Matisyahu's Blog

Finished work for the week, one week to go and then I’ll be off on my break for two weeks. I was watching a video regarding the AI hype cycle (link) and the way in which mainstream media are almost as though they’re ‘in on in’ it in much the same way that in the early 2000s you’d have talking heads hyping up stocks but secretly behind closed doors the talking heads were betting against it. What amazes me is how the ‘high priests of Wall Street’ are let off Scott free over and over again when they hype something, that something crashes and burns, then the audience has collective amnesia regarding what just took place. It reminds me of 8 years of George W Bush, the economy heading down the toilet, the United States stuck in two pointless wars then 2 years ago Barrack Obama is voted in as president the American population give Republicans a majority in both houses then act surprised that the whole time they’re in power they accomplish nothing. It’s almost as though humanity has collective amnesia where is a complete lack of capacity to remember something more than 2 years ago.

Every time I hear Greenspan excuse away financial crisis as ‘irrational exuberance’ then how the heck does that jell with the ideological underpinnings of neoliberalism that private sector is the best allocator of capital because it is propelled by the profit seeking motive that is shaped by rational self interest. If the market was rational then these sorts of idiotic hype cycles wouldn’t happen – people would see beyond the marketing hype and realise it for it is. The problem is that the alternative to neoliberalism is the government being the allocator of capital through government policy – using the government balance sheet and the ability to issue their own currency to make investments into social housing, to have institutions such as the Ministry of Works planning long term. I refuse to believe that the prophets of neoliberalism are unable to see the flaw in their own ideology but rather they keep perpetuating it because they now in a situation where they’ve invested so much into it that the only choice other than continuing would be to openly admit that they were wrong – the whole neoliberal experiment has been a colossal failure then having to admit they got caught up in a cult of market worship where they threw all rational thinking out the window.