Category Archives: Social values

Satyajit Das: History….One Thing After Another!

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.

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Fourth of July Musings: What Does it Mean to be an American?

By Lambert Strether. Originally published at Corrente

I missed the parade. Which seems about right.

There was a Times series recently, which I didn’t manage to read — even though Jill Abramson really seems to have improved the paper, at least in non-policy areas, before she was axed — on “What does it mean to be an American?” Probably I avoided reading because I couldn’t answer the question. Or because the answer would have been too painful.

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Reform and Be Re-Elected

Yves here. I suspect many will take issue with the cheery view expressed in this article. The authors contend that reformist candidates in the post-crisis era do better at polls than status quo types. That makes sense, but the authors appear to define “reform” in terms in more modest terms than most readers would deem to be sufficient. But this finding sounds correct, intuitively. Look at Elizabeth Warren. Even though she has made great use of her Senate bully pulpit, and has kept a focus on bank re-regulation, her policy proposals, such as her student loan fixes, have been cautious. A frame-breaking reformer, such as a Huey Long, would require a far more divided electorate with geographic concentrations of radicalized voters to be viable.

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Can Grass Root Efforts Combat Greed?

Bill Moyers’ current show focuses on how formerly disparate grass roots groups are starting to work together to shift cultural values away from greed and towards social and economic justice.

To Naked Capitalism readers, this notion may seem a bit quixotic. But Jim Hightower, who has been working with populist movements for over 30 years, sees these groups starting to collaborate on broad-based issues.

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Facebook Users Regularly Treated Like Guinea Pigs

A new Wall Street Journal story probes the frequency and casualness with which Facebook ran experiments with the explicit aim of manipulating users’ emotions. Some commentators pooh poohed the concern about the study, saying that companies try influencing customers all the time. But the difference here is that manipulation usually takes place in a selling context, where the aims of the vendor, to persuade you to buy their product, are clear. Here, the study exposed initially, that of skewing the mix of articles in nearly 700,000 Facebook subscribers’ news feeds, was done in a context where participants would have no reason to question the information they were being given.

While the controversial emotions study may have been Facebook’s most questionable study, it is the tip of an experimentation iceberg.

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Noam Chomsky: America’s Real Foreign Policy –  A Corporate Protection Racket

The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs.  In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons.  First, the U.S. is unmatched in its global significance and impact.  Second, it is an unusually open society, possibly uniquely so, which means we know more about it.  Finally, it is plainly the most important case for Americans, who are able to influence policy choices in the U.S. — and indeed for others, insofar as their actions can influence such choices.  The general principles, however, extend to the other major powers, and well beyond.

There is a “received standard version,” common to academic scholarship, government pronouncements, and public discourse.  It holds that the prime commitment of governments is to ensure security, and that the primary concern of the U.S. and its allies since 1945 was the Russian threat.

There are a number of ways to evaluate the doctrine.  One obvious question to ask is: What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989?  Answer: everything continued much as before.

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The Crapification of Biomedical Research

An urgent warning from PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

In the context of such progress, it is remarkable that even the most successful scientists and most promising trainees are increasingly pessimistic about the future of their chosen career. Based on extensive observations and discussions, we believe that these concerns are justified and that the biomedical research enterprise in the United States is on an unsustainable path.

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NY Fed’s Bogus Estimate of Return on College and the Neglect of the Intellectual Commons

Yesterday, the New York Fed released a new report by Jaison R. Abel and Richard Dietz, Do the Benefits of College Still Outweigh the Costs? which is getting good coverage in the mainstream media. Its major finding is that despite the fall in wages to college graduates due to the crappy economy, a college degree is still worth the expense because wages of high-school graduates have fallen too, keeping the wage premium of a college education high while reducing the opportunity cost of staying in school.

But while the media is repeating the findings of this report uncritically, in fact it relies on a discredited methodology for calculating returns, and also promotes the view that the only reason to get a higher education is to get a better job.

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“Risky Business” Climate Report: Paulson, Bloomberg, Rubin, Schultz Late to Combat the Denialists

Those who have been involved in trying to raise awareness of the risks of global warming might have to repress a “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” response to a new, accessible, and well written report on the probable impact of climate change on the US. The effort, called “Risky Business” has Hank Paulson, Michael Bloomberg, and Thomas Steyer, retired chairman of Farallon Capital, as co-chairs, with its other committee members including Bob Rubin, George Schultz, Henry Cisneros, Gregory Page (the executive chairman of Cargill), Donna Shalala, and Olympia Snowe. In other words, when Hank Paulson looks like the best of a bunch, there’s reason to be cautious.

Nevertheless, the report is meant to demonstrate that the US is long past having the luxury of debating whether global warming is happening, and that a sober look at the seriousness of the outcomes says we need to do something, pronto. If nothing else, it presents some important new analysis and represents a split among the elites, always a welcome development.

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Culture: Persistence and Evolution

The persistence of cultural attitudes is an important determinant of the success of institutional reforms, and of the impact of immigration on a country’s culture. This column presents evidence from a study of European immigrants to the US. Some cultural traits – such as deep religious values – are highly persistent, whereas others – such as attitudes towards cooperation and redistribution – change more quickly. Many cultural attitudes evolve significantly between the second and fourth generations, and the persistence of different attitudes varies across countries of origin.

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