Monday, March 9, 2009

What Dayton Leadership is All About - Groupthink

It would be interesting to really get at the table to discuss these issues and at least have a dialogue about the decisions that have been made in this town.  I have talked to the "movers and shakers" and if you look at their decisions over the last 10 years they have all been wrong.  However, they own the media through personal relationships or financial control, so no serious questioning of these decisions is ever undertaken. 

The Groupthink model is leading us directly over the cliff, and it appears on both sides of the aisle.  I have been appalled by the liberal medias take down of Rick Santelli and his Boston Tea Party rant.  Each side never really can take the middle ground.  I think most people would call the Daily Show a liberal view of politics, so when Jon Stewart used Rick Santelli to take down CNBC, he perpetuated the Groupthink model as he used the ONLY commentator on CNBC that ever questioned the blowing of the Greenspan bubble and every economy cheerleader that CNBC had on, especially Chief CNBC Economist and Apologist Rick Leisman.  Review the video and Stewart's team never uses Santelli again in its take down.  Keith Olbermann makes the same mistake on his worst person of the world take down of Santelli.

It is part and parcel of how those with some discerning or populist view of the world are taken down and out by both sides of the aisle.  Rick gets blasted all the time on CNBC and then when it looks like he might get a following, the corporate hacks get their liberal puppets to take the populist down.  It just reinforces my continued antipathy for "those in power".  It is not about what is right, it is about staying on top.  Corporations and Politicians are turning America into a dung heap, just like the Politicians and Corporations in our community are turning the Miami Valley into a dung heap.  Jesus, Martin Luther King, Rick Santelli and your's truly.


Economics Professors Are Unshaken by Financial Crisis - NYTimes.com
Unquestioning loyalty to a particular idea is what Robert J. Shiller, an economist at Yale, says is the reason the profession failed to foresee the financial collapse. He blames “groupthink,” the tendency to agree with the consensus. People don’t deviate from the conventional wisdom for fear they won’t be taken seriously, Mr. Shiller maintains. Wander too far and you find yourself on the fringe. The pattern is self-replicating. Graduate students who stray too far from the dominant theory and methods seriously reduce their chances of getting an academic job.

“I fear that there will not be much change in basic paradigms,” Mr. Shiller wrote in an e-mail message. “The rational expectations models will be tweaked to account for the current crisis. The basic curriculum will not change.”

“I hope I am wrong,” he added.


1 comment:

Joshua Stults said...

Greg said: "It is not about what is right, it is about staying on top."

So true; that's the biggest lesson I learned from my couple of trips to China. Nobody wants to be at the bottom of the oppression pyramid.