Families can be strange things. They show in microcosm the variations that can exist in broader society. We can leave them, but may not escape them.
Here I was struck by a Ramana's post Another “Success” Story. We have the community and the family that in some ways mirrors that community. And we have the person who does not fit in and drops out, but ends by finding an accommodation with the family that suits him.
I listened to the Australian Treasurer's budget speech last night. I have put up a preliminary comment in Australian Budget 2009.
I would be fascinated to discover the origins of the names adopted by our friendly Dili blogger. B's adopted name - "Diak Malae" is bad Tetun for 'good foreigner' - is clear enough. However, we also find, and I quote, "My wife’s name is Just Add Water. We have two sons, whose names are Three Strokes and Fidget."
Living dangerously, I would have said. Or perhaps Just Add Water is like my wife and does not read my blog! Diak took a break from posting while he and Just Add water visited Darwin and Kakadu. Now he is back, and I enjoyed his latest posts, especially the description of Dili's Emu Parade.
Yesterday I read an extremely unpleasant email chain among young women. I felt physically sick. Today I read stories about cyber bullying on Facebook that led to two girls being asked to leave a Sydney school.
In considering these two events I want to make a very small number of points.
In the past people could and did say very nasty things. Others were hurt, some permanently. Yet, with time, the damage eased on both sides.
This no longer happens. These events coarsen the fabric of society. They also inflict permanent damage on perpetrator and victim. This comes about because of the very speed and visibility of the communication.
The answer does not lie in law or regulation, the usual answer of our modern society. The answer lies in part in reinstatement of the role of manners.
Manners are designed to govern relations between imperfect human beings. They reduce the damage done by our own imperfections. Manners take many forms depending on the society. In all cases, the role is the same.
Part of the answer lies in the once understood Christian concept of redemption, the capacity of people to redeem themselves. Once a person is condemned for ever by an act including words, then redemption is irrelevant.
I was bullied. I have spoken of this. At no stage have I mentioned names. This is not a fear of libel. I still know many of these people. They are not now as they were then. To drag up my past pain and then attach it to names would do damage to others. Two wrongs do not make a right.
We cannot turn the world back to pre-internet days. We have to focus on how we manage this in social, not legal, terms. This is hard , I think, because Australia as a society no longer has the intellectual and moral framework to do so.
I have just brought up the post that I began last night, Personal confusions with a bill of rights. Reading it, I haven't got the argument quite right, although it took some time to write.
I don't know. Some of the research that I have been doing just at present brought me in contact with the Master and Servants Act in NSW during the 1840s. I knew of the Act, of course, but I was looking at the way it worked in practice in terms of the relationships between people.
From the perspective of 2009, the Act has many bad features. However, in writing about it from an historical perspective where my focus is on what happened and why, it becomes another piece of legislation set in the context of its time whose adverse effects were gradually removed.
It may well be that some of the things I complain about now are like this Act and will simply be remedied with time. After all, the current orthodoxy in politics, public policy and administration is in fact less than forty years old - the roots were much earlier of course - and is already bending under the strain.
In all this, I suppose that there are two things that worry me.
The first is our loss of the sense of progress outside the purely economic, although even this is under strain at present. The concept of progress is inseparable from the world we have known over the last two hundred years. Because we believe that things can get better, we try to make them so. It seems to me that our present sense of modernity is very strained because many in fact no longer believe that things will get better.
The second is our loss of wonder, of the existence of an unknown still to be discovered over the horizon.
I am not sure when the concept of progress first emerged. We can find it expressed in different ways at different times and in different places. What we can say, I think, is that it has been central to a lot of European thought for over three hundred years.
Some might argue that progress is an illusion, that its pursuit has done damage. I do not share this view. To my mind, progress is a liberating concept because it implies that change for the better is possible. If you don't believe that progress is possible, then what's the point in trying?
The emergence of post-modernism with its very denial of the concept of progress was in some ways a sign of the ennui that began to envelop life in many western countries. Sylvia Plath wrote around 1955:
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out of date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.
This poem may be more than fifty years old now, but it really does capture what has happened. Gone is the sense of wonder, replaced instead by a modern approach to risk management. Or, more precisely, risk avoidance.
