In 1979 John Kenneth Galbraith was the leading economist of the day and Paul Volker just became the head of the Federal Reserve. I was totally disillusioned by what I read in Tme , Newsweek, and Useless News and World Distort and what I saw on the nightly news. I was working construction and just waking up to politics. The post Vietnam war inflation was underway and I was in a constant state of anxiety.
For some reason I had kept a copy of the October, 1977 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. There was an article in it by Roger MacBride titled "Why I am a Civil Libertarian." It made an impression on me. I dug it out and noted he had been the candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1976.
After much digging, I found their address and wrote to the LP asking for more information. Someone sent me a list of organizations and contacts. One was Laissez Faire Books. I immediately ordered their catalog. There was a book called The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises. I ordered it and thought "this is my ticket to understanding money" and maybe it contained some good financial advice, too
I jumped right into it. After struggling through two chapters, I thought my head was going to explode. It was too much for an absolute beginner.
Fortunately there was another book available. It was called Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlet.
Here was a straight forward explanation of money, credit, government spending, inflation, foreign trade, wages and much more.
It made my understanding of all the economics that I would read afterwards possible.
And lucky you - you can read it online- Economics in One Lesson
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The first edition of that book was published in 1946. I searched it for "depreciation" and got three hits.
I never heard of John Kenneth Galbraith saying that accounting should be mandatory in the schools but he did write about the "planned obsolescence" of automobiles in 1959 in his book The Affluent Society.
I have a book about Linux from 2001. To my surprise it mentioned the "planned obsolescence" of computer software.
Technology has changed a bit since 1946. Lockheed was able to make the SR-71 Blackbird do 2000+ mph in 1964. Why should we have payed any attention to the shape of cars since 1970? Didn't they have to know a lot about aerodynamics to make the Blackbird do what it did?
So now we are supposed to buy an operating system like Vista which forces us to buy more powerful computers? Do you think most people understand how powerful these machines are now? IBM introduced the 3033 mainframe in 1978. Corporations were willing to rent or buy that computer though it cost $3,000,000. Incredibly that machine was about equivalent to a 300 MHz Pentium. I have a computer that fits in my pocket that beats that 3033 when it ran COBOL. The 3033 still wins with PL/I and assembler.
My point is that the American people have been buying their way into slavery going into debt for junk designed to become obsolete for decades and the Libertarians haven't been saying anything about it. I had one Libertarian tell me that accounting should not be mandatory in the schools because nothing should be mandatory.
So how much pollution has been created producing crappy cars over the last 50 years and now our economists can't tell us what the entire world has lost on the depreciation of all of that junk. But we are supposed to bail out the auto industry like they haven't ripped us off enough. The term "planned obsolescence" was coined in 1940. Keynes died in 1946. Most economists haven't said squat about planned obsolescence in the last 50 years. How seriously should we take an economics book from 1946? Could the computers run DOS in 1946?
If the accounting books weren't crap that don't even have diagrams of cash flow everyone could learn to do accounting on their computers without taking courses.
psik