Tag Archives: economics

by | January 26, 2010 · 10:57 am

David Brooks Fail

The milquetoast, kinder-and-gentler conservative NYT editorialist David Brooks delivered another brightly burning ideational bulb today. Man, I wish he had had the time to show it to the missus first!

It is all downhill after this tipping point, reached in the piece’s fourth sentence:

Politics, some believe, is the organization of hatreds. The people who try to divide society on the basis of ethnicity we call racists. The people who try to divide it on the basis of religion we call sectarians. The people who try to divide it on the basis of social class we call either populists or elitists.The Populist Addiction – NYT – 1/26:2010

Brooks wants to bracket his main point with, as it turns out, a nonsensical treatment of populism. He’s made this main point previously in a review Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. This review, titled Creating Capitalism, was published in April 2004 in the NYT.

From the review,

But Hamilton dreamed of a vibrant economy that would allow aspiring meritocrats like himself to rise and realize their full capacities. He sought to smash the aristocratic fiefs enjoyed by Southern landowners like Jefferson and to replace them with a diversified marketplace that would be open to immigrants and the lowborn. Their vigor, he felt, would drive the nation to greatness. ”Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort,” he wrote.

He started a political tradition, dormant in our own day, in which energetic government doesn’t oppose market dynamism but is organized to enhance it. Today our liberal/conservative debates tend to pit the advocates of government against the advocates of the market. Today our politics is dominated by rival strands of populism: the anticorporate populism of the Democrats and the anti-Washington populism of the Republicans. But Hamilton thought in entirely different categories. He argued that ”liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.” He wanted a limited but energetic government that would open fields of enterprise and give new directions to popular passions.

His editorial is a recycle job.

Hamilton championed capital markets and Lincoln championed banks, not because they loved traders and bankers. They did it because they knew a vibrant capitalist economy would maximize opportunity for poor boys like themselves. They were willing to tolerate the excesses of traders because they understood that no institution is more likely to channel opportunity to new groups and new people than vigorous financial markets.

In their view, government’s role was not to side with one faction or to wage class war. It was to rouse the energy and industry of people at all levels. It was to enhance competition and make it fair — to make sure that no group, high or low, is able to erect barriers that would deprive Americans of an open field and a fair chance. Theirs was a philosophy that celebrated development, mobility and work, wherever those things might be generated.

And what was the status and stature of the industrial revolution in the first decade of the 19th century in the U.S.? (Hamilton died in 1804.) What, at the time, was the normal range of ambitions for the average man? ‘open field’ indeed!

Then, having raced downhill, Brooks writes one of the most astonishing sentences of his career:

If they continue their random attacks on enterprise and capital, they will only increase the pervasive feeling of uncertainty, which is now the single biggest factor in holding back investment, job creation and growth.

I’m going to offer an opposing idea: people are certain about the current state of the economy. Many people are certain about who got bent over and who did the bending too.

Ironically, Brooks offers implicit advice, advice perhaps dear to the capitalist’s heart. Last implied by Phil Graham, remember?

Yup, suck it up you whiners–you’re the real problem. ‘Just let us make some more dough now that we’ve managed to eke out a bit more productivity from our lucky surviving workforce.’ After all, Al Hamilton says so, and, let’s face it, we’re really a country about the faction-less dynamism of marching capital.

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by | November 29, 2009 · 5:51 pm

Eva Palin & Palinism


Sarah Palin fascinates me as a person, personality type, and behavioral specimen. As a ‘psycvhological’ screen for a certain type of ‘main street’ resentment, she’s obvious ideally configured.

Sarah Palin’s ego and ambitions are breathtaking. People have told me: “Palin isn’t qualified to be President!” My reply: “It’s a popularity contest.” A lingering question would be: what kind of brain trust would she put together? How would she be manipulated? What kind of wreckage would be realized given her modest mental talents?


Eva Peron

But Palin is not much like Eva Peron. The point of comparison is presumably Peron’s magical hold on her public. But Eva Peron was altogether a more complicated character. Palin obviously isn’t a creature of left populism as was Peron, even if Peron married into something much darker.

“This is not rocket science. We’re talkin’ about going back to the basics of America.”

Of course, the documentarian has the ability to shoot a lot of film, select the most appalling clips, and assemble the horror show above. Similar takes were produced during last year’s campaign to highlight the lack of thoughtfulness of some Obama supporters.

