economics
emjohnson | January 15, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4Richard Hofstadter wrote in Social Darwinism in American Thought that this political theory was "one of the leading strains in American conservative thought for more than a generation." In this series I have shown many of the inconsistencies that exist in the literature on social Darwinism and have emphasized the main objections that scholars have raised about the utility of the term.
In Part 1 I presented the standard definition of social Darwinism as defined by Richard Hofstadter and R.J. Halliday. In Part 2 I highlighted the common objection that there…
emjohnson | January 11, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4In Quentin Skinner's celebrated history The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he writes that:
If the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice.
In Part II of this series I highlighted how a common objection to the political theory of social Darwinism is that it was a misapplication of Darwin's science to already existing ideas. A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the…
emjohnson | January 8, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 English sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852.As I pointed out in Deconstructing Social Darwinism, Part I scholars have begun to seriously challenge the usefulness of the term as a political theory. For example, Gregory Claeys calls the political framework of social Darwinism "a misnomer," Paul Crook states that the ground on which it rests is "decidedly shaky," Robert Bannister calls it a "myth," Donald C. Bellomy refers to it as "heavily polemical, reserved for ideas with which a writer disagreed," Thomas C.…
grrlscientist | January 7, 2010tags: politics, terrorism, economics, social psychology, Red Brigades, Italy, TEDTalks, TED Talks, Loretta Napoleoni, streaming video
Loretta Napoleoni details her rare opportunity to talk to the secretive Italian Red Brigades -- an experience that sparked a lifelong interest in terrorism. She gives a behind-the-scenes look at its complex economics, revealing a surprising connection between money laundering and the US Patriot Act.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their…
razib | January 5, 2010Alex Tabarrok has the back story on the infamous Paul Samuelson projections about Soviet growth. It gets interesting:
Tarshis and Heilbroner were more liberal than Samuelson and McConnell but offered a more nuanced, descriptive and tentative account of the Soviet economy. Why? Levy and Peart argue that they were saved from error not by skepticism about the Soviet Union per se but rather by skepticism about the power of simple economic theories to fully describe the world in the absence of rich institutional detail.
The issue can be generalized to many domains outside economics. If someone…
emjohnson | January 5, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4Social Darwinism is one of those concepts that everyone knows what it is but few can define. I myself have sometimes reflexively used the concept without fully knowing the history of the term or its use as a political theory. In this series it is my goal to raise some questions about the usefulness of social Darwinism and the way it has been applied. This is a history that is full of contradictions (as history often is) and I encourage people to both challenge and offer suggestions as I develop these ideas.
It is first important to point out that Darwin…
sastyk | January 3, 2010Longtime readers will know I'm a deep admirer of _The Automatic Earth_ where Stoneleigh and Ilargi do economic analysis. I think Stoneleigh has outdone herself this time, with a primer on resilience, cycles and where we're headed. Definitely worth a read - probably two reads.
I particularly like this bit of work on resilience, which clarifies and expands slightly on Buzz Holling's.
Resilience arises from a redundancy that has the appearance of inefficiency and a lack of critical structural dependency on specialized hierarchy, neither of which conditions are likely to be met at the peak of…
razib | December 31, 2009The Massive Stock Market Rally of 2009 Ends Today:
In what the Wall Street Journal calls "a comeback of historic proportions," the U.S. stock market's banner year closes later on today. The paper says, "With one trading day remaining in 2009, the Dow is on track for its biggest annual gain since 2003, when it rose 25%. It finished Wednesday up 3.1 points, at 10548.51, a fresh peak for the year and the highest since October 2008." Leading its business section, New York Times also takes note of this year's rallying stock markets, which "will ring out one of their most volatile periods in…
mikethemadbiologist | December 30, 2009Ever since I was a wee Mad Biologist, I've been told by Very Senior People that 'in five years, there's going to be a massive wave a retirement of older faculty.' This, in my mind, ranks up there with the Friedman Unit (in the next six months, we'll know if we have to leave Iraq, and six months later, we need another six months to know this), and the Samuelson Unit (the length of time to the ULTIMATE DOOOMMM!!! of Social Security is always 30-38 years from the time of prediction). Consequently, we will have a 'science gap' since not enough U.S. students know TEH SCIENTISMZ!!, even though…
mikethemadbiologist | December 29, 2009With Big Shitpile rolling on, there's been a lot of discussion about the ethics of defaulting on a home mortgage. Several people have commented on the hypocrisy of denigrating homeowners for doing the same thing that businesses do, without any moral qualms, so I won't say any more about that here. What I do find odd is the inappropriate personalization of who holds housing loans. This is a typical attitude:
Tom Sobelman, whose family of four lives across the street from Ms. Richey, at 3127 Club Rancho Drive, sees mortgages as a moral as well as financial obligation. He's still paying the…
sastyk | December 24, 2009I spend much of my life making the case for changing one's life (and not just one's life - for supporting political and social change that is associated with it) in fairly radical ways, very quickly. I spend a lot of my time writing, and periodically I get on a train or a bus or something and go stand up in front of people and make the same case. I know this is a diffcult thing for many people, whose infrastructure envelopes them and pushes them powerfully towards a particular way of life, so I try to make good arguments for doing it now. I make moral arguments, about the use of a fair…
razib | December 22, 2009There has been more blogospheric discussion on the topic of my post Doing the right thing, doing the legal thing. Megan McArdle, who started the discussion, has a long post elaborating on her objections to strategic defaults. Steve Waldman has two good posts up. Finally, at The Big Money Daniel Gross concludes:
Of course, corporate managers and financiers don't suffer from these neuroses. Do you think billionaire investor Sam Zell feels any guilt or shame because his buyout of the Tribune Co., which had $12.9 billion in debt, ended in a Chapter 11 filing last December? Rather than worry about…
mikethemadbiologist | December 18, 2009Over the last few elections cycles, we've heard about the importance of various demographic groups: Bubbas, soccer moms, NASCAR dads, hockey moms, and so on. But Nan Mooney's (Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class describes one demographic sector that has largely been ignored. Maybe it's because they* aren't 'real Americans', or perhaps they don't have a catchy nickname.
Mooney's book describes the economic problems facing college-educated professionals, including teachers, social workers, and, yes, scientists (contrary to popular belief, most…
razib | December 17, 2009Megan McArdle has a post up where she follows up on her disgust with home owners who "walk away" from their mortgage obligations when they can continue to pay them. In California, and many other states, the bank can't come after you if you walk away, so if your home is "underwater" then it is often a "rational" decision.
Megan makes the point that our economic and social system does not rely purely on rational self-interest, but also on an accumulated capital of norms which lead to virtuous cycles. My family is from Bangladesh, and I have seen this first hand. Corruption & nepotism in…
emjohnson | December 17, 2009 Wall Street's shadow in New York CityAs the education reformer and philosopher John Dewey once stated, "politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance." Unlike other critics of scientific communication, it is my contention that as long as we only address the shadow we will never create substantive change on such pressing scientific issues as health care and the climate crisis. Today James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt has linked to an excellent post highlighting this very concern. The post is from an anonymous employee…
mikethemadbiologist | December 15, 2009In short: seven long years. A few months, when everyone was getting all het up about the observation that the rate of increase in the unemployment rate (the second derivative) was decreasing--that is, more and more people were losing jobs, but more and more wasn't growing as fast as it once was, that struck me as pretty thin gruel. Well, the implications of the first derivative--the change in unemployment--are pretty grim too. Mark Thoma:
How long will it take the unemployment rate to go back down to 5 percent? A rough estimate can be obtained by looking at the rate of decline in the…
emjohnson | December 15, 2009The Guardian environment editor John Vidal, who first reported on the "Danish Text" that would seek to eliminate the Kyoto Protocol and allow wealthy nations to maintain double the carbon pollution as poor nations, has filed this report from Copenhagen. The outrage by developing nations was felt again last night as wealthy delegates met secretly and held "informal consultations with selected countries."
emjohnson | December 14, 2009"Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express the opinion that if there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater domain over nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that domain are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of want with its concomitant physical and moral…
emjohnson | December 14, 2009ScienceBlogs has the funniest ads sometimes. This image adorned the right hand side of my screen this morning (maybe now it's there twice). Intrigued I wanted to know more:
Compassion believes it takes more than education, healthcare and social programs to make a difference in the life of a child and help nations escape from poverty.
Finally, someone's advocating the abolition of all third world debt. Or they're suggesting that there needs to be a nonviolent civil uprising to remove authoritarian regimes throughout the Global South and expose the multinationals who support them. Exposing…
razib | December 13, 2009I was looking for the term "Depression," in the economic sense. But look at the clear seasonal trend in search for the term: