Re: Susie Bright interviews some guy

[dsquared]

On Fri, 28 May 2004 11:57:38 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:

> >  > Is the American work ethic ruining our sex lives?
> >
> >Without wanting to devalue the intellectual property
> >inherent in this, what was the answer? :-)
>
> What's your guess, given the predilections of both
> interviewer and interviewee?
>

Oh gawd, really?  I could work out that she thought it
was, but I was hoping you might have some sort of chart
or other proving "actually, surprising as it may seem,
overworked sweaty stockbrokers get loads and loads of
action".

I'd also suggest that the correlation between "work
ethic" and the actual amount of work done is getting
thinner and thinner these days, as in even if you don't
like the bloody stuff you still have to do it.


cheers

dd

Re: Options expensing

[dsquared]

On Fri, 28 May 2004 16:09:11 -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote:
> Eliminating that
> choice is very worrying
> for policymakers, not to mention the many US corporate
> leaders who rely on
> options to attract motivated employees.

[...]

> Executives say they will have to cut or eliminate
their
> options programmes
> as a result

If stock options were so very wonderful and useful in
attracting motivated employees, surely companies would
want to boast about their options programmes, not to
conceal them in the back of the accounts?

dd

Re: Susie Bright interviews some guy

[dsquared]

>
> Is the American work ethic ruining our sex lives?

Without wanting to devalue the intellectual property
inherent in this, what was the answer? :-)

dd

PS:  vested interest -- if possession or otherwise of a
work ethic was the main driver of one's sex life I'd be
the happiest man in Britain and I'm not.

Re: game theory

[dsquared]

Barkley Rosser has a very very good paper indeed on
this subject:

http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb/MetroRevised%20LBS2.doc

WHen I grow up I want to be like Barkley.

dd


On Mon, 17 May 2004 13:43:30 -0700, Michael Perelman
wrote:

>
> from Williamson:
>
> Oskar Morgenstern tells a wonderful story that
> illustrates how such second-guessing
> can make the price system go haywire:
>   ##Sherlock Holmes, pursued by his opponent,
> Moriarity, leaves Londonor the
> intellectually weaker of the two would have
surrendered
> to the other in Victoria
> Station, since the whole flight would have become
> unnecessary.  (Morgenstern 1935,
> pp. 173-4)
>   Morgenstern continued, "Always .there is exhibited
an
> endless chain of reciprocally
> conjectural reactions and counter-reactions.  This
> chain can never be broken."
> (Morgenstern 1935, p. 174).

Re: more economist scandals

[dsquared]

On Sat, 15 May 2004 18:50:34 -0700, Michael Perelman
wrote:

>
> I didn't get any responses from my note about Nobel
> prize-winning economist, Harry
> Markowitz, as the cofounder of one of the two infamous
> military contractors
> associated with the prisoner abuse scandal.
>

I was gonna reply with a brief chuckle - it's actually
a bit unfair because Markowitz set up CACI as a
computer programming firm (the first two letters stand
for California Analytics) and it only blossomed into
the thugs 'n' dogs operation it is today after years of
sucking on the military teat.

cheers

dd

Re: economist-poet

[dsquared]

yeh, he's been a hero of mine for years.  Seems like a
nice, and sensible enough bloke if you ignore some
pretty frightening departures into sub-Austrianism.
Bit of an irritating habit of doing the "Oh yes, Texas
Texas Texas, I'm from Texas, did I ever tell you about
Texas?" bit while not actually coming from there or
having any connection at all before being posted to the
Dallas Fed.  But less boring than the run of the mill,
and an interest rate dove so he's on our side.

dd

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 08:09:25 -0700, "Devine, James"
wrote:

>
> See
> http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1847162.
> This guy,
> Robert McTeer, the president of the Dallas Federal
> Reserve Bank, writes
> economic poetry. If I remember correctly, he's one of
> those total
> optimists and apologists. At least he has good taste
in
> music, liking
> Robert Earl Keen's "The Road Goes On Forever and the
> Party Never Ends."
> He says it represents the current era. Despite the
> name, the song is
> about larceny (quite appropriately).
>
> McTeer also missed the recent research indicating that
> poets on average
> live 6 years less than other authors. See
>
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-poets23apr23,1,1600439.story.
>
> By the way, the letter I posted to pen-l got published
> in the L.A.
> TIMES. See
>
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-le-devine23.2apr23,1
> ,4869466.story.
> 
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
> http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Re: capitalism = progressive?

[dsquared]

> >
> > >Chris wrote: >Russian peasants in the quasi-feudal
> tsarist era would
> > >work intensively for the three months or so of the
> year when the
> > >ground was usuable for agriculture, and then sit
> around on their
> > >asses the rest of the year, in any case.<
> > >

Chris this can't possibly be true, unless Tsarist
Russia was an entirely vegan society.  Even as a
description of arable farming I'd be suspicious of
this, but cows sheep and pigs need looked after all
year round no matter what the weather.

dd

Re: Aikido Activism -- a new economic and social model already begun?

[dsquared]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 10:29:08 -0700, Burkhart wrote:

> Kevin Danaher, a leading activist and writer regarding
> the history of corporate objectives and excess, has
> used the term Aikido to describe Global Exchange's
> strategic campaign against Nike, Starbucks, etc. --
> using the force of PR (a power and momentum
> traditionally leveraged by corporations) or the threat
> of that force to present a turning force to the
> corporation,

I thought that the current state of thinking was moving
against company-specific campaigns because they seemed
to produce only company-specific results?  I also don't
understand how intellectual property law fits into this.

dd

Re: Jobs: CES Net Birth/Death Model

[dsquared]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 09:39:47 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:

>
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > >
> >How sound is the CES Net Birth/Death Model?
>
> As good as a model can be, probably, which is good but
> not perfect.

Note that the birth/death model isn't a structural
model -- it doesn't incorporate any particular economic
assumptions.  It's just a pure model of the data, with
regular intercept corrections.  It would be highly
unlikely, from a mathematical point of view, for it to
make errors which were systematic or particularly large.

dd

Re: Query

[dsquared]

to be honest the only way to get an answer to this sort
of thing is to track down the bloke at the statistics
agency who maintains the series and get him to take you
through it line by line.  Most of them are quite
pleased that somebody took an interest.

dd


On Sat, 3 Apr 2004 10:07:12 -0500, dmschanoes wrote:








I realize that my submissions generally don't 
measure up to the quality standards of the list and for
that reason deserve to 
be ignored, but perhaps those  in need of a little pro
bono work might 
offer some enlightenment on the following perplexing
matter. 
 
The Economic Research Service of the USDA produces 
an abundance of data on the condition of US
agricultural production.
 
I find particularly interesting that table on 
capital stock 1948-1999 which shows an approximate 50%
increase in capital stock 
for the entire period,  yet a real, and dramatic
decline of some 33% 
between 1983 and 1999.  Now this makes sense to me,
given the 
"overweighted" portion of production value contributed
by farms with sales 
greater than $1,000,000-- the ability of concentrated
capital stock to be 
be smaller in volume, but denser in output and to
 "absorb" greater amounts 
of manufactured and farm based inputs.
 
However, when looking at the DofC BEA NEA tables 
for investment in and net stock valuation of
non-residential, private fixed 
investments for farms, such valuations show no decline
but an increase for the 
1983-1999 period.
 
I'm having some difficulty reconciling the two, or 
even finding the paths of divergence.
 
Has somebody encountered the same issue and perhaps
found an 
explanation?
 
Note to Sabri: The guy who knows what heteroskadastic
(sp?) means 
doesn't understand obfuscation? That's precious.  
 
 
 
 
 
 

Re: Job flight

[dsquared]

Inputs and outputs, though.  I certainly wouldn't want
to live in a precapitalist economy or in most forms of
Actually Existing Socialism, but one argument that I
always think ought to get more traction is that
capitalism has singularly failed to shorten the working
day.  A lot of people intuitively realise that there is
something wrong here; we were promised robot slaves and
unlimited leisure time in the comic books, and now the
space age is here and we're still working like dogs.

I occasionally find it a sobering thought that my
grandfather lived in a two-up-two-down he could barely
afford and rose at 0530 every morning to get down to
the market, and now, after the social mobility afforded
to the third generation thanks to a very expensive
university and business school education, I find myself
living in a two-up-two-down I can barely afford,
getting up at 0530 in order to be ready for the market.

dd


On Sun, 28 Mar 2004 14:01:49 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:


>
> Compared to what? It's hard to argue with its capacity
> to grow,
> innovate, and produce cheaper commodities over the
> centuries - at a
> high social and ecological cost, for sure, but I don't
> think you can
> win the "efficiency" argument from the left. It has to
> be on other
> grounds.
>
> Doug

Re: More on the labor theory of value

[dsquared]

To be honest, this is just more evidence of German
overmanning.  Does an orchestra really need two
trombone players, a timpanist and an oboist, each of
whom only plays a couple of notes?  Surely there's some
scope for retraining multitasking and flexible labour
practices here.  If everyone achieved the same level of
productivity as the violinists, we could get those
bloody Mahler symphonies over in a quarter of an hour.
Or better still, outsource the whole thing and play
them in a call centre in Bangalore.

dd


On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 08:46:29 -0800, "Devine, James"
wrote:

>
> of course, this isn't really about the labor theory of
> value, since the players produce a collective product
> with a collective labor process in which external
> benefits amongst workers imply that the effects of
> individual labors can't be separated. Being paid more
> for more effort is about the theory of
> wage-determination, not the theory of value of the
> products of labor.
>
> 
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
> http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>
>
>
>
> > -Original Message-
> > From: michael [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2004 7:47 AM
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: [PEN-L] More on the labor theory of value
> >
> >
> > We're being fiddled, say violinists
> >
> > AP, Berlin
> > Wednesday March 24, 2004
> > The Guardian
> >
> > Violinists at a German orchestra are suing for a pay
> rise on
> > the grounds
> > that they play many more notes per concert than
their
> musical
> > colleagues
> > - a litigation that the orchestra's director
> yesterday called
> > "absurd".
> > The 16 violinists at the Beethoven Orchestra, in the
> former
> > West German
> > capital Bonn argue that they work more than their
> colleagues who play
> > instruments including the flute, oboe and trombone.
> >
> > The violinists also say that a collective bargaining
> agreement that
> > gives bonuses to performers who play solos is
unjust.
> >
> > But the orchestra's director Laurentius Bonitz said
> it was
> > unreasonable
> > to compare playing a musical instrument with other
> jobs.
> >
> > "The suit is ridiculous," Bonitz said in a telephone
> interview. "It's
> > absurd."
> >
> > He also argued that soloists and musicians in other
> leading
> > roles - such
> > as the orchestra's two oboe players - should perhaps
> make more money.
> >
> > "Maybe it's an interesting legal question but
> musically, it's
> > very clear
> > to everyone," Bonitz said.
> >
> > The case is scheduled to go before a labour judge
> later this year.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > Michael Perelman
> > Economics Department
> > California State University
> > michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
> > Chico, CA 95929
> > 530-898-5321
> > fax 530-898-5901
> >

Re: Argentinean hardball

[dsquared]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2004 11:49:56 -0500, Marvin Gandall wrote:

> 
> Argentina is showing how a poor country can use a debt
> default to
> relieve its obligations to foreign creditors – a
tactic
> that has
> infuriated the big banks and split the IMF, report the
> Financial Times
> and the Guardian.

I do hope this catches on ...  AFAICS, Kirchner is
pretty far advanced down the template, even down to the
suggested opening offer of 50 cents in the dollar.

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/HowToDefault.html

dd

Re: oil crises

[dsquared]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2004 09:46:12 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Over the last 15 years or so, the price of oil has
> varied from under
> $10 to over $30. It may be that the Ricardian/Marxian
> mechanisms you
> and Bina point to determine the center of gravity
> around which the
> market price fluctuates, but what accounts for this
> 300%+ range?
>
> Doug

Fischer Black used to call the stock market "efficient"
because in his view it was almost always between 50%
and 200% of fair value (he wasn't joking either; this
was seriously his view and he nevertheless believed
that the stock market was informative and regarded
himself as an efficient markets/rational expectations
believer).  A range of 10-30 would be small compared to
this and if one took the view, one wouldn't need a
model of the fluctuation other than an anchor price
around $20 plus "noise".

Black's views on this subject were not exactly
mainstream, however ...

dd

Re: Question for you econ types out there

[dsquared]

sorry forgot the links!

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_economy/ESA95_Exhaustiveness.pdf

more statistical fun:

"Prostitution itself is not illegal within the UK.
However, most of the activities associated with
prostitution (e.g. soliciting) are illegal. Value added
from prostitution would generally be income from
self-employment (mixed income) in the household sector.
However, this is also difficult to measure since
prostitutes are not usually registered as businesses
and it seems unlikely that good quality data could be
collected from household surveys.

[...]

Imports and exports of prostitution services should in
principle be picked up by the International
Passenger Survey (although not as expenditure on
prostitution) with the expenditure already recorded in
the national accounts."

Note that Doug would need to modify his position that
you can carry out all the radical analysis you need by
making use of modified bourgeois statistics in this
case as the UK does not actually collect information on
the size of the drugs, prostitution or illegal gambling
markets; the only crime we incorporate in the figures
is smuggling.  Some South American countries do attempt
to estimate the size of the cocaine trade on the basis
that their capital a/c would make just no f'kng sense
at all if they didn't.

cheers

dd


also this one

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/34/2665863.pdf

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 06:10:25 -0800,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

>
> On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 16:00:23 +0300, "Chris Doss" wrote:
>
> >
> > Does anybody know how per capita income figures are
> > usually calculated for countries like Russia, which
> > have a large shadow economy in which workers are
paid
> > under the table and off the books? Thanks.
>
> Not actually as uncommon as you'd think; Spain and
> Italy have big off-the-books sectors.  Basically, you
> estimate, estimate, estimate.  Double-check with
> criminal authorities, carry out surveys, etc.  Also
> cross-check with observable facts; ie, you know how
> many buildings are going up, you know how many
brickies
> it takes, so you can guesstimate how many are employed
> in the building trade.  Then you use an econometric
> model going forward, to scale up the ongoing inome
> numbers based on the last time you did a proper check.
> It's a bit of a black art but by no means the most
> difficult thing a national statistics agency does.
>
> Here's a bit & piece by the UK Office of National
> Statistics.  To be honest the final chapter is the
> funniest (sample text "Under ESA95 the sale of illegal
> drugs should be treated in the same way as the sale of
> legal goods. They are imported or produced within the
> UK, sold through a chain of dealers (each adding their
> own margin), and eventually sold to a final
> consumer.").  But there's some stuff on the issues
> you're looking for too.
>
> cheers
>
> dd
>
> >
> > Official income figures for Russia have always
baffled
> > me. How do you calculate them when underreporting of
> > incomes is rampant in the private sector?

Re: Fear of polarization

[dsquared]

"The editor's task is to publish as many of the
proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers will
tolerate".

I think that this quote comes from Evelyn Waugh,
although the only online references I can find are to
me saying the same thing, occasionally attributing it
to his son Auberon Waugh for variety.

dd



n Mon, 8 Mar 2004 12:52:48 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:

> > A friend of mine who worked at USNWR during the '92
> election said
> that owner Mort Zuckerman oversaw the political line
of
> the mag. He
> wanted Bush to lose,

Re: Question for you econ types out there

[dsquared]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 16:00:23 +0300, "Chris Doss" wrote:

>
> Does anybody know how per capita income figures are
> usually calculated for countries like Russia, which
> have a large shadow economy in which workers are paid
> under the table and off the books? Thanks.

Not actually as uncommon as you'd think; Spain and
Italy have big off-the-books sectors.  Basically, you
estimate, estimate, estimate.  Double-check with
criminal authorities, carry out surveys, etc.  Also
cross-check with observable facts; ie, you know how
many buildings are going up, you know how many brickies
it takes, so you can guesstimate how many are employed
in the building trade.  Then you use an econometric
model going forward, to scale up the ongoing inome
numbers based on the last time you did a proper check.
It's a bit of a black art but by no means the most
difficult thing a national statistics agency does.

Here's a bit & piece by the UK Office of National
Statistics.  To be honest the final chapter is the
funniest (sample text "Under ESA95 the sale of illegal
drugs should be treated in the same way as the sale of
legal goods. They are imported or produced within the
UK, sold through a chain of dealers (each adding their
own margin), and eventually sold to a final
consumer.").  But there's some stuff on the issues
you're looking for too.

cheers

dd

>
> Official income figures for Russia have always baffled
> me. How do you calculate them when underreporting of
> incomes is rampant in the private sector?

Re: demo fervor

[dsquared]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:30:35 -0800, "Devine, James"
wrote:
> if the data is poorly measured, then even a case
>where
> there are no empirical counterexamples may be wrong.
> Jim D.

But Juriaan's point is surely that propositions can
certainly be *falsified* by empirical evidence and if P
is falsified, then "it cannot be proved that P" is
proved.

