Who profits from war? - - The Link Between War and Big Finance

[Octafish]

24. You are most welcome, woo me with science. War means Money!

Thank you for an outstanding Post #21, which should be an OP.

Tyler Cowan Explains the Grim Neoliberal Future

By: masaccio
FireDogLake, Sunday November 17, 2013 10:30 am

Tyler Cowan has an interesting think piece in Politico Magazine. Cowan is an economist at George Mason, with a side gig as general director of the Mercatus Center. That puts him at the heart of the neoliberal thought collective described by Philip Mirowski in his book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Cowan begins with a discussion of a dystopian science fiction story by Isaac Asimov, in which computers and robots have taken over, reducing humans to nothing but consumers and happy idiots. Cowan extrapolates from the current crop of robots to a society in which robots and computers do most everything, from manufacturing to health care, leaving no real jobs for most people.

The rise of the robots creates new economic winners and losers. If you can write code or otherwise make yourself useful to the machine class, you win. Otherwise, you become a consumer, with easy access to cheap entertainment and cheap education. He figures we need about 15% of the available humans and the other 85% have no purpose or goals other than consumption and perhaps to provide the Elect a purpose, to keep them pacified. Of course this will be a neoliberal world:

We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given a decent standard of living to one in which people are expected to fend for themselves.

Then Cowan explains that no one will be upset about this transformation of society. They will all think it’s natural and proper. If you are self-motivated, you will be able to join the Elite. Otherwise, the Market has passed judgment, and you are a Prole.

This new digital meritocracy will prove self-reinforcing. Worthy individuals will rise from poverty on a regular basis, but that will only make it easier to ignore those left behind. The wealthy class will grow larger over time, and more influential. And the increasingly libertarian values of the wealthy will shape the public debate, strengthening the upper class’s grip on the commanding heights of the economy and society, and pulling policy in their favor.

There won’t be any serious discontent, and certainly no violent revolution. That’s partly because everyone will be older and therefore more conservative. One reason people will be older is that there won’t be much reason to have kids in this society. What can kids provide that the robots and the other cheap entertainment won’t provide? (NSFW link) Second, the Proles won’t be envious of the Elites. Their envy will be directed towards other Proles. Proles are romantic people, harkening back to the Golden Age, when we had better politicians and bipartisanship. No revolutionary sentiment there.

In fact the Proles are radically conservative in Cowan’s view:

Just look at what is already happening in parts of the United States where incomes are relatively stagnant. Political conservatism is strongest in the worst-off, least-educated and most blue-collar states: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming—key outposts of Tea Party support. As the urbanist Richard Florida puts it, “Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind.”

The Proles will have no purpose, so they can just go on with their pointless lives as long as they leave the Elites alone. Whatever happens to them is meaningless in the larger picture. It’s not unlike the views of the aristocracies of the early 1900s, who were immersed in their own versions of Game of Thrones, and saw the Proles largely as fodder for their wars.

CONTINUED...

http://firedoglake.com/2013/11/17/tyler-cowan-explains-the-grim-neoliberal-future/

Sorry about the articles. I think the guy may be trying out for the new Strangelove, a Kissinger for the Millennials.