As always, one has to be careful about generalisations. However, the Australian material that I have been reading recently published between 1922 and the early nineteen seventies has in it a belief in progress that actually seems strange in the context of Australia today. Knowing what we know now, one might classify these beliefs as naive. Yet they also fed into individual positive action in ways that have begun to diminish in modern Australia.
Despite all, I remain an optimist. But then, I still believe in progress!
Neil Whitfield in his new role as boy reporter has just attended a gig on the question of an Australian Bill of Rights. I do love the idea of Neil as a boy reporter. I suspect he might be very good!
I used to be opposed to the concept of a Bill of Rights. This was partly a practical issue, the problems of definition involved. I also thought that we had a constitutional system whose long history provide a potent weapon against those who might misuse power.
Our freedoms had been obtained through blood and encapsulated in law and tradition. This provided a protection against those who might misuse power. They might do damage initially, but things tended to re-balance with time.
Since we moved towards a republican model I have become less sure of my position. My problems here are twofold.
The desire to move to a new form of government involves a conscious rejection of our past. A modern Australia requires a new form of Government, republicans argue. The difficulty is that our system of Government is so enmeshed in our history that rejection of one part of tradition leaves the remainder uncertain. We cannot necessarily pick and choose as to what will survive.
My second difficulty is that nobody knows what form an Australian republic might take. The favoured approach to pushing a republic through starts with a simple yes no plebiscite to the question do you favour a republic. Properly phrased, this might get through in terms of a simple majority. The intent then is to give the Australian people various choices, leading to the selection of a republican model that is preferred or at least least disliked by the population.
We now live in a heavily regulated society. The boundary between private and public space has been constantly shifted in favour of the public. I may argue against this in the general and the particular, but there seems to be no end to the trend.
I accept that I am old fashioned in some ways.
My own thoughts and perceptions about the relations between individual and state, about the use and abuse of the powers of the state, were influenced by the Vietnam war period. Then I had to make choices about personal action in circumstances where my religious views brought into stark contrast the conflict between the rights and powers of the state versus individual conscience.
A little later when I joined the Commonwealth Public Service on a year long training program as an administrative trainee, one part of our training dealt with ethics. This directly addressed the question of the appropriate relations between public servant and Government in the context of individual ethical views and of the conflicts that could arise. How should a public servant behave when his ethical views came into conflict with things directed by a Government?
The brainwashing processes used during the Korean War to progressively replace one set of values and beliefs with another were discussed. Adolf Eichmann was used as an example to point to some of the conflicts and problems involved, at the way in which a series of individual decisions and ethical compromises could lead to efficient inhumanity in the service of the state.
This was a very different world from today's focus in code of conduct training on what constitutes individual corruption. The broader ethical and principle questions we were concerned about have largely vanished.
All of this means that I am slowly coming to the view that some form of Bill of Rights may now be necessary to protect us against our own governments' actual and potential abuse of power.
My problem is that I find discussion in this area very confusing.
There seem to be two schools of thought. One sees a Bill of Rights primarily in terms of proscription of behaviours and views they believe to be incorrect. A second, the use of such a Bill as a protection against arbitrary Government action. So far, there is no common view as to what a Bill of Rights might involve.
There is also dispute between a legislated Bill of Rights and the incorporation of principles in the constitution itself. Some of those who support the first do so because they see the second as impossible.
I writing about management, I have pointed to the way in which topics become popular in discussion when the opposite is happening on the ground.
The great emphasis on people management coincided with the rise of process engineering and mass restructuring. The emphasis on the value of the brand coincided with the greatest period of brand destruction in modern history.
I think that something of the same has been happening over recent years in the discussion on rights, although the process is far more complex.
I will return to the old fashioned Belshaw theme to finish this post.
As a child, I read about and shuddered at the use of partial drowning as a torture technique by the Gestapo. To my young mind, this was almost of the exemplar of Gestapo horror. Consequently I could not understand or accept the use of so-called waterboarding.
In similar vein, I could not understand how such a culture of abuse of individual rights, of systemic cruelty, could emerge under the Howard Government. Worse, I could not understand why we accepted it for so long.
