These are ongoing questions I’ll be mulling over. Her are some links to some of his presentations (yutube has many more).

(the link is correct, copy and paste. I don’t see why it isn’t working with direct click).

* Note: the UN is very clear in the headline for their 2010 World Population Prospects that their projections are contingent on fertility decline: “World Population to reach 10 billion by 2100 if Fertility in all Countries Converges to Replacement Level” (see http://esa.un.org/wpp/Other-Information/Press_Release_WPP2010.pdf). The UN projections clearly show that the high variant, which assumes higher fertility, could result in a world population of 15.8 billion in 2100 (see http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm). In what way does this represent pseudoscientific theorizing? Please show us your alternative projections, and the data and methodologies to back them up.

In this way the iPhone is a civilization. It provides an infrastructure for communication that spans the arts and politics and religion. And it is hard to tell which is more dominant, business applications, or personal relationships. But it’s clear that they both now depend upon the iPhone or its equivalent.

But the iPhone is just a part of the physical background in which we live and it points out how much attention going into the iPhone has not gone in to the rest of the physical environment. True, millions of human hours have gone into the aesthetics of the automobile, but if we look at modern architecture or city planning, it is clear we are way short of the iPhone. It points to a task not yet complete and perhaps not even yet engaged-the civilizing of our environment.

Whether or not class struggle is the motor of history, it rarely goes by that name. Coggan attempts to stay above the fray: ‘Economic history has been a war between creditors and debtors, with the nature of money as the battleground.’ Graeber, for his part, enlists on the side of the debtors. His extraordinary book, at once learned and freewheeling, concludes with a call for a ‘biblical-style jubilee’ – in the Old Testament one was declared every fifty years – to cancel outstanding consumer and government loans: ‘Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start again.’ In a way, Graeber’s utopian proposal resembles Coggan’s anxious anticipation of the years ahead. ‘Borrowers,’ Coggan writes in his brooding introduction, ‘will fail to pay back their debts, either through outright default or by encouraging their governments to inflate the debt away.’

via Benjamin Kunkel reviews ‘Paper Promises’ by Philip Coggan and ‘Debt’ by David Graeber · LRB 10 May 2012.

Largest U.S. Banks Resist Federal Reserve’s Credit Limits- Bloombergby Cheyenne Hopkins, bloomberg.com

April 27th 2012 1:31 PM

The largest U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), told the Federal Reserve that a limit on their credit exposure is unnecessary and “fundamentally flawed.”

The Fed’s proposed rules on single-counterparty credit limits would have a negative impact on banks, their customers and the U.S. economy, according to a letter sent to the central bank today by five banking trade groups, including the Clearing House Association.

1 of 1 Video « » Dodd-Frank Expands Community Bank Threshold (4:17) 3 hours ago

In December, the Fed proposed tougher standards to supervise the largest banks whose collapse could jeopardize the economy. The central bank set a limit of 10 percent for credit risk between a company considered systemically important and counterparty when each has more than $500 billion in total assets.

“The Federal Reserve has provided no basis to determine that imposing the dramatically lower and arbitrary 10 percent credit limit on certain major covered companies would even help mitigate risks to the U.S. financial stability, much less be necessary,” according to the text of the letter obtained by Bloomberg News.

Other signers of the letter are the Financial Services Roundtable, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the Financial Services Forum and American Bankers Association. The Clearing House also represents Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) in addition to JPMorgan.

Fed Proposals

The Fed’s proposed rules would set triggers for regulatory enforcement for systemic firms and require boards of directors to oversee and approve plans for limiting liquidity risk. Comments on the Fed’s proposal are due on April 30.

The 10 percent credit risk limit is more restrictive than that contained in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law, which allowed for a 25 percent limit.

The banks are focusing their complaints on the proposal on the single-counterparty exposure limit. They argue it goes too far without justification from the Fed for its change. Further, they disagree with the central bank on its proposed formula for determining counterparty exposure.

The banks are attempting to bring heightened attention to the issue, in a fashion similar to the resistance to the Volcker rule’s ban on proprietary trading, and are beginning a push to get lawmakers’ input. Executives of the eight largest banks met with Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo on March 27, according to a Fed disclosure.

Important Implications

“This hasn’t gotten the attention of Volcker but its implications have been just as important,” said Satish Kini, co-chairman of the Debevoise & Plimpton LLP’s Banking Group.

Banks were subject to single counterparty limits prior to the financial crisis at the bank level not the holding company level. This proposal extends the authority to the holding company of institutions. The Fed has said this change is to address the links between firms considered systemically important.

“The financial crisis also revealed inadequacies in the U.S. supervision approach to single counterparty credit concentration limits, which failed to limit the interconnectedness among and concentration of similar risks within large financial companies that contributed to a rapid escalation of the crisis,” the Fed said in its December proposal.

The Fed did not explain why it changed the credit risk limit to 10 percent for the largest banks. The Dodd-Frank act allows the Fed to make the change if it determines it is necessary to “mitigate risks to the financial stability.” The banks argue the Fed should first try the 25 percent limit and, if it proves inadequate, adopt the 10 percent limit.

“Going beyond the 25 percent limit based on an array of untested, an unknown factors is over engineering,” said Karen Shaw Petrou, a managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a Washington research firm whose clients have included Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) “Throughout the rule there are really important improvements that ought to be put in place, kick tested and then expand it.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Cheyenne Hopkins at Chopkins19@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christopher Wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net

Original Page: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-27/largest-u-s-banks-resist-federal-reserve-s-credit-limits.html

What strikes me is the unwillingness of the reporter to go beneath the back-and-forth of the story to underlying causes.

 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/robert-wenzels-david-speech-crushes-federal-reserves-goliath-dreamRobert Wenzel’s ‘David’ Speech Crushes Federal Reserve’s ‘Goliath’ Dream

Please allow me to begin with methodology, I hold the view developed by such great economic thinkers as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard that there are no constants in the science of economics similar to those in the physical sciences. In the science of physics, we know that water freezes at 32 degrees. We can predict with immense accuracy exactly how far a rocket ship will travel filled with 500 gallons of fuel. There is preciseness because there are constants, which do not change and upon which equations can be constructed. There are no such constants in the field of economics since the science of economics deals with human action, which can change at any time. If potato prices remain the same for 10 weeks, it does not mean they will be the same the following day. I defy anyone in this room to provide me with a constant in the field of economics that has the same unchanging constancy that exists in the fields of physics or chemistry. And yet, in paper after paper here at the Federal Reserve, I see equations built as though constants do exist. It is as if one were to assume a constant relationship existed between interest rates here and in Russia and throughout the world, and create equations based on this belief and then attempt to trade based on these equations. That was tried and the result was the blow up of the fund Long Term Capital Management, a blow up that resulted in high level meetings in this very building.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/robert-wenzels-david-speech-crushes-federal-reserves-goliath-dreamRobert Wenzel’s ‘David’ Speech Crushes Federal Reserve’s ‘Goliath’ Dream

I also find curious the general belief in the Keynesian model of the economy that somehow results in the belief that demand drives the economy, rather than production. I look out at the world and see iPhones, iPads, microwave ovens, flat screen televisions, which suggest to me that it is production that boosts an economy. Without production of these things and millions of other items, where would we be? Yet, the Keynesians in this room will reply, “But you need demand to buy these products.” And I will reply, “Do you not believe in supply and demand? Do you not believe that products once made will adjust to a market clearing price?”

His unwillingness to enter into the spirit of other views at all is really striking. The idea that the supply and demand curve solves everything is trivial. Obviously with declining wages people cannot spend. Bug worse, some people in finance are happy with not having customers for products. That is because that is not where they’re selling. They’re selling into a world where money is being stripped out of the normal economy.

The Great Transition

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/byzantium-islam-great-transition/

In the century between 630 and 730 a considerable portion of the Old World took on its modern face. Through a series of astonishing campaigns, Arab Muslim armies created a single empire that, for a time, would reach from southern Spain to northern India and the western borders of China. From the “big bang” of these conquests a new galaxy emerged. From then onward, a closely interconnected chain of Muslim regions (one part of which, from modern Morocco to the borders of Iran, came to speak Arabic) stretched across Africa and Eurasia, joining the Atlantic to western China. A new civilization came into being, one that has lasted, with many permutations, into our own days. In the words of Finbarr Flood, a major contributor to the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum’s somewhat modestly titled exhibition “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century),” the foundation of the Arab empire was “one of the most remarkable achievements in human history.”

This exhibition—along with the groundbreaking scholarship that has gone into its catalog—has banished the melodramatic tone with which the rise of Islam has usually been presented in standard accounts of the period. We can now say with confidence that the Arab armies did not leave a trail of desolation across the Middle East. Local populations did not sink into poverty. Far from retreating into the status of timorous minorities, vigorous Christian and Jewish communities continued to maintain their own traditions largely unmolested.

It is time to look more closely at the ideals of these people. We can do this through the unique collections of ivories and textiles that are the pride of the exhibition. For it is through ivories and, above all, through textiles that we get to the heart of the self-understanding of the persons (Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike) who both bore the burdens of empire and reaped its profits. What did these objects mean to them? For textiles, the answer is plain. Textiles meant robes, and robes meant status. Looking at the spectacular Coptic textiles in the exhibition we are looking at a language of wealth and power that runs from one end of the period to the other. Many of these robes have been redated to the seventh and eighth centuries. Muslims would have worn them with as much pride as did Jews and Christians. These robes swathed their bearers in a mystique of good fortune. This mystique was adopted by members of every religious group. The ninth- or tenth-century shawl of Apa Toter carried an inscription that combined Kufic and Coptic letters that wished: “use it in happiness…and rejoice.” A contemporary shawl bore an inscription in Arabic that wished the Muslim wearer “blessing and happiness and safety.”

We forget this because we have been taught to see late antiquity and early Islam in exclusively religious terms. In the words of Finbarr Flood, the period has suffered from an “excessive focus on religiosity.” Anna Ballian warns us not to assume that “religion permeated every aspect of medieval society and in importance far outweighed secular matters.” For this was by no means the case. There was always room for a “religion of the world”—a tenacious conviction that there was more to life than piety. There was also something thrilling and almost numinous about wealth, good health, and the gift of children.

In around the year 600, these developments still lay in the future. But the young monk from the monastery of Epiphanius at Luxor, who copied out the Greek maxims of Menander, chose one maxim that says it all: “We all wish to get rich. But not all of us make it.”

Just good to know more of this history.

Your Brain Is Not as Rational as You May Think It Is

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/28/your-brain-is-not-as-rational-as-you-may-think-it-is.html

The boys had been carefully screened for uniformity—all were white, middle-class, and Protestant. None were particularly smart or dumb, and none knew any of the others. But both groups quickly formed tight-knit identities. The Rattlers and the Eagles, as they called themselves, each came up with their own flags, as well as “preferred songs, practices and peculiar norms,” as the researchers put it. Despite their similarities, when the groups were finally informed of the other’s existence, a fierce rivalry took hold, resulting in fighting, sabotage, and endless insults. And yet, once the “counselors” (in actuality, the researchers) presented them with challenges that affected all of them—for example, restoring the camp’s water supply, or starting a stalled truck that was going to acquire food for the camp—the groups quickly set their hostilities aside and worked as a cohesive unit. What could explain this? Why would young boys quickly bond together, develop an instant dislike for a rival group, and then set it all aside to work with that group when presented with common goals? In Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, Leonard Mlodinow argues that this and countless other peculiarities of human nature can only be explained by understanding that our rational brains aren’t really calling the shots. Most of the time, subtle cues—a flag, for instance—have a powerful, discomfiting pull on our behavior.

Indeed, as our models of the brain progress, rationality finds itself with less and less breathing room. That’s not to say we aren’t capable of rational thought, of coolly weighing the pros and cons of a purchase or a relationship or a trip abroad. But when we try to employ the most logic-bound parts of our brain, psychologists and neuroscientists are discovering, it’s incredibly easy for us to fool ourselves into thinking that we’re being rational when in reality there are powerful, submerged cognitive forces actually guiding us.

As it turns out, Mlodinow writes, “the brain is a decent scientist but an absolutely outstanding lawyer.” In other words, we’re experts at spinning out elaborate stories for why we believe what we believe—or about why we’re special. It’s no wonder that every psychological study that asks a large group to self-report about a given skill always elicits the same result: everyone considers himself or herself above average. (It’s an important self-defense mechanism, argues Mlodinow, since happy people simply do better than unhappy people on just about every metric.)

A fair bit of Subliminal overlaps with other recent popular treatments of our biased, easily confused brains, namely Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. If you’ve already read one or both of these books, you’ll find a lot of rehashing in Subliminal.

Mlodinow’s book is, however, a quicker read—he doesn’t go quite into as much depth as Kahneman or Haidt—and might be a better entry point for those who are less familiar with the subject. Overall, it’s a useful addition to the growing body of work arguing convincingly against the idea of the rational human brain. It may be discomfiting, but it’s true.

This is part of a large argument going on about rationality and emotions. While there is a new recognition of the power of emotions, they’re still treated as separate from rationality. This view is fundamentally wrong. Rational is making decisions that are consistent with some set of values and feelings.

The Associated Press - ‎8 minutes ago‎

By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, AP Economics Writer – 1 minute ago WASHINGTON (AP) – A strong showing by Socialist candidate Francois Hollande in the first round of France’s presidential election Sunday may rattle US and global financial markets in the …

via Google News.

The new New Yorker for April 23 has many heavy stories. There’s one by Nick Lehmann on inquality and another on gun control that is a good history.

One view is that the rich use that money to live the way the middle-class used to, in houses, with successful families, and calm communities. The rest of society is pushed the side to live in various forms of misery.

This is a review at several books such as Noah’s the great divergence: America’s growing inequality crisis and what we can do about it

And then there is Charles Murray’s coming apart. It actually argues that nothing much we can do because.

inequality  is genetically based on the upper 1% is breeding itself upwards through meetings in elite colleges.

And David Ross Kopf’s new book power inc

.   ”Government is becoming too small to succeed.” He believes politics created the situation and only politics can undo it. But where is the force, or  the votes, to get politics to do it?

Then moves to Tony Judt’s book ill fares the land

Where the basic idea is that people, misinformed and naïve move to single issue politics that has no hope of changing the direction.

Moves to an article from the national interest for Benjamin Friedman,  looks more systemically. In this picture everyone is afraid of everyone. My feeling is finishing national wealth the division of the smaller time requires that kind of competition and anger.

He moves on to another book David Ratigan’s greedy bastards.

“You can feel an adept liberal politician like Pres. Obama struggling to find a way to talk about the financial crisis and inequality. There must be some means of doing so that will resonate with most Americans, without driving away the considerable funding base and Obama has among the 1% ers.”

And we shift more to the ride with Mark Meckler and Jenny Martin tea party patriots.

How the right has been able to go after big government because big government does stuff for the support, without noticing that the government also does stuff for the banks which creates the problems.

Then comes the book by Cost, spoiled rotten: how the politics of patronage …

Lehmann concludes with the obvious. Government is necessary. But can we get to a society in which government business academia culture and the people who are left out of those institutions all benefits and feel at home? The issue is not addressed.

The leisure promised at the end of World War II never materialized because managers moved profit upwards. The fact that we treat profit as good but wages as costs Is part of the mindset.

Google search turns up

http://www.seriousleisure.net/

I have a book, by Sebastian DE Grazia on Leisure. Really good, claiming it is the core to culture. How can we create leisure without ceating a meaningless wasteland?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is one view of leisure we must keep in mind. The other is, who gets to create high culture? Many of the bourgeois  (used in Thomas Mann’s sense that all great art ahs come from there ) artists got by with menial clerk jobs. Is there a modern equivalent?

In 1944, historian Richard Hofstadter publishedSocial Darwinism in American Thought, an aggressive and widely influential critique of the libertarian philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and his impact on American intellectual life. In Hofstadter’s telling, Spencer was the driving force behind “social Darwinism,” the pseudo-scientific use of evolution to justify economic and social inequality. According to Hofstadter, Spencer was little more than an apologist for extreme conservatism, a figure who told “the guardians of American society what they wanted to hear.” The eugenics movement, Hofstadter maintained, which held that humanity could improve its stock via selective breeding and forced sterilization, “has proved to be the most enduring aspect” of Spencer’s “tooth and claw natural selection.”

