[PEN-L] The global economy through rose-tinted glasses: Robert Wade
The global economy through rose-tinted glasses Robert Wade FT Published: April 30 2007 18:29 | Last updated: April 30 2007 18:29 Talk of the future has been dominated by climate change and the mood is one of alarm. But among those who focus on economics the mood is upbeat. Climate change worries aside, the future to 2030 looks quite rosy. According to the World Bank’s recent Global Economic Prospects, output will probably double in real terms by 2030 and developing countries’ output will triple. In much of the developing world, average incomes per head will converge with those in high-income countries and the number of people living in poverty (on less than $2 a day) will fall from 2.7bn today to 1.9bn. These trends will be driven by increasing integration of trade and finance and diffusion of technology. If they continue on beyond 2030, Bangladesh will have a chance to become as prosperous as the Netherlands. It is worth taking a closer look at the World Bank’s model, for projections are only as good as the assumptions. The model assumes, first, that globalisation has been and will continue to be the main driver of improvements in economic performance – provided there is no protectionist backlash. In reality, much of the success attributed to globalisation is in fact the success of one giant country: China. The picture of the past 25 years would look quite different if we took the typical developing country rather than the average for all of them (which is pulled up by China). For example, the fall in the number of people in extreme poverty since the early 1980s is due entirely to the fall in poverty in China. Take out China, and the number rose. Many developing countries have gained little from globalisation and export-led growth and it is unclear whether they will gain more by continuing on the same track. The World Bank’s model also assumes that free-trade norms will continue to prevail. This is doubtful. In affluent countries, a lot of evidence suggests that further affluence is reducing people’s capacity to enjoy it. Throughout the west, rates of over-eating, family breakdown and addiction are rising. It is possible that electorates will respond by seeking to embed certain markets more firmly in a framework of political controls, even at the cost of slower growth. In developing countries, disillusionment with the paradigm of maximum openness is growing, as those that have moved towards free movement of goods, finance and enterprises have not experienced substantially improved economic performance. The focus on export-led growth has created intense competition between developing country producers to lower costs – including labour and environmental costs – and the exchange rate. Developing countries’ governments may begin to pay more attention to the growth of domestic demand and less to export demand as it becomes clear that export-led growth is not delivering. Commentators in the west will misrepresent this shift as a protectionist backlash. But the task for analysts is to figure out how to do import substitution well, and subject to multilateral disciplines, rather than just less. The Bank’s projections assume, third, no significant interruption from war. But the rise of important new economic states has almost always raised the level of conflict between them and existing dominant states. China’s rise is likely to generate further tensions between it and the US. The US may reassert its dominance by invoking China and Russia – flanked by Iran, North Korea and other non-compliant states – as a threat far beyond their real threat. The other impetus for conflict comes from the tendency for global supply capacity to run ahead of demand and for profits to fall. In response, the west has pushed for market liberalisation and infrastructure investment in developing countries, which help to expand demand by bringing in more consumers and producers. But their efforts have often generated conflict over the ownership of the newly liberalised assets and over the terms of exploitation. We saw western companies buying bankrupted Asian companies at rock-bottom prices after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, prompting a strong anti-western reaction. The emergence of China only adds to the tendency for supply capacity to run ahead of demand and for global financial instability to rise as payments imbalances accumulate. None of these less-than-rosy dynamics features in the World Bank’s projections to 2030 or in the prevailing optimism about the economic future. But we would be foolish to ignore them. The writer, a professor of political economy at the London School of Economics, is the author of Governing the Market __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
[PEN-L] Happy International Workers' Day!
in honor of May Day, let's hold off on personal attacks and conspiracy theory discussions. -- Jim Devine / __ CB: It would be more appropriate to honor May Day be holding off on personal attacks and _having_ discussions about capitalist government conspiracies against the workers and peoples of the world. The Haymarket Martyrs would encourage us to discuss such conspiracies not refrain from discussing them. Anybody heard any conspiracy theories lately ?