On the other hand, Palin’s core constituency, it would seem, is: the ignorant. Point me in the direction of thoughtfully articulated belief in her capabilities, and I’ll come back tail between my legs.

Among several elements which pop up for me is how Palin seems clueless about both being overmatched, and, about her not getting to specify the terms and context for her encounters with the media. Her reflections to Bill O’Reilly about her being annoyed by Katie Couric, are close to being the most psychologically revealing video of a politician since the time when Dubya froze when asked if ‘there was one mistake he most regretted.’

Yet, just because Palin’s own ‘theory of mind’ is—evidently—completely reflexive, (because she believes everyone is but her foil,) this plugs directly into the circuit of populist paranoia about a pointy-headed elite conspiring to “strip away their freedoms.” So: Palin herself gets to carry that collective projection forward and battle against the dark forces arrayed against so-called real Americans. She’s in way over her head, but that’s an advantage right now in the current, paranoid-delusional environment.

Never mind that Sarah Palin has obtained her own elite status in the scheme of Alaska success stories and is busily working to be a millionaire. Her main street bona fides are modest but her iconic stickiness lives large. In a way, Palin is a celebrity genre unto-herself.

As it is for other celebrated public figure and pundits, I wonder whether, in fact, he or she actually believes their own bullsh*t. Does Glenn Beck really read American history closely? This same reading engenders grandiose delusions such as his “100 Year Plan” to “re-found America.” Likewise, does Palin really think that her restoration of messianic Reaganism will in turn restore real American’s freedoms? In both cases, it could be said that it doesn’t work that way—since it hasn’t worked this way in the past.

Meanwhile, the Republicans once again get to flesh out the imago of a victimized main street, and mount the resentments of a white anti-elite, anti-intellectual, populace gasping for air. Their propositions are incoherent, but it hardly matters because it’s simple work to feed the embittered with talk of their loss of freedoms, the spectre of incipient socialism, and the rise of the personally irresponsible, (i.e. immigrants and minorities.)

It should go without saying that this is only the gambit of the Republican political elite when they’re out of power. Once they come back in power they morph back into Tories, social Darwinists, and go onto to laugh all the way to the bank. Reagan, Bush I, Bush II., didn’t deliver squat to their sacred silent majority. You can look it up.

I try to imagine the most cynical and dangerous Republican ticket in 2012. Easy: Palin/Petreaus. Still, the deranged possibilities are hilarious.

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by | November 25, 2009 · 2:21 pm

Bend Over Economics

Daniel Schmidt

An Economic Agenda for the GOP
Republicans need to be pro-market, not pro-business.
Luigi Zingales, City Journal, Autumn 2009

The success of the Republican platform went well beyond the voting booth, of course. The war against the evil empire brought the collapse of Communism and the democratization of the Soviet Bloc countries. During the Reagan years, the battle against the state led to a negative real growth rate in nondefense public spending. Deregulation freed the economy from excessive constraints and, together with tax cuts, sparked enormous entrepreneurial and creative forces. A golden era of economic growth began in the early eighties and continued, aside from a few minor recessionary interludes, until 2007—a quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity. After the Reagan economic reforms kicked in, the United States grew by an average of 3 percent each year, against Germany’s 1.9 percent, France’s 2.1, and Italy’s 1.8.

Not only did this revolution allow the U.S. to outpace Europe in income and productivity; it also transformed the country from a manufacturing economy into an innovative, high-powered service economy. Today, America does not produce iPhones, but it generates the technology and the design that permit a piece of plastic to sell for $300. It does not manufacture microchips, but it creates the technology that lets some wafers of silicon sell for thousands of dollars apiece. It does not build computers, but it develops the operating systems that run them. This transformation has enabled the United States to face the competition of emerging countries from a position of strength.

Let’s line up just three points.

(A) republican policies had successes too:

1. Deregulation and tax cuts sparked enormous entrepreneurial and creative forces

2. …transformed the country from a manufacturing economy into an innovative, high-powered service economy.

If we overlook the two recessionary bookends (1979-1984 / 2007+) and also overlook the crucial monetary policy—and its consequences—Reagan supported to wring out stagflation after he took office 1981, and, if we don’t know anything about supply side economics, still, #1 and #2 distinguish themselves to be, potentially, bald mythologizing about what ‘economic glories’ Reagan(ism) actually accomplished.

