The Need For State-Based Innovation
Politicians and pundits constantly call for the government to step out of the way and let entrepreneurs and “job creators” build the industries of the future. New Left Project argues that this current conventional wisdom is all wrong, and more often than not, game-changing innovation is funded by the government, not the private sector:
The current debate, in the UK and abroad, on the need to cut back the state in order to unleash the power of entrepreneurship and innovation in the private sector, builds upon a stark contrast that is repeatedly drawn by the media, business and libertarian politicians: a dynamic, creative competitive private sector versus a sluggish, bureaucratic, inert, `meddling’ public sector.
It is assumed that the private sector is inherently more innovative, more able to think out of the `box’ and to lead a country towards long-run innovation-led growth. But many examples in the history of innovation, entrepreneurship and competition,…
Don’t Know Much About History . . .
Yeah, volatility is usually considered a “bad thing” in economics. It’s basically the chance that the dollar you leave in your wallet tonight will be worth $0.50 or $1.50 when you wake up in the morning. Makes decision making difficult. Like living on a roulette table.
* Conversion of the U.S. dollar to silver and gold was suspended during the Civil War and discontinued entirely by 1972. Covers the years for which full data are available (i.e., 1820 through 2009).
This analysis excludes, for what I hope are obvious reasons, the years covering America’s wars of existential crisis…
13 States Considering Alternative Currencies
“We don’t want yer Yankee dollars ’round these parts.” CNN writes that a string of state currently have a crush on the idea of of gold and silver-based money:
A growing number of states are seeking shiny new currencies made of silver and gold. Worried that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. dollar are on the brink of collapse, lawmakers from 13 states, including Minnesota, Tennessee, Iowa, South Carolina and Georgia, are seeking approval from their state governments to either issue their own alternative currency or explore it as an option. Just three years ago, only three states had similar proposals in place.
The Constitution bans states from printing their own paper money or issuing their own currency. But it allows the states to make “gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” To the state legislators who are proposing state-issued currencies, that means gold and silver are fair game, said…
The Price of Your Soul: How the Brain Decides Whether to ‘Sell Out’
Via ScienceDaily:
A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.”Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred — whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics — is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.
Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris,…
Seven Big Economic Lies
Do tax cuts for the rich trickle down to the rest of us? And does taxing the rich hurt the economy? Is Social security a Ponzi scheme? Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, presents his list of seven popular-wisdom economic claims that are untrue. Feel free to debate.
Crony Capitalism and the History of Bailouts
In this revealing interview, David Stockman, former budget director and original Supply-Side proponent, tells of the 30-year history of how crony capitalism and the American finance industry has affected American politics.
The Freakonomics Of Hollywood’s Piracy Claims
The Freakonomics dudes have called BS on Hollywood’s piracy claims. Adrianne Jeffries reports for BetaBeat:
Anti-piracy rhetoric holds that online piracy is a devastating force on the U.S. economy, responsible for the theft of between $200 billion and $250 billion per year and the loss of 750,000 good American jobs. “These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010,” write the economists over at Freakonomics.
But those numbers are wrong, the authors say, citing a breakdown by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez.
In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin…
Ron Paul Highlights From CNN GOP Debate
He kills it in the debate, but the votes will be another story. Do you plan on voting for him?
Mass Suicide Threat Results In Massive Lay-Offs For Foxconn Workers
Will Fan Boys finally rebuke their iPhones as more news of Foxconn’s inhumane treatment of workers surfaces in this ZNet article by Hana Stewart-Smith?
When 300 men and women climb onto a rooftop and threaten to commit suicide in protest over denied compensation, it is impossible not to wonder how a company could lead its employees into such desperation.
But Foxconn did.
A little over a week ago, 300 employees at Foxconn’s Technology Park in Wuhan, China threatened their own lives because they were denied a vital pay increase. Foxconn told them they could either keep their jobs without it, or they could quit and be compensated.
Many chose to quit, but the company terminated the agreement, and none of the former workers received the promised compensation.
Production at the company was temporarily halted. It was not until 9 pm the next day that the town’s mayor was able to talk the 300 down from the roof.
Foxconn…
Degrade This!
We live in an increasingly degraded country.
Our politics are degraded and a laughing stock to the world. Our military is demoralized and degraded with soldiers urinating on dead civilians and awaiting deployment orders for the next illegal intervention.
Our education system has been degraded with standards falling and pervasive defunding. Our transportation system, ditto.
I could go on, but I don’t have to. We are all living the decline with downward mobility, joblessness and foreclosures, to cite a few trends that make life so miserable for so many.
Now, our godlike financial ratings agencies have decided to degrade nine countries struggling to fix their financial crisis. The decision by Standard and Poors (Best renamed, “It is now Standard to Be Poor”) to downgrade credit ratings for France, Italy, Austria and six other European countries signals those nations that Wall Street has them by the cojones. Their costs for borrowing will go up.
