huh..the largely neo-liberal imf thinks ace is wrong. how about that?
but wait! here's some information
this goes to the new world economic outlook report:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/...1/pdf/text.pdf
here's a little blurb about the report:
Western economies too weak for spending cuts, IMF warns | Business | The Guardian
there's an interesting philosophical problem that's raised through the op to do with how open-ended you understand your immediate environment/situation to be, how self-contained it is (or not as seems to me the case)...even at a kind of ordinary banal level, the illusion that what you see around you is self-contained it a problem (turn on a faucet---unless you think that water is implied by the existence of a faucet, there's a problem.) this sort of problem repeats at almost every level (think globalizing capitalism as a distribution system). and this isn't to even go near the problems of perceptual boundedness by scale (you know, at the biosystem level all kinds of stuff's going on all around you all the time and you don't see it and often when you do see it you misrecognize it) or, more hair-raising still, questions of what time is.
almost any answer to the question "what's really going on" that goes beyond the fatuous (well, i turned on my faucet and now there's water coming out of it.) entails a construction of one kind or another. and you could say that it takes a whole lot of work---and entirely bourgeois socialization---to convince people that there's a noun in the expression "common sense" and that empiricism is a viable stance toward the world.
of course it may well all be just an aesthetic thing and if you like the idea that the world is comprehensible as it's presented to you then you can tell yourself that and you'll probably also think that you can know lots of stuff about another person from a photograph. like what happens immediately before and after. because it's all so predictable the world.