SCIENCE CORRUPTED

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 17, 2020

My reference to several economists of the past in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991), included Dr. Juanita Kreps (1921 – 2010) who was trained as an economist at Duke University where she also earned recognition as a scholar being awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key, as was I at the University of Iowa. This scholastic honor society was established in 1776 with only 10 percent of American colleges and universities qualifying today to award such a distinction with only 1 percent of American college graduates among its members.

As Secretary of Commerce in President Jimmy Carter’s administration, when asked when she left that Cabinet position in 1979, if she would return to Duke University and teach, she said candidly, “I wouldn’t know what to teach.” Her words were not only prescience but prophetic. We don’t produce scholars anymore. We produce people who fit in with the prevalent chaos.

A friend of mine has confessed to working his way through Modern Monetary Theory, and I applaud him for the exercise as I think it keeps regenerating his “little gray cells,” as novelist Agatha Christie’s Hercules Poirot likes to put it when his brain is engaged in a mystery.

My sense, given the recent irrational events of late across the globe indicate that not only do our lives appear no longer to matter, but they have been corrupted with absurdity, for science that dictates the nature of our lives has been corrupted as well.

We are now victims of manipulation at a level never before experienced by the invisible hand of such electronic wizards as GOOGLE, which now controls 70 percent of our advertisers who pay for the talking heads, and printed words that go into such media outlets as cable television and main line newspapers not to mention where research dollars go.

GOOGLE, et al, couldn’t do this without the cooperation of all our sacred institutions and disciplines that are apparently afraid to challenge the predominant mania of the times.

Monetary policy, indeed, economic theory and practice, is not unlike our social and behavioral sciences, the domain that once were kept within reasonable parameters by traditional ethics and religion before secular civil religion became essentially monetary policy. We have become wind up stick figures of material substance with no spiritual spine.

I read every word, in fact, I studied every page of Jacques Barzun’s massive “From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present” (2000), covering 500 years of Western Cultural Life. He starts out with a chapter on “The West Torn Apart.” We see it in 2020 not only torn apart but void of distinctive personalities such as Gutenberg, Luther, Calvin and artists of distinction. We are in a nadir period and it is not a pretty sight.

Two World Wars in the 20th century have left us naked, barren and lost. There is no room for God because there is no room for love. It is a hateful time and the haters are now on center stage. This is a dangerous period because reality is now playing on another network.

The seeds of this were apparent with Dr. Juanita Kreps forty years ago. Now the weeds have taken over.