They are…
Are Skyscrapers Linked With Financial Collapse?
So says the BBC. On various continents, and going back for over a century, the construction of new record-nearing skyscrapers seems to be a consistent canary in a coal mine indicating that an economic bubble exists and a financial crash will soon occur in a given society:
There is an “unhealthy correlation” between the building of skyscrapers and subsequent financial crashes, according to Barclays Capital.
Examples include the Empire State building, built as the Great Depression was under way, and the current world’s tallest, the Burj Khalifa, built just before Dubai almost went bust. China is currently the biggest builder of skyscrapers, the bank said. India also has 14 skyscrapers under construction.
“Often the world’s tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction,” Barclays Capital analysts said.
The bank noted that the world’s first skyscraper, the Equitable Life building…
A World In Denial
Donald Rumsfeld
Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in the New York Times:
Could there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O’Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country’s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.
He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that “There are known knowns… there are known unknowns … there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was “unknown knowns.”
What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational…
What Is Coming After Capitalism?
Nothing developed by humans can withstand the test of time forever, and that includes capitalism. Via Jacobin Magazine, Pete Frase spins four possible scenarios, including the utopian, the distopian and the in-between, based on whether we run out of natural resources and whether machines take over all labor:
One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it.
The very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. At first, this imagining took a mostly grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like…
December 30, 2011 Will Not Exist (In Samoa)
After accepting bad advice nearly 120 years ago from an American trader, this South Pacific nation is taking a major step to improve its economy. (And in a nice slight of hand I wouldn’t mind experiencing, all Samoans who were supposed to get paid that day will still be paid for a day that didn’t exist …) Via Herald Sun:
On Thursday night, it will be December 29 when they go to bed and Saturday Dec 31 when they wake up — meaning they’ll skip Friday forever.
This neat bit of time travel is the result of a very contemporary concern: trade and economic relations with Pacific neighbors Australia and New Zealand, who are currently nearly a day ahead on the clock. Now, with the disappearance of Friday, Samoa will shift west of the international dateline and share the same date and time as its two key partners.
Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi…
If You Are Poor, It’s Because God Hates Your Guts
[Site editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the new Disinformation title 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion, authored by Daniele Bolelli.]
The history of Christianity is like a treasure chest for anyone who is fond of contradictions. The Gospels bicker with each other by relating similar tales in very different ways. But even more obviously, Christianity has often so dramatically departed from the words attributed to Jesus as to make you wonder how these glaring contradictions can be justified. Jesus tells you to “Love your enemies” and “Turn the other cheek”? So let’s show how much we love Jesus by waging crusades, inquisitions, witch-hunts, and brutal campaigns of repression against anyone who doesn’t love Him as much as we do. Jesus’s pacifism has drowned in the hyper-violence that has characterized much of Christian history.
But—we may object—most Christians alive today seem to have lost the bloodthirsty enthusiasm of their…
The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos: Bombshell Documents That Detail the Rule of the 1 Percent
Via Politicalgates:
“Are they real?” That’s the question people usually ask when they hear for the first time of the “Citigroup Plutonomy Memos.” The sad truth is: Yes, they are real, and instead of being discussed on mainstream media outlets all over America and beyond, Citigroup was surprisingly successful so far in suppressing these memos, using their lawyers to issue takedown-notices whenever these memos were being made available for download on the internet.
So what are we talking about? In 2005 and 2006, several analysts at Citigroup took a very, very close look at the economic inequalities within the USA and other countries and wrote two memos which were addressed to their very wealthy customers. If there is one group of people who need to know the truth about what is really going on within the society and the economy, minus the propaganda, then it’s businesspeople who have a lot of money to…
Breaking Apart An iPhone’s Cost
It’s still shocking to see just how little of the profits from an item go towards those who made it. From a piece on the power of transnational corporations, via Reports from the Economic Front:
The production of the iPhone offers one of the best examples of the logic and operation of these transnational corporate controlled cross border production networks.
Not surprisingly, the division of profits, as shown below, reflects the overall hierarchy that structures this and other cross border production networks.
Pope Benedict Peace Message Calls For Wealth Redistribution
Wait a second — does this make Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich a couple o’ them “Cafeteria Catholics”? From Francis X. Rocca at the Huffington Post:
VATICAN CITY (RNS)— Noting a “rising sense of frustration” at the worldwide economic recession, Pope Benedict XVI said that a more just and peaceful world requires “adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth.”
The pope’s words appeared in his message for the World Day of Peace 2012, released on Friday (Dec. 16) at the Vatican.
The message laments that “some currents of modern culture, built upon rationalist and individualist economic principles, have cut off the concept of justice from its transcendent roots, detaching it from charity and solidarity.”
Authentic education, Benedict writes, teaches the proper use of freedom with “respect for oneself and others, including those whose way of being and living differs greatly from one’s own.”