The truth of the matter revolves around another term, trickle-down economics. It’s employed to get at what a true narrative might make explicit: what actually resulted; who were the winners and losers. Is there, from this analysis, anything left of the twin assertions #1 and #2?

Now City Journal has long carved out its position in the rightward intellectual spectrum: seemingly sophisticated conservative cant.

I’ll forgive Zingales his ideological economic control panel, where, if you dial factors in just right, the economy booms. Business cycles exist on large scales and so to isolate ideological adjustments and simply assert. ‘this is how it should work,’ runs into various counterfactual, and the falsifying history. Such as, when the economy comes to boom, yet income tax rates are sky high. Ummm, this has happened.

Zingales’s narrative isn’t about either what happened between 1985-2007, or, what caused those happenings. You could set yourself to the task of figuring out what an accurate narrative would state to be the actuality of economic Reaganism.

I guarantee this accurate narrative would be troubled to serve ideological goals. But, it would be true enough compared to the seemingly sophisticated, anti-intellectual, garden variety posturing and mythologizing Zingales has somehow extracted from the facts.

(Ha. I doubt Zingales gave any consideration to the facts.)

Rates of taxation and regulation may vary, but trickle down remains, for the time being, the core commitment of our executive economic policy making ethos, irrespective of party.

fyi

“innovative, high-powered service economy” didn’t reach Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Toledo, etc.. Economic myth-making can come to instrumentally serve vast money-making regimes, as when it was recently supposed that housing prices would rise forever; that hedges can be perfected; that randomness itself can be mathematically purged from predictions…on and on.

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by | October 22, 2009 · 10:54 pm

Gold Men Sex

The Man Who Crashed the World

by Michael Lewis.

Toward the end of 2005, Cassano promoted Al Frost, then went looking for someone to replace him as the ambassador to Wall Street’s subprime-mortgage-bond desks. As a smart quant who understood abstruse securities, Gene Park was a likely candidate. That’s when Park decided to examine more closely the loans that A.I.G. F.P. had insured. He suspected Joe Cassano didn’t understand what he had done, but even so Park was shocked by the magnitude of the misunderstanding: these piles of consumer loans were now 95 percent U.S. subprime mortgages. Park then conducted a little survey, asking the people around A.I.G. F.P. most directly involved in insuring them how much subprime was in them. He asked Gary Gorton, a Yale professor who had helped build the model Cassano used to price the credit-default swaps. Gorton guessed that the piles were no more than 10 percent subprime. He asked a risk analyst in London, who guessed 20 percent. He asked Al Frost, who had no clue, but then, his job was to sell, not to trade. “None of them knew,” says one trader. Which sounds, in retrospect, incredible. But an entire financial system was premised on their not knowing—and paying them for their talent!

By the time Joe Cassano invited Gene Park to London for the meeting in which he would be “promoted” to the job of creating even more of these ticking time bombs, Park knew he wanted no part of it. He announced that, if he was made to take the job, he’d quit. (Had he taken it he would now be a magazine cover.)

Excellent article about the “delusion chamber” at A.I.G.


After tens of hours of research, and, especially in the academic economics journals now publishing research about the financial implosion, I’m beginning to get a purchase on what transpired.(And, to wrap your head around the structure of the financial crisis, is to comprehend how, in effect, a mountain of money could be conjured out of nothing.) It’s very complicated, but, where I end up is not complicated: like it was at Enron, the idea was to make as much money as one could and to do so without any thought about any consequence except for the consequence of riches.

Nowadays, there’s a bit of a Faustian bargain at work in the recovery. And, personal responsibility seems to be something only the little people are required to embrace. Many of those responsible have demonstrated that there is, in fact, such a thing as a free lunch. I predict our society will be soon again afflicted with another round of ‘shadow economy’ once the masculine players regain their potency.

The gambling—with other peoples’ money—seems to take place on its own weird planet. I don’t imagine for a minute that there’s some underlying set of moral principles that is common to the gamblers.What can you say about someone whose reputation for daring and acumen has been erased by their own hubris and stupidity, yet, nevertheless, sit licking wounds with $100,000,000 in the bank?

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by | February 16, 2009 · 6:01 pm

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

I’ve been thinking about writing a brief essay about the crossing of folk psychological prejudice and surface economic schemas, which is to suggest how people articulate their sense of economic conditions. Were I to do so I would highlight how ideological prejudice often trumps the usually bare schema and how this schema is bare because it barely corresponds to actual macroeconomic dynamics.

