Technocracy --
now that's a vintage meme:
turn the helm over to some engineers and
let 'em give us a technical fix,
maybe even a green one.
Enter Barry Lynn, a "senior fellow" at the sinister New America Foundation:
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2007/why_economists_cant_see_the_economy_5058
... with a cry for sanity. Our fast-globalizing system is becoming ever more "fragile", more vulnerable to devastating blows, if a few key supply links get snipped.
The industrialist grasps the idea of fragility immediately, and often offers up fresh tales of production shutdowns and close calls. Indeed, industrial fragility has quietly emerged as perhaps the single biggest operational concern of business today, reflected in a boom in programs to study supply chain risk at places like MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Penn’s Wharton School.Sooo... we need a team of logistical wizards to do a flow diagram, showing all the weak channels, bottlenecks, and power points, so this emerging train-wreck scenario don't become tomorrow's dead certainty.The economist, by contrast, just as swiftly rejects the idea of such fragility outright. Why? Because no industrialist, the economist will declare, would ever take such a risk. Industrialists who say that market pressures force them to take too much risk are simply seeking protection. They are selfish, or lazy.
Wow. Post-partisan expert action -- that's the ticket. Let the merit class steer us between the Scylla and Charybdis of the plunder class and the Great Uneducated.
Folks, if the two main economic classes are about to collide -- and they may well be -- then we all oughta be ready for more of this Walter Mitty imagineering.
Politics-free snake oil sounds mighty tempting when you're "the man in the middle."
