(among other things)
"One school of thought, due to John Maynard Keynes, was that reularities in consumer behavior could provide a basis for fiscal policy to manage economic fluctuations. Many elements in Keynes' theory, such as the "propensity to consume" or entrepreneurs' "animal spirits" that influence their investment decisions, were based on psychological concepts. This framework dominated United States' fiscal policy until the 1960s."
Sayfa 2 - Elsevier Inc., Typeset by Charon Tec Ltd., A Macmillan Company, Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier, London, UK, 2009·Kitabı okudu
The apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event
Karl Menninger used it, in Man Against Himself, by way of describing the tendency to overreact to what might seem ordinary, even predictable, circumstances: a propensity, Dr. Menninger tells us, common among suicides. He cites the young woman who becomes depressed and kills herself after cutting her hair. He mentions the man who kills himself because he has been advised to stop playing golf, the child who commits suicide because his canary died, the woman who kills herself after missing two trains. Notice: not one train, two trains.
Think that over.
Consider what special circumstances are required before this woman throws it all in.
“In these instances,” Dr. Menninger tells us, “the hair, the golf, and the canary had an exaggerated value, so that when they were lost or when there was even a threat that they might be lost, the recoil of severed emotional bonds was fatal.”
Yes, clearly, no argument.
📚🔔 Tatil zili çaldı!
Bir yıl boyunca verilen emeklerin ardından şimdi dinlenme, keşfetme ve yeni maceralara atılma zamanı. 🌞
Bu yaz bol kahkahalı, bol anılı ve elbette bol kitaplı geçsin. Tüm öğrencilere keyifli tatiller diliyoruz! 💙📖
“Because she had a propensity for madness?”
“Because she felt both tenderness and affinity for that leathered, broken body. The way Marianne looked after centuries in the bog, well, that’s how Sarah felt sometimes: all twisted and old and strange.”
A very different but striking example of the destructiveness of the Industrial Revolution is provided by a social historian, Emma Griffin (2018). One of the costs of the Industrial Revolution, she believes, is the disruption of the allocation of resources within the family, at the micro-micro level. Industrialization raised male incomes, “but at the same time it changed patterns of behaviour that had historically helped to ensure that children received the food they needed.” High wages, she feels, “went hand in hand with the erosion of age-old social pressures upon men to provide for their families, resulting in the divergence between male wages and family living standards” (Griffin 2018, 102–103). While Huck and Hanlon document the cost to the urban working class in terms of disease and pollution, Griffin stresses the grinding misery of the rural poor. Searching close to 350 autobiographies for references to hunger and similar terms, she finds that in rural house holds, dependents were most likely to suffer from occasional hunger. Yet in industrial regions, too, childhood deprivation was common. Griffin’s argument is that the Industrial Revolution was both an economic and a cultural event. “Wages formed the bedrock of well-being within families, but a complex series of social and cultural norms were needed in order to turn those wages into well-being.” Men whose real wages were increasing had a greater propensity “of reneging on their responsibility to provide with the consequence that children’s living standards lagged behind the male wage” (Griffin 2018, 106). Strikingly, infant mortality— a standard metric of living standards— stayed stubbornly high in England until the closing years of the nineteenth century.
"Menger sought to explain prices as the outcome of the purposeful, voluntary interactions of buyers and sellers, each guided by their own subjective evaluations of the usefulness of various goods and services (what we now call marginal utility, a term later coined by Friedrich von Wieser). Trade is thus the result of people's deliberate attempts to improve their well-being, not an innate "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange," as suggested by Adam Smith. The exact quantities of goods exchanged- their prices, in other words- are determined by the values individuals attach to marginal units of these goods."
Sayfa 8 - Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, Translated by James Dingwall and Bert F. Hoselitz, Copyright 1976, Reprinted in 2007·Kitabı okudu
What they call zeal is their propensity to wickedness and violence: it is not the cause which sets them ablaze but self-interest: they stoke up war not because it is just but because it is war.