But last night I saw a news clip from Friday in which Rep. John Boehner asserts the alternative Republican stimulus plan would have created “7 million jobs at half the cost.” I had to go find it, and I did.

Here’s the summary of its provisions.

Economic Recovery and Middle-Class Tax Relief Act of 2009
Subtitle A—Income Tax Reductions
Sec. 101. 2003 tax reductions made permanent.
Sec. 102. 5 percent reduction in individual income tax rates.
Sec. 103. Repeal of alternative minimum tax on individuals.
Sec. 104. Reduction in corporate marginal income tax rates.
Subtitle B—Reduction of Income Taxes on Capital Assets
Sec. 111. Indexing of certain assets for purposes of determining gain or loss.
Sec. 112. Reduced capital gains rate for corporations.
Subtitle C—Other Provisions Related to Businesses
Sec. 121. Repeal of certain limitations on the expensing of section 179 property.
Sec. 122. Research credit made permanent.
Sec. 123. 7-year carryback of net operating losses.
Subtitle D—Other Provisions Relating to Individuals
Sec. 131. Child tax credit increased and made permanent.
Sec. 132. Distributions not required from individual retirement plans at age 70
1?2.
Sec. 133. No IRA distribution during 2009 included in gross income.
TITLE II—ACROSS-THE-BOARD RESCISSIONS IN NON-DEFENSE
DISCRETIONARY SPENDING FOR FISCAL YEAR 2009
Sec. 201. Across-the-board rescissions in non-defense discretionary spending for
fiscal year 2009.
TITLE III—INCREASED INCENTIVES FOR EDUCATION
Sec. 301. Increased deduction for qualified higher education expenses.
Sec. 302. Increased deduction for interest on student loans.

wtf! This is chock full of corporate and upper class welfare at the same time it seeks to drain the bathtub to fulfill the Norquist dream. More trickle supply downside based in the conceit that the super rich possess the hidden hand that creates demand. Absurd. Now my mind wanders over to reflecting on the idea that in our democracy an ideologically ‘pure’ experiment is tenable. But the point of being an ideologue is the will to power which supports doing the damnable experiment irrespective of its results. Which I suppose would end up, economically, in a principled depression.

“Twice as Many Jobs at Half the Cost” – Mythbusting Republican Spin

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by | August 25, 2008 · 4:47 pm

WHEN FRUITS ARE VEGETABLES

A voter’s behavior at the polling place reduces to a decision. Hold that idea.

This is analogous to a shopper’s behavior. How much time does a shopper spend in deciding what tomato in a pile of tomatoes will provide the biggest payoff in return for their investment of “selection” time? Why is it that a given shopper will select several candidate tomatoes And then from this selection decide on a single tomato?

We enter, here, into the realm of behavioral economics. Although it must be true that in a given display of tomatoes one tomato (presumably) is objectively and certainly the best tomato, in fact, given a maximum amount of time to make the choice, a shopper will instead opt to deploy a practiced heuristic so as to dramatically cut their time investment. The shopper does this while, at the same time, they expect this lesser time is the appropriate time to invest toward realizing the ‘great tomato’ payoff. Spending more time is not worth it.

Take this thought problem: you pull fifty people off the street and line them up in front of a display of tomatoes and a display of apples. You then give each an opportunity to select one tomato or apple. Most people will invest very little time in deciding whether they go for a tomato or an apple. Their pick between the two will turn out to simply be a matter of their foregone preference. Given the choice between the two, each person will go for what they already prefer and then employ their favored rule of thumb.

However, for some it will be a hard choice between the two. They will be ambivalent to some degree. The considerable differences between tomato and apple in such cases are not instrumentally decisive differences. In this group, some might ask to check out both before they commit to one or the other.

Returning to voter behavior, what would you guess is the situation given voters who cannot decide between the tomato of Obama and the apple of McCain?

I’d like to offer several hypotheses about this group.

1. Having no strong foregone preference, most members of this group are likely not to spend a lot of time making their decision.

2. Some members of this group approach their decision not as if it is between a tomato and an apple, but rather is between two examples more similar than different.

Is it likely that persons who are willing to spend a lot of time investigating differences between options, nevertheless also more disposed toward a foregone preference?

If 15% of a national electorate are undecided, and this group is given as the portion of the electorate upon which the election will turn, is it then the case that elections turn upon persons who will invest the least amount of time in deciding between two candidates?

