It is well-documented that governments use information to blackmail and control people.
The Express reported last month:
British security services infiltrated and funded the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange in a covert operation to identify and possibly blackmail establishment figures, a Home Office whistleblower alleges.
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First, there’s just no getting around the fact that the United States government — or, as we like to call it, “our” government — just… just… Well, there’s really no nice way to say it: They just make sh*t up.
Read more...Climate-change denialism is but a species of externality denialism.
Read more...Yves here. This post looks at how little has been done in the wake of the global financial crisis is instructive because it takes an international view. The Australian writer, Catherine Cashmore, is particularly anxious about the failure to address the usually lucky country’s ginormous property bubble, and its not alone in having this problem (cue the UK, China, and Canada). It the US, although we’ve had a housing “recovery” and some markets are looking frothy, the bigger issues are the squeeze on renters as former homeowners are now leasing and the stock of rentals is tight in some markets (in part due to destruction of homes that would have been rentable in the foreclosure process due to servicer mismanagement and in some markets, due to properties being held off the market, both by servicers and by landlords who are either in the process of rehabbing them or have otherwise not leased them up). And it focuses on the elephant in the room: lousy worker wage growth.
Read more...Yves here. Some technology enthusiasts predict that as many as 47% of current jobs will be displaced in the next decade. Candidates include not only trucking and bus driving (to be eliminated by self-driving vehicles) but more and more white collar work, as computer get better at the sort of information scanning and analysis that is now done by entry and low-level workers. This post examines different scenarios for how that might play out in Europe.
Read more...One the markets that has been least easy to predict this year has been US bonds. The long term US bond bears, that are often monetarists at heart and believe QE will bring inflation, have been queuing up to short. Likewise, post-Keynesian’s have pointed at Japan and laughed about secular deleveraging and widow-maker trades.
The fact is, the bears have been wrong all year, and even with recent inflationary rumblings are still wrong.
Read more...Artificial trans fat is omnipresent in the global food chain, but the medical consensus is that it increases the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke. Between 2007 and 2011, New York City and six other county health departments implemented bans on trans fat in restaurants. This column presents the first evaluation of the effect of these bans on cardiovascular disease mortality rates.
Read more...The finance ministers of Italy and Serbia have just publicly thrown their heads of state and their nations under the bus. In a testament to the crippling effect of the belief that “there is no alternative” (TINA) to austerity, these finance ministers have insisted on bleeding economies that are in desperate need of fiscal stimulus. Their pursuit of economic malpractice is so determined that they eagerly sought out opportunities to embarrass the democratically elected head of state in Serbia when he dared to support competent economic policies.
Read more...Yves here. This post addresses a topic near and dear to my heart: the importance of financial interconnectedness, or what Richard Bookstaber called “tight coupling” in his book A Demon of Our Own Design. Tight coupling occurs when the processes in a system are so closely linked that when certain types of activities begin, they propagate through the system and cannot be halted. Or as Bookstaber put it in 2011:
Non-linear systems are complex because a change in one component can propagate through the system to lead to surprising and apparently disproportionate effect elsewhere, e.g. the famous “butterfly effect”….
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Yves here. Engelhardt argues that the official US empire, that of state/national power, has been hollowed and largely supplanted by the two real American empires, that of the surveillance state and of major corporations.
Read more...Mainstream economics today can be made to say anything. But in being able to do this it says nothing.
Read more...In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, the student Rudge describes history as: “just one f***ing thing after another”. The statement was originally that of Professor of History at Cambridge Herbert Butterfield. The substitution of “f***ing” for “bloody” was a sign of the advance of civilisation since the 1940s.
Jorgen Osterhammel’s fine The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century is anything but a linear recitation of events. Instead, it swoops, shimmies and carves ellipses and spirals through the facts to give readers an insightful view of the nineteenth century in all its complexity and confusion.
Read more...Word came recently that both the Philadelphia Quakers and the Unitarian General Assembly have decided to divest from fossil fuels. It followed by a few weeks the news that the Roman Catholic University of Dayton and Union Theological Seminary, the home of many a great thinker, had done likewise.
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