Re: Friedman's Folly
Bret Cahill
"thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
School, etc.
Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
When you dodge issues that are fundamental to your field you are a
fraud.
Bret Cahill
Vid...@tcq.net
well said.
Harold Burton
<88ec7336-1eba-4980...@j22g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
Bret Cahill <BretC...@aol.com> wrote:
Care for some cheese with that whine?
Yeah, and let us know when you win a Nobel Prize.
Love the sound of leftards whining.
Snicker.
Harold Burton
<d204392c-5b8d-4918...@b1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>,
Vid...@tcq.net wrote:
Love the sound of whining leftards.
Snicker.
John Galt
"Harold Burton" <hal.i....@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:hal.i.burton-B264...@comcast.dca.giganews.com...
It's also a classic straw man. "I'll decide what issues should be
fundamental to 'your field', so I can criticize you when you don't address
them."
>
> Love the sound of leftards whining.
Well, there are plenty (a substantive majority, even) who are free marketers
and have no quarrel with Friedman. The head of Obama's economic team is from
U of Chicago.
That said, there are indeed those who exist on the political fringe that
have no idea how intertwined human behavior is with economic needs, and are
thus doomed to criticze men like Friedman ad infinitum (and for the rest of
us, ad nauseum) based on some Cliff Notes they read about him on some fringe
socialist/communist/anarchist site.
JG
The Trucker
Friedman was not a total quack or an idiot at all. He said a lot that
made very good sense. But he forgot one minor detail: The ego will
destroy everything if left unrestrained. This desire to dominate out of
fear of being dominated must be held in check by a constitutional monarchy
checked by a body that represents the people or a well designed republican
form of government.
--
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers
of society but the people themselves; and
if we think them not enlightened enough to
exercise their control with a wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from
them, but to inform their discretion by
education." - Thomas Jefferson
http://GreaterVoice.org/extend
John Galt
"The Trucker" <mik...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:pan.2008.05.15....@verizon.net...
I have no quarrel with the sociologic argument. For all his insightful
brilliance into dissections of the dynamics of the Depression, for example,
Capitalism and Freedom is remarkable for its simplicity and straightforward
analysis of economic behavior.
Of course people are going to act in their own economic best interests.
And, as you say, of course they will continue to do so well past the point
that their current and future creature comforts are met.
JG
orang...@googlemail.com
Your not a fan of freedom of speech, huh?
Vid...@tcq.net
> In article
> <88ec7336-1eba-4980-9600-28c2a4d6e...@j22g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
> Bret Cahill <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > Friedman was an issue dodger just like all the remaining shills at GOP
> > "thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
> > School, etc.
>
> > Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
> > and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
>
> > When you dodge issues that are fundamental to your field you are a
> > fraud.
>
> Care for some cheese with that whine?
>
> Yeah, and let us know when you win a Nobel Prize.
>
> Love the sound of leftards whining.
>
> Snicker.
the nobel freidman won was a fake, and not sanctioned by the nobel
family. it was issued by far right cranks from a swedish bank.
just another conservative/libertarian scandal involving fraud.
Vid...@tcq.net
>
> Love the sound of whining leftards.
>
> Snicker.
we are not whining, we are coming from a position of knowledge.
something that alludes rightards.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
[Note: Part of the HET Website. This page is not related to or
endorsed by the Nobel Foundation, the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences or any other organization. See the official Nobel Memorial
Prize website]
In 1896, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of
dynamite, bequeathed his fortune to a foundation to create an annual
prize for person "who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred
the greatest benefit on mankind." Nobel's will specified prizes in
physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature and peace. These
were first awarded in 1901.
In 1969, the Swedish central bank (Sveriges Riskbank) established a
prize known as the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in
Memory of Alfred Nobel", which is commonly shortened to the Nobel
Memorial Prize. The Nobel Memorial Prize has a similar procedure of
award selection (by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) as the
original Nobel prizes. It also disburses the same monetary amounts
and shares in the formal ceremony.
The Nobel Memorial Prize has been quite controversial since its
inception and numerous objections have been raised against it. The
first objection is that economics is either not "scientific" enough or
does not contribute to "human advancement" enough to merit the
prestige of an award with the Nobel name. The sentiment, often echoed
in wider intellectual circles and the popular press, is shared by many
economists themselves. Indeed, Gunnar Myrdal, after having helped the
Riksbank set it up in 1968 and receiving the award himself in 1974,
eventually came to publicly admit this.
The second objection, is that the Bank of Sweden's decision to use the
prestigious "Nobel" name has thrust economics into a kind of medal
race, pitting nations, universities and individual economists against
each other. All this leads to a lot of unnecessary acrimony that
distracts and disrupts serious economics research.
A third objection, and one that has become increasingly louder, is
that there is an insufficient number of truly outstanding economists
that deserve it. After the initial splash of glorious names in the
1970s and early 1980s, many have come to argue that the awards made
during the 1990s are more disputable.
This is true to some extent, but understandable. When the awards began
being handed out from 1969 onwards, there were generations upon
generations of deserving scholars which had to be quickly awarded
before it was too late. The choices of the 1970s were not really
disputed. By sheer bad luck, giants such as Joan Robinson, Nicholas
Kaldor, Abba Lerner and Don Patinkin never won the award partly
because they were unfortunate enough to die too soon. By the
mid-1980s, with the "doubtless" Nobel laureates either already
rewarded or dead, it was natural for the awards committee to begin
pacing itself somewhat and start scooping gems from a little bit below
the cream.
A fourth objection is that the Nobel awards committee has its own
agenda and doles out the awards with an eye to encourage the
profession to move in a particular direction. At the crudest level,
some have claimed that it has a "Chicago School" bias, given the
number of economists associated with the University of Chicago that
have won the awards (for a breakdown of the awards by nationality and
school, click here).
This is not wholly untrue, but it ought to be placed in context. The
Nobel name, of course, lends a powerful platform to the recipients --
and the awards committee has made controversial and idiosyncratic
choices which have had a profound impact on the economics profession.
The 1974 award to the nearly-obscure Friedrich A. Hayek, for instance,
generated a huge resurgence of interest in Hayek and Austrian
economics. Milton Friedman's 1976 award elevated him overnight from
the profession's maverick to one of its elder statesmen and gave
Monetarism a more respectable polish. In more recent years, awards
have brought entire fields of study into the research spotlight:
bounded rationality was virtually unknown before Herbert Simon's 1978
award; so was Public Choice theory until James Buchanan's 1986
award. New Institutionalism and New Economic History were still
fringe movements before the awards to Coase, Becker, Fogel and North
in 1991-1993. Of course, at times, the suggestions of the Nobel
committee do not seem to have the desired impact. The awards to
Kuznets and Stone, for instance, were perhaps meant to encourage the
vital but unglamorous tasks of data compilation and interpretation,
but there was no perceptible rise in interest as a consequence.
A corollary to this is that the Bank of Sweden is occasionally
criticized is for failing to choose the most popular candidates. Some
of the choices it made have been openly criticized by professional
economists. There are a number of perennial candidates so universally
liked and recommended, always leading straw polls year after year,
whom nonetheless received no award. So, even if one disagrees
violently with its choices or gets frustrated by the fact that one's
favorite candidate keeps missing out, perhaps one ought to continue to
admire the Bank of Sweden's bravery.
However, it is precisely because of the erratic and disproportionate
"impact" the Bank of Sweden's choice has upon the profession and the
shape of subsequent economics research that many have called for an
end to the Nobel Memorial Prize. One proposition is to replace it with
a less lop-sided and less pretentious "lifetime award", like the
Francis Walker Medal that used to be handed out by the American
Economic Association.
The Bank of Sweden's Nobel Memorial prize for economics is announced
around October 12th of every year, while the actual ceremony (shared
with the original Nobel awards) is on December 8th. Winners are
requested to present a "Nobel Memorial Lectures", which is initially
published in the volume Les Prix Nobel en 19xx, put out every year by
the Nobel Foundation and then republished later in the academic
journals of their laureate's choice. In recent years, the American
Economic Review has intermittently reprinted many of the Nobel
Memorial Lectures.
NOBEL MEMORIAL PRIZES, 1969-1999.
1969 -
• Ragnar Frisch, 1895-1973. (Norwegian, Oslo University; Ph.D Oslo)
• Jan Tinbergen, 1903-1994. (Dutch, Netherlands School of Economics,
Dr. Univ. Leiden)
• "for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis
of economic processes"
• Lecture: "From Utopian Theory to Practical Applications: The case
of econometrics", Ragnar Frisch, 1981, AER
• Lecture: "The Use of Models: Experience and prospects", by Jan
Tinbergen, 1981, AER
1970 -
• Paul A. Samuelson, 1915- (American, M.I.T., Ph.D Harvard)
• "for the scientific work through which he has developed static and
dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level
of analysis in economic science"
• Lecture:"Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics", by Paul A.
Samuelson, 1972, AER.
1971 -
• Simon Kuznets, 1901-1985. (American, (b. Russian), Harvard, Ph.D
Columbia)
• "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth
which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social
structure and process of development"
• Lecture: "Modern Economic Growth: Findings and reflections", by
Simon Kuznets, 1973, AER.
1972 -
• John Hicks, 1904-1989. (British, Oxford, M.A. Oxford )
• Kenneth J. Arrow, 1921- (American, Harvard, Ph.D Columbia)
• "for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium
theory and welfare theory"
• Lecture: "The Mainspring of Economic Growth" by John Hicks, 1981,
AER
• Lecture: "General Economic Equilibrium: Purpose, analytic
techniques, collective choice", by Kenneth J. Arrow, 1974, AER.
