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cfraenkel 3 days ago

Economics, and the Powell Memo, followed by Milton Friedman and the Phillips curve and trickle down and Reaganomics, to start with.

throw0101d a day ago | parent [-]

> […] and trickle down and Reaganomics, to start with.

Ideas that were not taken seriously even by the people who put them forward:

> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]

> Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy.[28] In 1982, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the "trickle-down economics" that David Stockman was referring to was previously known under the name "horse-and-sparrow theory", the idea that feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat.[29] Reagan administration officials including Michael Deaver wanted Stockman to be fired in response to his comments, but he was ultimately kept on in exchange for a private apology.[30]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_...

See also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment

It'd be like saying traffic engineering and urban design are bullshit because politicians keeps building highways—when traffic engineers know this won't solve the issue of traffic:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox

Also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city#Conspiracy_theo...

Just because quack ideas attributed to a particular field are used to justify certain ideological ideas or policies does not mean the field itself is devoid of valid models.