Political-Economic Power Games 
So why no mandatory accounting in high schools?

https://www.spectacle.org/1199/wargame.html

 

Do Economists actually understand the system?
Are they just keeping the Peons confused?

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5 hours ago, umbrarchist said:

Political-Economic Power Games 

Have been ongoing for over a century here in the USA.

 

5 hours ago, umbrarchist said:

So why no mandatory accounting in high schools?

As mentioned previously, accounting is primarily used for businesses.

 

Running a household doesn't require knowledge of accounting.

 

5 hours ago, umbrarchist said:

Do Economists actually understand the system?
Are they just keeping the Peons confused?

There is no lack of knowledge. There is no confusion.

 

People of all classes have bought into the economic systembas it has been constructed.😎

6 hours ago, ProfD said:

As mentioned previously, accounting is primarily used for businesses.

 

Running a household doesn't require knowledge of accounting.

Running a household and running a household WELL are not necessarily the same thing.

 

My senior year in high school I was in the basement of what I was told was the biggest bookstore in the city. That is where the business section was. I looked in one book, it was a rather thin book, but very near the beginning it suggested that every household should be run like a business. That would have been 1969 or 70. Possibly before you were born.

 

For some reason I didn't buy it. But I never forgot it. But I took for granted that Planned Obsolescence was happening in cars before I graduated from high school. I built lots of models of planes and cars in grammar school.

 

I built one of these in grade school.

 

 

This piece of junk has a hand crank on the back. 60 years ago there was an electric motor in the starter housing. A PhD economist could not explain a car engine to me in the 90s.

 

I watched a video of a man complaining about having to pay £500 to get a light bulb working on a car. Electricity to the bulb was controlled by a computer circuit board. The bulb was not the problem. The computer board had to be replaced. This is progress?

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On 11/4/2025 at 1:47 AM, umbrarchist said:

Running a household and running a household WELL are not necessarily the same thing.

Over several generations, good enough has managed to suffice for most households.

 

 

On 11/4/2025 at 1:47 AM, umbrarchist said:

My senior year in high school I was in the basement of what I was told was the biggest bookstore in the city. That is where the business section was. I looked in one book, it was a rather thin book, but very near the beginning it suggested that every household should be run like a business.

The book suggested that every household should be run like a business. 

 

I wonder if that particular book also mentioned that most businesses fail within the first 5 years or so for one reason or three.

 

On 11/4/2025 at 1:47 AM, umbrarchist said:

I watched a video of a man complaining about having to pay £500 to get a light bulb working on a car. Electricity to the bulb was controlled by a computer circuit board. The bulb was not the problem. The computer board had to be replaced. This is progress?

Any type of *advanced* technology is more expensive to repair. 

 

Surely, people could learn home economics and electronics and home improvement, etc., in order to save money on everything from eating out to car repairs and home maintenance. 

 

The reality is that the average person only has a limited amount of bandwidth.   The majority of people on the planet are average.

 

IMO, people are better off using their time and energy on their purpose and/or pursuing those things of interest to them.

 

The wonderful thing about the world in which we live is there is no shortage of individual pursuits.  Live life to the fullest because our time here is very short in the grand scheme of things.😎

On 11/5/2025 at 1:30 PM, ProfD said:

Over several generations, good enough has managed to suffice for most households.

 

 

The book suggested that every household should be run like a business. 

 

I wonder if that particular book also mentioned that most businesses fail within the first 5 years or so for one reason or three.

 

Any type of *advanced* technology is more expensive to repair. 

 

Surely, people could learn home economics and electronics and home improvement, etc., in order to save money on everything from eating out to car repairs and home maintenance. 

 

The reality is that the average person only has a limited amount of bandwidth.   The majority of people on the planet are average.

 

IMO, people are better off using their time and energy on their purpose and/or pursuing those things of interest to them.

 

The wonderful thing about the world in which we live is there is no shortage of individual pursuits.  Live life to the fullest because our time here is very short in the grand scheme of things.😎

 

How much do people need to Know to comprehend a Bathtub Curve graph? But when does anybody ever hear of a Bathtub Curve?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

 

It was like my working at IBM. I NeVeR heard or saw the word 'benchmark' the entire time I was there. I had to write my own. Almost every computer you encounter uses a von Neumann architecture. IBM hired John von Neumann as a consultant in 1950. There was no mention of him or the architecture while I was there.

 

I am simply saying that Important but Easily Understood information disappears. Black Americans are not going to get far not getting passed the bullshit.

 

Making a light dependent on a computer is a stupid design when it could cause an accident or get the driver a ticket.

2 hours ago, umbrarchist said:

I am simply saying that Important but Easily Understood information disappears. Black Americans are not going to get far not getting passed the bullshit.

The question is how important is the information if Black folks have made it this far BS included.

 

Reminds of a comment the CEO of OpenAI recently made that if AI can do the same job as a human, the job must not have been that important anyway.😁

 

2 hours ago, umbrarchist said:

Making a light dependent on a computer is a stupid design when it could cause an accident or get the driver a ticket.

Calculated risks are taken all the time in every aspect of our lives. 

 

Right now, they are not overly worried about air traffic controllers walking off the job as a result of not getting paid and letting planes crash or fall out of the sky.😎

Out of curiosity I asked ChatGPT:

 

Are Economists stupid or liars in relation to dealing with the Depreciation of Durable Consumer Goods?

 

========= ChatGPT =========

Economists as a group are not stupid or liars regarding consumer depreciation — but the way depreciation is handled in economics can create confusion, and there are legitimate criticisms about how economists talk about it.

 

Here’s a clear breakdown:

 

✅ 1. Depreciation is well understood in economics — but mostly in firms, not households

Economists have long had precise models of:

 

capital depreciation

replacement cost

optimal capital stock

amortization schedules

productive vs. nonproductive assets

But most of this theory is applied to businesses, not households.

 

This means economists usually study:

“How do companies account for depreciation?”

not

“How do consumers actually experience depreciation?”

So the gap is real — but not malicious.

 

✅ 2. Consumer depreciation is important… but economists largely ignore it

For households, depreciation governs much of economic reality:

 

Cars lose thousands per year

Phones become worthless in 3–5 years

Appliances fail

Clothes wear out

Buildings degrade

 

A huge share of consumer spending is really replacement spending

This is often called the Maintenance Burden or Replacement Burden of consumer capital, and it is nowhere near as integrated into mainstream models as business depreciation.

 

This is a legitimate criticism:

Economists dramatically underemphasize the economic drag created by required replacement of depreciating consumer goods.

 

But this oversight is systemic, not deceitful.

=========== ROFL ============

 

I would just call it lying but some economists must be stupid. 🤣

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Edited November 14, 2025Nov 14 by umbrarchist
Bolding

I did a search for "automotive economist".

 

"An automotive economist analyzes the economic factors, trends, and data shaping the global vehicle industry, focusing on sales, production, supply chains (like the shift to EVs), consumer behavior, and market forecasts for manufacturers, suppliers, dealers, and investors"

 

No results found for "automotive economist" "planned obsolescence".

 

Apparently an automotive economist must be out of touch with reality. 🤣

I have been blocked by two PhD economists on BlueSky back to back. One from Yale, on Christmas!

 

 

Neither one commented on anything I wrote and I knew nothing about them before the blocks. Their CVs are public. They got their PhDs in 2015 and 2017.  So it has occurred to me that I figured out that the Economics Profession was doing algebra wrong before they were born.

 

Are we taught to Think of Economics incorrectly?

 

Where is the data on the depreciation of all American cars purchased by consumers since 1976? How many hundreds of billions of $$$ has that amounted to by now? How long can this go on?

 

Can the Trumpression bring this up as an issue? We have had 75 years of planned obsolescence in automobiles. 70 years before the Great Depression was the American Civil War.  NO CARS!

 

This is a different situation.

The Great American Slave State!

 

 

Double entry accounting is SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS old.  Funny how it is not mandatory in high schools.  Gotta read Thucidides and the Pelloponesian Wars.

Vulcan Anarchist Manifesto

It is fascinating that we are now living in an Amok Time. The administration of the United States government is reeking havoc in the US and around the world, economically, politically and militarily.

It was in the first episode of the second season of "Star Trek" that Leonard Nimoy in the role of Mr. Spock introduced the Vulcan salute 🖖 and greeting "Live Long and Prosper". That episode was titled "Amok Time".

As a science fiction artwork "Star Trek" often presented us with the perennial SF problem, what to do with, and how to cope with changing technology. It is possible that we have been failing at that in a major way since the end of World War Two. The Great Depression before WWII may have helped bias economists and politicians to make a serious error.

We have been hearing GDP, Gross Domestic Product, on a nearly daily basis since about 1990. Before that it was GNP, Gross National Product. The difference is of no practical importance to the vast majority of people. The increase in what the acronyms stand for has been regarded as Economic Growth, but that is not quite the case. It is Growth in Economic Activity but what it actually increases can depend on the amount of Depreciation.

At this point we can raise the Logical Issue of what exactly do we mean by PROSPERITY???

The concept of GNP was developed in the late 1930s when the US and the World were still in the grip of The Depression. Politicians of the day were frantic about UneMployMent and what the unemployed might get up to. A derivative concept NNP, Net National Product, was part of the Economic Concept.

NNP = GNP - Depreciation

What was meant by Depreciation in 1938 was strictly Capital Goods in the form of machinery and buildings to further production. Samuelson's Economics textbook of 1948 continued teaching that perspective and ignored automobiles and refrigerators purchased by consumers. However in 1948 fewer than 1% of American households had televisions. See where Technology and Star Trek are sneaking into the picture? The Enterprise of economics must expand The Federation.

By 1950 almost 10% of American homes had televisions and the percentage grew continuously through the 50s. It reached 90% in 1962. Possibly the fastest spread of a technology in history up to that time.

What probably could not be known at the time, but can now be found with computer analysis is that before 1965 "planned obsolescence" was appearing in print more often than 'consumerism' but afterwards consumerism took off and left PO in the dust. Not even Mr Spock could have known. What was TeleVision advertising doing to the minds of Americans? Do we have permanent cultural Brain Damage? The terms can be graphed over time with the N-gram App.

So what has advertising and technological change done to society and economics since the 1960s? The Moon Landing was So Long Ago! The Original Star Trek was off the air before Apollo 11, but the next generation of technology was always coming. What have economists been telling us about the Depreciation of consumer technology for Decades?

NOTHING!

Karl Marx is an infamous name in the subject of Political-Economics. He was an intellectual participant in the Amok Time of the French Revolution of 1848. His "Communist Manifesto" was not a minor incendiary at the event. His name continues to echo down the halls of history getting louder with "Das Kapital" and every economic stumble of Capitalism. Marx said that he was not a Marxist but vast numbers of lesser intellectuals have carried on in his name. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has come and gone in his name but after 177 years political-economics seems on the verge of running amok again.

Can the World handle a Trumpression?

Can a little historical perspective possibly help us see through this mess?

How many horses were there in New York City in 1899, 16 years after Marx's death? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000, there was no great urgency for accuracy. This presented a problem for every major city because each horse produced about 25 pounds of manure per day.

13 thousand Tons per week!

There were no automobiles when Marx died. Henry Ford introduced the Model-T in 1908. By 1912 the number of horses, which was already declining, equaled the number of motor vehicles which was rising to crossover at about 110,000. The horse population was down to 56,000 by 1920. Fortunately they did not have to count the flies. The count was at 22,000 by 1930.

The gasoline engine made more things possible than automobiles. The Wright brothers' plane of 1903 looked like something only madmen would try to fly but the advances over the next 40 years were remarkable. The fastest planes of World War One topped out at 130 mph. But 30 years after the Model-T engineers were working on the P-38. The first Lightning took to the sky on January 27th of 1939. It's cruising speed of 275 mph was more than double the maximum of machines that fought the Great War. By the end of World War Two a number of planes were getting near the theoretical maximum for propeller driven craft.

Technology was affecting the world before Marx died in 1883. Marx wrote about the depreciation of "rolling stock", that is Trains. Only volume 1 of Das Kapital was published by his death, with 11 mentions of 'Depreciation'. Frederick Engles, with what must have required herculean effort, edited and published volumes 2 and 3, with 'depreciation' arising many more times, about 100. Marx must have mentioned Adam Smith more than 100 times in Das Kapital also. What did Smith say that might still be relevant today? He never mentioned 'depreciation' but used the word 'education' Eighty Times and wrote "read, write and ACCOUNT" FIVE times. In 1776 50% of Brits were illiterate, but where are economists advocating mandatory accounting in high schools today? The US could have done that since 1950. Sounds more useful than 4 years of English literature.

Vladimir Lenin became an ardent believer in Marxist theory and a central driving figure in the Russian Revolution. Although a believer in Marx, like many other Marxists, he did not say much about Marx's attention to the detail of 'Depreciation'. But the year after his death in 1924 a new techno-economic phenomenon became a feature of the future. In 1925 the Phoebus Cartel was formed to organize the "Planned Obsolescence" of light bulbs. A technology that was struggling to work when Lenin was struggling to walk had become too good for satisfactory corporate profits after his death. It was to have its quality reduced to raise the demand for the quantity desired by the manufacturers. The customers must buy more for the benefit of investors.

The Wall Street Crash was 4 years away.

The Depression stressed out the entire world but scientific and technological advances continued. The neutron was discovered in 1932 and got greater historical significance in a dozen years. The global economic condition motivated a lot of thought about curing the economic malaise. Bernard London wrote about alleviating the problem with Planned Obsolescence, also in 1932. World War Two provided an eventual solution to unemployment though it came with strings attached, death and destruction, which might be regarded as very high speed depreciation.

All things must pass so eventually the War ended, but what did the Depression and the War do to the psyche of America? A fanatical belief in Economic Growth seems to have taken over the Power Elite after the War. Who decided what to do with the technology and the phenomenal productive capacity? In the early 2000s Will Steffen and his colleagues coined the term "The Great Acceleration" for the period beginning immediately after the War. The period that the "Baby Boomers" were born into. The period that Donald Trump was born into, in 1946. But unlike most Boomers, he was born rich.

What do children know about Normal? They just see and experience whatever is happening at the time. Post-WWII America was not Normal. Television was a new thing all through the 1950s. Saturday morning cartoons were Normal for 1950s kids but it had never happened to any previous generation. Europe and Japan were rebuilding from the War. The United States was riding higher than Normal with them temporarily out of the picture.

What were economists saying about the Depreciation of Durable Consumer Goods through the 1950s? Who really cared what Vance Packard had written in "The Waste Makers" in 1960? Grow, grow, rah, rah, rah!

The first national presidential debate was broadcast in September of 1960. The post-debate analysis showed that radio listeners thought that Nixon had won but television viewers went with Kennedy. More than 60,000,000 Americans watched the debate. Kennedy won the election and by 1962 90% of American households had televisions. Almost everyone could watch The Beatles, Star Trek and eventually, the Moon Landing.

Technologies have changed the road we have been traveling since the turn of the 20th Century. Did the Depression raise our fears causing us to miss a turn at the end of World War Two? Has Planned Obsolescence been a bad idea? What if we had made long lasting products but kept prices down by not changing styles? Consider what happened to Ford Model-T prices from 1908 to 1926. Sliding down from $850 to below $300. In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes was writing about a 15-hour workweek for grandchildren. That might have been the 1990s. Maybe we could have had a 3-day workweek.

What have we been doing with automobiles since the end of WWII, and Why? What could be the point of constantly redesigning machines that roll along the ground, mostly at less than 100 mph? Faster than that is usually illegal! Are corporations encouraging us to get our egos wrapped up in useless variations of mature, if not antiquated, technology for their economic benefit, just like light bulbs in 1925? This brings us back to Marx's Depreciation but he was not talking about automobiles, they did not exist at the time. We must deal with the economics and consequences of technologies that Marx never imagined. Shouldn't modern economists compute and report the depreciation of current technologies?

Other issues that arose during World War Two were the durability, reliability and repairability of machines under wartime conditions. The engine of a Sherman tank could be replaced in 4 hours. Can auto mechanics replace an engine in that time today? What is a "Bathtub Curve"? How long is a "Mean Time To Repair"? Have corporations been at war with the American consumer since 1950? Have Americans been bleeding money?

Where are the economists talking about the NET Domestic Product and Demand-Side Depreciation? This ilLogic has proceeded since the Baby Boomers left high school. Professional economists were not advocating mandatory accounting in high schools back then and have not seen the light since. Apparently they cherry-pick what Adam Smith had to say. That "Invisible Hand" is heard from far more often than it should be. The real Adam Smith only mentioned it ONE Time in 1100 pages. The caricature of Smith that is supposed to inspire our Love of Capitalism never taught Logic at the University of Glasgow in 1751. Would the real Smith call "BS" on modern economists?

Real accounting would deal with real depreciation and recognize that Real Planned Obsolescence is causing much of it.

We are not in Keynesland any more, Toto!

The road to serfdom is paved with techno-trash automobiles. We cannot prosper by spending money on crap.🤑

🖖💰 Live Long & Prosper y'all 💰🖖

SF footnote:

Voyage from Yesteryear (1982) by James P Hogan
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
First 9 chapters Free!
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671577980/0671577980.htm
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