[PEN-L] The Wall Street Journal Worries About Excessive Leverage
The paper offers a perspective on the buildup of wild speculation with little potential for governmental regulation -- a recipe for disaster. Smith, Randall and Susan Pulliam. 2007. As Funds Leverage Up, Fears of Reckoning Rise. Wall Street Journal (30 April): p. A 1 ^ CB; The Wall Street Journal is starting to sound like a PEN-L recession monger. Doug, I think you should warn them they may be under a bad influence. ^^ Estimates by analysts of leverage at major securities firms, borrowing by hedge funds and margin loans to individuals added up to $4.9 trillion in 2006, compared with $1.8 trillion in 2002. Hedge-fund borrowing and other financing tools were valued at $1.46 trillion last year, up from $177 billion in 2002, according to estimates by Bridgewater Associates Inc., a Westport, Conn., hedge-fund company. Private-equity firms, investment funds that often buy entire companies, also are contributing to the leverage buildup. Loans to companies bought by private-equity firms rose to $317.3 billion in 2006 from $51.5 billion in 2002, according to Reuters Loan Pricing Corp. That's partly a function of more and bigger deals. But borrowing has also risen relative to cash generated by companies the funds buy. Individual investors have been moving in the same direction. Their margin debt -- the amount they borrowed from brokerage firms to buy stocks -- totaled $293.2 billion in March, the third straight month it exceeded the record set during the high-tech bubble in 2000, according to the New York Stock Exchange. That's up from $134.58 billion in 2002. There's leverage everywhere -- whether at corporations or broker dealers or hedge funds or private-equity funds, says senior credit analyst Tanya Azarchs, who follows U.S. banks and brokers at Standard Poor's Corp. It sort of feels like something's got to give. In 2006, the Federal Reserve estimated there was $20.6 trillion worth of corporate stock outstanding, up 73% from 2002. Suppose a hedge fund wants to bet that IBM stock will rise. Under the SEC rule governing margin lending, the fund couldn't borrow more than $50 for every $100 of IBM stock it buys. A total-return swap on $100 of IBM shares would cost $5 or less for many hedge funds, at least initially. If IBM shares were to rise, the return per invested dollar would be better than if the hedge fund bought the IBM shares outright using a margin loan. If IBM shares were to fall, however, the derivative leverage would work in reverse: The hedge fund would have to pay the counterparty an amount equal to the decline in share value -- plus the agreed-upon fee. Mr. Buffett contends that the proliferation of such swaps is dangerous. Total-return swaps make a mockery of margin requirements, he says. The widespread use of swaps, he maintains, makes the leverage that preceded the 1929 crash look like a Sunday-school picnic. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com
[PEN-L] Something there is that doesn't love a wall
http://www.star-telegram.com/462/story/87591.html Texas officials criticize fence plan By LYNN BREZOSKY Associated Press Writer McALLEN, Texas -- A new map showing President Bush's planned border fence has riled Rio Grande Valley officials, who say the proposed barrier reneges on assurances that the river would remain accessible to farmers, wildlife and recreation. City officials in the heavily populated valley had anticipated a virtual fence of surveillance cameras and border patrols. Instead, a Customs and Border Protection map depicts a structure running piecemeal along a 600-mile stretch of Texas from Presidio to Brownsville, a border region where daily life is binational. We were given the impression that they were not going to be building walls, that there would be more cameras, surveillance, boots on the ground, said Mike Allen, head of McAllen Economic Development Corp. This is going to seriously affect the farmers, he said. They will not have access to water. It's just going to create bedlam. (clip) Environmentalists fear the fence will block Rio Grande water access to endangered cats such as ocelots and jaguarundi and ruin key feeding and resting areas for migratory birds. === http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/22908/format/html/edition_id/458/displaystory.html Ecologists raise alarm over Israel's security barrier by Loolwa Khazzoom Tel Aviv | For months, Palestinians have blasted Israel's West Bank security barrier. But an Israeli ecologist says the fence's potential impact on plant and animal life has been completely overlooked. Noa Olchovsky, campaign coordinator on the fence for Green Action, an Israeli environmental group that advocates socio-ecological change, said the proposed border zone threatens Israel's ecological system. What will tear the ecological system is the separation fence itself, she said. Animals won't be able to get from the places they sleep to the places they drink water. Trees and plants won't be able to reproduce themselves properly, because their seeds won't be carried by the wind more than 20 feet in one direction. In a few years, certain species of animals and plants in the region will be extinct. Already, Olchovsky says, Israel has uprooted hundreds of trees and bulldozed Palestinian farmland to build the fence and a patrol road alongside it. Yehoshua Shkedi, landscape ecologist for Israel's Nature Reserve Authority, the governmental body in charge of natural conservation, says the problem with the fence is twofold: It will destroy everything within its range, he said, and will impact ecological corridors. It blocks movement of animals and impedes the growth of plants that are dispersed on the fur of animals. === MENDING WALL Robert Frost Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'. Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me~ Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, Good fences make good neighbors. -- www.marxmail.org
[PEN-L] AKP exploits Kemalist insulting Turkishness laws
Counterpunch, May 2, 2007 Criminalizing Art Trouble in Turkey By MICHAEL DICKINSON I was in court again last week, summoned in connection with the Turkish Penal Code (TCK) Article 301 charge of 'insulting Turkishness' by displaying a couple of collage pictures I had made of the Turkish Prime Minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan last year, depicting him as a pet dog of America. I was surprised at the sudden summons (brought to my door by a plain-clothes policeman). Having being held in police custody for 10 days last September, and then suddenly released, I'd presumed that the case was over. . Apparently not; and when I went with my lawyer to the courthouse, there was my name on the list as the accused; the plaintiff: Tayyip Erdogan. The foyer on the second floor was crowded with folk, some in handcuffs with guards, waiting to have their cases heard by the judges in their little courtrooms. (There is no jury system in Turkey. Decisions are made by a board of judges or a sole judge depending on the nature of the case.) My case was to be heard at 11-30, but because of a power cut, it was adjourned until afternoon. When my lawyer and I returned from lunch, there was a street dog lying streched out asleep on the pavement in front of the entrance to the courthouse. Ironic. The hearing lasted about 45 minutes. In my defense I said that my pictures had not meant to be personally insulting to Tayyip Erdogan, but to show his position as a close friend and ally of George W Bush, and the fact that 90 nuclear bombs are stored on Turkish soil at the American airbase in Incilik. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/dickinson05022007.html -- www.marxmail.org
[PEN-L] Build it Now review
http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/44/39/ -- www.marxmail.org
Re: [PEN-L] Demonstrations today
about 4000 here in orblando, replicating last year's 30,000 that shut downtown streets would have been a herculean task, but organizers this year were privately saying that turnout might be in the several hundreds, so yesterday's event far exceeded those low numbers, kudos once again to the florida association of farmworkers (among others) for its efforts... michael hoover On 5/1/07, Julio Huato [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Any local report on the May 1 demonstrations for immigrants' rights in different places of the U.S.?