1973 -
• Wassily Leontief, 1906-1999. (American (b. Russian), Harvard, Ph.D
Berlin)
• "for the development of the input-output method and for its
application to important economic problems"
• Lecture: "Structure of World Production: Outline of a simple input-
output formulation", by Wassily Leontief, 1974, AER
1974 -
• Gunnar Myrdal, 1898-1987. (Swedish, Stockholm, Dr. juris,
Stockholm)
• Friedrich A. von Hayek, 1899-1992. (British (b. Austrian), Univ.
Freiburg, Dr. jur. Univ. Vienna)
• "for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic
fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence
of economic, social and institutional phenomena"
• Lecture: "The Equality Issue in World Development", by Gunnar
Myrdal, 1989, AER
• Lecture: "The Pretence of Knowledge", Friedrich A. von Hayek, 1989,
AER
1975 -
• Leonid V. Kantorovich, 1912-1986. (Soviet Union, Inst. Nat. Econ.
Management, Moscow; Dr. Leningrad Univ.)
• Tjalling C. Koopmans, 1910-1986. (American (b. Dutch), Yale, Ph.D,
Univ. Leiden)
• "for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of
resources".
• Lecture: "Mathematics in Economics: Achievements, difficulties,
perspectives" by Leonid V. Kantorovich, 1989, AER
• Lecture: "Concepts of Optimality and their Uses", by Tjalling C.
Koopmans, 1977, AER,
1976 -
• Milton Friedman, 1912- (American, Chicago, Ph.D Columbia)
• "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis,
monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the
complexity of stabilization policy"
• Lecture: Inflation and Unemployment", by Milton Friedman, 1977,
JPE.
1977 -
• Bertil Ohlin, 1899-1979. (Swedish, Stockhom Sch. of Econ., Dr.
Univ. Stockholm)
• James E. Meade, 1907-1995. (British, Cambridge, M.A. Oxford)
• "for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international
trade and international capital movements"
• Nobel Lecture: "1933 and 1977 - Some Expansion Policy Problems in
Cases of Unbalanced Domestic and International Economic Relations", by
Bertil Ohlin, 1993, AER
• Lecture: "The Meaning of "Internal Balance"", by James E. Meade,
1993, AER
1978 -
• Herbert A. Simon, 1916- (American, Carnegie-Mellon, Ph.D. Chicago)
• "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process
within economic organizations"
• Lecture: "Rational Decision Making in Business Organizations", by
Herbert Simon, 1979, AER.
1979 -
• Theodore W. Schultz, 1902- (American, Chicago, Ph.D Wisconsin)
• W. Arthur Lewis, 1915-1991. (British (b. St. Lucia), Princeton,
Ph.D. L.S.E.)
• "for their pioneering research into economic development research
with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries"
• Lecture: "The Economics of Being Poor", by T.W. W. Schultz 1980,
JPE
• Lecture: "The Slowing Down of the Engine of Growth", by W. Arthur
Lewis, 1980, AER.
1980 -
• Lawrence R. Klein, 1920- (American, Pennsylvania, Ph.D. M.I.T.)
• "for the creation of econometric models and the application to the
analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies"
1981 -
• James Tobin, 1918- (American, Yale, Ph.D Harvard)
• "for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to
expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices"
• Lecture: "Money and Finance in the Macroeconomic Process", by James
Tobin, 1982, JMCB
1982 -
• George J. Stigler, 1911-1991. (American, Chicago, Ph.D Chicago)
• "for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of
markets and causes and effects of public regulation"
• Lecture: "The Process and Progress of Economics", by George J.
Stigler, 1983, JPE.
1983 -
• Gérard Debreu, 1921- (American (b. French), UC Berkeley, D.Sc.
Univ. Paris)
• "for having incorporated new analytical methods into economic
theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general
equilibrium"
• Lecture: "Economic Theory in a Mathematical Mode", by Gérard
Debreu, 1984, AER
1984 -
• Richard Stone, 1913-1991. (British, Cambridge, DSc. Cambridge)
• "for having made fundamental contributions to the development of
systems of national accounts and hence greatly improved the basis for
empirical economic analysis"
• Lecture: "The Accounts of Society", by Richard Stone, 1986, Journal
of Applied Econometrics
1985 -
• Franco Modigliani, 1918- (American (b. Italian), M.I.T., Ph.D New
School for Social Research)
• for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets"
• Lecture: "Life Cycle, Individual Thrift and the Wealth of Nations"
by Franco Modigliani, 1986, AER.
