Is AI the Final Frontier for Human "Jobs"?

Ever since the industrial revolution everybody has been terrified about the End of the Job. And sometimes the terror extended to violence, as in the textile machine wreckers inspired by Ned Ludd.

And of course there was real hardship; there must be in any change, because change means that some people's plans and assumptions about the world will be dashed to pieces, and others will be pleasantly surprised.

Back before the industrial revolution something like 90 percent of people were working on farms. In the US the number is now something like 3 percent. That transition did not unwind in a small, X percent per year, fashion. It never does. It occurred in horrific farm crises, like the crisis in the late 19th century that spawned rural populism on the Great Plains. And of course there was the Dust Bowl that sent millions of farmers to California. Then there is Zola's La Terre all about  the French peasant getting zeroed out by grain from the Great Plains.

Today, everyone is talking about the AI and the robots that will take the jobs of retail workers and truck drivers. And so on. As in "The Mother of All Disruptions" by Kay S. Hymowitz.

Jobs are disappearing or will disappear not just in retail, but in legal services, oh yes, and journalism. And some people are worried about the US going Japan and giving up on sex and babies.

But I think it is best to admit that we just have no clue what is coming, and just get on with it. Let us stop worrying about just which jobs will disappear and why, and develop a culture that accepts change and flexibility in employment.

For instance, at the Hampton Inn in Willow Grove here in the NE Philly suburbs the free breakfast, what I call the bunfight, is run by a kindly black woman. This morning she was sitting at a computer in the lobby ordering food for tomorrow. She seems to have another, health-care related job.

Isn't that some kind of a clue? Here's a woman doing a wait-staff job and a supervisor job and an order-clerk job, and she is computer literate and she has another job where she cares for people in a health care facility.

In a large sense, we are just in another "de-skilling" era. When people were carpenters and skilled artisans and cooks they spent years developing manual skills. In the old days scribes spent years developing handwriting skills. But then came the machine and the printing press, and advanced manual skills were not longer required. The same is also true in many technology fields. Used to be that an engineer had to develop math skills and knowledge to do "calcs," computing stresses and beam sizes. No longer, I suspect, because all the calculating and the sizing gets done on finite-element analysis programs.

The best understanding of work, in my view, comes from longshoreman Eric Hoffer. As I wrote in "A Critique of Social Mechanice," for Hoffer the industrial revolution was an incomplete revolution, so

man had to use his fellow men as a stopgap for inventiveness. He had to yoke men, women and children with iron and steam... There was no escape for the mass of people from the ravenous maws of factories and mines.

Coal miners did not get released from the yoke until strip-mining with drag-line excavators started in the 1950s. But Hoffer is optimistic about the future. It is true, he writes, that factories used to be “agencies of dehumanization.”

But we of the present know that communion with machines does not blunt our sensibilities or stifle our individuality. We know that machines can be as temperamental and willful as any living thing. The proficient mechanic is an alert and intuitive human being. On the waterfront one can see how the ability to make a fork lift or a winch do one’s bidding with precision and finesse generates a peculiar exhilaration, so that the skilled lift driver and winch driver are as a rule of good cheer, and work as if at play.

Could that be the future? That work becomes more like play as we all learn how to operate the automation so that the hard work and the strength and the manual dexterity is done by machines and we humans get on with the social cooperation, rather than doing the grunt work?

Who knows. Nobody knows.

But I would argue that the most important thing is for people to be flexible and adjust themselves to the demands of the market.

Because resistance to the market only makes things worse.

The Paradox That Progressives are the Real Reactionaries

I don't pretend to know the real meaning of Hegel's dialectic. In fact I suspect that the dear chap gets himself lost in its contradictions and oppositions.

But I do believe that the Arrow of History concept, as in Progress, is wrong. Life, the universe, and everything is much more complicated than that.

It is in this sense that I believe that a "thesis" calls forth its "antithesis" and the resultant mess congeals, eventually, into a new "synthesis."

Or, simply put, life is messy.

For instance, it is a wonder to me that the opposition to "advanced capitalism" and its unprecedented Great Enrichment that has increased the income of ordinary people by 3,000 percent in two centuries, wants to build a world of total administrative domination.

