X-Message-Number: 6108
From:  (David Stodolsky)
Subject: Re: "investing in cryonics"
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 96 13:05:04 +0100

In Regards to your letter <>:
> > Ideally, you want patient care funds sufficiently distanced from 
> > your cryonics organization that the organization could fail
> > completely, and your funds would still remain intact and able to
> > continue maintenance payments to a successor organization. 
> 
> It is dangerous to assume that suspension funding alone 
> would be enough continue a suspension. "Successor 
> organizations" might just as well be interested only in 
> the continued payments. The false premise is that money 
> is enough to buy "loyalty" and "caring". It isn't.

Those how put their faith in the "market" might consider the solidity
of the intellectual and social foundations upon which it rests:

"Actually, on theoretical ground one might think that only six of these
are possible. But as I noted, Whitley has the peculiar case of economics,
which he calls a "partitioned bureaucracy": strategic dependence and
strategic task uncertainty both foster the more rigid, bureaucratic
form at the upper, theoretical levels of the field (the apparatus of
indifference curves and market forces), while technical task uncertainty
and functional dependence foster decentralization and ad-hocracy at
the empirical end (forecasting business trends and proposing government
policies). Twentieth-century economics thus turns out to be not only
the most peculiar of the social sciences, but the strangest intellectual
organization in the whole universe." (p. 294).

Collins, R. (1988). Review of "The intellectual and Social Organization of
the Sciences", by Richard Whitley (Oxford and New York: The Clarendon
Press, Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). _Theory and Society_, 17(2), 291-299.


The question raised here is, very crudely put,
Is economics a science or a massive propaganda apparatus?

dss

David S. Stodolsky      PGP KeyID: B830DF31       
   Tel.: +45 38 33 03 30   Fax: +45 38 33 88 80 (C)


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=6108