1986 -
• James M. Buchanan, 1919- (American, George Mason Univ., Ph.D
Chicago)
• "for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases
for the theory of economic and political decision-making"
• Lecture: "The Constitution of Economic Policy", by James M.
Buchanan, 1987, AER
1987 -
• Robert M. Solow, 1924- (American, M.I.T., Ph.D. Harvard)
• "for his contributions to the theory of economic growth"
• Lecture: "Growth Theory and After", by Robert M. Solow, 1988, AER
1988 -
• Maurice Allais, 1911- (French, Ecole Nat. Sup. Mines, Ing. Dr.
Univ. Paris)
• "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and
efficient utilization of resources"
• Lecture: "An Outline of My Main Contributions to Economic Science",
by Maurice Allais, 1990, Theory and Decision
1989 -
• Trygve Haavelmo, 1911- (Norwegian, Oslo, Ph.D Oslo)
• "for his clarification of the probability theory foundations of
econometrics and his analyses of simultaneous economic structures"
• Lecture: "Econometrics and the Welfare State", by Trygve Haavelmo,
1997, AER
1990 -
• Harry M. Markowitz, 1927- (American, CUNY, Ph.D Chicago)
• Merton H. Miller, 1923-2000 (American, Chicago, Ph.D Johns Hopkins)
• William F. Sharpe, 1934- (American, Stanford, Ph.D UCLA)
• "for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics"
• Lecture: "Foundations of Portfolio Theory" by Harry M. Markowitz,
1991, J of Finance
• Lecture: "Leverage" by Merton H. Miller, 1991, J of Finance
• Lecture: "Capital Asset Prices With or Without Negative Holdings",
William F. Sharpe, 1991, J of Finance
1991 -
• Ronald H. Coase, 1910- (British, Chicago, B.Com. L.S.E.)
• "for his discovery and clarification of the significance of
transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure
and functioning of the economy"
• Lecture: "The Institutional Structure of Production", by Ronald
Coase, 1992, AER
1992 -
• Gary S. Becker, 1930- (American, Chicago, Ph.D Chicago)
• "for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide
range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket
behaviour"
• Lecture: "The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior", by Gary S.
Becker, 1993, JPE
1993 -
• Robert W. Fogel, 1926- (American, Chicago, Ph.D Johns Hopkins)
• Douglass C. North, 1920- (American, Washington Univ. St. Louis,
Ph.D UC Berkeley)
• "for having renewed research in economic history by applying
economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic
and institutional change"
• Lecture: "Economic Growth, Population Theory and Physiology: The
bearing of long-term processes on economic policy" by Robert W. Fogel,
1994, AER
• Lecture: "Economic Performance Through Time" by Douglass C. North,
1994, AER
1994 -
• John C. Harsanyi, 1920-2000 (American (b.Hungarian), UC Berkeley,
Ph.D Budapest)
• John F. Nash, 1928- (American, Princeton, Ph.D. Princeton)
• Reinhard Selten, 1930- (German, Bonn, Ph.D. Frankfurt)
• "for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-
cooperative games"
1995 -
• Robert E. Lucas, 1937- (American, Chicago, Ph.D Chicago)
• "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational
expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis
and deepened our understanding of economic policy"
1996 -
• James A. Mirrlees, 1936- (British, Cambridge, Ph.D. Cambridge)
• William Vickrey, 1914-1996.(Canadian, Columbia, Ph.D Columbia)
• "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of
incentives under asymmetric information"
1997 -
• Robert C. Merton, 1944- (American, Harvard, Ph.D. M.I.T.)
• Myron S. Scholes, 1941- (American (b. Canadian), Stanford, Ph.D.
Minnesota)
• "for a new method to determine the value of derivatives"
1998
• Amartya K. Sen, 1933- (Indian, Cambridge, Ph.D. Cambridge)
• for his contributions to welfare economics.
1999 -
• Robert Mundell, 1932- (Canadian, Columbia, Ph.D M.I.T.)
• for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different
exchange rate regimes and his analysis of
optimum currency areas
2000 -
• James J Heckman, 1944- (American, Chicago, Ph.D. M.I.T.)
• Daniel L. McFadden, 1937- (American (b. Canadian), UC Berkeley,
Ph.D. Chicago)
• Heckmann: for his development of theory and methods for analyzing
selective
samples,
• McFadden: for his development of theory and methods for analyzing
discrete choice
2001 -
• George A. Akerlof, 1940- (American, UC Berkeley, Ph.D. M.I.T.)
• A. Michael Spence, 1943- (American, Stanford, Ph.D. Harvard)
• Joseph E. Stiglitz, 1943- (American, Columbia, Ph.D. M.I.T.)
• for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information
2002 - ? To be announced early October 2002. Check out the Nobel
laureates internet poll at Economics.com/Amherst College in the
meantime.
