aifedean
1 week ago
“This
is where my libertarian instincts on my far right meet my anarchist
instincts on the far left. Yet somehow my opinions tend to be
centrist. I think it’s fair to say I don’t understand myself.”
That’s
because you continue to insist on trying to understand yourself using
the meaningless left-right dichotomy, which is essentially just a way
to fool the people of western democracies to ally themselves behind
the government by thinking that the government is up for grabs and
that there are two parties vying for it. In reality, of course, the
only two parties in these societies are not left and right, they are
the state and the people. Both left and right are divisions of the
state, and of the people fooled into supporting either wing of the
state party.
My
anarchist reading list would be largely similar to any mainstream
development economist’s reading list. The main difference is that I
would make my students assess things based on what they actually are
and based on their actual consequences, whereas the entirety of
modern development economics is built on the diefication of good
intentions and their utilization as a license to do whatever you want
while ignoring the negative consequences. So, with the same reading
list, I would arrive at the conclusion that the World Bank is
institutionally set-up to serve the interests of the US government
and its continuing theft of the planet by the dollarization of the
world economy, a side effect of which is the destruction of poor
countries. Mainstream development economists however will continue to
view things from the perspective of the World Bank as a development
institution, and all the disasters it causes can never alter the
desire of the development economist to think of alternative policies
that will make the world bank “fulfill its development mission”,
or whatever is the latest buzzword kids are using these days.
As
an anarchist, however, I would entirely oppose the concept, relevance
and severe lack of ethics that the entire RCT industry represents.
RCT, essentially, is a way to generate tenure, jobs and publications
for rich white people by allowing them to carry out
scientific-looking experiments on poor dark human lab rats under the
pretext of “development”. Humanity is too complex to be studied
in these labs, and the results from RCT’s are meaningless outside
their very narrow contrived lab context. If you look closely, you
find that the only actual positive impact from these studies accrues
to the researchers. The lab rats, on the other hand, end up wasting
enormous amounts of their precious time on filling out surveys that
will never improve their life in any way, and will only ever serve as
fodder for yet another unreadable, irrelevant and ignored modern
academic economic paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment