On the scabrous PSJR site, the questions was raised, "Greatest Comparativist Ever? Living or Dead?"
Usual names. Someone suggested Marx. My response is here:
Marx is plausible as an answer to the "Best Comparativist."
But he was a student of Aristotle. And, Aristotle's work on comparatie constitutions is still widely cited.
I think you have to go with Aristotle, then. The problem is that none of his work was refereed, and even his books were not published by major presses. That may be why he didn't get tenure, after Plato deeded the Academy over to his nephew Speusippus. Of course, Ari had to go look for another job, even though he had great teaching evaluations and had been doing all the busy work for Plato for years.
Fortunately, having ivy league background gave Ari a leg up when he moved to Asia Minor, but who wants to have to teach in one of those "directional countries"? Ari ended up hiring out to teach some rich brat, who left to fight wars before they got to the more advanced stuff.
Ari went back to Athens, but got snubbed AGAIN for the TT job at the Academy. That brown-noser Xenocrates got the job, leave Ari to work as a VAP. Ari started his own school, the Lyceum, and did some of his best work, including two big NSF grants and attracting some excellent grad students. (And I mean, EXCELLENT. I think one of Michael Ting's ancestors thought about going to the Lyceum, but ended up staying at Columbia)
But then there were student riots after Alexander the Great died. The students were pissed off about core requirements, and of course the hegemony of "dead Macedonians" in the curriculum. Ari was accused of impiety, and loudly making that motorboat sound whenever he saw a hot undergraduate wearing a low-cut peplos. Some deans threatened to put a committee together to study some of the contingencies of toughening their rhetoric, and Ari had to go live with his mom on the island of Euboea.
Moral of the story: Publish in refereed journals, and get a tenure-track job. Otherwise, even if you are the greatest comparativist who EVER lived, you may have to go live with your mom. Oh, and don't make that motorboat sound.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Bad news for Everyone
Mark Linkous, AKA Sparklehorse is dead by his own hand. Here is the story from Pitchfork, and here is another from Rolling Stone.
For those of you who don't know Sparklehorse's music, the 2001 album, "It's a wonderful life" (God, what a horrible title that is now) is, in my opinion, their best and one of the very best works of this new, blighted, century.
What does it say about a person when his artistic heros keep killing themselves?
Sunday, March 07, 2010
You Think Joe Stiglitz is Funny? NYT is funny, too!
The New York Times, apparently now the "Pay Lady of News," is busy whoring out to the "don't worry, be happy!" crowd.
Check this article....
The concern, of course, is that one day rates will inevitably go up, which means interest payments will too. According to this school of thought, as our debt grows, lenders will be willing to take the risk of giving more money only if they can get more in return. And yet with the rise of China, India and Brazil, the world is awash in money looking for safe places. Even with the U.S. economy weak, the dollar remains one of the few truly safe havens, and that means interest rates could stay low for a very long time, which in turn means that our debts — however big — can be managed.
Indeed, though eliminating deficits might seem wise, it could actually be fatal to future prosperity. China is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure, while America can hardly repair its bridges. The U.S. has to invest and spend to build a future, to help re-create a workforce, and for now debt is a means to that end — provided Washington shows it can effectively channel that money.
(See the best business deals of 2009.)
Like home mortgages, much of the debt never has to be paid down. Half of the debt of trillions of dollars is owed by the federal government to itself, and a quarter more is owed to the American public. Because of the unique role of the dollar as the global reserve currency, the debt the government owes itself can simply be rolled over endlessly. Only the interest payments are a must. As long as the dollar remains central to the global system — and there is little chance of that changing in the next decade — the U.S. will have the latitude to borrow more than most other countries.
Worrying about debt is like gaining too much weight and worrying about the size of your clothing.
Okay...first, it's NOT "like gaining too much weight and worrying about the size of your clothing." The US debt is like gaining too much weight and saying it's okay to gain more weight.
Second, if you want to make that bizarre analogy work, you would have to say, "Eating 5,000 calories a day would be okay if you are training for a marathon. But if you are sitting around watching curling, eating 5,000 calories a day is disastrous."
