Category Archives: Social values

The Wages of Austerity: Superbug Runs Wild in Greek Hospitals

Many writers tend to depict the effects of austerity in purely economic terms: loss of wealth and income, lesser income/social mobility. But depressions and accompanying changes in social norms can and do have more serious consequences.

A story in Bloomberg illustrates how the combination of budgets slashed thanks to austerity policies leads directly to deaths. The Wall Street Journal described last year how distress in the Greek economy had produced a significant increase in suicides. A new Bloomberg story recounts how severe cutbacks in hospital staffing have enabled superbugs that is hard to combat even under normal circumstances to inflict even more fatalities than usual in Greek hospitals.

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Wired’s Embarrassing Whitewash of Foxconn

Wired’s Joel Johnson has written a stunning bit of PR for Foxconn, now-controversial supplier to the consumer electronics industry, duly wrapped in credibility-enhancing guilt over Western materialism.

The article, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?” pretends to be about Foxconn’s factories. But Johnson admits he’s a tech toy writer who apparently has no knowledge of manufacturing. Yet he’s remarkably uninhibited in using his fantasies and abject ignorance as a basis for making sweeping generalizations about the Taiwanese powerhouse. For instance:

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Daniel Alpert: Tinkerbell Economics – The Confidence Fairy, Pixie Dust and a Sleeping Dragon

By Daniel Alpert, the founding Managing Partner of Westwood Capital. Cross posted from EconoMonitor

While we may be hours away from a partial (and certainly a stopgap) agreement in the talks among the Greek government, the troika and private sector creditors, it is doubtful that a deal will emerge in a fully constructed fashion that will survive its application in the real economy.

It is likely that the only common view amongst participants in the various talks is a desire to try to avoid a disorderly default. Beyond that there is a severe disconnect fostered by parallel realities that seem unable to intersect. Accordingly, a deal that can hold up both in the streets of Greece and in the markets is both illusive and unlikely. Here’s why I think so.

Recently I have had opportunities to meet with and question senior members of the economics establishment within the German government and the broader German intelligentsia. Our meetings were held under Chatham House rules so I can’t name names, but – after several meetings with policy delegations from Germany over the past 60 days – I am prepared to sum up what appears to be the pretty-universally-held German policy position as follows (my apologies if the below evidences some degree of frustration – but these encounters leave me quite chagrined):

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Obama’s SOTU, authoritarian followership, and civil society: Part II

lambert strether is an old school blogger from Corrente.

Last week in Part I of this piece, I argued that Obama’s recent State of The Union speech endorsed a particular model of military organization named the “warrior ethos” by its DOD developers, and that this ethos and American soldier’s oath of enlistment (10 U.S.C. § 502) were in contradiction. That is, one can treat the “mission” and the “team” as primary, or the Constitution and the UCMJ as primary, but not both. Ethos is one thing; the rule of law another, and in the SOTU Obama, by focusing exclusively on the first, rejected the second — and not merely for the military, but for civil society also, since the SOTU posits that the warrior ethos should apply to all citizens, not only soldiers.

Obama’s rejection of the rule of law should surprise nobody who has been following his administration’s failure to prosecute bank executives for accounting control fraud, his abolition of due process when assassinating U.S. citizens, or his vote, while still a candidate, to grant retroactive immunity to the telcos for felonies committed during the program of warrantless surveillance initiated by the Bush administration.

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Cathy O’Neil: Women in Math

By Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist who lives in New York City and writes at mathbabe.org

A study recently came out which was entitled “Can stereotype threat explain the gender gap in mathematics performance and achievement?”. One of the authors created and posted a video describing the paper, which you can view here.

As a preview, there seem to be four main points of the paper and the video:

1. The papers on stereotype threat normalize with respect to SAT scores which is bad.
2. Evidence for stereotype threat is therefore weak.
3. We should therefore stop putting all of our resources into combating stereotype threat.
4. We should instead do something easy like combating stereotypes themselves.

I will first address a meta -issue and a blog discussion related to this paper, and then will argue directly against the paper and its conclusions.

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Mainstream Economics as Ideology: An Interview with Rod Hill and Tony Myatt — Part II

Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John and Fredericton (respectively). Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com.

Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington

Philip Pilkington: I think it was Joan Robinson who said something along the lines of “while we may have to teach a limited amount of material, we could at least teach that which is useful”. I’ve often encountered economics students who, frankly, seem to me to have a very tenuous grasp of the important aspects of economics. I recall one in particular who graduated from a very prestigious university not understanding what I meant when I said that I thought the chronic unemployment in Ireland was due to a lack of effective demand triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble.

In your experience do you find that students leave mainstream economics courses equipped to deal with real world issues?

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Mainstream Economics as Ideology: An Interview with Rod Hill and Tony Myatt — Part I

Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the Department of Social Science at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com.

Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.

Philip Pilkington: Your book seems to me a much needed antidote to the mainstream economics textbooks and can either be read alone or together with them. I think that’s a great approach because it allows students to become familiar with what is being taught in the classroom but also allows them to take a critical perspective on this material. So, let’s start with the format of these textbooks.

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Marshall Auerback: Anschluss Economics – The Germans Launch a Blitzkrieg on the Greek Debt Negotiations

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager

News stories continue to suggest that Greece once again appears on the verge of reaching a deal with its private sector creditors on how much of a loss they would be willing to accept on their bond holdings.

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Doug Smith: Useful Idiot Watch – Matt Yglesias

By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me

Earlier this month, Matthew Yglesias of Slate tweeted “EXCLUSIVE: The activities of individual business executives have no relationship to the level of economy-wide employment.”

It’s hard to choose what is most ridiculous here…

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Michael Hudson: Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

A shorter version of this article in German will run in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on January 28. 2012

The inherently symbiotic relationship between banks and governments recently has been reversed. In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States.

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Philip Pilkington: ‘Does Capitalism Have a Future?’ – Why the Financial Times Asks All the Wrong Questions to Avoid the Real Issues

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

The Financial Times recently ran a series on the future of capitalism. The FT is usually an excellent publication – but the series came up seriously lacking.

The lack arises because of the question posed.

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Advisors Feast on the Lehman Carcass: Bankruptcy on its Way to $2 Billion in Fees

One of my buddies who must go unnamed because he is involved in the Lehman bankruptcy told me many months ago that the unwinding was going to cost over $2 billion. A new story at Bloomberg suggests that his prediction is on track. The costs of various advisors to the Lehman estate in now in excess of $1.6 billion, and it ain’t over.

But perhaps more important, my mole, who has oodles of experience on big messy international bankruptcies, was incensed at the way various advisors, in particularly Alvarez & Marsal, which is running what is left of Lehman and is the major domo, and the lead law firm, Weil Gotschal, were feeding at the trough.

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Spain’s “Indignados” and the Globalization of Dissent

Real News Network highlighted a foreign broadcast on Spain’s “indignados,” and the way they have been providing advice to other anti-neoliberal movements around the world. I’m not sure it has gotten the attention it warrants, but the people that were involved in Occupy Wall Street early on conferred a good deal with seasoned protestors in Spain and Egypt.

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