See, the way I look at it, the whole point of the economic growth of the last 200 years is that, against all odds, the political powers-that-be were unable to stop the successive waves of innovation, starting with textiles on through the latest turn of the internet.

The characteristic of the old world, before capitalism, was its hierarchical structure. Feudalism was a system of domination and subordination, from the king and his direct vassals down to the meanest serf on a lord's estate.

Then came the 19th century with ordinary people running all over the world without permission. It was in the middle of the 19th century that rich kids invented socialism proposing to reestablish the old regime of top-down control. Only the socialists called it the new regime, in fact the absence of all regimes.

Then we got the astonishing paradox that the socialism that was to liberate the masses from the horrors of capitalism enslaved them with the most murderous and disastrous political regimes in all history.

We had the paradox that just as the intellectual elite of Europe started a movement against slavery the industrial revolution appeared and enslaved the masses in regimented factories.

Or, right now, we have the paradox that the modern left, that insists on the right of protest, ruthlessly suppresses and all speech that challenges its hegemonic narrative. It calls itself the Resistance, but don't you dare resist it.

All this is why I am not particularly distressed that the Republican Senate cannot summon the gumption to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Why I am not that exercised by lefty judges on the DC Court of Appeals arrogating to themselves the right to reverse an administrative decision of the Trump EPA. I am not even that exercised about immigration.

That's because I believe that despite the best hopes of today's political movers and shakers the future will not be what they imagine. And the reason is that they are idiots.

I was taking an acquaintance to the airport yesterday and she complained about the folly of wars. I replied that, up until yesterday, humans had to defend their land to the death because that land grew the food that gave them life. It is only today that land doesn't matter, because you can buy and sell food rather than grow it. So they don't need to defend their patch of land to the death. But it takes time for people to adjust to the new reality. Meanwhile they will react to all setbacks with wars and rumors of wars and by trying to return to the old ways that "worked"

There will be people telling us they are leading us to the future by returning to the failed politics of the past.

I guess my point is that everything in life is trial-and-error and cleaning up after one mistake after another. Whatever your grand and glorious plans, they will be pulverized by reality, as in the elder Moltke's dictum that "no campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy."

To me, the basic fact of today is that the great and glorious top-down administrative state is creaking and groaning in every joint.

And it is going to get worse before it gets better.

What is Trump's Obamacare Strategy?

If you have merely dabbled in strategic thought you will know that one of the key precepts is "do not underestimate your enemy."

This is obviously a challenge for the leaders in any fight, because one way to keep up the morale of your side is to characterize the other side as contemptible worms.

This problem even exists in religion where Satan is represented both as the Prince of Darkness and also as bound to fail because Good Will Prevail in the end. So which is it?

Our liberal friends have a similar problem when it comes to Republican Presidents. Are they idiots or are they evil?  Generally speaking, liberals decided Eisenhower was an idiot; Nixon was evil; Reagan was an amiable dunce; Bush was a idiot; and Trump is an idiot with a combover.

In my view, Trump is not an idiot; he only plays one on TV.

So what about President Trump and Obamacare? We know that Trump signed onto the notion of "repeal and replace" in the campaign. But it seems to me that he has shown a remarkable light touch on Obamacare thus far.

Is that because the president is an idiot, or because he has been waiting for the Congressional Republicans to fail, because only then would he have an opportunity to lead?

I suppose the answer is: we shall see.

At any rate, the president's reaction to the failure of the Republican Obamacare replacement in the Senate seems to tell us something. Tweeted he:

As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!

I think that Donald Trump's Art-of-the-Deal approach to politics is rather unfamiliar to university-trained students of politics. This is because politicians usually try to present themselves as demi-gods, that never have a doubt, and never make a mistake. Thus the original Obamacare was presented to us as a triumphal progress, rather than a savage battle for votes in Congress and a battle of the special interests from Big Health to Big Drug to Big Insurance. But Trump doesn't seem to worry about his moment-to-moment image. He seems to be able to deal with setbacks and tactical retreats.

Will this work with Obamacare? We don't know. But we do know that, as of now, Democrats don't seem to be too worried about the ongoing trainwreck of Obamacare with insurers exiting for state markets all over the place. There have been zero Democratic votes for the Republican plans thus far.