Looking back at Australian history, there have been many abuses of state power. However, these stand out because they take place against a backdrop of slow improvement and of protest at the time and later that constrained what Government did.
I think, I haven't attempted to count it, that there were more cases of state perpetrated individual injustice under the Howard Government than in the entire history of twentieth century Australia outside the war years and their immediate aftermath.
In saying this, I am putting aside the specific question of our treatment of Australia's Indigenous people. This raises a different set of issues.
My problem is that I think that this systemic pattern continues because we have acquired a mindset that no longer questions.
Let me finish with an example that some might find very odd. Recently, the Rudd Government announced measures that would require young people up to the age, I think, of twenty five to either work or study. These appeared to be universally welcomed.
I was struck by the emphasis on compulsion. Of course Governments providing money can set terms and conditions. They have to. Yet the language that was used, the focus on what kids must do because we know best, to my mind simply continued the authoritarian mindset.
I have stayed home today to try to finally break this flue.
One of those silly conversations with daughter Clare who is at home finishing a university essay. The Monty Pythons' sketch involving the fictitious philosophy department at the University of Woolloomooloo triggered the conversation.
Clare is quite obsessed with MP, an obsession that carried over into the recent Macquarie University Ancient History Society review. Who can resist the drinkers' song?
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
While the sketch has very English perceptions of Australia, it is still funny.
The discussion led Clare to remark that she wanted a knighthood. I said that she would need to go to New Zealand since they had just reintroduced the imperial honours system. Apparently nobody recognised New Zealand honours.
Then I thought hang on, isn't there an equivalent in the Order of Australia?
I actually had to look this up.
When this new order of chivalry was established by the Queen on 14 November 1975 at the request of the then Whitlam Government to replace the old imperial system, it had just three levels - Companion (AC), Officer (AO) and Member (AM). Following the defeat of the Whitlam Government, on 24 May 1976, the further categories of Knight (AK), Dame (AD), and Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) were established by the Queen on the advice of Mr Whitlam's successor Malcolm Fraser. The following Hawke Labor Government then abolished the Knight and Dame categories.
So Clare still has to go to New Zealand. However, there is another problem. Clare wants to be called Sir Clare, not Lady Clare (that's too pissy) or Dame Clare (that's too old). To this end, she needs the Queen to change the rules. In theory, this could be done by the Queen as Queen of Australia. However, given the Australian attitude to honours she really needs to go to the UK and seek the Queen's assistance in her right as Queen of Great Britain. Hard, but not impossible if she becomes a super successful writer.
In the meantime, and this bears upon the recent New Zealand decision to go back to imperial honours, who is likely to get the best seating in a New York restaurant, Sir Michael Somare or his Australian equivalent carrying a mere AC?
So to finish with the rest of the song:
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whisky every day.Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed.
In Counting the unemployed, Neil Whitfield (Ninglun) looked at the definition of employed used for statistical purposes. Neil is correct that we have adopted international definitions. He is also correct in inferring that the way employment is defined grossly understates the level of real unemployment.
The use of standard definitions of this type means that the statistics do reflect trends. However, it can also make it difficult to use the numbers for much more than this.
Very early on in the life of the new Australian Government, I expressed two cautions.
In Saturday Morning Musings - foreign policy, Mr Rudd and the dangers of Australia's middle power status I said in part:
Internationally, Mr Rudd has been emphasising Australia's role as a middle power and seems determined to assert this in whatever forum he can. To my mind, there is a real danger that he will get what he wishes, a greater international role for Australia....
With locked in media coverage, Mr Rudd's trip appears to have played well to a domestic audience, in part because it feeds to our sense of self-importance. I would feel far more comfortable if we were keeping our national head down, playing a quieter and more subtle game.
My other concern expressed in Slow down Mr Rudd, for all our sakes, slow down was that the Government's desire to do would outrun the Government's capacity to deliver. Both have been on display this week.
The Government's new Defence White Paper was always going to attract some attention because of the numbers involved, new equipment is expensive, as well as its analysis of the strategic environment. However, the advance leaks of the Paper and the language surrounding it created an unfortunate atmosphere when set against a background of previous Government remarks on Australia's middle power status. Talking tough may play well to an Australian domestic audience, but it is not a good international line.
