There are some really good insights in the article.
Most economists come from eras where economies were growing, which is important -- it's a correlation/causation problem: Did the economists cause the explosion in economies, or did the booming economies allow people to participate in decadent fields such as economics which do not have any productive output to speak of and take credit for something they happened to exist beside?
Stagflation being more complicated than just a relationship between unemployment and inflation, and that would be self-evident to anyone who isn't staring at charts. During the pandemic, unemployment reached massive levels by design, and what happened? Massive inflation. Why? Because lots of dollars were going out and productive capacity was massively slashed by fiat. The fact that lawmakers can do stuff like that and do changes the calculus on its own, forget about times of higher or lower productivity not related to government such as floods or droughts. Economics fails immediately when it decides the real world doesn't exist and only economic theories exist.
Defining economics by nation does harm the real story. In 2006, Ontario was shrinking and Alberta was booming, so Canada was booming. In America, silicon valley was booming while most of the geographical area was destitute. The massive homogenization hides stories of regions that are facing huge problems and mutes stories of other regions being massively successful. On the other hand, many countries are tiny and so that doesn't happen there, and instead one nation looks fantastic while 40 others look destitute.
I don't like the idea that cities are magical or necessarily even good such that they are the unit to go with either. Our current worldview is city-centric to the point that many in cities think everyone should live in cities and it's immoral to do anything else. These people might be shocked to find their raw materials often require the economic output from places there are basically no people.
Confucius traditionally placed farmers and miners above artists and merchants within the societal hierarchy. This view stems from the emphasis Confucianism places on practicality and productivity as essential virtues for a harmonious society. Farmers, as cultivators of the land, were seen as crucial for providing the sustenance necessary for societal stability. Miners, on the other hand, were valued for their contribution to the extraction of valuable resources essential for economic prosperity. In contrast, artists and merchants were often considered less essential, as their professions were seen as less directly tied to the material needs of society.
I'm not saying that we should treat farmers and miners as the top of the social hierarchy, but looking at these powerful engines of economic productivity as merely a vehicle to provide for cities seems like a stretch we have to be very careful of. The factories and supermarkets won't be doing anything without different forms of primary production to create the materials to feed them.
For me, that's why rather than privileging the nation or the city, I'd prefer looking at the region. There are many regions without a city, but there can't be a city that isn't reliant on its surrounding regions for economic inputs. The article itself ends up talking a lot about regions as a concept as well, but then ties it back to the city.
The United States started under this concept, where each region would have a local state and it would be able to manage based on the realities of that region with a very weak national government to tie it together. That changed a lot when Abraham Lincoln fundamentally changed how America worked in the civil war, making the President a much more central figure, and the federal government a much more central power.
I like the concept of monetary policy as a feedback mechanism, but I'm not sure about the specific example provided. Detroit being in decline may or may not mean that it should produce more of its own stuff, it may just mean the city is in decline. I don't think Detroit having its own currency would have changed anything, and I don't know that the argument given is really persuasive -- there's lots of places where they should do more locally, but they don't because of many factors -- Maybe they just aren't industrious, they don't want to, they don't have the capital or the expertise to figure it out. Small nations decline all the time.
The concept of a separated Canada makes a lot of sense to me, to be honest. Toronto dominates the east too much, and Vancouver dominates the west too much. In between there's a landmass the size of Europe that's even more diverse. The idea that a landmass that size is dominated by two superpowered cities is sort of absurd when you think about it.
Some of the ideas of "policies of decline" being pushed at are wrong, however. Subsidizing farmers is entirely self-serving on the part of cities. They're going to need the food no matter what. The option is whether to try to make it cheaper by encouraging production through subsidies, or to let it run at market levels by not subsidizing it. Toronto isn't funding farms because it wants the farmers to feel good, it's funding farms because Toronto requires those crops to be Toronto.
One unfortunate truth is that the economics of big countries sort of mean something different from the politics of big countries. Rome may have eventually collapsed, but it existed in one form or another for over 800 years, 400 years of the roman republic, and another 400 years of the roman empire before finally being crushed.
Meanwhile, Athens the city-state may have existed for near 900 years, but (and this is the key thing) it was under the control of other, larger, more powerful states for most of that. Effectively, the sovereign state is more likely to be able to continue as a larger state than a smaller one, which is why city-states typically don't stick around and nation-states do.
The null hypothesis of "why didn't this person's ideas take off" isn't that experts reviewed and rejected them, but that nobody ever reviewed them. I mean, I don't expect any expert to real The Graysonian Ethic with an eye to integrating any of my ideas into their work. It's just reality -- there's too much to possibly read in a lifetime out there, so people will tend to focus on what seems most important.
Overall, the review of the books was quite interesting and there were some interesting ideas in there. Personally, I like the idea that communities become more self-sufficient and while I don't specifically like cities as a unit of focus, if we change the concepts to be for small regions instead and cities just become a focal point within regions where there's enough economic centralization and specialization to justify them within those regions, the idea of viewing the world that way does help make sense of the world, and I think it would possibly explain why cities exist where they are and don't exist where they aren't, and could help justify why those regional cities should be given a greater focus despite not being another region's megacities.
I to feel like a lot of these ideas are "be careful what you wish for". In a world where cities need to compete for different regions attention and don't just get it by virtue of being the biggest dick in the large arbitrary political unit, I think those underplayed regions suddenly become a lot more powerful. Farming regions without subsidies would likely demand more for their produce, mining regions would likely demand more for their metals and minerals, and a lot of things big cities want won't happen -- I guarantee you the oilsands regions unshackled from the federal and provincial governments would have no interest whatsoever in carbon credits or whatever cockamaney scheme Toronto and Vancouver are trying to cram down everyone else's throat.
