"The New Debt Colonies"

This is an important long-read to help understand the modern era of finance capitalism and its methods.  Thanks Jerome Roos for the insight.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/new-debt-colonies/

government austerity

thanks to Unsplash / Alessio MumboJumbo

Good video featuring Steve Keen myth-busting on this topic. Thanks @Renegade_Inc

https://renegadeinc.com/sunday-papers-mainstream-economists-live-in-a-parallel-universe/

recently

Yanis Varoufakis on the fragility of democracy

https://www.ted.com/talks/yanis_varoufakis_capitalism_will_eat_democracy_unless_we_speak_up

Yanis articulates well many of the issues of the capture of democracy by capitalism and offers some suggestions for paths forward.

Better than anywhere else I've seen, he describes the cost to the worldwide economy of the mountain of unused capital aggregated via inequality.

labor, work, and higher education

Here is an interesting look at worker's compensation:
https://www.propublica.org/article/workers-comp-conferences-expos-and-middlemen

It seems in the middle of the 20th century or so we set about putting together systems and programs that solved problems, and we were reasonably sincere about it, and some of those programs worked reasonably well, for example to educate people, to alleviate poverty at least a bit and especially to address the denial of opportunity to non-white people. Ever since the 80s or so, we've done our best to subvert and divert those programs back to rewarding the wealthy and powerful and away from their original purpose. Very effectively it would seem.

In particular, we seem to be getting very good at abstracting processes so the economic inputs get soaked up by the administrators of various programs.  In other words, the people who can abstract the process or program - hike it up one level of abstraction by focusing on the middlemen or managers of the process - capture the gains.

Another example is higher education - when the economy boomed education got more expensive but people could afford it because the economy was expanding, jobs were available, and education was seen as a public good and thus a good use of public money. It seems in many cases much of the additional cost went to additional layers of administration. In the current time of economic retrenching, austerity, and a dim view of public financing of education, we frequently cut academic department and keep the administrative layers, generally, because admins are powerful.

For tech people, there is one silver lining - the gold rush of patentable innovation keeps many research labs at universities at least reasonably afloat. Meet the workforce needs and all that! But the dream of a good quality higher education for all who want it recedes at a time of greatest need. 

Education and workman's comp are somewhat related - workers are under great pressure: not just workman's comp is diminished, but unions have been weakened and as a result, worker protections have also weakened. Additionally, workers have lost economic power because of globalization's explicit expansion of the workforce and concomitant wage competition, and now workers face, finally, the prospect of many types of jobs disappearing forever due to the cruel/beneficent and ever-increasing capability of automation and AI to become more and more effective. (Any wonder income and wealth inequality has skyrocketed?) We need an excellent education system, and not one narrowly vocationally focused because, first, technical skill requirements are starting to evolve faster than people can be retrained in them, and second, because in a time of great change, we need people prepared to think unusually creatively about how they can sustain themselves, and thrive and participate in defining the new society that is emerging.

More on many of these topics in the future, for sure. 

many thanks to ryanlerch (librarian) for the clipart. https://openclipart.org/user-detail/ryanlerch

Capitalism, Hijacked by Finance?

I stumbled on this 25 minute video recorded last year in South Africa. Clayton Christensen discusses how the cycle of innovation may have been interrupted, contributing to jobless recoveries.

In my opinion, add this analysis to those of Piketty's Capital in 21st Century and Brynjolfsson & McAfee's Second Machine Age when trying to understand the issues we face with employment and inequality.

I guess one overly-simplistic takeaway could be: you get what you measure, so be careful what you measure. More importantly, this suggests, as other analysis seems to as well, that capitalism has been hijacked by finance (and financiers, I suppose) resulting in sub-optimal outcomes, unless you're in finance. The role of capitalism in society is vitally important, and we need to find analysis and vocabulary to help us make policy and political decisions that make sure capitalism is generative, not extractive.

feed the oligarchs, see what happens

this quote:

'He is referring to the 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, in which economist Daron Acemoglu, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that societies fail when they move from an inclusive to an extractive economy, meaning an economy “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society (the masses) to benefit a different subset (the governing elite).”'

from: http://www.thestar.com/news/atkinsonseries/2013/12/13/the_incredible_disappearing_middle_class.html, via: @sarahkendzir

image thanks to: http://economyincrisis.org/content/america-is-caught-in-a-vicious-downward-cycle

Sterling on the NSA, Wikileaks, Assange, Manning, Snowden. Oh my.

Bruce Sterling frequently gets to the real point very clearly, and he's outdone himself in this article posted on Medium: https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/a1ebd2b4a0e5

dystopia is on the march

From the ever entertaining yet thought-provoking @FearDept

https://twitter.com/FearDept/status/341777394459365377

Military Spending - Leading Nations

This is evocative.  Data from 2007. Would be interesting to see updated post-Great Recession data.