The new program is to be funded in part through $20 billion internal Defence reform program. This may be possible, but I do have doubts.
I have lost count of the number of times in recent years that Australian Governments have announced that they are going to part fund Defence acquisitions through savings.
Of itself, this makes me cautious. However, the announcement also comes at a time of apparent tensions between the Defence Department, the Australian Defence Forces and the Minister. This has been playing out in different ways, but adds to my caution about the actual funding and delivery of the program.
Modern weapons systems are incredibly complex. Cost over-runs are common and difficult to control. We shall see.
I haven't commented on the Government's emissions trading scheme. While I have read the various discussions and commentary, I haven't done the personal analysis required to form a balanced view. That said, it has been clear for some time that the scheme has been facing difficulties.
I don't blame the Government for deferring the start date. I don't share the current obsession about the inviolability of election promises. Things change, and Governments must change with them.
Part of the Government's problems in this case lie, and this is the link with Defence case, in the language used previously. Instead of discussing issues, the Government locked itself in to a fixed position. The changes made to the scheme appear to have been carefully crafted in political terms to gather maximum support, but it remains the case that the Government has been forced to change position.
Over on the New England Australia blog I have started an irregular series called Distant memories of a now vanished North Coast. This gives me another excuse for a somewhat nostalgic peek back into the past. 
In preparing Distant memories of a now vanished North Coast - Coffs Harbour Surf Music, I came across this photo from the NSW State Library.
The photo by J H Howarth shows the SS Fitzroy at the Coffs Habour Jetty. The caption says c1925. That is almost certainly wrong for reasons that I will explain in a moment. But look at the picture first.
The Fitzroy maintained a weekly service between Sydney and Coffs Harbour carrying passengers and cargo. Notice how crowded the ship is. At 623 tons, it is not a big ship. Passengers, crew and cargo were all crowded aboard.
You can see the railway lines on the Jetty. These brought logs from the surrounding forests including the Dorrigo. The luggage with the initials JH has presumably been offloaded or, more likely, is waiting to be loaded. The women in the front in the long dress and hat leaning to the side is watching passengers being unloaded in a basket by crane. There is no gangway.
This method of loading and unloading passengers was apparently quite common. A few years back I was talking to Eric Reeves who attended the Armidale Teachers College in the 1930s. To get home for holidays, one of his friends used to take the train from Armidale to Sydney and then catch the steamer to Woolgoolga. The wharf at Woolgoolga stretched out into the sea from the beach. There he would be swung in a basket from the ship to the wharf.
For those who do not know Woolgoolga, it is on the coast north of Coffs Harbour. It is just over 212 kilometres from Armidale, a bit over 3 hours by road. The long trip to Woolgoolga by Sydney is a sign of just how bad transport could be in New England even in the 1930s. The first tarred road to the coast dates, I think, from the late 1950s or early 1960s.
From the clothes that people are wearing, it does look as though the photo was taken after the First World War. However, it could not have been 1925.
On the afternoon of Saturday 25 June, 1921, the Fitzroy left Coffs for Sydney. During the night the ship ran into a cyclonic storm. Around 6.30 am on the Sunday a large quantity of water came aboard. The ship began to list increasingly to port. Water was discovered pouring in, apparently from an open ash-shoot and from a smashed port hole.
The crew attempted to jettison the cargo, but there was no steam for the winches. The engineer then announced that the position was hopeless. The crew prepared the boasts for launching, but the captain felt that there was too much risk of them being overturned or smashed if launched. Instead, he decided that it would be better to let them float off as the vessel sank.
Now look again at the photograph. You can see the two boats at the back, plus one on the side not far back from the funnel. There would not be a lot of room once those boats were swung out. The ship was listing badly and tossing heavily. Getting the boats safely into the water would have been quite a task.
Around 8am, the timber deck cargo shifted, causing the ship to capsize off Cape Hawke near the Manning River. Two of the boats with people in them floated off, but one immediately capsized. Of the 35 people on board, 31 were drowned. One survivor, seaman Olaf Johannson, managed to swim for 14 miles through raging seas to reach the shore.
A few kilometres over the horizon, the SS Our Jack, 281 tons, was also sunk. The SS Brundah came to her aid, rescuing four of her crew of ten.