?

dd

Re: Critique of the Brookings Institution - this time by a Russian

[dsquared]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:16:19 +0100, Jurriaan Bendien
wrote:


>
> This year's trendily daft
> notion is that "the
> curse of natural resources" is to blame for Russia's
> fate. That's right:
> Russia's problem is that it's got far too much oil,

My old economics prof Steven Nickell, in relation to
North Sea Oil and the UK economy, used to remark that
it was curious that so many economists spent so much
time on the claim that it was bad news to strike oil in
your back yard, and their having done so, it was
curious that they were not simply recognised as loonies
and treated as a public health problem.

quite a dry wit he had.  He also, in relation to the
empirical evidence on efficient markets theory,
remarked that it was "enough to make you weep, if you
cared about that sort of thing".

dd

Re: more rightwing bands

[dsquared]

I don't think the Exploited belong on that list ...

dd


On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 15:14:47 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:

>
> My friend Joel Schalit (interviewed on the topic of
> anti-Semitism,
> and the Counterpunch book on the topic in particular,
at
> )
> listed some
> right-wing rock bands (some dupes from my list):
>
> >-Skrewdriver (OG British racist band,70s-80s)
> >-Centurion (late 90s american nazi band)
> >-Vegan Reich (wierdo right wing john zerzan types)
> >-Rahowa (OG American racist band, 90s)
> >-The Exploited (long running British hardcore band)
> >-Aggravated Assaulted (generic skinhead racists)
> >-American Standard (ibid)
> >-Deaths Head (ibid)
> >-White Wash (ibid)
> >-Earth Crisis (eco-antiabortion straightedge
metalcore
> band)
>
> I've actually got some Skrewdriver, Rohowa, and
> Exploited in my
> iTunes library. Not too bad, if you overlook the
lyrics.
>
> Doug

Econophysics ...

[dsquared]

I have formed the opinion that this working paper is
really a rather excellent specimen of the genre.  I
usually have very little patience indeed with the Paul
Ormerod approach, but I really quite like this one.

http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0401/0401053.pdf

Is it actually interesting, or have I jut gone soft in
my old age?

dd

Re: a "neoclassical" model of Marxian exploitation

[dsquared]

>
> Your comments on the above are welcome, though I doubt
> that this list is
> interested in them, so send them to me directly.
>

If comments on a neoclassical model of Marxian
exploitation aren't on topic for this list, I'm not
sure what might be?

dd

Re: pitfalls of economic journalism

[dsquared]

British Home Stores; it's a mid-market clothes
retailer.  The lower-casing of the last two letters of
the acronym was put in there by some bunch of branding
charlies in the 90s.  It's currently owned by Philip
Green, one of the "characters" of Brit business.

dd


On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 13:48:42 -0600, Carrol Cox wrote:

>
> What company is Bhs? What business is it in? I've
never
> heard of it, but
> then I've never heard of most companies.
>
> Carrol

Re: Savings question

[dsquared]

Not necessarily that extreme; remember that savings is
the difference between two large numbers (income and
expenditure) and so you have to expect volatility.

dd


On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 12:20:30 -0800, michael wrote:

>
> Michael Dawson had an interesting figure on the
> depletion of savings
> after World War II.  Like Carroll yesterday, the
> figures seemed to
> extreme to be credible.  I went to the source that
> Michael mentioned.
> But Kolko gave no references.
>
> Kolko, Gabriel. 1976. Main Currents in Modern American
> History (NY:
> Harper & Row).
>  317: By 1947 the huge reserve of personal savings was
> virtually spent,
> dropping in two years from $37 billion in 1944 to less
> than $5 billion
> in 1947."
>
>
> --
>
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
> Chico, CA 95929
> 530-898-5321
> fax 530-898-5901

Re: stephen j. gould thought of the day

[dsquared]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 20:11:47 -0800, Michael Perelman
wrote:

>
> Stephen Jay Gould: "I am somehow less interested in
the
> weight and
> convolutions of Einstein's brain, than in the near
> certainty that men and
> women of equal talent have live and died in
> cottonfields and sweatshops."
>

it's always troubled me that it's a statistical
near-certainty that some time in the nineteenth
century, the British killed a genius of the calibre of
Beethoven and didn't even know we were doing it ...

dd

Re: Wolf on Renminbi Flexibility

[dsquared]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:16:55 -0500, Michael Pollak
wrote:

>
> [I thought this was a surprising good discussion that
> covered all the
> bases.]
>

Interesting though, that the general principle that in
a fixed rate system the burden of adjustment falls on
the deficit country, is completely ignored; ie the
entire problem is framed as a question about what
*China* will do ...

dd

Re: Question for Louis Proyect

[dsquared]

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 18:52:38 -0500, Louis Proyect wrote:

>
> Michael Dawson wrote:
> >I did not call you an FBI agent on LBO-talk, though I
> did say you have penis
> >envy regarding Doug Henwood.
>

Time to resubscribe to lbo-talk 

dd

Re: Greenspan's Ponzi Scheme

[dsquared]

On Sat, 29 Nov 2003 03:23:40 -0500, Michael Pollak
wrote:
>Had there been such a miracle, then some
> though not all of the
> > higher valuations would be justified; if the S&P 500
> Index is selling on
> > 20 times earnings, and productivity growth undergoes
> a secular and
> > permanent increase of 1 percent per annum, without a
> change in real
> > interest rates, then the S&P 500 should start
selling
> on 25 times
> > earnings (an earnings yield of 4 percent rather than
> 5 percent.)
>
> Could somebody briefly explicate the math in that last
> sentence?
>

A somewhat garbled but not absolutely egregious use of
the good old "Gordon Growth Model".

Basically, if you're given the responsibility of
valuing a series of cashflows which stretches off into
perpetuity and grows over time (like a stylised version
of common stock earnings), then the GG model is a
reasonable way of going about it.

Where D is today's earnings, R is the discount rate and
G is the rate at which the cashflows grow, then the
value of a growing series of dividends is given by V=
D/(R-G).  The derivation of the formula shouldn't be
hard to find in a finance textbook or via Google, but I
always contrive to screw it up in some way or other, so
I'm not going to try here.

Hence, if we say that, for a decent average of US
companies, R might be 10% and G might be 5%, then V/D
(the price/earnings ratio) would be 1/(10% - 5%) =
1/0.05 = 20.

Bung an extra 1% onto the growth rate for "productivity
miracles", and you get 1/0.04 = 25.