Consider what might be involved in a voter’s having to decide between Obama and McCain. Since the policy positions between the two are mostly stark, what other features of the candidates would blur those difference and reinforce a voter’s ambivalence?

There are cases for which substantial policy differences are not instrumentally decisive. If someone can’t decide between Obama and McCain, it is very likely that their ambivalence vectors around something other than policy differentials.

(I spend a lot of time researching various data in the political realm. However, as far as my voting behavior goes, where I feel my time is worth investing in deciding who among the democratic apples is the apple of my eye, it is for me a foregone conclusion that I will vote for a democrat. I rush to the apple display! I will also spend a lot of time researching, as a matter of opposition intelligence, the opposing republican. And, I would suppose that my total time invested puts me in a marginal group, investment-wise; say in the group of people who spend 5+ hours a week investigating political information. One mitigating behavioral factor suggested by this is that the extra time invested after I’ve made my decision does not increase the possibility of a greater return. From this it could be suggested that a much greater ratio of return is gained by the person who invests almost no time in making their decision. However, keep in mind this low time cost is also attachable to a low expectation of return, and so there is the extreme represented by most non-voters, no time cost-expectation of zero return.)

[See: Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron Cass R. Sunstein; Richard H. Thaler

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

review of above: Economics: Which Way for Obama? By John Cassidy; NY Review of Books; June 8, 2008]

Darnit! On the other hand, voting behavior may be largely driven by effects due to implicit (unconscious) processes. In which case, the time sunk by undecided voters may be commensurate with what is necessary to efficiently confirm their bias. If so, such voter’s ambivalence could be termed pseudo-ambivalence.

“Undecided” Voters’ Minds Already Made Up, Study Says

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by | July 6, 2008 · 8:33 am

FACADE COSTS

via Naomi Klein
University of Chicago Faculty Letter on The Milton Friedman Institute

6 June 2008

President Robert Zimmer
Provost Thomas Rosenbaum
University of Chicago
5801 South Ellis Avenue Suite 502
Chicago IL 60637

Dear President Zimmer and Provost Rosenbaum:

We were interested to read President Zimmer’s recent message announcing the Milton Friedman Institute, with its 200 million dollar plus endowment and prime real estate location on campus. We understand that the University of Chicago’s association with Friedman has been important to its international reputation during the last four decades, and can imagine that the University reasonably sees benefit in cultivating a continued involvement with his school of economic thought.

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by | August 24, 2005 · 5:43 pm

SUNNY IF IT WERE SUNNIER

The Centre for Confidence (Glasgow) doesn’t have much in front of its online door, except for an amusing and often thought evoking line-up of articles. What is really amusing are the articles about the psychological consequences of the Scots aesthetic; (proudly disbelieving, depressive in the Kleinian sense; expecting the worst). If you’re interested, check ’em out. The work I’d like to highlight is linked to off the site, a fine paper by Ed Diener and Marvin Seligman, (2004). Beyond money: Toward an economy of well-being.. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, 1-31.

At the individual level, the economic model allows people to structure their time in the pursuit of concrete goals, and to readily track progress toward specific goals. It is possible that people derive considerable well-being from goal pursuits related to earning income, and from the activities of consumption, and therefore even a well-being economy will include these activities. Thus, although laments about how economic activity can interfere with family and religion are often heard, it is likely that the economic model will remain dominant for many decades to come. We do not contest this fact of life. Well-being is not a panacea that will in itself solve all of the world’s problems. Even if well-being one day becomes the dominant paradigm, it must be supplemented by other values of societies, and people must be socialized for humane values for the well-being economy to be a desirable concept.

One challenge for a society based on well-being is that individuals do not have ready and concrete models of how to pursue the goal of greater well-being, other than following the economic model. When people are asked what would improve the quality of their lives, the most frequent response is higher income (Campbell, 1981). It is not clear to people how they would achieve greater positive emotions and life satisfaction. Until there are concrete and proven steps toward these noneconomic aims, people are unlikely to abandon the dominant economic paradigm. Thus, psychologists need to demonstrate compellingly the malleable factors that can increase well-being before the well-being paradigm can replace the economic one. In addition, it should not be forgotten that the theoretical models on which the economic model is based are in many cases more sophisticated than current scientific models of well-being. (2004: Diener/Seligman)

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by | August 7, 2005 · 5:49 pm

OUTSIDE THE COMFORT ZONE

Mark Lund, Experiential learning. A small exploration, supplies an okay overview of experiential learning’s intellectual roots. No doubt its concision came at a cost of completeness. I guess I’m not much of a judge of this, because there is an equally pithy list of items taken from the work of Bill Proudman. I’m don’t know Proudman’s work, but his list is aces.