The North Coast seas could be quite dangerous, leading to a lot of wrecks over time. It is quite an eery feel looking at that photo and knowing what is in store for the ship in the not too distant future.
Sources:
Jack Loney, Wrecks on the New South Wales Coast, Oceans Enterprises, 1993, ISBN 0646110810, 9780646110813, p 137, accessed via Google Books, 3 May 2009.
Argus, Melbourne, 26 July 1921 carries a report on the commission of inquiry into the sinking. Accessed on-line 3 May 2009. There are some discrepancies between Jack Loney's account and that in the Argus. The most important one is that Loney suggests that four out of 26 survived.
My train reading has briefly switched to another professional interest, economics, although in this case the book - Robert L Heilbroners' The Worldly Philosophers:The Lives, Times and Ideas of Great Economic Thinkers (Touchstone, New York, revised seventh edition, 1999) - actually spans interests.
Heilbroners' book was given to me some time ago by Joseph, then a work colleague. It is only now that I am getting to read it. I find it a remarkably good book. Well written, it brings people and ideas alive.
Recently a number of prominent economists have suggested that too many in the profession are failing because they do not know enough economic history, that the profession itself has failed because of the way that economic history has been squeezed out of a busy professional curriculum. I suspect that they are right. However, I would go further, and say that they they do not know enough history, full stop.
When I first studied modern history at school, much was made of the agrarian and industrial revolutions. Frankly, I found this pretty boring stuff. The discovery of the Bessemer process for the mass production of steel from pig iron was clearly important, but I was much more interested in other topics.
I think that part of my problem lay in the way the topic was taught with its emphasis on facts. There was too little linkage between the discussion of changes in technology and the economic outcomes and other changes that were taking place in society and in the way people thought.
One of Heilbroner's great strengths is that his discussion of the development of economic thought treats his selected economists as people and links their ideas to changes in the world around them. I found his discussion especially interesting because the book actually sits at the centre of a number of my current pre-occupations.
At a first level, the agrarian and industrial revolutions are important in economic terms. The development and application of scientific and commercial farming practices that formed the core of the agrarian revolution led to an expansion of agricultural production that supported a higher population and and helped lay the basis for the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution with its focus on technology, on new forms of production and organisation and on the accumulation of capital is arguably the central defining event in the formation of the world as we know it in 2009.
What we do and how we do it forms our thinking. However, what we think then feeds back into the what, how and why of doing. This simple statement sits at the heart of a lot of my writing as I seek to understand our changing views of the world and the impact this has on actions.
Heilbroner suggests that economics as a discipline is linked directly to the industrial revolution.
In the pre-industrial world with its feudal structures there was no scope for economics as such. As I argued long ago in my original honour thesis on the economic structure of traditional Aboriginal life in Northern New South Wales, the questions that economists ask are relevant to the study of different societies. However, economics as a discipline depends in part upon the concepts such as accumulation, private property, investment, profit, specialisation and "the market", and these concepts did not really exist before the industrial revolution.
First political economy and then economics emerged because of changes in the way we do things. However, the ideas then developed fed back into our thinking about the world.
Smith, Ricardo, Marx were all responding to current events and thinking. Smith's arguments were then used by those opposing Government intervention with business, Ricardo's arguments by those wishing to abolish the corn laws, Marx by those opposed to capitalism. We can see this today in the use and abuse of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes.
Just as Smith became the symbol of laissez faire capitalism, so Keynes has become a symbol for Government intervention. Neither man would have supported the use to which they have been put. However, that is beside the point. They existed, therefore they will be used.
In writing about current events and thinking, I have placed great stress on what I see as an increasingly mechanistic approach to management and public policy. I have also attacked what I see as an overwhelming and wrongly conceived obsession with measurement.
I have linked all this to the the computer age, to the structuring of the way we do things to fit with the approach to decision rules required to make computer systems work. I have also suggested that this began well before computers, but that computers have rigidified and codified the approach.
I thought that this argument was important and, to a degree, new. Important it remains, new it is not.
I find that that strange, socially dysfunctional, American economist Thorstein Veblen captured the essence well before me.