I accept, as Angus did before, that debt might be okay if we were investing it. But we are not. We are using debt to fund pet projects that have no purpose other than re-electing Senators, or paying to put more people on the public employment roles so they will reliably vote Democrat.
Third, the dude actually says, "According to this school of thought, as our debt grows, lenders will be willing to take the risk of giving more money only if they can get more in return. And yet with the rise of China, India and Brazil, the world is awash in money looking for safe places." That's not a school of thought, that's accounting physics. Further, if either the Eurozone or Chinese get their act together, our complacency ("sure we suck, but they suck worse! Eat that pie!") will be hammered.
Yes, I realize that the author is in fact some shill, not the NYT ed page itself. Still, this is pretty funny. Almost as funny as Joe Stiglitz.
(Nod to Kesav)
Check this article....
The concern, of course, is that one day rates will inevitably go up, which means interest payments will too. According to this school of thought, as our debt grows, lenders will be willing to take the risk of giving more money only if they can get more in return. And yet with the rise of China, India and Brazil, the world is awash in money looking for safe places. Even with the U.S. economy weak, the dollar remains one of the few truly safe havens, and that means interest rates could stay low for a very long time, which in turn means that our debts — however big — can be managed.
Indeed, though eliminating deficits might seem wise, it could actually be fatal to future prosperity. China is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure, while America can hardly repair its bridges. The U.S. has to invest and spend to build a future, to help re-create a workforce, and for now debt is a means to that end — provided Washington shows it can effectively channel that money.
(See the best business deals of 2009.)
Like home mortgages, much of the debt never has to be paid down. Half of the debt of trillions of dollars is owed by the federal government to itself, and a quarter more is owed to the American public. Because of the unique role of the dollar as the global reserve currency, the debt the government owes itself can simply be rolled over endlessly. Only the interest payments are a must. As long as the dollar remains central to the global system — and there is little chance of that changing in the next decade — the U.S. will have the latitude to borrow more than most other countries.
Worrying about debt is like gaining too much weight and worrying about the size of your clothing.
Okay...first, it's NOT "like gaining too much weight and worrying about the size of your clothing." The US debt is like gaining too much weight and saying it's okay to gain more weight.
Second, if you want to make that bizarre analogy work, you would have to say, "Eating 5,000 calories a day would be okay if you are training for a marathon. But if you are sitting around watching curling, eating 5,000 calories a day is disastrous."
I accept, as Angus did before, that debt might be okay if we were investing it. But we are not. We are using debt to fund pet projects that have no purpose other than re-electing Senators, or paying to put more people on the public employment roles so they will reliably vote Democrat.
Third, the dude actually says, "According to this school of thought, as our debt grows, lenders will be willing to take the risk of giving more money only if they can get more in return. And yet with the rise of China, India and Brazil, the world is awash in money looking for safe places." That's not a school of thought, that's accounting physics. Further, if either the Eurozone or Chinese get their act together, our complacency ("sure we suck, but they suck worse! Eat that pie!") will be hammered.
Yes, I realize that the author is in fact some shill, not the NYT ed page itself. Still, this is pretty funny. Almost as funny as Joe Stiglitz.
(Nod to Kesav)
Bondage dungeon in Devon.
One guy showed up during the search. He was questioned. But he claimed, "But I have an appointment!" Perhaps he thought all the burly men in police uniforms were a new wrinkle in the show?
And check this list of contraband:
The sex dungeon was then found in a converted room filled with "hundreds" of items including whips, gas masks, wooden bats, handcuffs, clothes pegs and shackles.
Police also discovered bondage chairs with straps, straight jackets, sex toys, gimp masks, S&M outfits, shackles, cattle prods and car batteries used to power the toys.
Um, that's "straitjacket," please, unless you are some illiterate product of the failed British school system.
(Nod to Tommy the Brit.)
One guy showed up during the search. He was questioned. But he claimed, "But I have an appointment!" Perhaps he thought all the burly men in police uniforms were a new wrinkle in the show?
And check this list of contraband:
The sex dungeon was then found in a converted room filled with "hundreds" of items including whips, gas masks, wooden bats, handcuffs, clothes pegs and shackles.
Police also discovered bondage chairs with straps, straight jackets, sex toys, gimp masks, S&M outfits, shackles, cattle prods and car batteries used to power the toys.
Um, that's "straitjacket," please, unless you are some illiterate product of the failed British school system.
(Nod to Tommy the Brit.)
Joe Stiglitz is a funny dude
He says we shouldn't worry about the deficit because of all the valuable assets we are acquiring by spending the money!
"Most economists also agree that it is a mistake to look at only one side of a balance sheet (whether for the public or private sector). One has to look not only at what a country or firm owes, but also at its assets. This should help answer those financial sector hawks who are raising alarms about government spending. After all, even deficit hawks acknowledge that we should be focusing not on today’s deficit, but on the long-term national debt. Spending, especially on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure, can actually lead to lower long-term deficits."
Here, check it out:
"Most economists also agree that it is a mistake to look at only one side of a balance sheet (whether for the public or private sector). One has to look not only at what a country or firm owes, but also at its assets. This should help answer those financial sector hawks who are raising alarms about government spending. After all, even deficit hawks acknowledge that we should be focusing not on today’s deficit, but on the long-term national debt. Spending, especially on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure, can actually lead to lower long-term deficits."
Sweet fancy Moses! Shall we count our valuable investments? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Entitlement spending? Farm subsidies? Putting billions into acquiring failing companies?
Hey Joe! We are not running over a trillion dollar deficit because the Federal government is making big investments in education and technology.
And by all means, let's focus on the national debt and not on the current deficit. Didn't it just double under the last President and isn't it slated to almost double again under the current one?
My, what amazing valuable assets we must have built up with that spending binge.
Now he does go on to discuss how the business cycle affects the deficit and to opine that it is too soon in the recovery to consider spending cuts or tax increases for short term deficit reduction, which is perhaps a defensible point of view.
But why oh why oh why do so many excellent economists turn off their brains when they address the public?
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
"For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists, and the public at large have tended to think about empires in such cyclical and gradual terms... Yet it is possible that this whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed... Great powers and empires are, I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components ... somewhere between order and disorder -- on 'the edge of chaos'...A very small trigger can set off a 'phase transition' from a benign equilibrium to a crisis...Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of 'fat tail' events -- the low-frequency, high-impact moments that inhabit the tails of probability distributions, such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes, and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in The Black Swan as 'the narrative fallacy': the construction of psychologically satisfying stories on the principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc...Perhaps the most famous story of imperial decline is that of ancient Rome...But what if fourth-century Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome's fall was sudden and dramatic -- just as one would expect when such a system goes critical...What is most striking about this history is the speed of the Roman Empire's collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters.
Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century -- inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle -- shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe...Other great empires have suffered comparably swift collapses...Ming China was the world's most sophisticated civilization by almost any measure...The transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade. In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity...The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly...the United Kingdom's age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan. The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union...In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power."
[Niall Ferguson, Foreign Affars, ATSRTWT] [LA Times excerpt]
(Nod to Kevin L, who ill NEVER fall)
Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century -- inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle -- shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe...Other great empires have suffered comparably swift collapses...Ming China was the world's most sophisticated civilization by almost any measure...The transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade. In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity...The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly...the United Kingdom's age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan. The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union...In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power."
[Niall Ferguson, Foreign Affars, ATSRTWT] [LA Times excerpt]
(Nod to Kevin L, who ill NEVER fall)
Icelanders: "No way, We won't pay!" Hey, We Don't WE Get to Vote on the Bailout?
So a bunch of goofballs in Europe put their money in a phony bank in Iceland, and lost a lot of Euros.
Then the European "We passed a law against risk" doofuses, (okay, the Brits and the Dutch) decided that making citizens take responsibility for being goofballs is just too harsh, and used taxes raised at gunpoint from non-goofball citizens to pay off the goofballs.