NOBEL STATISTICS
Nobels Awarded
• Total - 33
• Awarded Individually - 20
• Shared between two - 10
• Shared between three - 3
• Nobelists - 49
Nationalities of Laureates
• American - 31
• British - 7
• Canadian - 2
• Norwegian - 2
• Swedish - 2
• French - 1
• Dutch - 1
• Indian - 1
• German - 1
• Soviet Union - 1
(Note: foreign-born Kuznets, Koopmans, Debreu, Modigliani, Harsanyi
and Scholes received their awards as Americans; foreign-born Hayek and
Lewis received theirs as British. Foreign citizenship was retained
for recepients Coase (British) and Vickrey and Mundell (both
Canadian)).
Affiliated Universities/Institutions (at time of award)
• Chicago - 9
• UC Berkeley - 4
• Cambridge - 4
• Harvard - 4
• Columbia - 3
• M.I.T. - 3
• Stanford - 3
• Oslo - 2
• Princeton - 2
• Yale - 2
• Bonn - 1
• Carnegie-Mellon - 1
• City University of New York - 1
• Ecole National Superieure de Mines, Paris - 1
• Freiburg - 1
• George Mason - 1
• Institute for National Economic Management, Moscow- 1
• Netherlands School of Econ. (Erasmus Univ.) - 1
• Oxford - 1
• Pennsylvania - 1
• Stockholm Univ. - 1
• Stockholm School of Econ. - 1
• Washington Univ., St. Louis - 1
Universities where Laureates received their Highest Degree (Ph.Ds,
etc.)
• Chicago - 7
• M.I.T. - 5
• Columbia - 4
• Harvard - 4
• Cambridge - 3
• Johns Hopkins - 2
• Leiden - 2
• L.S.E. - 2
• Oxford - 2
• Oslo - 2
• Paris - 2
• Princeton - 2
• Stockholm - 2
• Berkeley - 1
• Berlin - 1
• Budapest - 1
• Frankfurt - 1
• Leningrad - 1
• Minnesota - 1
• New School - 1
• UCLA - 1
• Vienna - 1
• Wisconsin - 1
Resources on the Nobel Memorial Prize
• Official Nobel Memorial Prize Website in Sweden
• "The Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences
in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1969-1998" by Assar Lindbeck
• Nobel winners internet poll at Economics.com/Amherst College
• Britannica Guide to the Nobel Prizes
• "Who Wins the Nobel Prize?" by Johan van Gompel in Challenge, 1999
• "Dynamite Plan Bolsters Myth: The Nobel, Towering Genius", by
Catharine R. Stimpson, New York Observer, 2000
• "Too Many Eyes On the Prize" by James Glanz, New York Times, 2000
• "Les courants qui ont marqué trente ans de prix Nobel d'économie",
Le Monde, October 16, 2000
• Nobel Prize Winners at Ideachannel
• Autographs of Nobel Prize Winners - private collection by Reinhard
Zuta
• "Five Market-Friendly Nobelists", by C.K. Rowley, 1999, Independent
Review
• Several Nobelists, 1981, Boston Globe
• About the Nobel Prize at Nobelists for the Future
• Other Internet Nobel Pages: Britannica, Bartleby, Univ. of
Victoria,
"THE "NOBEL" PRIZE THAT WASN'T"
BY HAZEL HENDERSON
EXCLUSIVE TO LEMONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
© Hazel Henderson, December 2004
www.hazelhenderson.com
(word count 1,367)
"THE "NOBEL" PRIZE THAT WASN'T"
by
Hazel Henderson
An unusual row erupted at the recent annual Nobel Prize awards. Peter
Nobel, heir of Alfred Nobel, who endowed the Prizes added his voice to
the growing outrage of many scientists at the confusion over The Bank
of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Over
the years since this $1 million prize was set up by Sweden’s central
bank in 1969, it has become conflated with the real Nobel Prizes and
is now often mis-labeled as the so-called “Nobel Memorial Prize.”
The brouhaha emerged December 10th, 2004 in Sweden’s main newspaper,
Dagens Nyheter in an extensive Op-Ed by mathematician and member of
Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences, Peter Jager, Mans Lonnroth, Senior
Lecturer in Technology and Society and former Environment minister and
Johan Lonnroth, economist and a former member of the Swedish
Parliament. The article pointed out in great detail how many
economists including those who had been awarded the Bank of Sweden
Prize – actually mis-used mathematics by creating unrealistic models
of social processes. Peter Nobel, in an exclusive interview, told me
that Alfred Nobel had never mentioned in any of his letters a prize in
economics. Nobel added “The Swedish Riksbank has put an egg in
another very decent bird’s nest and thereby infringed on the
trademarked name of Nobel. Two thirds of the Bank’s prizes in
economics have gone to US economists of the Chicago School who create
mathematical models to speculate in stock markets and options – the
very opposite of the purposes of Alfred Nobel to improve the human
condition.”
What appeared to be the last straw, which caused these objections to
finally surface, was this latest award of the Bank of Sweden Prize to
two more US economists, Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott. Cited
was their 1977 paper describing their mathematical model which
purports to prove that central banks should be independent of the
influence of elected legislators – even in democracies. This has been
an ideological drumbeat of central bankers, commercial banks,
neoclassical economists and financial journals, including London-based
The Economist. Witness the citation that went with this year’s Bank
of Sweden Prize, which lauded Kydland and Prescott’s paper as having
“had a far-reaching impact on reforms carried out in many places (such
as New Zealand, Sweden, Great Britain and in the Euro area) aimed at
legislated delegation of monetary policy decisions to independent
central bankers.”
These dubious “reforms” are precisely the problem for popularly-
elected representatives in democracies, where transparency in policy
decisions is highly valued. Monetary policy is at the heart of how
wealth, income and opportunities are distributed in societies. An
excessively tight monetary policy for example, falls heavily on
workers as unemployment rises, while many small borrowers of car and
home loans bear the brunt of high interest rates. Lenders and those
with capital assets do well.
In my Politics of the Solar Age (1981, 1986), I documented the
ideological biases of neoclassical economics and the unreality of many
of the inaccurate assumptions underlying even today’s economics
textbooks. A new chorus of scientists in physics, mathematics,
neurosciences and ecology are now joining their Swedish colleagues in
calling for the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics to either be
broadened, properly labeled and disassociated from the Nobel Prizes –
or simply abolished.
The objections are from the “hard” scientists who study the natural
world and whose research findings are therefore subject to
verification or refutation. They contend that the economics prize
devalues all the real Nobel Prizes and has become an embarrassment.
Scores of ecologists, biologists, natural resource experts, engineers
and thermodynamicists have critiqued economics, building on the 1971
classic by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic
Process, which I reviewed in the Harvard Business Review.
But even the growth of hybrid professions – so-called ecological
economics, natural resource economics and others, cannot escape
economics’ fundamental errors. Many critics liken these to religious
beliefs, such as the postulate of “an invisible hand” of markets.
Thus, the long-standing question of whether economics is a science –
or a profession has now surfaced. I have long-maintained that
economics is a profession, not a science since so many of its
“principles” are unlike the tested principles in physics that can
guide a spaceship to the moon. For example, I showed that economics’
Pareto Optimality “Principle” ignored prior distribution of wealth,
power and information – and could lead to unfair social outcomes.
Dressing up such concepts in fancy mathematics tends to disguise their
underlying ideologies. Professor Robert Nadeau, a distinguished
historian of science at George Mason University in the USA has also
examined such flaws in economics in his recent books, The Non-Local
Universe (Oxford University Press 1999) and The Wealth of Nature
(Columbia University Press, 2003).
The temptation to mathematize concepts and faulty assumptions in
economics is understandable, because it obscures these value-laden
biases. This conceals public issues as too “technical” for the public
or even legislators to understand. Thus, economists gain influence
with the wealthy and powerful institutions in society which usually
employ them. Neither have economists been held to the same standards
of accountability as other professions. If a doctor makes a patient
sick, a malpractice suit can be filed. Economists’ bad advice can
make whole countries sick – with impunity.
Neuroscientists, biochemists and those studying the role of hormones,
as well as psychologists, anthropologists, behavioral scientists and
evolutionary biologists are now dealing death blows to economics’ most
enduring error. This lies in its model of “human nature” as the
“rational economic man” who competes against all others to maximize
his own self-interest. This fear and scarcity based model is that of
the early reptilian brain and the territoriality of our primitive
past. Neuroscientist Paul Zak at Claremont University has linked
trust, which enables humans to bond and cooperate, to the reproductive
hormone oxytocin.
David Loye in his Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love (2000) based on re-
visiting Charles Darwin’s original notebooks, shows that Darwin did
not focus on the “survival of the fittest” and competition as major
factors in human evolution. Darwin was more interested in the human
capacity to bond and trust, to cooperate and share and in the
evolution of altruism as factors in human success. Game theory can
lead to similar conclusions, as Robert Axelrod documents in The
Evolution of Cooperation (1984), also emphasized by Robert Wright in
Non Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny (2000) and Riane Eisler in The
Power of Partnership (2002). Indeed, how otherwise could we humans
have evolved from roving bands of nomad gatherers and hunters to
create cities, corporations, The European Union and the United
Nations?
Other scientists including physicist, Professor Dr. Hans Peter Durr of
Germany’s famed Max Planck Institute agree that economics is not a
science. Durr says “economics is not even bad science because its
core assumptions are incorrect.” Chaos theorist and Professor of
Mathematics at the University of California, Ralph Abraham believes
that economics may one day become a science. Abraham is researching
the new mathematics employed by some economists, by programming
“agents” in computer models that are supposed to mimic human
behavior.
The snag for mathematicians is that people don’t behave like atoms,
golf balls or guinea pigs. Unlike the economists “rational economic
man” people are often irrational and their motivations are complex,
with many, especially women, enjoying caring, sharing and cooperating
often as unpaid volunteers. The agent-based computerized efforts to
make economics more scientific may pay off in the future. One recent
model “Sugarscape” simply recreated poverty gaps and trade wars. I
suggested that if they had programmed half of their “agents” with the
behavior females so often exhibit (by choice, or involuntarily in
patriarchal societies) they might have produced different results.
Economics is patriarchal to its core, which accounts for the rise of
feminists economics.
The row over the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science (which I
hold was set up to give this profession the aura of a science) has
uncovered all these deeper issues. A major academic scandal may be
unfolding. It may be ignored by the World Economic Forum of business
and government elites in snowy Davos, Switzerland, while becoming a
major focus at the World Social Forum in sunny Porto Alegre in Brasil.
****
HAZEL HENDERSON, author of Building a Win-Win World and other books
(www.hazelhenderson.com), co-created with the Calvert group of
socially-responsible mutual funds, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of
Life Indicators (updated at www.Calvert-Henderson.com). She created
the financial TV series, Ethical Markets, premiering on Public
Broadcasting stations in the USA in January, 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/business/20nobel.html?em&ex=1193025600&en=47c2b5f3ce1aa479&ei=5087%0A
The Prize That Even Some Laureates Question
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 20, 2007
Carping from time to time over the unworthiness or politics of a
particular Nobel peace or literature laureate is expected. But when it
comes to economics, it’s the award itself that sometimes comes in for
sneers; even a couple of its winners have suggested it be abolished.
Skip to next paragraph
Jonas Ekstromer/Agence France-Presse
The laureate Amartya Sen said his focus, social welfare, had not been
given its due.
Unlike the original five prizes named in Alfred Nobel’s will more than
a century ago, the economics award — formally called the Bank of
Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — was
created in 1968 by the nation’s central bank in honor of its 300th
anniversary. But it isn’t so much bloodlines that have stirred up
dismay as the kind of work that has often been honored.
“They’re not engaged in the problems of the actual world,” said James
K. Galbraith, an economist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public
Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin, voicing an all-too-
common complaint that much of the Nobel-anointed economic work seems
out of touch with reality.
Complaints about prize winners generally fall into one of three
categories: too ideological; too preoccupied with theory and
mathematics; or too narrowly focused on problems facing Wall Street
instead of on pressing global issues like inequality, poverty and the
environment.
“Historically, there was a lot of justification to the critique that
it was somewhat ideological in nature,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, who
won the prize in 2001 along with George A. Akerlof and A. Michael
Spence for their analyses of markets in which people are informed to
different degrees.
He referred to a six-year period in the 1990s when economists from the
University of Chicago — Milton Friedman’s headquarters and the temple
of laissez-faire economics — won five of the prizes. Some of that
work, he complained, “was clearly not breakthrough in any fundamental
sense.”
That is no longer the case, he said; indeed, he said, the trouble now
stems from the committee going to the opposite extreme.
“The main criticism right now is, if anything, they’re slanted more to
mechanical modeling and technical advances,” he said. “One can
understand that as part of a response to criticisms that they were too
ideological,” he explained, but the problem is that not enough thought
has been given to “how substantial the work is.”
That’s not how Gary S. Becker — an economist at the University of
Chicago who won the 1992 prize for applying economic theory to a wide
range of human behavior, including crime and racial discrimination —
sees it.
“People have different judgments about what constitutes the biggest
contribution,” he said, but he maintains that the winners “do reflect
the most important work in economics” and that the work being honored
is “useful in understanding how societies work.”
Amartya Sen, one of the few winners whose work focuses on social
welfare, said he, too, thought the winners were “very worthy” of the
honor. He was particularly pleased that this week the prize went to
Leonid Hurwicz, 90, and Roger B. Myerson and Eric S. Maskin, both 56 —
three American economists who helped create and develop a
sophisticated explanation of the interaction among individuals,
markets and institutions.
While “there was a fair amount of criticism” about ideological bias
more than a decade ago, he said, that has not been the case recently.
A lot of work has been “connected to technical reasoning,” Mr. Sen
said, but that is “related to the nature of the subject.”
Mr. Becker compared the field of economics with chemistry or physics,
in which there is “more of an orientation towards theory” to get at
more fundamental questions. He also dismissed the idea that the string
of University of Chicago awards showed a political bias, saying the
work for which those academics were honored had “nothing to do with
ideology.”
The hard-science prizes were certainly the model for the newest Nobel.