Re: [PEN-L] Build it Now review
Louis Proyect pointed to the following review of Michael's Build it Now: http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/44/39/ This contains the following: “Lebowitz comes back to the serious challenge posed by the There is No Alternative ideology that pervades contemporary societies. This ideology not only kills the possibility of movements but also creates uni-focal ideological discourses that look at capitalism as the only possible form of society - with some modifications and improvements as and when required. 'We need to recognize the possibility of a world in which the product of the social brain and the social hand are common property and the basis for our self-development - the possibility in Marx's words of a society of the individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth. For this reason, the battle of ideas is essential' (p. 50-51). The text from the Grundrisse quoted here (not quite accurately, in particular the adjective free is missing from individuality) is part of a passage I’ve pointed to myself as demonstrating the continuance in Marx’s late writings of the idea of human history as a set of stages in an “educational” process eventually creative of the kind of “individuality” – the “free individuality” of the “universally developed individual” - required for a “good” life in a “true realm of freedom,” an idea that sublates Hegel’s philosophy of history (as does the text from Engels we've just been discussing). “Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third. Patriarchal as well as ancient conditions (feudal, also) thus disintegrate with the development of commerce, of luxury, of money, of exchange value, while modern society arises and grows in the same measure.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm Ted
[PEN-L] Chapman 2009 campaign
Happy May Day, progressive economists, the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive. . . -- Resolution of the Congress of the International Working Men's Association meeting at Geneva in 1866 (written by Karl Marx) Who knew that a star pupil of Alfred Marshall, theorizing in the marginalist tradition, confirmed the analysis of Karl Marx regarding the interaction between the intensive and extensive dimensions of the working day and the role of human capacities in defining absolute limits to the production of surplus value? And who cares that his theory was widely accepted by the most eminent economists of the day until it was stuffed in a cubby hole by a pair of Hayek fans from the London School of Economics? Marvel at the way that way that mathematical pure theory swallows gold (Chapman's theory) and spouts dreck (the income-leisure indifference curve)! I have uploaded to Google docs a draft of a paper on Sydney J. Chapman's theory of the hours of labour that I will be presenting at the Association for Social Economics conference in Amsterdam this June. http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgr92tk3_0fq75fz The paper launches Sandwichman's Chapman 2009 campaign, which uses the centenary of the theory's 1909 publication as an occasion to re-examine the relevance of Chapman's contribution to economic theory to current social and environmental issues. I welcome any comments and suggestions on the draft. I have copied the conclusion to the essay below, which summarizes the main points of the essay: Sydney Chapman's theory of the hours of labour was both insightful and authoritative. It was widely accepted by eminent English economists of its day. It buttressed the novel conclusions that the ideal hours of work for maximizing social welfare would be shorter than those for maximizing profits and that the hours of work set in a competitive market may be too long even from the standpoint of maximizing output. Yet the theory was displaced by a simplification that assumed conditions contrary to those results and by a gesture of realism based on neither evidence nor argument. In its place has sprung up a mathematical model of income-leisure choice in which the face of actual work is unrecognizable. With the centennial of its original presentation fast approaching, it is fitting that we should re-examine what has been lost and what -- if anything -- has been gained by this remarkable instance of theoretical substitution. Regards, Tom Walker/Sandwichman
Re: [PEN-L] Chapman 2009 campaign
Sandwichman wrote: Who knew that a star pupil of Alfred Marshall, theorizing in the marginalist tradition, confirmed the analysis of Karl Marx regarding the interaction between the intensive and extensive dimensions of the working day and the role of human capacities in defining absolute limits to the production of surplus value? That would be Marshall himself who, as I've pointed out before, both understood and endorsed this aspect of Marx. “suppose you had told an intelligent man 100 years ago, that all manual labour would thus be dispensed with, he would have looked forward to a time of perfect freedom, a perpetual Sunday, when work would be so entirely subordinated to what was important, to the growth of man and of his character, that it would almost have been forgotten.” (Alfred Marshall's Lectures to Wome, edited by Raifaelli, Biagini and Tullberg, p. 92) Finding and ameliorating the causes of lack of progress in this direction constituted one of the main motivations behind his study of political economy. “I claim then to have shown what pressing reason there is for showing why the development of our arts of production has done so little to prevent the sacrifices of man to production. And it is not easy to see why the hopeful prophecy we imagined a man of a hundred years ago to have uttered has not yet come true. Why every day is not a Sunday, devoted to culture, with just so much work perhaps, as is necessary for the health of the body, with time to learn and to think, to be educated for science, and art.” (ibid., p. 95) Marshall, by the way, also sublated Hegel on the relation of the sea to the development of free individuality (see Water as an Element of National Wealth in Memorials of Alfred Marshall). In Industry and Trade (p. 774, note), he cites Marx, in Capital, quoting Anitpatros in support of the claim that water power was the first to raise hopes that mankind might be eased from severe toil by the benignant help of Nature. In the same context, Marx also quotes Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity, pointing to the same possibility arising from the general development of forces of production. “'If,' dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity, 'if every tool, when summoned, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Daedalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephaestos went of their own accord to their sacred work, if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers, or of slaves for the lords.' [73] And Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the invention of the water- wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the elementary form of all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the bringer back of the golden age. [74] Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him the still wiser MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity. They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another. But to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus, might become 'eminent spinners,' 'extensive sausage-makers,' and 'influential shoe-black dealers,' to do this, they lacked the bump of Christianity. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm Ted
Re: [PEN-L] Demonstrations today
Re: Demonstrations today Michael Hoover wrote: about 4000 here in orblando, replicating last year's 30,000 that shut downtown streets would have been a herculean task, but organizers this year were privately saying that turnout might be in the several hundreds, so yesterday's event far exceeded those low numbers, kudos once again to the florida association of farmworkers (among others) for its efforts... Thanks, Michael. For those interested, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now show today focused on the issue. Interesting interviews. Very hopeful signs. The show's iPod-able file should be on the web site tomorrow.
[PEN-L] four year anniversary
It's been four years since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. Has anyone paid attention to that country to see how they've handled this unprecedented period of peace and prosperity? ;-) -- Jim Devine / Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
[PEN-L] www.google.com/books
I haven't really paid much attention to the Google Book search, but it looks like a *tremendous* resource. It contains both full books and selections. Here's how it can be of some use. I am planning on writing about Patricia Highsmith at some point. She is the novelist who wrote the Ripley novels that a couple of fascinating movies have been based on. I wanted to take a look at what else she has written and this would have meant a stroll to the bookstore or the Columbia Library in the past. With google/books, you enter Patricia Highsmith and you get 351 results! I was particularly interested in The Tremor of Forgery, which is set in Tunisia and takes swipes at Zionism and the US war in Vietnam. Highsmith is a fascinating character. She was bisexual and rather misanthropic. She also hated American society, so much so that she moved to France in 1963. Scotland on Sunday, June 1, 2003, Sunday BOOK REVIEWS: BEAUTIFUL SHADOW: A LIFE OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH: A BEAUTIFUL TALENT WITHIN A TORTURED SOUL BYLINE: Todd Mcewen BEAUTIFUL SHADOW: A LIFE OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH Andrew Wilson Bloomsbury, GBP 25 PATRICIA Highsmith, born, as she said, under a sickly star in 1921 in Texas, spent her life in flight. She had a desperate childhood, raised by a jealous mother, constantly moving between the south and New York. She probably suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father and by the time she attended university was fairly sure of her lesbianism. Her first novel, the amazing Strangers on a Train, began her bumpy literary life. Highsmith created one of the most disturbing anti-heroes in modern literature, Tom Ripley. Although she wrote in a genre of her own, as one admirer said, her books now seem to belong more with those of her beloved Dostoevsky and Camus than those of Chandler and Cain. Andrew Wilson has chosen a wonderful subject and written an excellent book. His analyses of culture in the United States during the decades of Highsmith's life are apt; so too his examination of the political and moral implications of her work. He offers a brilliant reading of Highsmith's lesbian novel Carol, published under a pseudonym in 1952, showing it to be a virtual critique of McCarthyism. Something Highsmithian and creepy grows on you as you read Beautiful Shadow: a deja vu of the worst years of American imperial blindness, Korea and Vietnam. Her intense understanding of human ambiguity can only become more important; the Highsmith view makes sense of the crass mono-manias racing round the world now. The abnormal point of view is always the best for depicting 20th century life, not because so many of us are abnormal, realising it or not, but because 20th century life is established and maintained through abnormality, she wrote in 1942. Mad people are the only active people, they have built the world. There are a lot of writers who set out to make themselves as miserable as possible, and Highsmith may be their queen. Her later years, unfocused and paranoid, make dreary reading. Wilson may not have penetrated her latter secrecy, but perhaps no one did. It's clear she had a depression that went unattended and that she drank herself to death, surviving