I´d say that until the Democrats decide, all of a sudden, that the world is coming to an end and that We Need Action on Obamacare NOW, that it is useless for Republicans to propose reforms and replacements.

When the Democrats are ready to cry Uncle and demand that President Trump take action NOW, then it will be the moment to ask them: how much am I bid?

Because, you see, it's the science. There's the science of strategy, and the science of the economy, and The Calculus of Consent.  Our liberal friends are in denial about all of them, and they won't change their minds until their political building is burning down.

What's All This About Treason?

Remember back in the day when liberals were really touchy about patriotism? Hillary Clinton spoke for all liberals back in the Bush administration when she said:

I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.

Yes indeed. Then came the Obama administration. Fortunately, the Obamis and their willing accomplices in the media did not question the patriotism of regime opponents. They just called them racists if they opposed the president.

So on the one hand you are not allowed to criticize Democrats for opposing a Republican administration, because, hey, we're Americans and we got rights. But you are not allowed to criticize a Democratic administration because racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Or any other  pejorative that the intersectional SJWs at Activism Central might come up with.

Back in the Cold War it was insupportable to dare to mention the "T" word. Oh No! That was McCarthyism! How dare anyone accuse Alger Hiss of Treason and  spying for the Commies. And how dare anyone say a word against the noble and innocent Rosenbergs, condemned to death and executed -- for what? McCarthyism, straight up.

But now, pore little Donald Trump Jr. has a meeting with a curious Russian character, you know, the lady that was given a special waiver to enter the US without a visa by the Obama Justice Department, and Democrats start talking about Treason!

I  am just starting a book by überlefty Jürgen Habermas about Theory and Praxis and how the purely theoretical approach of the ancient philosophers and the Natural Law chappies had to be replaced by a critical theory that combined both theory and practice in an environment of proper communications where ordinary people are included in the conversation.

But today, we have a "depoliticized public" that is not involved in "a general discursive formation of the public will". Only the left-wing media and Democratic politicians and lefty NGOs are allowed to participate in the conversation. Everybody else is afraid to speak.

That is because liberals and progressives and Democrats and all their activist groups are yelling pejoratives from dawn to dusk; there is no chance for conversation.

When Habermas advances his theory of communicative action, recognizing, after Wittgenstein, that humans are fundamentally communicative folks that use language to interact and cooperate, he is assuming that lefty communication and theory and practice will replace the flawed bourgeois notions of "advanced capitalism."

That is assuming that Habermas is serious about serious non-hegemonic communications. I suspect though that he imagines that non-hegemonic communication is inherently critical and inherently leads to the deconstruction of "advanced capitalism" and its replacement by an egalitarian liberatory society where people are truly free rather that formally free.

Suppose he is wrong, and that open dialog  and conversation leads to a small government society without a starring role for a lefty educated class? What does the robin do then, poor thing?

What the robin does then, poor thing, is to start to shout and sing, and drown out any discouraging word, and starts to call ordinary elite Americans traitors.

The robin is telling us that the whole lefty project is in real trouble, from its theory of society to its practice of centralized administrative systems. And don't forget it was from Frankfurt School lefties that I got my meme of "System is Domination." It really is getting a little old that in a society where the ruling class is all over anyone that dares to challenge its left-wing assumptions that old-fashioned oppression and exploitation are still as bad as ever. Is it really true to say, as this Good Little Girl does:

I believe in liberation. I believe it is our duty to obliterate white supremacy, anti-blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism.

And obliterate it with what? Leftist supremacy, anti-whiteness, anything-but-hetero-archy, socialism, and lefist cultural imperialism?

The fact is that our lefty friends are in a trap. They have been implementing their cultural and political agenda in the name of liberation for the last century, and the truth is that lefty liberation doesn't liberate; its imprisons. They are no longer saying that their top-down centralized administrative dominatory systems are a wonder. So they are reduced to saying that if you touch a hair of Medicad [sic] then millions will die. They find themselves accusing their opponents of treason.

They are in the position of President Maduro of Venezuela that is desperately saying and doing anything to keep his socialist disaster from imploding.

