Reviews for Capitalism and growth

The average rating for Capitalism and growth based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-04 00:00:00 Tommy Johnston One of the most destructive books ever written Officer Barbrady: „Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of s**t, I am never reading again." No, of course, I will keep on reading forever, don´t worry. Most of why it´s so stupid has been/will be described in my reviews of books by Naomi Klein, David Graeber, others, and the rants about Hans Roslings´ Factfulness and Steven Pinkers´ Enlightenment now. It´s one of those evil books one might ask to how many people it brought suffering, poverty, and a terrible life until an unnecessary, early death. Let´s make a thought experiment: Let´s say that the Keynesian model stayed and established stable, fair democracies all over the world, strong Nordic model utopias where everybody is happy. Influenced by that, natural destruction, poverty in the Southern hemisphere, climate change, and all the other problems we are facing right now are not nearly as bad and can be solved. So how many people live better lives in such an alternate universe? I would really like to do the math, but it´s a bit tricky, so let´s say that this idiotic economic, political, and social systems keep running for some more years, close to the 22nd century, when there will possibly be up to an 11-digit number of people on the planet. Even if we just take a small amount of these, just one percent of 10 billion, 100.000.000 people that have horrible existences, it´s a crime against humanity of unimaginable dimensions. But we are right now, at this moment, accepting and ignoring that billions of people are dying, suffering, and despairing without any other purpose than to make the rich richer. All politics is part of the problem at the moment, the only change can come from the civil society and NGOs, only engagement in those is useful, real democracy doesn´t exist anymore. The freaking maddest thing about this bonkers ideology faith bad science nightmare is that nobody talks, debates, analyses, thinks,... openly about Hayek and his fanatic soldier Friedman, that the foundation of the corpocracy we are all living in is nothing to openly quarrel about, because it´s like law, it´s like faith, it´s a total dogma that has infected and weakened close to all Western puppet democracies for decades and is at the moment destroying the whole nature of this only earth at a never before seen speed while boiling it at the same time. Because of much talk and discussion about the replication crisis with friends and in general, I will add these thoughts to all following nonfiction books dealing with humanities in the future, so you might have already seen it. Sorry folks, this is one of my last rants, I am sick and tired of this and want to focus on true science and great fiction instead, not this disturbed fairytales for adults who never had the chance to built a free opinion because most of the media they consume to stay informed and get educated avoids any criticism of the current economic system. Without having read or heard ideas by Chomsky, Monbiot, Klein, Ken Robinson, Monbiot, Peter Singer, William McDonough, Ziegler, Colin Crouch, Jeremy Rifkin, David Graeber, John Perkins, and others, humans will always react to people like me, condemning the manipulation Friedman was practicing with terrifying success, with anger and refusal. These authors don´t hide aspects of the truth and describe the real state of the world that should be read instead of epic facepalms like this. They don´t predict the future and preach the one only, the true way, ignoring anything like black swans, coincidences or the, for each small child logical, fact that nobody knows what will happen, and collect exactly the free available data people such as Friedman wanted to ignore forever. Some words about the publication crisis that even have some positive points at the end so that this whole thing is not that depressing. One could call the replication crisis the viral fake news epidemic of many fields of science that was a hidden, chronic disease over decades and centuries and has become extremely widespread during the last years, since the first critics began vaccinating against it, provoking virulent counterarguments. I don´t know how else this could end than with nothing else than paradigm shifts, discovering many anachronisms, and a better, fact- and number based research with many control instances before something of an impact on the social policy gets accepted. A few points that led to it: I had an intuitive feeling regarding this for years, but the replication crisis proofed that there are too many interconnections of not strictly scientific fields such as economics and politics with many humanities. Look, already some of the titles are biased towards a more positive or negative attitude, but thinking too optimistic is the same mistake as being too pessimistic, it isn´t objective anymore and one can be instrumentalized without even recognizing it. In natural sciences, theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, physicians… that were friends of a certain idea will always say that there is the option of change, that a discovery may lead to a new revolution, and that their old work has to be reexamined. So in science regarding the real world the specialists are much more open to change than in some humanities, isn´t that strange? It would be as if one would say that all humans are representative, similar, that there are no differences. But it´s not, each time a study is made there are different people, opinions, so many coincidences, and unique happenings that it´s impossible to reproduce it. Scandinavia vs