Bill Proudman (1992 p 21) in reviewing experiential education suggests the following principles for the delivery of any experiential learning program, that there must be:

1. mixture of content and process.

2. absence of excessive teacher judgement.

3. engage(ment) in purposeful endeavors.

4. encourag(ment of) the big picture perspective.

5. teaching (for) multiple learning styles.

6. … reflection.

7. … emotional investment.

8. … re-examination of values.

9. the presence of meaningful relationships.

10. learning outside of one’s perceived comfort zone.

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by | July 7, 2005 · 4:38 am

NOT ON BROADWAY

Sorry, comments are in fact turned on. The In-Box broils a bit due to my my earlier controversial post. Accused of not knowing the other side or anything about Weatherhead internal politics, I admit t’is so. I also note better information didn’t tag along with the accusation.

When I returned to Cleveland in 1992, skinned a bit during a spell of music biz fear and loathing in West L.A., I networked through the non-profit arts community. Unable to elevate smarts over being a nobody, I received many lectures. None were memorable. Being a tracker, since that time I’ve listened to complaints about gatekeeping, who sits at the table, the sound of one hand clapping the speaker’s back, deaf calling card pushers, etc.. Sometimes like this: encounter. It’s all very funny and “Cleveland”.

(13 years later) Cleveland is the poorest large city in the U.S. Might I add too: Cleveland is a paragon of segregation, white flight, paranoia, and, pardon me, efacement. This motivates me to make a similar suggestion to the one I pose to Republican loyalists. Lessee, Nixon, Ford 1968-1976; Reagan, Bush, 1980-1992; Bush II 2000-2005. 25 of 37 years in executive power and what have you to show for it? Incomes at the median stagnant for three decades, executives making 100+ times the average salary of the workers who actually produce the products; and a savage neoliberalism riding quarterly profits -these days- based in aggregate returns accrued in the majority to capital holders rather than workers for the first time since good stats began being kept post world war 2.

Oh, the suggestion: the purported best and the brightest locally have achieved exactly what to benefit us all over their long reign? The bankers, tycoons, real estate emperors, foundations, sr.academics? Follow the money? It hasn’t landed on Broadway in decades.

How to spot revolutionary intelligences? I don’t spend great gobs of time out hobnobbing and networking so my spottings tend to be few in number, but, the approach scales so I assume Cleveland has a lot of revolutionary intelligence. The rich intelligence, (I know of,) isn’t, in fact could not, be thinking about, for example, casinos, convention centers, and new ‘university commons’.

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by | July 4, 2005 · 10:09 am

LAKEWOOD LIBERATES ITSELF

Meanwhile…over Lakewood way, I’m involved as advisor, facilitator, and writer in the Lakewood Observer project. As an east sider with one foot planted in Lakewood, I like to believe myself to be the observer of the Observer. The crew of characters has been uniquely open and have welcomed my involvement and the wild stuffs I bring with me, stuffs stuffed into the ol’ toolbox. Gracias — you know who you are.

The model of the project is open source to a large extent. This means that ideas, conversations, documentation, planning, is shared freely, and, overwhelmingly, the project’s internal works and generativity do not attach themselves to particular persons over time. This means the project, in effect, owns the creative capital. Crucially, the LO project is necessarily fueled by volunteers vitalized by the collaborative and cooperative ethic.

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by | June 4, 2005 · 7:10 am

BOTH SIDES NOW

Underneath the complex clashes of the cultural war are very interesting conundrums which do not yield to superficial criticism. For example, any cost/benefit analysis used to rationalize real harm supports a dry ‘scientism’ unhooked from morality. From the other side, this same problem arises in most presumptions of primary substantive principles. With this, the cost/benefit analysis isn’t often done. Yet, in the clash between liberal social analysis and absolutist ‘guiding, a priori ordination’ both share a terrific insensitivity to real harm. The idea of Justice was once time-honored; it tends to disappear at both extremes.

I take problems like this to be problems of human sentience. The Sentient Times March issue contains an interview with Paul Krugman, yet another presentation from George Lakoff, and, pertinent to this item, an interview with John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

We’re a long way off from a Buddhist politics.

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