by the end only on licks of peanut butter from a jar in her purse. Strangely, Wilson has chosen to track her as gay, but it would have been useful to confront her early on as an alcoholic as well - it's all there, the ravings, fears, flights from partners; the successful spendthrift who descends from liberal views into bigotry and weird penny-pinching. She died in Locarno eight years ago, having spent her life looking - in her work, which she thought her only real pleasure - for a solution that is somehow satisfying, as my personal solution can never be. What a pleasure is reading the dictionary, said this lonely woman who admired only existentialists, snails, psychopaths and cats, the only book I know that is true and honest. When Andrew Wilson finished Beautiful Shadow he was given a robe that had belonged to Highsmith. He put it on; there were some of her hairs on the collar. In doing this, he says he caught a glimpse of her. A stunt he might better have kept to himself. But it's what the talented Mr Ripley would have done - before killing someone. -- www.marxmail.org
[PEN-L] query
where did Joan Robinson say that Keynes himself did not understand the full implications of his theory? -- Jim Devine / Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
[PEN-L] Iraq, By The Numbers - Some statistics from Nancy Pelosi’s office
Including, but not limited to: Number of insurgents in Iraq in November 2003: 5,000 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07] Number of insurgents in Iraq in March 2007: 70,000 (Sunni only) [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07] Amount of Iraqi reconstruction funds unaccounted for by the Coalition Provisional Authority: $8.8 billion [Boston Globe, 4/6/06] Tons of cash shipped to Iraq in December 2003 and June 2004 under the authority of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority: 363 [Reuters, 2/12/07] Number of weapons bought by the U.S. intended for Iraqi troops that are now missing: 14,030 [SIGIR, 10/29/06] (That number is low, unless the Pentagon has succeeded in locating the 1/4 million AK-47s that vanished enroute via a Bosnian air shipment contractor.//leigh) More... http://leighm.net/wp/2007/05/02/bythenumbr_dscrsnet/
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
On 2 May, 2007, at 2:34 PM, Jim Devine wrote: where did Joan Robinson... Any relation to Julia Robinson? --ravi
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
On 2 May, 2007, at 2:34 PM, Jim Devine wrote: where did Joan Robinson... On 5/2/07, ravi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Any relation to Julia Robinson? I don't know. Who is Julia R? -- Jim Devine / Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
Re: [PEN-L] Differential games
me: The fact that Julio's model produced non-intuitive results is a major blow against Ted's critique, which is totally on the methodological philosophical level as far as I can tell. Methodology and philosophy can guide us in our thinking, but if simple social science produces unexpected results, it's a step forward. Ted: Actually, it's completely irrelevant to the arguments I made. You've also mischaracterized them. I am sorry if mischaracterized your opinions. I'm afraid that I have a problem with reading your contributions to pen-l and am thus prone to such errors. I'm not a big fan of exegesis of quotes from famous people, while sometimes it seems that parts of what you say are _non sequiturs_. Perhaps your goals in posting to pen-l are different from mine, so I don't see what should be the obvious point of these seeming side-tracks. I sometimes find that you see too much of an agreement between Marx and Keynes, but then don't see it at as worth arguing about. I find myself generally agreeing with your individual points but then not quite understanding your main point. I'm afraid that I usually find myself moving on to someone else's e-mail before I finish yours. Philosophy in the sense of ontology is necessarily an feature of every explanation, i.e. every explanation involves explicit or implicit claims about the ultimate nature of reality... sure, the ultimate nature of reality is crucial. It's a major matter. It distinguishes, say, Marx's perspective from, say, that of the neoclassicals. (However, I'd say that their differing class stances are even more important.) One's conception of ontology in term determines the broad outlines of one's views of epistemology (i.e., methodology). But what about a purely intellectual enterprise? It is the standard view -- the conventional wisdom, if you wish -- that a bunch of individualists will hurt each other (and thus the collectivity) if they are put into a Prisoners' Dilemma-type situation. If Julio is pointing to a reason why this isn't so, it says something about the validity of this wisdom. It's true that the line between purely intellectual exercises and the real world is at best a permeable membrane and a thin one at that. But there is some place for ivory-tower theorizing, even if it's provisional. Some of us have jobs in academia and thus end up having to pay attention to sometimes-silly debates whether we want to or not. It can be very useful to have intellectual raw material to deal with -- and if possible, subvert -- some of the pompous windbags and narrow-minded dogmatists who populate academia. This has methodological implications. It makes it logically impossible to translate that explanation into mathematical abstractions for the reason that such abstractions require the irrelevance of internal relations for their valid application. Do you mean empirically impossible here? after all, one might take an insight or explanation and try to distill it down into some axioms or assumptions and then logically/mathematically derive conclusions. (By logic, I mean that which follows the Aristotelian tradition.) The problem is, of course, with what's left out (the abstraction) and how it leads to a