You've hit the nail on the head here. These past few years I've felt like every major institution has been in a credibility crisis. Government, news, universities, the whole thing is falling apart. One hypothesis I'm starting to believe was coined by Eric Weinstein as the Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO). The basic idea is we had a few historically unique decades post WWII of exponential growth, and all of our institutions are now reliant on that. But the real exponential growth is over and they're flailing about trying to fake it.
Yes, I'm familiar with this idea, and I think it really does get close to one of the roots of the problem. I hope more people start listening carefully to individuals like Mr. Weinstein before it's too late to change course.
I don't always agree with everything he says on other issues, but we are lucky to have him in a position where he's afforded the right to speak freely. It's a shameful embarrassment to the state of our public discourse that it takes a billionaire hedge fund backing to secure that right.
My problem with Weinstein and his ilk is that I don't see them offering solutions, they just yell "distrust, distrust, distrust" and not much creative and serious thinking about solutions. Meanwhile long time economists, labour and political activists (voluntarists and america-style libertarians, statist-socialists and classical neoliberals and a bunch of other flavors), artist/sacademics across the board and others have been saying "distrust these people for these reasons and do this to fix it" for decades and no-one seems to care because it goes against their politics, while claiming to not have politics because they are too smart and cynical for that.
The "Embedded Growth Hypothesis" for example has been a thing that socialists, eco activists and even austrian economics and classical keynesians (if that's a proper term, I mean Keynesians who believe that debt is a problem and you should pay it back and not rely on MMT to pay it back via inflation) have been trying to push for a long time. But they also offer solutions which are compatible with an open society (at least the ones moderate enough to become mainstream), they don't just claim the current system is corrupt.
It's fine to just criticize without offering solutions, but if you are gonna claim "everyones distrustworthy" you should back things up more.
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Oh, and Weinstein in particular has been using his right to speak freely for decades and continues to use it about being silenced. Now he just has a billionaire backer whose politics align with what he's saying to amplify him.
You've hit the nail on the head here. These past few years I've felt like every major institution has been in a credibility crisis. Government, news, universities, the whole thing is falling apart. One hypothesis I'm starting to believe was coined by Eric Weinstein as the Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO). The basic idea is we had a few historically unique decades post WWII of exponential growth, and all of our institutions are now reliant on that. But the real exponential growth is over and they're flailing about trying to fake it.
https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligation