Publisher's Synopsis
In politics, as in military science, the alternative to doom, is a sudden change in the pre-set rules, which often brings victory to the side which has the good sense to see a reality which exists outside the world as it is seen according to the generally accepted notions of existing rules. The easily recognizable name for such successes in breaking the assumed rules of the game, is called "flanking" the problem. The famous von Schlieffen documented the way in which Frederick the Great of Prussia flanked and whomped, twice in the same day, a superior, highly professional Austrian army, which latter thus suffered the misfortune of playing by a set of pre-fixed "blackboard" rules of the game, at Leuthen. In the practice of science, the discovery of a universal physical principle, is exactly such a "flanking" action against the stubborn fool who is still playing at the blackboard according to pre-set rules of mathematical physics. It is also a fundamental general principle of all successful scientific practice, that all great scientific discoveries of principle, occur as a result of the eruption of a crisis in a generally accepted, present way of thinking in terms of some fixed set of rules. My associates and I have repeatedly cited an historically interlinked pair of Classical examples, that of the way in which Kepler discovered a principle of universal gravitation, and that of the way in which Fermat created a revolution in geometry by discovering a principle of quickest time, rather than shortest distance. Any such crisis in the juxtaposition of fact and belief, takes a form which may be described mathematically, as a fatal error in the equivalent of currently generally accepted mathematical physics at the blackboard. What one's mathematics at the blackboard says should happen, not only does not happen, but any attempt to describe the contradictory reality by existing mathematical rules leads to a disaster of the type called a fundamental paradox, within the existing practice of science. The same principle applies, with full force, to generally accepted forms of that mathematics-at-the-blackboard used to describe and defend what is taught as economics in virtually every university classroom and boardroom in the U.S. today. The reason I have been consistently successful, over more than three decades, in my long-range economic forecasts, whereas all of my opponents in that field have consistently, and now catastrophically failed, is that, as the saying goes, "they were not playing with a full deck." They were playing according to sets of rules, which, while generally accepted among most influential circles, did not correspond to the real world. Sooner or later, as has now happened, the fact that my critics "were not playing with a full deck," has caught up with them. If they are intelligent and sane, they will admit their mistake; if they refuse to admit their mistake, they have no choice but to go utterly mad, as hopeless Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has done. Whether the response is, in one case, a sane one, or, in another, not, nearly everything each has believed about economics, up to now, especially "free trade," "globalization," and "new economy," has been proven, in reality, to have been dangerously absurd. Now, therefore, how do I react to all those wellmeaning people, who advise me to win others to my point of view "without alienating them by insulting their intelligence," without pointing out to them the silliness of rules of economics and politics in which they continue to believe? How do I react to those who insist that I should address people "on their own level," and "in terms they are willing to accept"?