distortion preventing correspondence with empirical reality (ultimate or otherwise) . In addition to this, an explanation in terms of the psychological fact that everyone in New York is scared so stiff as to be unable to move can't be consistently translated into an explanation in terms of the assumption that everyone in New York is rationally optimizing. I don't understand why you bring up this point. I don't think _anyone_ is rationally optimizing. However, I do think that as a first approximation, a lot of people are pushed to act _as if_ they were rationally optimizing (in the neoclassical sense of that phrase) by certain societal situations, e.g., extremely competitive markets. You're the expert on quotes from Marx: didn't he say somewhere that capitalism encourages individualistic behavior and ideologies to prevail? if so, then neoclassical rational optimizing isn't totally irrelevant. It might be a first approximation of actually-existing behavior and ideology. Because (again as a first approximation) a lot of people sometimes act _as if_ they were rationally optimizing by certain societal circumstances, it seems to me that we cannot _a priori_ reject models based on economic rationality. Rather, we have to decide the extent to which they actually reveal something about the (ultimately) real world. We have to examine all of the assumptions to decide if they are so far off that the model isn't worth the effort at all. Most aren't, but that does not say that all aren't. On it's own, the claim that if simple social science produces unexpected results, it' a step forward leads to absurd conclusions. The Bedlamite conclusion of the remorseless logician Hayek that real wealth was growing faster in the Great Depression than in
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
On 2 May, 2007, at 4:13 PM, Jim Devine wrote: On 2 May, 2007, at 2:34 PM, Jim Devine wrote: where did Joan Robinson... On 5/2/07, ravi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Any relation to Julia Robinson? I don't know. Who is Julia R? Who *is* Julia Robinson!!!? Why the cheek! ;-) Julia Robinson was one of the most important mathematicians/logicians of the 20th century. --ravi
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
On May 2, 2007, at 5:18 PM, ravi wrote: Who *is* Julia Robinson!!!? Why the cheek! ;-) Julia Robinson was one of the most important mathematicians/logicians of the 20th century. I always suspected that I have no idea what mathematicians do. Then I read a bit about Julia Robinson, and my worst fears are confirmed. None of it made any sense to me. Makes Lacan read like McGuffey's. Doug
Re: [PEN-L] Fwd: again, differential games
On 4/30/07, Julio Huato [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Julio writes: Choice theory is not the only way one can learn about the world. But, again, *if you use choice theory*, you cannot (or should not) appeal to preferences magically changing outside of the model from selfish to altruistic. That's an admission of failure. there is an alternative to the assumption of given tastes and that of changing tastes as a _deus ex machina_. Tastes could be made endogenous in a systematic way, as I do in my paper on Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau (at http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/hlr/HLR.pdf). In more orthodox terms, in macro, expectations of the future play a very similar role to that of tastes in micro. The big difference is that expectations are not taken as exogenously given, but are instead determined endogenously, reflecting historical and current data. (I'm deliberately ignoring RatEx, which seems to be witchcraft.) The dynamics of a society _might_ produce expectations that are stabilizing. That is, if people expect that ripping off someone will cause counterattacks, that might (under certain circumstances) stabilize what looks like a disastrous prisoner's dilemma. Preferences might follow a similar pattern of endogenous determination. (I apologize to the Wiccan community for comparing them to RatEx.) -- Jim Devine / Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
well, I'm no mathematician. Anyway, Joan was British, while Julia was an Amurrican. On 5/2/07, ravi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2 May, 2007, at 4:13 PM, Jim Devine wrote: On 2 May, 2007, at 2:34 PM, Jim Devine wrote: where did Joan Robinson... On 5/2/07, ravi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Any relation to Julia Robinson? I don't know. Who is Julia R? Who *is* Julia Robinson!!!? Why the cheek! ;-) Julia Robinson was one of the most important mathematicians/logicians of the 20th century. --ravi -- Jim Devine / Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
Find an effective way to determine whether a polynomial equation with integer coefficients and one or more unknowns has any integer solutions. (Sort of like the quadratic formula.) I never went beyond elementary calculus, and didn't learn that very well. But I can sort of vaguely see how solving this would be both beautiful and spooky. 3x*4 + 7y*3 + 13y - 17x - 7xy - 374 = 0 If I understand this correctly, what is sought is a method by which one could, just by inspecting this equation, but without solving it, determine whether or not it held for some values of x y as whole numbers!!! And if, as is often the case with mathematical discoveries, it was then found that this method illuminated physical relations not recognized or understood before. I really wish I'd had two or three more years of math. Carrol
Re: [PEN-L] query
Jim Devine wrote: where did Joan Robinson say that Keynes himself did not understand the full implications of his theory? Isn't it almost standard that the originator of any very powerful theory does not understand its full implications. (This could be derived as a necessity from the axiom of the priority of practice: that is, there is no way to judge a theory's full implications prior to a long period in which it informs practice.) Carrol
