ever to taint the human conscience. Consumers in the West should not only be demanding answers from retailers as to how goods are produced but looking deep within themselves at how they spend their money".
There is no more abusive a form of capitalism than the sub-species that the planet is currently enduring and it is important that we look beyond their statistical propaganda and lies to the structural and economic environments which exist both to disprove the integrity and morality of their psychopathic financial system and to inform in a manner of, as the Italians might say, dietrologia.
If we're going to have a war on terror then lets have one on the terrors of a neo-liberal imperialist capitalism.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
