Since I am an economist and my school year is not too far along, my classroom discussion of how all of economics traces back to the fact of scarcity (the combination of limited resources, which implies a limited ability to produce, along with wants that always exceed the amount that can be produced) facing everyone was quite recent.
Along with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, Ben Bernanke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics today. The three have written extensively on the need to bail out the banks in times when the economy is in corrective mode, generally after a long period of monetary injections. Bernanke was Chairman of the Federal Reserve when he pushed for the latest round of bank bailouts in 2007-2009.
It won’t be away from anyone’s knowledge not to observe the way many active celebrities favor collectivist ideology. Most probably the answer to why intellectuals favor socialism or collectivism is answered clearly. Unlike in the twentieth century, actors and athletes are more popular than scholars. Therefore, the new concern should be why these famous personalities in the majority favor one or the other way of collectivism. It’s not that this case holds for everyone but only those who are more actively involved in these topics.
I’ll begin with a provocative thesis: socialism is ideological and free market thinking, while involving myth, is nonideological. I will show why socialism is ideological and why free market thinking involves myth but is nonideological by defining the terms myth and ideology and distinguishing them from each other.
While whispers of the current emerging market debt crisis, the result of the rapidly strengthening dollar, could be heard throughout the summer, virtually no one predicted the blow the dollar’s rise would deal to some other developed economies. But with the dollar reaching levels not seen in a generation, a battering is precisely what several are being unexpectedly dealt.