Thanks to Lindsey Bieda on Twitter: @lindseybieda, original: https://twitter.com/lindseybieda/status/312943374359478272

passports by state

This is telling.  Don't need Nate Silver to spot some of the correlations in this data.

Thanks to: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/how-many-americans-have-a-passport.html

via:

 http://exp.lore.com/post/44802179035/passport-ownership-in-america-by-state-lets

What is Wealth Inequality in the United States?

Check the video on Mashable:  http://mashable.com/2013/03/02/wealth-inequality/

TLDR - more inequality than we imagine, or wish.

sigh. foreseeable, lamentable, unintended consequences

Polio rates increasing in Central Asia. Heath workers distributing vaccines killed. Reason? Health workers used as cover by CIA trying to find OBL back in the day, leading to distrust now.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/12/health-workers-killed-trying-deliver-polio-vaccine-pakistan/60100/ 

Map thanks to http://www.polioeradication.org/Dataandmonitoring.aspx

economic basics - observations from Ian Welsh

In particular, one caught my eye.  This observation illuminates an extremely effective oligarchy-enhancing policy mechanism:

Austerity is a means by which the rich can buy up assets which are not normally on the market for cheap.

For Ian's full post, see: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/some-basics-on-the-economy.html    Warning: kinda sobering.

buying your laws - oligarchy

So this might be an example of how large corporations buy favorable laws & regulations through campaign contributions, lobbying efforts, etc...  http://www.alternet.org/food/156195

Partially related: http://boingboing.net/2012/06/13/meritocracies-become-oligarchi.html

I could have said that we've decided that the people who are the best at making money must obviously also be the best at all other activities, like governing or setting policy, or maybe heart-surgery or philosophy.  But really, its just that the aggregation of great wealth has become so concentrated wealth-holders have unprecedented mechanisms for re-shaping society into forms that solely benefit further wealth consolidation.  Its ironic that at a time in history when we have, also, unprecedented mechanisms for broadening democracy and citizenship, we've decided instead to build a class of wealth those in the Gilded Age could have imagined only with envy.

regulatory capture

I keep looking for well-articulated insight that captures the frequently distressing 21st century zeitgeist.  Here is a quote from a New York Review of Books article by Zadie Smith:

"... complicit in this new, shared global reality in which states deregulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss."

Takes the concept of "regulatory capture" to another level.

article here: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-west-london-blues/ 

the new monopolies

So, useful article online in Harpers.  Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies are Destroying Open Markets

I've been struggling for a while now trying to figure out how to articulate some of the issues I see with the current state of our economic system and free markets (to use the term loosely).  This is is good thought piece and serves as one framework to understand some of the current  impediments to growth.  Sometimes it seems to me we're spending most of our national economic policy efforts in reconfiguring our society and culture into one large no-risk cash machine benefiting a relatively small number of large corporations.

This article also offers a sobering description of the impact on small companies of “Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts” where, in my words, large companies can play small companies off against each other resulting in economic win-lose, not win-win scenarios.  Disproportionally higher returns to larger aggregations of capital, I suppose one could say.

Money quote:

Today, our overlords not only refuse to defend the power they hold—they deny that it is even possible for any American to accumulate such power. And to make such an absurd claim stick, they (or the more politically sophisticated of the academic economists in their employ) have undermined our language itself. Their most impressive act of lexical legerdemain was the coinage of various misnomers, some so audacious as to be worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Corporate monopoly? Let’s just call that the “free market.” The political ravages of corporate power? Those could be recast as the essentially benign workings of “market forces.”

America in decline?

From time to time in conversation with friends, and even in this blog, I lament about the condition of the United Stares.  I have used the unwieldly phrase "banana-republification", as well as other terms.

James Fallows pointed to an article in der Spiegel which advances several themes about how we got in the condition we're in.  Its interesting to see our quandary from the point of view of others.   Maybe there is a little schadenfreude, but its gentle enough not to distract.

Anyway, if you've got a few minutes, take a look at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726447-6,00.html

"strike at the root"

Excellent 18min video from TedXBoston, - Lessig's plea to "strike at the root" of the problem facing us today.   He makes a strong case that our Republic stands in the balance, and the root of the problem is the effect of corporate funding of Congressional campaigns.

No one has said it better, in my opinion.  Its worth the 18mins, check it out here:  Of/By/4

 http://lessig.blip.tv/file/3945764/

Andy Grove on job creation

Best, most succinct article on basic problems in America's ability to create jobs.   For a while I've been telling people that American companies have been creating millions of jobs in the last decade or two.  Just not here.  Grove puts seasoned analysis behind my sloganeering.

Read it here, thanks to Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html