Reply #51: The Fatalist Temptation

[Demeter]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/the-fatalist-temptation/

I’m seeing more and more pieces like this one,(SEE LINK AT ORIGIN) in which pundits look at stubbornly high unemployment and declare that it must be structural — something we just have to live with, or at least something that will take long-term policies (translation — someone else’s problem) rather than mere stimulus, to correct.

Bah humbug. Actually, worse than that, because this kind of fatalism corrodes whatever will we might have to actually deal with our problems...the truth about our slump — that we know how to fix it, that we could fix it in a year if we had the political will, but that bad ideas and worse politicians are standing in the way — makes people uncomfortable. They want to believe that we have a deep problem, and that’s why we’re in such a mess.

The truth is that the fault lies not in our structure, but in ourselves.