----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com>
Question: Stiglitz recently won the [not the] Nobel Prize in Economics for his work saying that any reckoning of costs had to include the economics of obtaining information. Has anyone ever attempted to extend his work towards an explanation of the regular occurrence of bubbles (which in standard economic theory aren't supposed to happen)? The rational economics that keep information bubbles inflated (esp. as media become more integrated and "competitive"), and their predictable effect on collective and individual judgement (since they change the data on which decisions are made) seem made for his sort of analysis. And on first sight, information bubbles seem more fundamental, more prevalent, and more explicable than economic bubbles.
Michael
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I'm not sure bubble is an enduringly workable metaphor for what the Repug. propaganda complex of polling strategies are attempting to accomplish. Remember the neolibs. ran a similar ops. in the 90's w/the new globaloney economy discourse and presented it as a fait accompli to boot precisely to generate self-fulfilling prophecies. So we may be temporarily stuck like John Malkovich in the restaurant scene in 'Being John Malkovich'; polls referring to polls in insidious recursions and interminable redundancies until 11-2. All the factions driving the disinfo dynamics of supply side politics hate uncertainty and the fact that the citizenry might know that they don't know so they attempt to smother us with yet more drivel.
Ian