Sunday, November 30, 2008

Emergence and the neo-Marxist meme: Google throws up an Amazon book

I was searching on the "golden age of fraud", curious to see what the Google-mind said about fraud in the 1920s.

Turns out, there was no Google "golden age of fraud" connection to 1920.

Number 3 on my Google list was a post of mine, but that's a side-effect of the emergently solipsistic world of Search -- Google learns what I like and gives it to me.

Number 4 though was interesting: Amazon.com: The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos: Ravi Batra.

From a scan of the reviews it appears Mr Batra has been predicting doom for some time. This 2007 publisher's weekly critique is funny today (emphasis mine) ...
... After nearly 20 years of predicting economic disaster, Batra (Greenspan's Fraud, etc.) suggests a reversal, though only after we rise up in revolution against the forces of chaos. This time, he charges politicians, academics, business executives and rich people with "corruption," defined as "any policy that enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor and the middle class." Among the practices Batra censures are raising congressional pay but not the minimum wage, and cutting income taxes while increasing Social Security taxes. Though the analysis is keen and provocative and the conclusions unorthodox as ever, his specific economic predictions aren't likely to be any better than those in his 11 previous books...
Well, it turns out that 2007 was an excellent time to predict oncoming disaster, though 20 years of precedence inevitably evokes "stuck clocks".

I've not read any part of the book, but the reader reviews have a neo-Marxist flavor.

I suppose this is the right time for a neo-Marxist revival. As someone sympathetic to the obligations the (transiently) strong owe the (currently) weak, I'm not entirely opposed.

It is necessary to point out, however, that Marx was at least as deluded as Freud.

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