the normal world. The society people live in makes happiness, not theoretical, not definitive concepts. One can manipulate so many parameters in those studies that the result can be extremely positive or negative, just depending on what who funds the study and does the study wants as results. One could use the studies she/ he needs to create an optimistic or a pessimistic book and many studies about human nature are redundant, repetitive, or biased towards a certain result, often an optimistic outcome or spectacular, groundbreaking results. Do you know who does that too? Statistics, economics, politics, and faith. I wish I could be a bit more optimistic than realistic, but not hard evidence based stuff is a bit of a no go if it involves practical applications, especially if there is the danger of not working against big problems by doing as if they weren´t there. A few points that lead away from it: 1. Tech 2. Nordic model 3. Open data, open government, 4. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, quantum computing, to make each financial transaction transparent and traceable. 5. Points mentioned in the Wiki article 6. It must be horrible for the poor scientists who work in those fields and are now suffering because the founding fathers used theories and concepts that have nothing to do with real science. They worked hard to build a career to just find out that the predecessors integrated methods that couldn´t work in other systems, let's say an evolving computer program or a machine or a human body or anywhere except in ones´ imagination. They are truly courageous to risk criticism because of the humanities bashing wave that won´t end soon. As in so many fields, it are a few black sheep who ruin everything for many others and the more progressive a young scientist is, the more he is in danger of getting smashed between a hyper sensible public awareness and the old anachronism shepherds, avoiding anything progressive with the danger of a paradigm shift or even a relativization of the field they dedicated their career to. There has to be strict segregation between theories and ideas and applications in real life, so that anything can be researched, but not used to do crazy things. The worst bad science practice includes, from Wikipedia, taken from the article about the replication crisis: 1. The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely.[ 2. The inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results 3. A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments).[8] In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did. 4. „Psychological research is, on average, afflicted with low statistical power." 5. Firstly, questionable research practices (QRPs) have been identified as common in the field.[18] Such practices, while not intentionally fraudulent, involve capitalizing on the gray area of acceptable scientific practices or exploiting flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting, often in an effort to obtain a desired outcome. Examples of QRPs include selective reporting or partial publication of data (reporting only some of the study conditions or collected dependent measures in a publication), optional stopping (choosing when to stop data collection, often based on statistical significance of tests), p-value rounding (rounding p-values down to 0.05 to suggest statistical significance), file drawer effect (nonpublication of data), post-hoc storytelling (framing exploratory analyses as confirmatory analyses), and manipulation of outliers (either removing outliers or leaving outliers in a dataset to cause a statistical test to be significant).[18][19][20][21] A survey of over 2,000 psychologists indicated that a majority of respondents admitted to using at least one QRP.[18] False positive conclusions, often resulting from the pressure to publish or the author's own confirmation bias, are an inherent hazard in the field, requiring a certain degree of skepticism on the part of readers.[2 6. Secondly, psychology and social psychology in particular, has found itself at the center of several scandals involving outright fraudulent research, 7. Thirdly, several effects in psychological science have been found to be difficult to replicate even before the current replication crisis. Replications appear particularly difficult when research trials are pre-registered and conducted by research groups not highly invested in the theory under questioning. 8. Scrutiny of many effects have shown that several core beliefs are hard to replicate. A recent special edition of the journal Social Psychology focused on replication studies and a number of previously held beliefs were found to be difficult to replicate.[25] A 2012 special edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science also focused on issues ranging from publication bias to null-aversion that contribute to the replication crises in psychology.[26] In 2015, the first open empirical study of reproducibility in psychology was published, called the Reproducibility Project. Researchers from around the world collaborated to replicate 100 empirical studies from three top psychology journals. Fewer than half of the attempted replications were successful at producing statistically significant results in the expected directions, though most of the attempted replications did produce trends in the expected directions. 9. Many research trials and meta-analyses are compromised by poor quality and conflicts of interest that involve both authors and professional advocacy organizations, resulting in many false positives regarding the effectiveness of certain types of psychotherapy 10. The reproducibility of 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals.[44] Overall, 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value below 0.05) compared to 97% of the original studies that had significant effects. The mean effect size in the replications was approximately half the magnitude of the effects reported in the original studies. 11. Highlighting the social structure that discourages replication in psychology, Brian D. Earp and Jim A. C. Everett enumerated five points as to why replication attempts are uncommon:[50][51] 12. "Independent, direct replications of others' findings can be time-consuming for the replicating researcher" 13. "[Replications] are likely to take energy and resources directly away from other projects that reflect one's own original thinking" 14. "[Replications] are generally harder to publish (in large part because they are viewed as being unoriginal)" 15. "Even if [replications] are published, they are likely to be seen as 'bricklaying' exercises, rather than as major contributions to the field 16. "[Replications] bring less recognition and reward, and even basic career security, to their authors"[52] 17. For these reasons the authors advocated that psychology is facing a disciplinary social dilemma, where the interests of the discipline are at odds with the interests of the individual researcher 18. Medicine. Out of 49 medical studies from 1990-2003 with more than 1000 citations, 45 claimed that the studied therapy was effective. Out of these studies, 16% were contradicted by subsequent studies, 16% had found stronger effects than did subsequent studies, 44% were replicated, and 24% remained largely unchallenged.[58] The US Food and Drug Administration in 1977-1990 found flaws in 10-20% of medical studies 19. Marketing is another discipline with a "desperate need" for replication.[64] Many famous marketing studies fail to be repeated upon replication, a notable example being the "too-many-choices" effect, in which a high number of choices of product makes a consumer less likely to purchase.[65] In addition to the previously mentioned arguments, replication studies in marketing are needed to examine the applicability of theories and models across countries and cultures, which is especially important because of possible influences of globalization. Continued in comments

Review # 2 was written on 2010-12-07 00:00:00 Maurizio Grassia This book is an interesting case of modern day sophistry - where the worse argument is made to appear the better. If one needed proof that much of modern economics is an exercise in ideology and self-interested appeals on behalf of the obscenely wealthy then this book provides ample evidence. The French Revolution was fought under a flag of three colours and for three causes, Liberté, égalité, fraternité - Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood. Friedman is only interested in what he refers to as freedom. He rails against equality as all liberals (in the traditional definition of that term) tend to. It is hard to imagine anything more mean-spirited than such a person. Naturally, this freedom he is so fond of generally equates to a freedom for the majority to have less while the few are given much more. He says the opposite, of course, but decades of the applications of his prescriptions have turned America into a grossly and increasingly unequal society. Should a theorist be held responsible for the consequences of their theories? If Marx is to be held responsible for Soviet Russia then Friedman is much more responsible for the state of current day America. Even the so called 'left' - as in the Democrats in the US, the Labour Party in Britain and the Labor Party in Australia all look to 'market-based' solutions to problems. Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives will complain that Friedman's ideas have never been fully implemented and that this is why we have so much trouble today - if you ever want to create a utopian vision splendid my suggestion is to follow Plato's example in the Republic - make the society you envision so impossible to implement that your followers can always claim some vital element has been left out and so never properly applied. Here we have a government whose sole role is supplying the police and army - both mostly to protect the interests of property. All other government activity (even printing money and registering doctors) is either fundamentally wrong and needs to be done by the private sector or should be presumed dangerous and in need of constant vigilance. I was keen to see what he might say about monopolies - given he appears obsessed with 'competition' I thought he might discuss the benefits of anti-trust laws, for example. But how foolish of me. The only monopolies he was actually concerned about are those of trade unions. Individuals are all that matter, while trade unions are an example of 'collectivism' and therefore enough to have him fuming and spitting fire. It is remarkable how rarely he supports any of his assertions with anything other than the boldness of his claims. One of my favourite examples was towards the end where he discusses the effect of government subsidies in the US on cotton growers overseas - I won't go into the details of the argument, it is even one of the few I would tend to agree with him on, but he says, "The list of similar cases could be multiplied." Well, yes, obviously - given that he gave but one example they could hardly be divided. Here is yet another commentator who presents himself as a scientist and his social theories as self-evident truths, rather than the ideological sophistry they really are. I hadn't realised just how radical this guy was - no wonder he disliked being called a conservative. There is little he is seeking to conserve and much he is seeking to overturn.