We conservatives, we normals, are often intimidated by our liberal friends, who so confidently expound upon race and sex and equality. But when they are "resisting" the election results for the second time in sixteen years, and when they are starting to accuse people of treason in addition to the regular menu of racism, sexism, and homophobia, then we have to assume that something is going very wrong for them. Confident people, secure in their world view, do not have to accuse and blame. They accept electoral defeat with a wink, knowing that the next election, or the next but one will be "time for a change."

But if the times are out of joint, if the Inconceivable! has happened, if a rank beginner has routed the ruling class despite all its advantages and its patronage, then the ordinary timid peaceful protester and Progressive Activist, Second Class, starts to quiver. Something is going wrong; perhaps the racist sexist insurgents are at the gate.

McCarthyism flourished in the late 1940s after the Democrats had won five presidential elections in a row. Republicans started looking under the bed to figure out what was going on. They suspected treason and espionage and actually they were right. There were people on the left that had let their enthusiasm for a better world trump their loyalty to country. Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy; the Rosenbergs did steal atomic secrets. So maybe the Republicans of the era had an excuse for a bit of paranoia.

But Democrats got paranoid that George W. Bush won in a normal Time for a Change election after two terms of Bill Clinton. Now they are resisting after another Time for a Change election after two terms of Obama. You have to be a particularly dull kind of person not to understand that the political pendulum swings to and fro and this is a good thing that keeps the nation from civil war.

And if your partisans are screaming Treason when the son of the president meets with a foreign national, what is their problem? And what is your problem?

Does the Trump-Russia Scandal Help or Hurt?

A week is a long time in politics. So said British politician Harold Wilson. Only he may not have said it, and it may have been "two weeks" rather than one.

After the week of the Donald Trump Jr. collusion-with-the-Russians scandal, people are worrying that the president's tax and health care agenda is in peril.

But I wonder. Is it worse to have Democrats on CNN wailing that millions will die if Obamacare goes down, or is is better to have them raging about Trump Jr. having a meeting with a Russian woman that has connections with the Fusion GPS Democratic opposition research organization and mysteriously got to enter with US without a visa?

I'm not a pollster or a politician so I really don't know how all this comes down on the politicians that are no doubt wheeling and dealing behind the scenes on the Republican health bill.

All I know is what I read in Buchanan and Tullock's book The Calculus of Consent. The basic argument of that book is that, if you are a county council and some of the landowners want the government to pay for a county road that benefits them, then the representatives of those landowners are going to have to buy the votes of the landowners that probably won't benefit enough to want to pay for the new road.

In other words, when you read of Republican United States Senators that are opposed to the health bill currently up in the Senate, you might easily think that the GOP leadership hasn't made a good enough offer yet.

You might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.

See, I don't know if the swing votes in the 2018 midterms will be the folks that lost some of their Obamacare subsidies or whether they will be the folks that will cancel their expensive Obamacare health insurance and go naked if they don't have to pay a penalty.

My instinct is that the folks getting Obamacare subsidies are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. My guess is that the folks that would go naked are probably Trump supporters. But, of course, the voters in an election are usually motivated by anger rather than satisfaction, so I would guess that the dyed-in-the-wool Democrats that lost their subsidies would be more inclined to vote than the Trump voters that can now risk their non-existent fortunes on the odds that they might find themselves in the ER and be facing a $100,000 hospital bill without insurance. But what do I know?

All I know is that, if you don't have home equity or a retirement nest egg, you don't need health insurance. The point of insurance is to protect your assets against a big hit. If you don't have assets then you can just go bankrupt.

The only thing for the Trumpsters and the GOP to do is to enact their agenda, buy the necessary votes is concerned, and hope for the best. Get the tax rate cuts out there and have them take effect immediately. Get the Obamacare reform out there and make sure that it starts relief on premiums as soon as possible. Help the fracking revolution along as much as possible, and ease the way for oil and natural gas exports.

What most people want is a decent job and a home and decent schools for the kids. They are not that interested in identity politics and not that interested in the SJW activism that is consuming the educated class right now. In fact, most people are probably afraid of political correctness, because they recognize that a careless tweet could cost them their job.

