aballah

“For a while, debt was also falling because the banks were tightening up their lending standards. It appears to be that people are paying off one debt and then just as soon taking on another to make ends meet. Americans are tapped out, and despite their expressed desire to get out of debt, they just can’t get off the treadmill…

The backdrop to all of this is the long-term upward redistribution of wealth in this country, with those on top of the pile taking an ever increasing share of the national income and leaving the rest of us to fight over the crumbs…

And it’s important to understand that it is this overhang of personal debt, rather than the public debt over which Washington is obsessing, that is really dragging down the economy. It’s an economy that’s built largely on consumer spending after all…”

from Guernica

Not that I’m keen to see consumer spending rise…

“The way in which knowledge progresses… is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) assumptions, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism; that is, by attempted refutations, which include severely critical tests. They may survive these tests; but they can never be positively justified: they can never be established as certainly true nor even as ‘probable’ (in the sense of the probability calculus)… As we learn from our mistakes our knowledge grows, even though we may never know - that is, know for certain. Since our knowledge can grow, the can be no reason here for despair of reason. And since we can never know for certain, there can be no authority here for any claim to authority…”

- Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (1963)