Most economists come from eras where economies were growing, which is important -- it's a correlation/causation problem: Did the economists cause the explosion in economies, or did the booming economies allow people to participate in decadent fields such as economics which do not have any productive output to speak of and take credit for something they happened to exist beside?
Stagflation being more complicated than just a relationship between unemployment and inflation, and that would be self-evident to anyone who isn't staring at charts. During the pandemic, unemployment reached massive levels by design, and what happened? Massive inflation. Why? Because lots of dollars were going out and productive capacity was massively slashed by fiat. The fact that lawmakers can do stuff like that and do changes the calculus on its own, forget about times of higher or lower productivity not related to government such as floods or droughts. Economics fails immediately when it decides the real world doesn't exist and only economic theories exist.
Defining economics by nation does harm the real story. In 2006, Ontario was shrinking and Alberta was booming, so Canada was booming. In America, silicon valley was booming while most of the geographical area was destitute. The massive homogenization hides stories of regions that are facing huge problems and mutes stories of other regions being massively successful. On the other hand, many countries are tiny and so that doesn't happen there, and instead one nation looks fantastic while 40 others look destitute.
I don't like the idea that cities are magical or necessarily even good such that they are the unit to go with either. Our current worldview is city-centric to the point that many in cities think everyone should live in cities and it's immoral to do anything else. These people might be shocked to find their raw materials often require the economic output from places there are basically no people.
Confucius traditionally placed farmers and miners above artists and merchants within the societal hierarchy. This view stems from the emphasis Confucianism places on practicality and productivity as essential virtues for a harmonious society. Farmers, as cultivators of the land, were seen as crucial for providing the sustenance necessary for societal stability. Miners, on the other hand, were valued for their contribution to the extraction of valuable resources essential for economic prosperity. In contrast, artists and merchants were often considered less essential, as their professions were seen as less directly tied to the material needs of society.
I'm not saying that we should treat farmers and miners as the top of the social hierarchy, but looking at these powerful engines of economic productivity as merely a vehicle to provide for cities seems like a stretch we have to be very careful of. The factories and supermarkets won't be doing anything without different forms of primary production to create the materials to feed them.
For me, that's why rather than privileging the nation or the city, I'd prefer looking at the region. There are many regions without a city, but there can't be a city that isn't reliant on its surrounding regions for economic inputs. The article itself ends up talking a lot about regions as a concept as well, but then ties it back to the city.
The United States started under this concept, where each region would have a local state and it would be able to manage based on the realities of that region with a very weak national government to tie it together. That changed a lot when Abraham Lincoln fundamentally changed how America worked in the civil war, making the President a much more central figure, and the federal government a much more central power.
I like the concept of monetary policy as a feedback mechanism, but I'm not sure about the specific example provided. Detroit being in decline may or may not mean that it should produce more of its own stuff, it may just mean the city is in decline. I don't think Detroit having its own currency would have changed anything, and I don't know that the argument given is really persuasive -- there's lots of places where they should do more locally, but they don't because of many factors -- Maybe they just aren't industrious, they don't want to, they don't have the capital or the expertise to figure it out. Small nations decline all the time.
The concept of a separated Canada makes a lot of sense to me, to be honest. Toronto dominates the east too much, and Vancouver dominates the west too much. In between there's a landmass the size of Europe that's even more diverse. The idea that a landmass that size is dominated by two superpowered cities is sort of absurd when you think about it.
Some of the ideas of "policies of decline" being pushed at are wrong, however. Subsidizing farmers is entirely self-serving on the part of cities. They're going to need the food no matter what. The option is whether to try to make it cheaper by encouraging production through subsidies, or to let it run at market levels by not subsidizing it. Toronto isn't funding farms because it wants the farmers to feel good, it's funding farms because Toronto requires those crops to be Toronto.
One unfortunate truth is that the economics of big countries sort of mean something different from the politics of big countries. Rome may have eventually collapsed, but it existed in one form or another for over 800 years, 400 years of the roman republic, and another 400 years of the roman empire before finally being crushed.
Meanwhile, Athens the city-state may have existed for near 900 years, but (and this is the key thing) it was under the control of other, larger, more powerful states for most of that. Effectively, the sovereign state is more likely to be able to continue as a larger state than a smaller one, which is why city-states typically don't stick around and nation-states do.
The null hypothesis of "why didn't this person's ideas take off" isn't that experts reviewed and rejected them, but that nobody ever reviewed them. I mean, I don't expect any expert to real The Graysonian Ethic with an eye to integrating any of my ideas into their work. It's just reality -- there's too much to possibly read in a lifetime out there, so people will tend to focus on what seems most important.
Overall, the review of the books was quite interesting and there were some interesting ideas in there. Personally, I like the idea that communities become more self-sufficient and while I don't specifically like cities as a unit of focus, if we change the concepts to be for small regions instead and cities just become a focal point within regions where there's enough economic centralization and specialization to justify them within those regions, the idea of viewing the world that way does help make sense of the world, and I think it would possibly explain why cities exist where they are and don't exist where they aren't, and could help justify why those regional cities should be given a greater focus despite not being another region's megacities.
I to feel like a lot of these ideas are "be careful what you wish for". In a world where cities need to compete for different regions attention and don't just get it by virtue of being the biggest dick in the large arbitrary political unit, I think those underplayed regions suddenly become a lot more powerful. Farming regions without subsidies would likely demand more for their produce, mining regions would likely demand more for their metals and minerals, and a lot of things big cities want won't happen -- I guarantee you the oilsands regions unshackled from the federal and provincial governments would have no interest whatsoever in carbon credits or whatever cockamaney scheme Toronto and Vancouver are trying to cram down everyone else's throat.
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