The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 58 – Heterodox Economics
July 23, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, heterodox economics, as a formal definition, is any economic theory that contrasts with orthodox schools of economic thought. What are your thoughts?
Rick Rosner: All right. So, having that idea makes sense. You should critique the prevailing wisdom and a couple of places to start. I haven’t read any of this stuff. I’ve read very little economics in general. But the other one area is the traditional market economics.
It kind of assumes that people are good at figuring out what’s good for them. And we know that you can list a bunch of instances in which people aren’t good at that. And there’s a related deal where your brain doesn’t necessarily have your best interests at heart.
There’s the idea, I think, of Adam Smith. I don’t know that a bunch of people working to maximize their own well-being or create a rational market will maximize everybody’s well-being.
And that’s a bunch of huge assumptions, unspoken assumptions. And there’s plenty we don’t even know what we want. And even if we kind of knew what we want, there’s no guarantee that the scales, the analytics in our minds and our brains, are playing fair with us.
In fact, we know they are when it comes back to jizzing, because you can stop anybody’s chain of thought by just putting the right kind of butt in front of them. We live in the butt era. I grew up in the no butt era where people just had no asses in the 70s.
Americans were skinny, they did cocaine, they jogged. And everybody in the media, the people who got the most exposure, nobody had asses on Charlie’s Angels. No asses on Charlie’s Angels.
If you look at old episodes of Battle of the Network Stars, no bras, but also nobody needed them because everybody was super skinny, no ass. But now we live in the butt era and you can hypnotize people with a butt. So, what kind of mechanism do you have that you can shut it down just by showing people asses? So there you go.
Jacobsen: Is this more powerful on men than women?
Rosner: Yeah. I mean, probably. Well, I don’t know. It’s said that men are more visual, but that’s based on what’s his name, not Masters and Johnson, Kinsley from the 50s. So that’s probably subject to revision, too.
But even if women can’t behave, they can have brains scrambled as much by a nice ass. There are other ways to scramble women’s brains with stuff. That seems in the overall scheme of things more trivial than something that scrambles your brains should be.
Jacobsen: Like what?
Rosner: I don’t know, I mean, you could argue that women are more rational. They take into consideration overall well-being more than just a nice ass. There’s a whole sociobiological theory that the guys just want to spread their seed everyplace. And women are looking for good providers. And I’m sure that’s subject to all sorts of critique because there are 50 layers of sexism built into that.
But you can make all sorts of claims. People can be manipulated by bullshit. Even though, economics likes to assume that we’re rational actors because that’s the easiest place to start. Anyway, that’s it.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 