All the above is of course dependent on the discount
rate being a valid concept, average productivity growth
being a valid concept across sectors, plus the growth
rates being in the "right" sort of order of magnitude
(as you can see, this model will blow up as R-G
approaches zero).  etc etc.  But I'm pretty sure that's
what they mean.

dd



> Michael

Re: the weirdest spam I ever got

[dsquared]

I think it's Billy Joel's working notes for the 1990s
update of "We Didn't Start The Fire".

dd


On Fri, 28 Nov 2003 06:39:17 -0500, Michael Pollak
wrote:

>
> [picnic.jpg] adulthood boggle botswana expressly
> polluted messy sanely
> acquit playtime bostonian hoses hunted count billie
> thence exclusively
> humorously hydrophilic breadwinners scalar plenteous
> bolstering scrapping
> textural bogey thallophyte explores
>
> bonze boll tensions pounces crossable albright potent
> pont popular
> housekeepers cozy milkiness politic sapsucker bonnets
> crackle tamper
> melanin accommodated mayoral achieve tan ad bernadine
> season crackling
> creations
>
> bismarck bona meritoriousness exorcise cowardice
> euphorbia bluefish
> teaching term adjudicated imagen albanian seasonal
> plebian tactics
> microsecond taxis admitted exertion tease activations
> aztecan countable
> bootstrap sear bizet savage
>
> [thank.gif]
>
> mate exchequer aylesbury admixture ads idlers boot
tags
> hundredfold
> allstate branched baylor sears bhutan arnold adjacent
> existent courtrooms
> agway bookstores midpoints cremation aces
> evenhandedness exhale excepts
> playthings bogging advancement bottles arlen estimates
> ariadne talkers
> tail cribbing hyphen house illumination hysteresis
> criticize american
> boughs pragmatic eventide explosively crossly positron
> seamed acrylate
>
> bop exhausting podge exempts mauve craved telepathic
> angelica secedes
> hypothetic bolshevik sculpt abernathy tainted
> evidential scarce boatswain
> eviller melodic then idealizations tensile eventful
> plebiscites adjutants
> bourbon a&m

Re: Worries about terrorist attack on Bush affects stock markets

[dsquared]

I would strongly advise the consumption of a very large
grain of salt when reading any of these "explanations"
of why the market did this or that.  This particular
one comes from a Reuters wire service report that was
being put out around 1800GMT when the Scotsman would
have been put to bed.  As it happens, the Dow turned
round in the last couple of hours and closed only 50
points down, with no very obvious developments in the
likelihood of a terrorist attack.  No disrespect to the
guys at Reuters who write these comments, but it's a
bit of a joke; they have to write something to fill the
space, but nobody who knows anything will talk to them
because anybody who knows anything a) has better things
to do than talk to Reuters and b) probably doesn't want
the world to know what they're up to.

In general, it is usually vain to try and find reasons
for anything happening in the stock market which are
located in the world outside the stock market.  It
really is an amazingly insular place; in six years, the
only time I have ever seen people take interest in the
outside world was September 11th, and even that was for
three or four days max.

cheers

dd


>
> Such is the worry of an attack [on Bush during his
> state visit to Britain]
> that the stock markets in Wall Street and elsewhere
> fell sharply, with the
> Dow Jones dropping 130 points at one stage and the
FTSE
> 100 down 58.1 at
> 4338.9.
>
> http://www.news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1272842003

Re: Pet Snakes

[dsquared]

Seems like there are a couple of worm-eating snakes ...

http://www.petplace.com/Articles/artShow.asp?artID=1778

NB that the article seems to suggest that we're dealing
with dead, frozen mice here rather than actual
squeaking ones.

cheers

dd


On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 19:29:19 -0700, joanna bujes wrote:

>
> Apologies for an off-topic question, but I am
> desperate. My nine year
> old daughter passionately wants a pet snake. My
> question is, is there
> such a thing as a snake that does not eat mice? Bugs
or
> worms would be
> ok. Worms would be great cause I have a compost pile.
I
> understand that
> snakes must eat live food, but I simply cannot put a
> mouse in a cage
> with a snake.  Please reply offlist if you have a
> solution.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joanna

Re: Slightly more patient capital?

[dsquared]

UK has a stack-load of measures of this sort, without
obvious effect.

dd



On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:49:46 -0400, "Max B. Sawicky"
wrote:

>
> Yes but I forget who.  Somewhere I have a stack of
> papers
> from a conference on this.
>
> Capital gains rates, among other complexities, reflect
> this purported intention of encouraging buy and hold.
> Best recent book is Len Burman, "The Capital Gains
> Labyrinth."
>
> Where ya been?
>
> max
>
>
>
> It got me wondering.  Did anyone ever propose
something
> similar to a "Tobin
> Tax" on domestic stock trading (not quite the same,
> since Tobin's focus was
> speculation)?  Either tax increases or tax cuts that
> would encourage
> longer-term investment?  If so, what were the details?
>
> Thanks,
> Anders Schneiderman

Re: the fed and the yuan

[dsquared]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:36:29 -0700, Michael Perelman
wrote:

>
> The US approved of the Argentinian peg and disapproves
> of the Chinese peg.
> Does anyonc sense a policy of expediency?
>

Not only that, but according to this morning's FT,
Greenspan said that "China cannot go on accumulating
ever more dollar assets without putting its financial
system at risk".  Apparently the burden of adjustment
falls on surplus countries in the New Economy.

dd

Re: in the same city

[dsquared]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 08:08:28 +0100, Chris Burford wrote:

> I suspect there is a law of the internet that two
> correspondents from the
> same city cannot agree.
>

No there isn't.

dd

London.

Re: Complexity

[dsquared]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:57:17 -0400, Barkley Rosser
wrote:

>
> Briefly, there were
> indeed "intellectual bubbles" regarding cybernetics,
> catastrophe theory, chaos theory, and complexity
theory,
> which rose and then fell.

What's your view on Didier Sornette and log-periodic
power laws?  Another intellectual bubble developing?
I've got his "Why Stock Markets Crash" and there is
some good stuff there, but he appears to be trying to
extend his theory into a general principle of stock
market movements.  HE's also predicted economic
collapse somewhere around 2050, which is usually the
economic iconoclast's equivalent of jumping the shark.

dd

Re: 'Straussians' in the news; the world trembles (II)

[dsquared]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 11:47:10 -0700, "David S. Shemano"
wrote:



>3.  I have no personal knowledge whether Straussians
>are secretive or
>elitist, 

I bet you do really, but you're not telling us.

dd

Re: US auto industry to die?

[dsquared]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 11:05:55 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:

>
> Hmm, the tone on PEN-L is turning apocalyptic - U.S.
> auto industry to
> die, jobs disappearing forever, etc. This makes me
> wonder if the
> economy is bottoming out.
>

Forecasting the death of Detroit is pretty much a
constant across the cycle.  Three years ago we'd have
been saying that they'd have their business models
destroyed by the Internet.

dd


> Doug

Re: Hobsbawn on the American Empire

[dsquared]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 06:51:10 -0400, Michael Pollak
wrote:
> I thought Spain was the very model of an empire that
> sucked in so much
> gold that it deindustrialized itself.  (In early
modern
> sense of
> industry.)

H yes and this was the one that worried me too.
But I think that from an (utterly anachronistic)
national income accounting point of view, digging up
gold overseas and returning it home would count as a
credit item on the current account balance; by doing
so, Spain in principle reduced its net debtor position
with respect to the rest of the world.  It's
complicated because there is no counterpart on the
capital account because they are literally digging up
the gold, but I'd still be tempted to call Imperial
Spain a net exporter of capital because it was a net
importer of treasure.

dd

Re: Hobsbawn on the American Empire

[dsquared]

On Sun, 15 Jun 2003 23:48:41 -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote:

>
> June 11, 2003
>
> After Winning the War
> The Empire Expands Wider and Still Wider
> By ERIC HOBSBAWM
>
> The present world situation is quite unprecedented.

John Gray (not the author of "Men are from Mars")
thinks that the really strange thing about the current
situation is that the USA is the first empire to be
running a structural current account deficit rather
than a surplus.  I rather think that I agree with him,
although I have not checked his assertion that Britain,
Spain, Rome etc all exported capital.

dd

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[dsquared]

Obviously I'm sorry for that one then.

dd

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:08:26 -0700, andie nachgeborenen
wrote:

>
>  but it's also
> > quite annoying for us to be magisterially directed
> > to
> > read a 400-page doctoral thesis before we're allowed
> > to
> > have opinions.
>
> That's unfair. The mention of diss occurred in a
> different context, where person who brought the topic
> of social v. natural sciences did so in the broadest
> possible way (saying that there was a big diff), and I
> didn't suggest or even direct that he or anyone read
> my opus, but mentioned its length by way of saying
> that there was a  lot to b esaid about this, most of
> which might be beside the point unless one knew what
> the specific question was; and I invited further
> specific questions to which discussion of that sort
> might be directed. Anyone who made the mistake of
> reading my diss, by the way, hoping for insight into
> the demarcation criterion, would mostly be
> disppointed. Except in an oblique way I don't discuss
> the issue. jks
>
> __
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to
> Outlook(TM).
> http://calendar.yahoo.com

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[dsquared]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 12:05:41 -0700, andie nachgeborenen
wrote:

>[Popper] admitted that, therefore, falsification
>cannot be atomic, proposition by proposition, and can
>only be tentative and propvision, not conclusive. He
>disputed, however, that this meant that therefore
>there was no point in talking about falsifiability,
>or that it could not be the demarcation criterion, or
>that there was no demarcation criterion. I think he
>was right both in his concession and his conclusions
>about its limited effect. If you think
> otherwise, explain why.

Three related reasons:

1) Because Popper honoured this self denying ordinance
as often in the breach as the observance whenever he
started actually saying things about science,
pseudoscience and nonscience.  I'm sure that sufficient
diligence might dig up some example of him saying that,
for example, there might be constructed some valid
science of personality based on planetary movements and
that the validity of the Sirius-Nile cycle and lunar
cycles in things from suicide rates to stock returns
needed to be explained in some manner, but it was
hardly representative of the man's work and by and
large was discarded completely by his wannabes.  There
has to be some sort of product liability for academic
theories, and Popper is as culpable for the influence
of the cruder version of his theory as the producers of
Vicodin.

2)  A lot of the explanation for 1) is that the grammer
of the word "demarcation" makes it very difficult to
use in contexts where you are talking about something
that admits of degrees and can only be judged
holistically.  And language is telling us something
here; it is specifically telling us that a "Criterion"
which can't be relied upon to give a definitive answer,
isn't much of a criterion at all.  If Popper had only
talked about a "falsificationist approach", a way of
thinking which set score by attempting to knock down
null hypotheses, then he'd have been true to this
interpretation of them, but he'd have been saying
something more similar to Lakatos.

3)  And finally, a lot of the force behind 2) above
comes from the fact that a lot of the *point* of
falsificationism is that it's meant to give us a short
way with all the problems of holism and tentativeness
which dog theories of science based on confirmation.
If falsificationism isn't going to definitively rule
anything out, and if it can't be used to assess the
scientificity of particular propositions, then what's
the advantage over Bayesianism?  Popper was originally
fighting a war on two fronts, and it strikes me that in
making these concessions to one side he's very much
opening himself up to attack on the other.

dd

PS: If Ian had been quicker on the draw he might have
pointed out that Quine thought that it *was* a problem
for Popper and demanded that you be the one to "explain
why" you disagreed.  I'm not sure you realise how
dismissive you're being.  It must be irritating to have
to revisit ground you thought had been covered and lost
in the academic literature ages ago, but it's also
quite annoying for us to be magisterially directed to
read a 400-page doctoral thesis before we're allowed to
have opinions.  Everyone on this list has to explain
the basic material of their own specialist fields every
once in a while.

