> I've been watching this exchange with some, umm, fascination. Don't ask why:
> I don't know.
'i know exactly what you mean.'
> Anyway: the predeliction to interpret contingent events as justifying one's
> worldview is not Reaganite--it did not begin or end with him. Else, there
bien sur, it goes back, oh, ~2500 years that i can think of. but to dwell on the gruesomes of the recent form that *is* reaganite --the cadence of appeals for affirmation, the shrill sneer aimed at bogosifized caricatures, the smug baiting, etc.--i really was trying to avoid this. in no small part because jordan (hi jordan) is absolutely at the witty and charming end of the spectrum (the long-distant unwitty and uncharming other end being stooges like limbaugh). and i use 'reaganite' rather than, say, 'eighties' be- cause the discursive shift that marked this period was almost ob- sessively personal: witness the GOP's lingering fascination with the reaganite dynasty in the form of 'dubya.' i swear, about the only conceptual tool that'll prepare anyone to grok the eighties is wigged-out anthro about sovereignty a la georges dumezil. any- way, neocons are far and away the masters of pissing and moaning (hence their constant need to attribute this to 'liberals' etc.), and i think jordan's 'needling' of doug can be read in this kind of light--which is why i noted its perpetually premature valedic- torian emphasis, the 'see! see! told you so!' positivist mantra.
> > you can argue that a handful of 'slick' technical policies
> > have negated forces that might lead to a 'correction,' but
> > i think that kind of argument is intensely naive. it fails
> > to address hard-to-quantify cultural factors, which in the
> > long run are much more powerful than social engineering by
> > means of tax policies. 'imo,' natch.
> >
> > i'm real bullish on the cultural front.
>
> Me too, but I thought the whole part about people getting up and putting on
> suits and basically refusing to do anything but buy (or rather, hold on to
> cash) *was* cultural. Tax policies that support the market, after all, don't
> say anything about how participants will act in the market--i.e. buying
> techs, selling whatever they are selling--which was the point of departure
> for this discussion. Wouldn't all that be due to the culture of the market
> in the U.S.?
it's been cultural with a lowercase 'c' maybe, but if (like me) you're after the uppercase Cultural angle, you should start ask- ing people what they're doing for 'new years' and why. as for what, afaict there are two basic camps: sitting at home, or nip- ping off to the country for the weekend. the why part is where it gets really interesting, insofar as it involves an awful lot of 'i dunno...'
jordan can, of course, assess this as utterly irrelevant and the sign of a mind gone far too soft for anything resembling logic; that's his prerogative. but for my part, beneath all the rump long-boom horseshit i detect a *serious* undercurrent of anxiety and lack of faith in The System. tax policies are nice and fine, and there's no doubt that tinkering with interest rates can pull rabbit after rabbit out of the hat, but ultimately that faith is what this regime needs to perpetuate itself. and it just ain't there.
do you really think that people were jumping out of windows in 1929 because they lost a bunch of money? rubbish. they jumped because their worldview--nay, more, their cosmos--collapsed. and the beauty of it is, it doesn't really matter how many actually did jump, because, when it comes to Culture, quantities cannot hold a candle up to qualities; and much as the 'MIA' embodies a certain failure in vietnam, the plummeting investor embodies a certain failure in finance. that's why i think jordan's analyses are so funny. 15%! well, knock me over with a feather!
cheers, t