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Innerarity on Prophets of Doom and Gloom

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From Innerarity’s Ética de la hospitalidad (Ethics of Hospitality):

There is nothing more annoying than these prophets of misery who sit there eagerly awaiting for the humanity to destroy itself just to prove them right.

Did I say this guy was brilliant, or what? I’m sure we all know such prophets of doom and gloom both in the public realm and in our own lives. They especially love musing on how everything is getting more horrible with every passing day and how humanity is doomed after a hearty meal and several expensive drinks.

7 responses to “Innerarity on Prophets of Doom and Gloom”

  1. Spanish Prof Avatar
    Spanish Prof

    Yes and no. On one hand, I think I understand what he is saying, in very general terms. On the other hand, prophets of gloom and doom was how the economists that alerted as early as 2005 to the economic bubble that the US was going through in the Bush years were called. So you have to be careful not to overgeneralize.

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  2. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    That reminds of of the joke that economists have predicted 19 of the last 5 recessions!

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  3. Spanish Prof Avatar
    Spanish Prof

    Yes, but the last one was pretty serious, I would say, and not too many predicted it.

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  4. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    OK, we may be venturing off-topic, but just because some economists got it right on one particular financial event doesn’t mean much. Economists aren’t generally very good with prediction. In fact they can’t even agree of some very basic stuff. Paul Krugman says supply side economics is bullshit. Not so, says Gary Becker, another Nobel Prize winner. Economists can’t decide whether cutting taxes is good, or whether putting money into infrastructure makes sense, or how to get out of a recession, or just about anything else you could think of.

    It’s a very flawed field, with assumptions that are too simplistic to model a complex system (billions of human beings with different ideas of utility). They try to make it up by using sophisticated math, but then as they say, garbage in garbage out. Math won’t save you if your modeling approach and assumptions aren’t correct.

    With so much vagueness going around I’d be shocked if no economist predicted the financial market failures. But I’m sure those economists were incorrect the other ten times when they made predictions. That’s how it goes. If those economists were right all the time (or even most of the time) they’d be billionaires by now. They aren’t.

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  5. Spanish Prof Avatar
    Spanish Prof

    Listen, I’m from Argentina, so if there is one thing I will not engage in is a defense of economist. But my point is that it’s not a bad idea to listen to what others have to say, instead of dismissing them as gloom and doom. In this particular case, because it almost brought down the entire financial system, it wasn’t just a “recession”. But let’s take another example: I don’t know if you are American, or what you thought of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. I was already living in the U.S at that time, and to whoever wanted to listen, I gave a “gloom and doom” prediction of what would happen. Trust me, “prophet of gloom and doom” would have been a nice phrase, compared to what I was told. On a daily basis and on personal relationships, I don’t like people who keep telling how everything is horrible and the world is going to hell. I don’t like Polyanna’s either. But on public policies, sometimes it is a good idea to listen to them.

    Off-topic: Clarissa, the Norton Anti-Virus blocked my access to your blog twice as a Pornographic site. Now I’m on my home computer and can access, but you might want to check what is causing it, because I’m sure it has happened to many readers.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      Thank you for telling me, Spanish Prof. I know that my blog was deleted from several directories because of this post on indigenous art: https://clarissasblog.com/2009/05/11/mochica-ceramics/

      The post is two years old and I thought that the curse of being confused for a pornographer has been lifted. Apparently, it isn’t so. I’m not going to delete the post, though, because I believe it serves an educational purpose.

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  6. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Hey, I’m a doom and gloom person myself, and I agree with what you said, especially about the Iraq war. My comment was specific to economists, as in, I don’t have much faith in economists’ ability to predict anything.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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