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[dsquared]

>FWIW, academic psychology involves a lot of
>experiments, as does so-called "behavioral economics"

Asking non-rhetorically, is psychology a social science
and if so why?  I tend to call the "social sciences"
economics, sociology and political science, the idea
being vaguely that these three commit you to reifying
social entities.

I have to say I've never had much time for behavioural
economics precisely because I don't like its attempt to
import experimental methodology into a social field.  I
don't think that anyone who claims to take "framing
effects" seriously has any business in continuing to
spend effort on finding out how graduate economics
students behave in experimental situations.

dd

dd

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[dsquared]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 20:39:21 -0700, andie nachgeborenen
wrote:

>I'm a little unclear on the point here. You're
>expected to use double-blind test in social
>scientific research

I'm assuming you mean "medical research" here; I'm
entirely unsure how you'd define the concept of a
double blind in social sciences research, most of which
is not experimental.

And even in the medical context, I think that the
demand that psychoanalysis use double blind tests would
be silly.  It's one thing to give someone a placebo
pill, but how in the heck do you carry on a placebo
version of a talking cure?  The only ways of designing
such an experiment that I can think of would involve
systematically lying to a patient which, aside from
being unethical in the extreme, would not even really
satisfy the double blind criterion; the "placebo"
psychologist would certainly know that he was faking
it.

And then even if you somehow solve this problem (or
more likely ignore it), you're faced with the task of
trying to carry out statistical analysis of your
results in a context where it is not clear at all that
any of the fundamental assumptions necessary for such
analysis are satisfied; there is no statistics of
individual cases, however much the Austrian economists
wished that there were.

Now you might want to define "scientific method" as
being identical with the use of statistical methods on
the results of double-blind experiments, but then it
seems pretty clear that if you do this, the charge that
psychoanalysis is "unscientific" loses all of its
rhetorical force; you've simply reduced the scope of
the term "science" until Freud falls outside it, not
pushed him out the door.  I'm not a Freudian, but nor
do I like attempts to create a "quick way" with
theories that people don't like in this manner.

dd

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[dsquared]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 14:50:44 -0700, "Devine, James"
wrote:


>I noticed
>that a major element of Crews' critique of
>Freudianism (in the New York REVIEW
>OF BOOKS a few years ago) is that it can't be
>falsified (following Popper's
>criterion). Unfortunately, this seems to apply to
>_all_ of social science (and
>to Popper).

But as I have pointed out before, not, of course, to
the paradigmatic example of a Popperian social science,
astrology.  Unlike any other social scientists, the
astrologers provide me with twelve succinct, specific
and easily falsifiable predictions every day with my
daily newspaper.

dd

Re: Re: Iraqi Funds in Swiss Bank confiscated by US treasury

[dsquared]

Looking at the linked story, it seems very much as if
the Iraqi oil money was paid into this particular
"blocked" account precisely to facilitate such
confiscation if it became necessary.  I seem to
remember Mexico adopting such a "blocked account"
mechanism in 1994/95 in order to collateralise the US
lending facility made available in that year.  Whatever
one thinks about the morality, this looks like
something that the Iraqis would have expected.

dd


On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, andie nachgeborenen wrote:

They told Switzerland, "You're next. jks
 
 k hanly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The news release below claims that the US treasury has
confiscated funds ina Swiss bank and the bank will
tranfer them to the treasury.Just how doesone legally
arrange things like this? These are funds blocked under
UNsanctions. What right has the US to take them and why
would the bank agree?Isnt this headline news? The
release is from a mainstream info site
onSwitzerland.Cheers, Ken
Hanlyhttp://www.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=161&sid=1715459Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live
on your desktop!

Re: RE: Iraq's money supply

[dsquared]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, "Devine, James" wrote:

>clearly, using dollars within Iraq without their
>express consent would violate their sovereignty. Our
>wise and humble leaders would never do that! Luckily,
>for a very small cost, they could get the US mint to
>print up a passle of Iraqi dinars with Bush's picture
>on them...

Alternatively ...

Saddam is known to possess printing plates for making
extremely accurate forgeries of old-style US dollar
bills (the "Iraqi Perfects" which embarrassed a number
of banknote experts about four years ago and which were
largely responsible for the most recent currency
redesign).  Obviously the solution to a lot of problems
is to reflate the Iraqi economy with counterfeit dollar
bills, thus helping to talk down the dollar and reflate
the domestic economy when all these forgeries come home.

dd

Re: Re: Re: RE: Stiglitz on Dubya's tax plan

[dsquared]

On Mon, 03 Mar 2003, Eugene Coyle wrote:

> 
> But for tax purposes, corporations (and individuals)
> keep a different 
> set of books, using the fastest allowable 
> depreciation
> rate. Who cares 
> about the "true" rate?  

Neoclassical economists, but then again, who gives a
fuck what they think?

dd

Re: RE: Stiglitz on Dubya's tax plan

[dsquared]

"Max B. Sawicky" wrote:

> 
> The 'true' rate is an economic concept, estimated
> with hairy models, flaky data, and fuzzy math.
> 

It's also an economic concept in very poor
epistemological standing, since it relies on being able
to determine how much of the replacement cost of a
capital item reflects genuine depreciation of the old
one and how much reflects improvements in the quality
of the new vintage of capital.  In all but the very,
very simplest cases, this implies a commensurability
between capital of different vintages and gives rise to
something like Joan Robinson's issues about the
aggregation problem for capital.

dd

Re: RE: Re: To the victor go the spoils

[dsquared]

>The contracts would go "exclusively to US companies
and to 
>subcontractors from nations officially designated as
friendly", the 
>report said.

Is this strictly legal, from a WTO point of view?  Or
have we reached that point in the stock market crisis
at which the world goes into a funk of retaliatory
tariffs and beggar-my-neighbour devaluations?  Hope not.

dd

Re: A reply to Ian McEwan

[dsquared]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Louis Proyect wrote:

> 
> Dear Ian McEwan,
> 

Quite so.  I know it's bad taste to bring up Vietnam,
apparently, but if that's not permissible, surely we
have the example of Latin America to suggest that human
rights in the world might be better off without the
creation of yet another region where the US feels able
to interfere as will in support of "democracy".

dd

Re: NYC Report

[dsquared]

> John Studer tried to explain to me why the SWP was
>not
> part of today's 
> protests. 