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
On 2 May, 2007, at 5:30 PM, Doug Henwood wrote: On May 2, 2007, at 5:18 PM, ravi wrote: Who *is* Julia Robinson!!!? Why the cheek! ;-) Julia Robinson was one of the most important mathematicians/logicians of the 20th century. I always suspected that I have no idea what mathematicians do. Then I read a bit about Julia Robinson, and my worst fears are confirmed. None of it made any sense to me. Makes Lacan read like McGuffey's. Well yes, it may not make sense at the outset, but mathematics and the doing of it, is the easiest to learn/understand by its very nature of atomic inferential progression. If you read about her you probably learnt that she contributed the major part (the other contributors being Martin Davis, a few blocks away from your office, Putnam, and a young fellow named Matjasevich) to resolving Hilbert's 10th: the question of whether there is a procedure for determining if polynomial equations have integer solutions. Note that the question is not about solving a particular equation, but of whether a general procedure or algorithm can answer the question of solving to integer values. And the answer is No, there isn't! Even if you do not follow the math of it, what an interesting result! I have no idea who McGuffey is, and I know that Lacan is vilified by the anti-pomo crowd. Irrespective of that, I believe you are missing out one of the most fundamentally beautiful human activities by dismissing (from your scope of knowledge) the doing of mathematics prematurely! --ravi
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
On May 2, 2007, at 6:50 PM, ravi wrote: I have no idea who McGuffey is, and I know that Lacan is vilified by the anti-pomo crowd. Irrespective of that, I believe you are missing out one of the most fundamentally beautiful human activities by dismissing (from your scope of knowledge) the doing of mathematics prematurely! I'm not dismissing it at all - I even use it from time to time, though mostly in a vulgar way. I stopped studying math after the first semester of college calculus. I admire people who can understand it with any depth; I'm just not one of them. McGuffey is the name of legendary 19th century readers for American schoolkids. Doug
Re: [PEN-L] query 2
On 2 May, 2007, at 6:55 PM, Doug Henwood wrote: On May 2, 2007, at 6:50 PM, ravi wrote: I have no idea who McGuffey is, and I know that Lacan is vilified by the anti-pomo crowd. Irrespective of that, I believe you are missing out one of the most fundamentally beautiful human activities by dismissing (from your scope of knowledge) the doing of mathematics prematurely! I'm not dismissing it at all - I even use it from time to time, though mostly in a vulgar way. I stopped studying math after the first semester of college calculus. I admire people who can understand it with any depth; I'm just not one of them. I did not mean that you are dismissing mathematics, but that you are dismissing the possibility of your making sense of the workings of it. You are being a bit too modest -- I studied math at undergraduate and graduate level, but there are mathematical things you can do and talk about that I would not understand -- at least not any longer. And perhaps that is vulgar math by some token, but even within the math community, the divide is not just between pure and applied math, but also between math and meta-math (the latter often suffering the disadvantage). Or perhaps I am being too immodest, though, in my defence, I do not claim that I understand math to any depth ;-). McGuffey is the name of legendary 19th century readers for American schoolkids. Ah! --ravi
Re: [PEN-L] query
the quote I was looking for is There were moments when we had some trouble in getting Maynard to see what the point of his revolution really was. In Essays on John Maynard Keynes. ed by Milo Keynes. On 5/2/07, Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jim Devine wrote: where did Joan Robinson say that Keynes himself did not understand the full implications of his theory? Isn't it almost standard that the originator of any very powerful theory does not understand its full implications. (This could be derived as a necessity from the axiom of the priority of practice: that is, there is no way to judge a theory's full implications prior to a long period in which it informs practice.) Carrol -- Jim Devine / Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
Re: [PEN-L] query
Isn't it true of literature as well. I recall that Brecht intended Mother Courage to be a negative character. When he put on the play, the audience loved her. Brecht was upset so he replaced her with his wife, who was even more endearing. [from possibly spotty memory] Also Stephen Hymer in the Monthly Review showed how Defoe did not understand that Robinson Crusoe actually contained an effective critique of capitalism. On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 05:36:25PM -0500, Carrol Cox wrote: Isn't it almost standard that the originator of any very powerful theory does not understand its full implications. (This could be derived as a necessity from the axiom of the priority of practice: that is, there is no way to judge a theory's full implications prior to a long period in which it informs practice.) Carrol -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com
Re: [PEN-L] query
On May 2, 2007, at 7:25 PM, Jim Devine wrote: the quote I was looking for is There were moments when we had some trouble in getting Maynard to see what the point of his revolution really was. In Essays on John Maynard Keynes. ed by Milo Keynes. Maybe he was afraid it'd undermine bourgeois rule, which he was all for. Somewhere else Robinson says something like, Maynard was always talking about the quantity of investment, but never what it was for. Thus the burying and unburying of bottles example.
