Commentaries (some of them cheeky or provocative) on economic topics by Ralph Musgrave. This site is dedicated to Abba Lerner. I disagree with several claims made by Lerner, and made by his intellectual descendants, that is advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). But I regard MMT on balance as being a breath of fresh air for economics.
Saturday, 1 August 2015
Free “whinge about Greece” software.
You’ve been given the job of writing an article about the evils of the Eurozone? Worried about what to say? Then worry no longer: just download our “write an article that witters on about the evils of the EZ” software.
The software does all the hard work, meanwhile you just sit back and watch the cheques roll in from the organisations that publish your article.
The program gives you various options, like how often do you want to repeat the fashionable word “neoliberal”: once per sentence – once in every ten sentences? It’s up to you.
You’ll also have the choice as to how far you want to portray Wolfgang Schaeuble as the devil incarnate.
The program will automatically include that nonsense about the EZ compromising democracy in Greece. That’s democracy as in “Greeks have the right to vote themselves billions of other peoples’ money, while those other people (German and other core country taxpayers) have no vote on how much is removed from their pockets”.
The article won’t mention the fact that joining ANY organisation – EZ, EU, NAFTA, the UN etc etc – involves a loss of sovereignty. After all that would detract from the “weep / wail / whinge” thrust of the article.
You may have noticed that nearly all the articles that witter on about the alleged evils of the EZ appear very similar, for example they all go on about the above point about Greek democracy being compromised. That’s because half of the articles use our software!
And don’t worry about your article being near identical to dozens of others: people don’t read articles in order to glean information. They read them in order to get their daily Adrenalin rush and to confirm their prejudices. If you got your high from Cocaine yesterday, that doesn’t stop you getting a similar high today does it? Same goes for emotionally charged articles: the fact that you read an article yesterday much the same as the one you read today doesn’t diminish the high.
Also there’s no need to feel guilty about devoting all your article to whinging rather than making constructive suggestions: if you WERE TO MAKE constructive suggestions, no one would be interested.
Solving the problem as to how REALISTIC solutions to the Greek problem would actually work is far too much like hard work for 99% of the population. In contrast, they’ll pay good money to have their emotions aroused.
For example Heiner Flassbeck (a former State Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Finance) suggested import tariffs as a solution for Greece’s problems about a month ago. And certainly that would, at least in theory, solve Greece’s problems. That is, it would allow demand to be increased and unemployment reduced in Greece, while not at the same time throwing the country’s balance of payments back into deficit, which in turn would mean Greece going further into debt.
But do you think anyone has taken an interest in that constructive suggestion? Dream on.
Your article will contain blatant self-contradictions like claiming that pushing Greece out of the EZ is wicked at the same time as claiming the Grexit would benefit Greece. But don’t worry: almost none of the twits reading the article will notice the self contradictions.
Hello Ralp,
ReplyDeleteI have copy/pasted your article into my blog Hope you don't mind.
https://contradictingyanis.wordpress.com/
OK as long as I get a mention.
Delete