In The Theory of Business Enterprise published, would you believe in 1904, Veblen presented a theory of the eventual decline of the businessman and of the system that sustained him. In Heilbroner's words,
Veblen believed that the days of the business leaders were numbered, that despite their power, there was ranged against them a formidable adversary. It was not the the proletariat (for the Leisure Class had shown how the underlying population looked up to its leaders), but a still more implacable foe: the machine.
Veblen was writing in a world where the unrestrained excess of business buccaneers had created a system of creating wealth independent of the real productive capacity of the economy. Sound familiar? He was very much a man of his times. However, in writing he captured ideas still relevant today. Again to quote Heilbroner:
For the machine, thought Veblen, " throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought." It forced men to think in terms of matter of fact, in terms precise, measurable, and devoid of superstition and animism. Hence those who found it increasingly difficult to swallow the presumption of "natural law" and social differentiation which surrounded the leisure class. And so society divided; not poor against rich, but technician versus businessman, mechanic against war lord, scientist opposed to ritualist.
Veblen saw this leading to a revolution in which business would be replaced by engineers who would run the economy along the lines of a huge well-ordered production machine. To some degree this has happened. However, what Veblen did not foresee is the way in which the machine would capture humanity, the full way it would affect thinking.
In forcing us to think in terms precise, the machine has effectively forced us to throw out those things than cannot be measured. Dreams, visions, faiths, hopes and emotions have no place in a well-ordered machine. Worse, the machine has taken away freedom for discretion and even mistakes. Just as the robot on a production line will destroy you if you walk in front of it, so the modern Government or business machine stamps on those who will not comply or simply do not fit.
So, to my mind, Veblen was right in pinpointing the impact of the machine on thought, but wrong in his assessment of the implications.
This type of failure is, in fact, a feature of all the great economists. It arises because all economists necessarily write from a current perspective, exploring and explaining what they see as the lessons and conclusions.
Today's economists have, I think, become captives of Veblen's machine. Their focus has narrowed. They forecast, project, apply their skills to current problems. Their focus is on technique.
This is not new. Heilbroner talks about the rise of the academic economist such as Alfred Marshall. They effectively codified the discipline, but in so doing (and there is a dreadful irony here) they laid the basis for its subsequent decline.
Initially this was concealed. The first half of the twentieth century was the age of the economist. Keynes stands out because of his prominence over a long period, but he was not alone. Economists provided new insights in many areas and played a dramatic role in public policy. We can see this in Australia or New Zealand where the small number of economists became public names, active players in intellectual debate as well as public policy.
Things changed from the 1950s. This was partially a matter of scale. There were a lot more economists. However, it was also a question of focus.
More and more economists became technocrats, using economics' skill sets to solve particular problems. The larger profession fragmented into fields - labour economists, health economists etc. Those engaged in research focused on more technical issues. Mathematics proliferated. Journals became full of arcane articles beyond the understanding of those without a certain level of mathematical understanding.
Not all these changes were necessarily bad. There were considerable advances of knowledge in particular fields. However, economics as a discipline both fragmented and passed beyond the understanding of even the educated lay person.
To my mind, the strength of economics has always been in the rigour of its thinking, the way it forces new questions, the way it integrates a range of thinking about aspects of the human condition. Once economics became a set of tool kits the discipline was, to my mind, damned.
I stand to be corrected here, but I do not think that any economist would challenge my view that the discipline has retreated greatly over the last fifty years in terms of student reach and public prominence.
Now with the global recession, economics and economists are back. At a purely personal level, that's great. However, I am struck by the apparent inability of economists to explain what has been happening and, more importantly, to suggest what we might do.
Am I being unfair? Perhaps.
Certainly I no longer claim to know the detail of current thinking. Here I am always conscious when I talk about economics or the economy of my lack of knowledge, of the risk of making simple errors. However, as a former professional economist who was drawn in different directions, the thing that stands out when I read the economics' commentary is its fragmentation.
I think that the problem that many economists face at present is the need to move from the particular to the general. At the particular level, they are comfortable. But the skill sets intended to explain the particular do not necessarily help in explaining the general. In a sense, we are back to where we were in the past when economics addressed broader questions.
I think that this is enough for this morning. I actually need to look at the latest statistics on the economy!
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