Re: [PEN-L] query
On May 2, 2007, at 7:28 PM, Michael Perelman wrote: Isn't it true of literature as well. I recall that Brecht intended Mother Courage to be a negative character. When he put on the play, the audience loved her. It's not what you say, it's what they hear. - Frank Luntz
Re: [PEN-L] Differential games
Jim Devine wrote: Philosophy in the sense of ontology is necessarily an feature of every explanation, i.e. every explanation involves explicit or implicit claims about the ultimate nature of reality... sure, the ultimate nature of reality is crucial. It's a major matter. It distinguishes, say, Marx's perspective from, say, that of the neoclassicals. (However, I'd say that their differing class stances are even more important.) One's conception of ontology in term determines the broad outlines of one's views of epistemology (i.e., methodology). But what about a purely intellectual enterprise? It is the standard view -- the conventional wisdom, if you wish -- that a bunch of individualists will hurt each other (and thus the collectivity) if they are put into a Prisoners' Dilemma-type situation. If Julio is pointing to a reason why this isn't so, it says something about the validity of this wisdom. It's true that the line between purely intellectual exercises and the real world is at best a permeable membrane and a thin one at that. But there is some place for ivory-tower theorizing, even if it's provisional. Some of us have jobs in academia and thus end up having to pay attention to sometimes-silly debates whether we want to or not. It can be very useful to have intellectual raw material to deal with -- and if possible, subvert -- some of the pompous windbags and narrow-minded dogmatists who populate academia. How is this relevant to demonstrating that Julio's non-intuitive results are a major blow against Ted's critique? This has methodological implications. It makes it logically impossible to translate that explanation into mathematical abstractions for the reason that such abstractions require the irrelevance of internal relations for their valid application. Do you mean empirically impossible here? after all, one might take an insight or explanation and try to distill it down into some axioms or assumptions and then logically/mathematically derive conclusions. (By logic, I mean that which follows the Aristotelian tradition.) The problem is, of course, with what's left out (the abstraction) and how it leads to a distortion preventing correspondence with empirical reality (ultimate or otherwise) . What's at issue is Keynes's explanation of a liquidity crisis, an explanation that, in the way I claimed, makes the ontological idea of internal relations relevant. It can't be consistently translated into an explanation that implicitly assumes the idea is irrelevant, i.e. the assumption that internal relations are relevant contradicts the assumption that internal relations are not relevant. In addition to this, an explanation in terms of the psychological fact that everyone in New York is scared so stiff as to be unable to move can't be consistently translated into an explanation in terms of the assumption that everyone in New York is rationally optimizing. I don't understand why you bring up this point. I don't think _anyone_ is rationally optimizing. However, I do think that as a first approximation, a lot of people are pushed to act _as if_ they were rationally optimizing (in the neoclassical sense of that phrase) by certain societal situations, e.g., extremely competitive markets. You're the expert on quotes from Marx: didn't he say somewhere that capitalism encourages individualistic behavior and ideologies to prevail? if so, then neoclassical rational optimizing isn't totally irrelevant. It might be a first approximation of actually-existing behavior and ideology. Because (again as a first approximation) a lot of people sometimes act _as if_ they were rationally optimizing by certain societal circumstances, it seems to me that we cannot _a priori_ reject models based on economic rationality. Rather, we have to decide the extent to which they actually reveal something about the (ultimately) real world. We have to examine all of the assumptions to decide if they are so far off that the model isn't worth the effort at all. Most aren't, but that does not say that all aren't. Again, what's at issue is Keynes's explanation of a liquidity crisis. Part of my critique (Julio had claimed that dynamic systems, statistics, and game theory provide the sharpest and most economical framework for people (e.g. young people) to grasp what Keynes' is really up to in chapter 12 of his General Theory) was that game theory couldn't represent an explanation, Keynes's, or a reality in which irrationality plays an essential role. He'd asked for a concrete illustration of why this wasn't so. In response, I pointed to Keynes's explanation of interest rate levels in New York in 1932. So the point is relevant to demonstrating that Julio's non-intuitive results are irrelevant to this critique and don't constitute a major blow against it. Marx claims a particular kind of individuality dominates in capitalism. Even where he characterizes this individuality as rational, however, as in his
Re: [PEN-L] query
Doug Henwood wrote: the quote I was looking for is There were moments when we had some trouble in getting Maynard to see what the point of his revolution really was. In Essays on John Maynard Keynes. ed by Milo Keynes. Maybe he was afraid it'd undermine bourgeois rule, which he was all for. Somewhere else Robinson says something like, Maynard was always talking about the quantity of investment, but never what it was for. Thus the burying and unburying of bottles example. But this idea of artificial gold mining implicitly refers to Keynes's foundational claim that the love of money as a possession and auri sacra fames are what investment in capitalism is, for unconsciously anchored reasons, for. In the context, he was satirizing conventional ideas about public spending which, for the same psychological reasons, opposed expenditure on anything actually useful (and, in the worst case, preferred the destructiveness of war). Joan Robinson missed this aspect of Keynes. Since this is how Keynes understood bourgeois rule, it's not accurate to describe him as all for it. Ted
Re: [PEN-L] Differential games
Jim Devine wrote: It is the standard view -- the conventional wisdom, if you wish -- that a bunch of individualists will hurt each other (and thus the collectivity) if they are put into a Prisoners' Dilemma-type situation... But it has *always* been known that a bunch of individualists will hurt each other (and thus the collectivity)... Adam Smith was great, among other reasons, because he specified institutional arrangements under which this would not be the case. But what is this Prisoner's Dilemma stuff? The original formulation of this dilemma (the situation in which the prisoner has neither access to a lawyer nor the elementary intelligence not to believe anything his jailers tell him) is so absurd that I find it a bit hard to think that even economists could base a theory upon it. So has anyone ever given this Dilemma a rational formulation? Shane Mage When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly. When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true. (N. Weiner)
[PEN-L] Query 3
Jim Devine wrote: where did Joan Robinson... Any relation to Julia Robinson? --ravi ^ CB: Weren't they sisters of Jackie Robinson ?
Re: [PEN-L] query
On 5/2/07, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the quote I was looking for is There were moments when we had some trouble in getting Maynard to see what the point of his revolution really was. In Essays on John Maynard Keynes. ed by Milo Keynes. Maybe if they had been asked him instead of 'getting him to'. It sounds like his revolution had been usurped by people with other motivations.. Leigh