A hit upon publication, the book helped make Hofstadter’s name, doing much to secure him his prominent perch at Columbia University, where he taught until his death in 1970. But there’s a problem with Hofstadter’s celebrated work: His claims bear almost no resemblance to the real Herbert Spencer. In fact, as Princeton University economist Tim Leonard argues in a provocative new article titled “Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism,” [pdf] which is forthcoming from the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Hofstadter is guilty of both distorting Spencer’s free market views and smearing them with the taint of racist Darwinian collectivism.

So what happened? As Leonard notes, Hofstadter was no neutral observer. Rather, he “wrote as an opponent of laissez-faire, and also as a champion of what he took to be its rightful successor, expert-led reform.” A one-time member of the Communist party, Hofstadter himself later admitted that the book “was naturally influenced by the political and moral controversy of the New Deal era.”

At the heart of Hofstadter’s case is the following passage from Spencer’s famous first book, Social Statics (1851): “If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.”

That certainly sounds rough, but as it turns out, Hofstadter failed to mention the first sentence of Spencer’s next paragraph, which reads, “Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.” As philosophy professor Roderick Long has remarked, “The upshot of the entire section, then, is that while the operation of natural selection is beneficial, its mitigation by human benevolence is even more beneficial.” This is a far cry from Hofstadter’s summary of the text, which has Spencer advocating that the “unfit…should be eliminated.”

Similarly, Hofstadter repeatedly points to Spencer’s famous phrase, “survival of the fittest,” a line that Charles Darwin added to the fifth edition of Origin of Species. But by fit, Spencer meant something very different from brute force. In his view, human society had evolved from a “militant” state, which was characterized by violence and force, to an “industrial” one, characterized by trade and voluntary cooperation. Thus Spencer the “extreme conservative” supported labor unions (so long as they were voluntary) as a way to mitigate and reform the “harsh and cruel conduct” of employers.

I think each person should work out their own framing for history that gets us to where we are.

My own now is

• The fall of Rome
• The rise of the city state economies beginning in the 1300s
• The shift from Genoa to Holland to England to the United States and now China
• The shift from agricultural slavery to industrial wages
• The French Revolution(some of these overlap).
• The rise of bureaucracy with Bismarck Napoleon and Lincoln
• The failure of the revolutions of 1848
• The crisis of capitalism from World War I world War II and the current collapse
• The exuberant and and unassimilable growth of the post-World War II economy in the United States
• The rise of neo-conservatives to regain the profits as decline started in the 1960s
• Increasing population, increasing environmental degradation, and the increase of weapons dispersion.
• The rise of the Internet, peoples movements, and the security states martix.

Clearly much else could be added. What counts is what each of us thinks is salient. What is your framework?

When I hear the kind of language that is directed at Obama and watch the interplay of forces as the country goes slowly broke I keep thinking that the the French Revolution,  looking for a little bit more equity in society, is not Only still being realized, but it is still being thwarted.

I’m also aware that we have forgotten so much., Slavery, the Native Americans, the Philippines, Mexico, just to name those in the 19th century, but just as we forget our dreams, so we forget our nightmares. Goya talked about the sleep of reason. Even Descartes while waking in his bed and watching a fly take a path in the four coordinates of his room remembered at least some of his dreams, even while he wanted to impose mathematics on all emotions.

People for the most part hold themselves together so long as the circumstances that hold them hold together.

It used to be the people live in towns with major central squares around which the life of the town pulsated. People sort of like us mingled with the aristocracy and the political powers, the pomp and circumstance, the fascinating drama of political power and economic might. Most of us live now in much more narrow circumstances. we never see the people of power. The result is that our image of life has narrowed down to small dramas while the large dramas go on out of sight. In past centuries people could see that they lived in complex societies. We do not have that privilege. Our picture of where we are in social history is way out of phase.