The Delightful Nobel Prize Folly
Everyone has known how silly the Nobel Peace Prize is. It is frequently awarded to people who've been horrifically violent yet have recently announced how much less violent they will be, or to people who contribute to the enablement of others' violence by offering up mealy-mouthed "peace" language to disguise their ineptitude, or to people who've done absolutely nothing but appear as quite nobly valiant racialist crusaders, such as Barack Obama in 2009.
Such is the World System's grand institutionalized virtue signaling program.
I also pay attention to a bit of the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was awarded this morning. It too has a reputation for foolishness, probably the most notable example is the one given to Myron Scholes in 1997, the guy who helped set up the genius Black-Scholes investment formula that was the linchpin in the notorious torpedoing of Long-Term Capital Management sinking to the bottom of the financial world investments amounting to a few billion dollars.
That's nice. Everyone still thinks you could devise the algorithm, the investment formula, the derivatives-value-sensitive program for optimum returns.
Yeah.
Today the award was given to behavioral economist guru Richard Thaler, someone who has spent his professional career merely blithering the most elementary things about the ways that people generally behave in certain circumstances. He's always added that there are all kinds of things they do that are irrational when making decisions.
I've always wondered, ahem --
Who decides what is "irrational"?
Richard Thaler?
He seems to do so with such authority. He does so because he assumes the mantle from the attention he and uber-bureaucrat Cass Sunstein got after publishing their seminal work Nudge, all about how government should "encourage" people to make the right decision whenever they think people are being a bit too irrational. They even had a word for it, libertarian paternalism.
Get people to feel they are free to make the decision Caesar "nudges" them to make.
Insidious as all get out.
I've written some more about this in this home page piece, I invite you to look over it to discover how ugly are the scholarly precepts of the reigning behavioral economists. Here's another one. I've also written this piece about Cass Sunstein's conception of "trimming," a recommendation for public discourse straight from hell if there ever was one.
Considering everything as either "rational" or "irrational" dismisses the fact that any objective consideration of what is teleologically true or even more significantly what is fully righteous must come from a transcendent standard. It is pretty simple actually. From the 14th Psalm...
"The fool says in his heart there is no God."
You can see some of the most brilliantly ingenious folly from today's behavioral economists. And the Nobel Prize committee is all too eager to dutifully make it official.
___
Such is the World System's grand institutionalized virtue signaling program.
I also pay attention to a bit of the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was awarded this morning. It too has a reputation for foolishness, probably the most notable example is the one given to Myron Scholes in 1997, the guy who helped set up the genius Black-Scholes investment formula that was the linchpin in the notorious torpedoing of Long-Term Capital Management sinking to the bottom of the financial world investments amounting to a few billion dollars.
That's nice. Everyone still thinks you could devise the algorithm, the investment formula, the derivatives-value-sensitive program for optimum returns.
Yeah.
Today the award was given to behavioral economist guru Richard Thaler, someone who has spent his professional career merely blithering the most elementary things about the ways that people generally behave in certain circumstances. He's always added that there are all kinds of things they do that are irrational when making decisions.
I've always wondered, ahem --
Who decides what is "irrational"?
Richard Thaler?
He seems to do so with such authority. He does so because he assumes the mantle from the attention he and uber-bureaucrat Cass Sunstein got after publishing their seminal work Nudge, all about how government should "encourage" people to make the right decision whenever they think people are being a bit too irrational. They even had a word for it, libertarian paternalism.
Get people to feel they are free to make the decision Caesar "nudges" them to make.
Insidious as all get out.
I've written some more about this in this home page piece, I invite you to look over it to discover how ugly are the scholarly precepts of the reigning behavioral economists. Here's another one. I've also written this piece about Cass Sunstein's conception of "trimming," a recommendation for public discourse straight from hell if there ever was one.
Considering everything as either "rational" or "irrational" dismisses the fact that any objective consideration of what is teleologically true or even more significantly what is fully righteous must come from a transcendent standard. It is pretty simple actually. From the 14th Psalm...
"The fool says in his heart there is no God."
You can see some of the most brilliantly ingenious folly from today's behavioral economists. And the Nobel Prize committee is all too eager to dutifully make it official.
___
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