And never forget that the reason Donald Trump is president today rather than Jeb! is that the old Republican order failed. It failed because it did not know how to push back against the bully boy tactics of the left that made everyone that disagreed with the Democratic line du jour into a racist sexist homophobe. Or a fascist.

Yes, Culture and Behavior Codes Matter. But So Does Policy

When conservatives get annoyed with David Brooks, the house conservative columnist at The New York Times, they forget his job description. His job is to gently waft a bit of conservatism at NYT readers without turning them off with the nasty smell. It is to hold up s soft-focus mirror to the lumpen-liberals, so that maybe they will laugh at themselves. Just a little.

But never, oh never, make them mad. Because then they will stop reading, and then David Brooks won't have a job.

Conservatives have been laughing and sneering at David Brooks for his recent article, "How We Are Ruining America," that gently suggests that the whole upscale latte culture, with a side of organic food and Italian sandwiches, is just a teeny bit exclusionary. It is what we might call the liberal equivalent of raccoon-skin coats and Stutz Bearcats.

Once upon a time wealthy young college men used to wear raccoon-skin coats and drive Stutz Bearcats. At least I think so. Hollywood made a few movies with those kind of kids in them, so I suppose it must be true. The point about raccoon-skin coats and Stutz Bearcats, I assume, was that you can't afford them.

Paul Mirengoff takes after Brooks and his critics by pointing out that the big divide in America is not about exclusionary cultural markers that tell the hoi-polloi that they are not welcome here. The reason that educated people do well and others do not comes down to "behavior codes."

Brooks and the experts he cites in his column are blaming people with winning behavior codes for the woes of the children of people with losing codes.

And that, for Mirengoff, is missing the point.

Meanwhile Gavin McInnes takes after a documentary by Ben Lear, the son of Archie Bunker's Norman Lear, that present violent Hispanic boys in the US as helpless victims of the system "that does nothing to help." One boy shot and paralyzed a young woman; the other one stabbed a fellow gang member. Both were living in single-parent homes. Gavin McInnes assumes the settled science that the way to avoid raising killer kids is:

1. Finish high school.
2. Don't have kids until you are married.
3. Don't get divorced.

OK, so why don't the folks in the inner city get a clue? Why don't they drive their kids mercilessly to do well in school? Why do they put up with lousy schools? What is wrong with them?

You know what is coming. I propose to analyze the lower orders using my reductive Three Peoples theory and my definition of government:

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the people thereof to reward its supporters.

 But I want to further sharpen my definition of government to suggest that a government and its supporters are very like an army. The ruling class is the officer corps and the supporters are the "licentious soldiery" that sit around in the barracks doing nothing except drinking and fighting unless mobilized to march off to war and become cannon fodder.

On this view our there is a method to the madness. The underclass and its votes are the liberals' army. They are the People of the Subordinate Self that live in subordination to some boss, whether to the steward of a great landowner or the local welfare bureaucrat. It makes sense to keep the soldiers barracked off from the rest of America in inner-city ghettos with lousy schools and with no jobs, but with welfare to keep the soldiers from deserting the colors. And it makes sense to sell the idea that, boy, those inner-city folks are fierce political soldiers, and you better not mess with them.

Put it this way. If the underclass all suddenly got married and insisted on decent schools and got jobs and got off welfare, what happens to the liberals' electoral army? In twenty years all those welfare recipients would be rock-ribbed Republicans. And we can't have that.

But is it right for liberals to blight the lives of millions of Americans by keeping them lounging around the liberal barracks with nothing to do but drink and drug and fornicate and kill each other? Is it not the vilest injustice ever? To tempt people into dysfunction with the promise of a miserable welfare check? Or, as they say, to pimp out the underclass with money for nothing?

In the old days, of course, the poor just died off. That is clear from Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms. Before about 1800, in England, the poor had fewer surviving children than the middle class and the rich so society was "downwardly mobile." But the industrial revolution changed all that and society became "upwardly mobile" as the lower classes bettered their condition and rose from penury to decency and then to prosperity.

In recent years, most commentators agree, the upwardly mobile society seems to have stalled, in part because of the decline of manufacturing, and because of the workforce competition from immigrants like me and from women entering the workforce. Oh, and, of course, from so many people exiting the workforce to go on welfare or disability.

