Month: April 2010

Edward Harrison:

Of course the US deficits are too large. Come on: 10% deficits as far as the eye can see are unsustainable over the long-term. The key word, however, is long-term.

No one seems to understand the difference between short-term and long-term and the debate has become an ideological free-for-all.

Anyway, the point is that the US economy will not be able to sustain recovery for long without stimulus. The likely result of withdrawing stimulus is a recession that is deeper than the last one, a major depression.

He seeks to explain:

Policy is exogenous and deficits are endogenous.

What that essentially means is that when I think about government, I view it with suspicion and my inclination is to seek to limit its size and scope. That means I have an innate disaffection for big government, deficit spending, money printing, etc. – but not in an ideological way.  It all depends on the circumstances.

HA! You knew that.

via James Kwak:

“You’ve criticized the government for withdrawing from the economic and particularly financial sphere and allowing private sector actors to do whatever they wanted. Do you think the government should simply act so as to correct the imperfections in free markets? Or do you see a positive role for government in determining what kind of an economy we should have?”

“College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar.” [link]

The session started off with a film from John De Graaf called, “What’s the Economy for Anyways?” which examined American society under the conclusions of Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service who defined the economy as, “The greatest good for the greatest number over the long run.”

Using that metric, the US economy has done a terrible job since 1970.

The US leads the world in GDP but its citizens suffer on nearly every major health and quality of life metric.

The key point here is breaking down the GDP myth.

Matt Taibbi on how greed-is-good conquered America and the simply inevitable folly of brigands:

Even if he stands to make a buck, your average used-car salesman won’t sell some working father a car with wobbly brakes then buy life insurance policies on that customer and his kids.

As  Ayn Rand and Greenspan and foolish minions from Reagan to Bush put it:  ‘How To Buy A Car Without Rules’.

The Wonderful World of American Fraud:

You distract the dumbshits with free-market B.S. because hey, for whatever reason, that’s what the public likes to hear, it doesn’t really matter what lie you feed them so long as it’s the lie that puts them in a trance.

And then behind the scenes, you do the very opposite: You fix the game, you cover up this problem here with those funds there, you move shit around, you skim budgets and you subsidize the system, you cover up the bad shit and once in a while throw a has-been to the wolves to keep the public entertained—that’s the way the system works, and anyone who’s an adult understands that.

What surprised you the most as you researched the history of orange juice?

The degree to which consumers have bought the myths that the industry has created about orange juice.

You say in your book that consumers act like robots when it comes to orange juice. What do you mean?

Orange-juice drinkers are misinformed about what it is they are drinking.

Flavor packs are made from the chemicals of orange essence and oil. Flavor and fragrance houses, the ones that make high end perfumes, break down orange essence and oils into their constituent chemicals and then reassemble the individual chemicals to resemble nothing found in nature. Ethyl butyrate is one of the chemicals found in high concentrations in the flavor packs added to orange juice sold in North American markets, because flavor engineers have discovered that it imparts a fragrance that Americans like, and associate with a freshly squeezed orange.

Right now the formula for fresh orange flavors is just about as secret as the formula for Coke.

My intent was not to get people to stop drinking orange juice but to realize what it is they’re drinking.

The official death toll from the Chernobyl disaster is 4,000, but the true toll could reach tens or even hundreds of thousands. More than 25,000 emergency workers known as “liquidators” from then-Soviet Ukraine, Russia and Belarus have died.

“There are still more than two million people suffering from harmful effects of radiation exposure, of whom 498,000 are children.”

The dead reactor is still a threat because the concrete cover hastily laid over some 200 tonnes of spilled radioactive material is cracking.

John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Immigrants hold one-third of America’s doctorates.

There’s talk of turning suburbs into agricultural centers:

In cities, agriculture might be able to take the place of vacant lots. And in suburbia?

Well, in 2008, the New Urbanism evangelist Andrés Duany, of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, architects and town planners, proclaimed that “agriculture is the new golf” a prescient and deliberately provocative claim that is helping frame the conversation about suburbia’s future.

“Only 17 percent of people living in golf-course communities play golf more than once a year.”

Local success is much of what’s missing in our economy. I don’t hang much with tyranny’s preachers, but I do track renovation and re-purposing of regional assets – unused labor and undreamt options in a great new variety of witty vendors.