{"id":4744,"date":"2011-11-21T05:00:10","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=4744"},"modified":"2011-11-21T07:47:34","modified_gmt":"2011-11-21T12:47:34","slug":"chronocentrism-this-time-its-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/4744","title":{"rendered":"Chronocentrism: “This Time It’s Different”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chronocentrism has been\u00a0defined\u00a0by British science journalist\u00a0Tom Standage<\/a> as\u00a0“the egotism that one’s own generation is poised on the very cusp of history.” It is to time what ethnocentrism is to ethnicity.<\/p>\n

From Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man<\/a><\/em>\u00a0— “History is directional, and its endpoint is capitalist liberal democracy” — to Rifkin’s The End of Work<\/a><\/em> — “We are entering a new phase in history, one characterized by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs”\u00a0—\u00a0to Millenarians<\/a>, present-biasedness and the belief that the old rules no longer apply seem insuperable for many people.<\/p>\n

Nowhere was this clearer than when the world’s population hit seven billion<\/a> a few weeks ago.\u00a0Never mind\u00a0the past 25 million years of human evolution, during which humans always managed to develop technologies to feed themselves. Never mind the fact that famines are man-made and not directly caused by a lack of food to go around. Never mind all that: many commentators saw fit to inform us that the old rules no longer applied, and that we were about to enter an era of starvation and famine.<\/p>\n

The Four Most Dangerous Words in the English Language<\/h3>\n

But chronocentric policy making can be dangerous.\u00a0The four most dangerous words of investing — “This time it’s different” — are also the four most dangerous words in the English language.<\/p>\n

Going back to the example of the world at seven billion, if you believe we have crossed a special population threshold beyond which we will experience constant starvation and famine, you are probably willing to adopt drastic population-control policies that would curtail the freedom to have as many children as they want many people currently enjoy.<\/p>\n

Would that be right? And how confident would you have to be that “this time it’s different” to justify a potential loss of welfare spread out over so many people?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chronocentrism has been\u00a0defined\u00a0by British science journalist\u00a0Tom Standage as\u00a0“the egotism that one’s own generation is poised on the very cusp of history.” It is to time…<\/p>\n

Continue readingChronocentrism: “This Time It’s Different”<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,55,48,45,12,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-economics","category-methods","category-miscellaneous","category-policy","category-social-sciences","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-1ew","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4744"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4782,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4744\/revisions\/4782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}