Interesting ... SWP were out in force in Hyde Park, as
were a number of other grouplets ... the Socialist
Labour Party was the table I gravitated toward, as they
were selling tea and biscuits, but SWP were definitely
there.

dd

Re: RE: Gary Becker

[dsquared]

I disagree.  I read his recent thing on the economics
of advertising and thought it was a pretty good go.  A
lot of his stuff that won him the Nobel Prize is pretty
lame and obvious, but at bottom, I think that he's at
least asking interesting questions.

The real problem with Becker is his legions of
wannabes, who are just atrocious.  But if we were
hanging people for that, we'd have to dig up Charles
Darwin for starters.

dd



On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, "Devine, James" wrote:






RE: [PEN-L:34697] Gary Becker



Martin says:>I was found Becker very unimpressive.<


he is definitely unimpressive. I once heard him present
a paper in which he portrayed "the" family as being run
by a benevolent dictator to attain the family's welfare
optimum (my words, not his). Who is he kidding? If
there didn't exist a Chicago claque to applaud, he
would be laughed out of the profession. 


Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & 
http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Re: RE: Today's quiz

[dsquared]

>no insult taken. I am very upset that I won't be able
>to attend the demo, since I'm flying to New York (on
>a red-eye!) to see my father-in-law inducted into the
>Toy-makers' Hall of Fame (for inventing the 
yacket->yak teeth, among other things) and then flying
home >almost immediately. 

jeepers, that's some pretty high-flying company your
fatherinlaw is keeping:

http://www.toy-tma.com/industry/halloffame/listing.htm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: doublethink

[dsquared]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Peter Dorman wrote:

> 
> Sorry about linear algebra.  You didn't find
> eigenvectors beautiful?
> 
> Peter

I was always told that there were two ways to learn
linear algebra; the hard way and the easy way.  And the
easy way doesn't work.

dd

Re: Re: doublethink

[dsquared]

> 
>If you don't know what
> Russell's paradox is I'll take the liberty of asking
> that you look it up as it's one of the most
> important results of 20th century mathematics-logic.
> Feel free to refuse.>
>

Alternatively, Ian, you could carry out the task of
looking up problems for all and only all those
listmembers who won't look them up for themselves :-)

dd

 
> 
> Ian

Re: Re: Re: Irradiated Beef in School Lunches

[dsquared]

On Sat, 08 Feb 2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Does irradiation kill or at least render harmless to 
> humans "E. coli and the like" found in meat?  If so, 
> wouldn't irradiation be an effective way, at least for
> "E. 
> coli and the like" purposes, of "dealing with the
root 
> causes" referred to?  

Perhaps, but I still feel a little aesthetically
squeamish at the prospect of eating cow shit.

dd

Re: PEN-L equals redistributionist LIBERALS

[dsquared]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> 
> I look at PEN-L and all I see are a bunch of LIBERALS
> from universities

Absolutely right mate.  In fact it might be worse than
that.  I think that some of them are practically
SOCIALISTS!  Perhaps it would help if somebody could
look up a few statistics from the Black Book of
Communism.  Once we've sorted that out we can move onto
abortion and war in Iraq, on which issue I fear you may
also be disappointed by the general tenor of discourse.

dd

Re: Re: Re: The human cost of budget cuts

[dsquared]

Most likely what the NPR bloke meant is that the
original machine tools used for manufacturing the
Shuttles have been dismantled and put to other uses,
the dies have been melted down or whatever, and so you
can't just phone up an order to the factory for another
shuttle.  

dd


Doug Henwood wrote:

> 
> Ian Murray wrote:
> 
> >I just heard on NPR news that the US no longer has
the
> manufacturing ability
> >to make any more space shuttles...
> 
> Eh? It's a 1970s design that it would make no sense to
> replicate now. 
> But it's impossible to believe the U.S. couldn't
design
> and build one 
> based on 2000s technology. You have more context?
> 
> Doug

Re: Re: Re: Turkey, again.......

[dsquared]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, Louis Proyect wrote:

---
We observe that what lies behind the colourful jargon
of “effective and 
transparent government”, “good governance”, and
“credibility” is a set 
of structural transformations to ultimately satisfy the
needs and 
demands of the foreign capital centers, rather than the
strategic 
requirements of the domestic economy. 
---

This point cannot be emphasised enough.  The case of
Argentina underlines the fact that the IMF would far
rather see a vigorous privatisation programme combined
with macroeconomic policies that are actively stupid,
even on the IMF's own analysis, than genuinely "sound"
macro policies and no privatisation.  It is this point
more than anything else which has convinced me that the
IMF cannot be considered to be a development
institution of any kind, not even on the most
charitable interpretation of its work.

dd

Re: New Labour's management system

[dsquared]

> "Are you really suggesting that any management system
> [slight pause 
> searching for meaning], business enterprise, does not
> need targets?" Paul 
> Boateng bright black  lawyer in New Labour government,
> relaxed yesterday 

Of course, when targets are targets for social
equality, they are called "quotas" and become bad.

dd

Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: RE: Re: tax theory/policy

[dsquared]

Jesus!  That's 75 notes where I come from.  Well I
suppose that's one way of teaching undergraduate
students a lesson.

dd

n Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Doug Henwood wrote:

> 
> Devine, James wrote:
> 
> >Doug writes: >Say Mankiw's book retails for $40, and
> he gets a 15% 
> >royalty. (Dunno
> >the real numbers, just guessing.)<
> >
> >I don't know about the %, but the book's more likely
> to sell for 
> >$100. (My students go on-line to avoid the retail
> price...)
> 
> My god. Amazon sez it's $120.70. Assuming 15%, he gets
> $18.11 apiece.
> 
> Doug