Not surprisingly, the non-goofballs were miffed about this. Though I think in Britain and Nederlands there are laws against independent thought.... still, some people said, "why?"
So, the European government thugs decided to use extortion: Iceland, you can't play in our EU sandbox until you tax YOUR citizens to pay back OUR non-goofballs for having bailed out OUR goofballs who should never have invested in YOUR fake bank in the first place.
The Iceland government agreed, of course. It's not their money. The money belongs to the citizens of Iceland, who already took a giant hit because (as far as I can tell) every citizen of Iceland is a giant goofball in his/her own right.
But losing money because YOU are a goofball makes sense. Having to pay other people because THEY are goofballs....I don't see that. The Telfarssons and Helgotsdottirs of Iceland appear to agree, voting "NO" quite emphatically.
On the plus side, at least Icelanders get to VOTE on their dumb bailout. In the US, we are even worse: we don't have votes, just back room deals and payoffs to Democratic senators.
(Nod to Anonyman)
Then the European "We passed a law against risk" doofuses, (okay, the Brits and the Dutch) decided that making citizens take responsibility for being goofballs is just too harsh, and used taxes raised at gunpoint from non-goofball citizens to pay off the goofballs.
Not surprisingly, the non-goofballs were miffed about this. Though I think in Britain and Nederlands there are laws against independent thought.... still, some people said, "why?"
So, the European government thugs decided to use extortion: Iceland, you can't play in our EU sandbox until you tax YOUR citizens to pay back OUR non-goofballs for having bailed out OUR goofballs who should never have invested in YOUR fake bank in the first place.
The Iceland government agreed, of course. It's not their money. The money belongs to the citizens of Iceland, who already took a giant hit because (as far as I can tell) every citizen of Iceland is a giant goofball in his/her own right.
But losing money because YOU are a goofball makes sense. Having to pay other people because THEY are goofballs....I don't see that. The Telfarssons and Helgotsdottirs of Iceland appear to agree, voting "NO" quite emphatically.
On the plus side, at least Icelanders get to VOTE on their dumb bailout. In the US, we are even worse: we don't have votes, just back room deals and payoffs to Democratic senators.
(Nod to Anonyman)
Hang up your cell phone, and drive a Toyota
People are going nuts over how dangerous Toyotas are.
And I suppose that it would be a bad experience to have your accelerator stuck. ("If your accelerator gets stuck for more than four hours, seek medical attention...")
But as Prof. Fischbeck points out, it is FAR (FAAAAAR) more dangerous to go for a walk, or to speak ("Hey, gurl! Watchoodoin'? Nothing, I'm jes drivin'...")
And I suppose that it would be a bad experience to have your accelerator stuck. ("If your accelerator gets stuck for more than four hours, seek medical attention...")
But as Prof. Fischbeck points out, it is FAR (FAAAAAR) more dangerous to go for a walk, or to speak ("Hey, gurl! Watchoodoin'? Nothing, I'm jes drivin'...")
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Congress tries a hostile takeover of Obama Motors!
So the Obama administration takes over GM, hammering bondholders, handing over huge chunks of taxpayer money and more or less calling the shots in GMs restructuring.
GM decides to reduce the number of models it offers and close down a bunch of marginal dealerships (2000 or so).
Local dealerships support local congress people, and apparently many of these marginal dealerships want to stay in business with GM even though GM doesn't want to be in business with them.
Congress then passes a law requiring an appeals process for dealers who want to keep the family together.
1100 dealers appealed!
GM has now decided to re-instate 600 or so of them on the grounds that it's less costly to put up with unprofitable dealerships than it is to fight Congress about closing them.
Meanwhile, the Obama management team for GM opposes the legislation and appeals process because (obviously) it is going to make it that much harder for GM to get a chance at someday being profitable.
So the executive branch tosses billions to bail out GM and the UAW and Congress then mandates that some of that money flow (indirectly) to unprofitable dealerships as well.
AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!
I feel like Casey Stengel wondering "can't anybody here play this game"?
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