I'd say that the reason for this is liberals. It is liberals that gave manufacturing workers privileges so they could be paid above market with union jobs that could not be adjusted until the whole thing came crashing down. It is liberals that have flooded the nation with immigrants and tempted corporations to hire cheap immigrants instead of native workers. It is liberals that have taught women to believe that they should be careerists rather than mothers and homemakers. It is liberals that have relaxed the rules for welfare and for disability.

And why not? For liberals, political power is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. And to do politics you need a political army that will march off to war when the command is given.

So nothing will change unless we break the power of the liberals.

Missing the Point on Economics and Government

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I got to read a piece in the London Guardian about "How Economics Became a Religion" by John Rapley.

The article is a promo for Rapley's book just out, Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How it all Went Wrong. I think that Rapley, at least in the Guardian's "long read" article, misses the point completely.

Rapley writes about how

Economics offers a comprehensive doctrine with a moral code promising adherents salvation in this world; an ideology so compelling that the faithful remake whole societies to conform to its demands. It has its gnostics, mystics and magicians who conjure money out of thin air, using spells such as “derivative” or “structured investment vehicle”. And, like the old religions it has displaced, it has its prophets, reformists, moralists and above all, its high priests who uphold orthodoxy in the face of heresy.

Well, yes. But there is a tendency for all doctrines to elevate themselves above mere practical utility and attempt to penetrate the empyrean. For one thing, it helps in fending off pretenders to knowledge who have no business challenging the high priests of the temple.

But the point about economics is that its practitioners are very useful to politicians, because economists advertise that they can help to keep the ship of state from foundering on hidden economic reefs.

It is one step from merely using economists as cooks in the kitchen of economic policymaking to elevating them to the status of priests and shamans versed in the mysteries of economic divination, in order to represent ordinary political power plays and routine political looting as the divine rulings of the immortal gods rather than shabby efforts to use the economy as a piggy bank to reward the supporters of the ruling class, in accordance with my dictum:

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

Now in the dim and distant past, before the advent of modern economics, rulers frequently got into a bit of a jam when it came to funding their wars and rewarding their supporters. To my recollection, Edward III ruined a few Italian bankers in his efforts to fund the First Hundred Years War against France and to set up the Black Prince as a prince among men. Henry VIII, he of the multiple wives, had several financial crises during his reign, which included debasing the currency. He had it harder than Edward III because his policy of disarming the nobles meant that he needed to fund the entire national security budget through taxes and with credits from the merchants of London rather than in the old feudal way of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays when each nobleman talked about bringing "our powers" to the battle.

But then the Dutch invented central banking in their war of liberation against the empire of Spain, and when they invaded Britain in 1688 they brought their financial technology with them. The result was that the Brits won the Second Hundred Years War against the French even though they had cranked up their National Debt to 250 percent of GDP by 1815 and the decisive Battle of Waterloo. France lost the war because it was cursed with financial twerps like John Law that ruined French finances (he was treated as a demi-god until it turned out he had feet of clay).

In the middle of all this, enter the classical economists with their notion of the division of labor and their two-pronged value theory: use value and exchange value -- plus comparative advantage, free trade and all that. All this was pretty magical, but nobody thought to sell it to the people as magic. Not yet.

It was Karl Marx who elevated economics to the status of a religion. That's because Marxism is a secular religion promising heaven on earth if only we follow the prophet Marx and his precepts, which were a dog's breakfast of classical economics, a mashup of use value, exchange value, surplus value, and the obvious point that, in a competitive market, all the profit gets squeezed out and everybody gets poorer and poorer as they fight for market share on diminishing profit margins. Marx had the brilliant insight that you could dress up your political ideas as "science" and promise to save the world from a fate worse than death.

Of course, Marx finished his Capital in the early 1860s and published Volume 1 in 1866-67, just before the marginal value revolution of 1870 that made nonsense of his economics. Hey, that happens, but you will read Marxist writers in vain to discover any attempt to revise Marx's prophecy in light of the new science. So they had to elevate his prophesies into Holy Writ.

Up until Bismarck's social insurance politics of the 1880s government's only interest in economics was in funding its wars, and this could be done using the precepts of central banking developed by the Dutch and brilliantly executed in the US by folks like Alexander Hamilton.

But the big-government state that Bismarck and the social reformers instantiated before and after World War I raised the stakes on government. Government began interfering with the workings of the price system and the economy in a number of ways, and so government needed technical experts to make sure that its usual blunders didn't pitch the economy into a big financial panic.

Just as natural science allows humans to build structures and engines and internets that would be impossible without the technology built upon a foundation of natural science, it is also true that government could not run the current mega-state with its myriad of taxes and privileges and subsidies without a technology to guide them.

Gee, funny how the first thing that happened after economists really got into the saddle was the mother of all financial crashes, the Great Depression of 1929-33.

Obviously, after a blunder like the Great Depression, government needed a miracle, and it got one, in the form of Keynesianism. Keynes taught a receptive audience that it was the height of progress and sophistication to spend borrowed money on the regime's supporters in the aftermath of a financial crisis. Obviously, governments could not say that the point of Keynesianism was to clean up the mess made by interventionist government. Instead they let it be known that their tame economists were geniuses that had completely reformed the old, classical economics that had got us into the Great Depression. Eventually, the government's tame economists decided that they had tamed the business cycle. Of course they did. That was in the 1960s, right before the inflation of the 1970s and the big recession of 1980-81.

With that sort of politics and its constant mumbling and bumbling, pretty soon you need to make economists into demi-gods, cunningly manipulating the economic world from Mt. Olympus, so that the politicians on the bridge can report to the people that they will navigate the ship of state out of financial trouble with a magical economic compass that only those initiated into the mysteries of the New Economics could read. It's the obvious thing to do. When practical knowledge fails, humans resort to magic.

And naturally, just as we tend to venerate Albert Einstein as a kind of demi-god for coming up with relativity, we tend to venerate the economists that walk on the death-defying tightrope of economic policy, trying to find cunning ways for the government to win elections and hand out free stuff without going full Venezuela.

Obviously it is best not to let the plebs see how this sausage gets made. It is better to distract them and rulers since the dawn of time have done that in a condominium with shamans, temple priests, and established churches. Or, as Rapley writes,

Over time, successive economists slid into the role we had removed from the churchmen: giving us guidance on how to reach a promised land of material abundance and endless contentment. 

Of course they did. The ordinary person doesn't understand economics. So the sensible thing for the ruling class to do is to cloister the right kind of economists in educational monasteries and treat their utterances as holy writ. As was the case with good old established churches, the politicians get to appoint the abbots and bishops of the economic monasteries and cathedrals and the abbots and bishops loyally maintain the fiction that their divinations come directly from God, er, science. Nothing to see here. It's the way it always works.

I see what Rapley's game is. You can see it from the blurb at Amazon.

Imagine one day you went to a cash-machine and found your money was gone. You rushed to your branch, where a teller said that overnight people had stopped believing in money, and it all vanished. Seem incredible? It happened, and it could happen again. Twilight of the Money Gods is the story of economics, told not as the science it strove to be...

Well, yes. The government's tame economist bishops and abbots are exactly what the established church abbots and bishops were: ruling class stooges. And when the music stops the bishops and the abbots won't be a bit of good to help you get money out of your local ATM.

When the music stops the key thing is for the government to step into its role of "lender of last resort." Walter Bagehot wrote the bible on that in Lombard Street. In the 2008 crash the government ended up doing a pretty good job of last-resort lender, after a brief panic when Ben Bernanke muffed on his priestly job of bailing out Lehman Brothers in September 2008. He said he didn't have the legal authority to bail them out. Oh please, Ben. The only job of the Federal Reserve is to be lender of last resort. Period. And you muffed it, and you made it worse. Of course, Ben Bernanke was an academic economist.

The whole lender-of-last-resort operation in 2008 added up to about $16 to 20 trillion in bailouts and (mostly) guarantees. See my TARP bailout page for details. So in the end the priests and abbots of the global established church of economics did their job and applied extreme unction to the economy with the appropriate rites, incense, and laying on of hands. Whatever that means.

But don't forget the unforgettable Mrs. Proudie. There must be a role for her in the New Church of Economics.