As Burton Feldman explains in his book “The Nobel Prize: A History of
Genius, Controversy and Prestige,” the economics award was created at
a time of exuberant affluence, when mathematics and statistics had
colonized economics and practitioners were claiming their field was
more akin to physics than to sociology.
Yet the notion that economics is scientific, said Jeff Madrick, the
director of policy research at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy
Analysis at the New School in New York, is “highly exaggerated.”
Mr. Madrick not only doubts that significant contributions in the
field can be limited to those based on econometrics but also questions
whether that type of work is as unbiased as is often claimed. “The
Nobel prize has become quite a political animal,” he said, “in the
disguise of being scientifically pure.”
This was the heart of the complaint from the Nobel winner Gunnar
Myrdal. In a 1977 letter to a Swedish newspaper, he rejected the idea
that the field of economics could claim a Nobel on the basis of its
scientific rigor. Economics should concern itself with political and
social needs, he argued, and he called for an end to the prize in
economics.
The free-market conservative Friedrich von Hayek, who shared the Nobel
in economics with Myrdal in 1974 despite being his ideological
opposite, agreed on that point. If he had been asked, Hayek said, he
would have “decidedly advised against” creating an economics prize.
Barbara Bergmann, an emerita professor at American University and the
University of Maryland, said the same problem that afflicts the award
afflicts the profession as a whole: too much theorizing and not enough
actual research.
For all its prestige, the award’s biggest failing, Mr. Galbraith
complained, is that “certain branches of economics have been more or
less excluded,” citing as examples work on poverty, inequality, the
economics of climate change, the collapse of communist economic
systems and debt crises.
Mr. Galbraith needed to look no farther than his own dinner table for
evidence. His father, John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the most
influential economists of the 20th century but always an outsider to
the academic ranks of the profession, never won the prize.
Mr. Sen also mentioned John Kenneth Galbraith as someone who could
have been honored but was overlooked. Work dealing with unemployment,
inequality and poverty, Mr. Sen agreed, has not been cited in
Stockholm very frequently.
“Those require recognition, too,” Mr. Sen said, “but that doesn’t mean
those who were recognized don’t deserve it.”
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-chinobel.htm
The Long FAQ on Liberalism
A Critique of the Chicago School of Economics:
ALL THOSE NOBELS…
To date, the Chicago School of Economics has garnered eight Nobel
prizes -- an odds-defying achievement, given that there are thousands
of economic departments around the world. "I'm astonished," said
Robert Lucas after he picked up his prize. "They keep coming back to
us. I'm sure there will be more." (1)
There will be more if Assar Lindbeck has anything to do with it.
Lindbeck is the Swedish economist who has chaired the Nobel selection
committee for economics since 1980. (He has been on the committee
since its inception in 1969.) At the start of his career, Lindbeck's
politics were slightly right of center, but over the decades he has
become increasingly conservative. His working papers today make
arguments typically associated with the Chicago School's. In 1994 he
published a book entitled Turning Sweden Around, which called for
drastic cutbacks in Sweden's welfare state. (2)
As Lindbeck's politics have marched to the right, so has the selection
of prize winners. In its early days, leftist economists like Paul
Samuelson and Gunnar Myrdal could occasionally win the prize. But
between 1990 and 1995, the Nobel has gone to someone from the
University of Chicago five out of six times.
What is the relationship between Lindbeck and the University of
Chicago? By all accounts, it is a cozy one. This alone does not prove
impropriety, of course, but when an award is as distinguished as the
Nobel prize, even the appearance of impropriety should be avoided.
Lindbeck not only ignores this rule, but flouts it openly.
For over twenty-five years, Lindbeck has served as head of the
Institute for International Economic Studies, a prestigious research
center that is both publicly and privately funded. Seven of "Assar's
Ten Commandments" for running (and presumably funding) a successful
research program call for establishing international contacts. His
fourth commandment calls for these contacts to be based on "intense
individual interaction." (3) Along these lines, Lindbeck has forged
close working relationships with many of the Chicago economists to
whom his committee has awarded Nobel prizes. For example, Lindbeck
joined Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and Douglass
North in a long-running project to construct an "Economic Freedom
Index." The purpose of this project was to rank developing nations by
the level of government interference in their economies. It was funded
by the Center for International Private Enterprise, a far-right think
tank designed to promote the international business interests of its
affiliate, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (4)
On a certain level, Lindbeck's actions can be defended: he is a
respected economist, and it is only normal that he should write
papers, attend conferences and cooperate in projects with other
respected economists. However, the possibility of incestuous
relationships between awarders and awardees means that the selection
process should be carefully designed to avoid this pitfall. The award
process for economics is not so designed. Consequently, not a few
economists agree with Edward Herman's charge that the Chicago School's
growing number of "awards has increased its leverage in the award
process." (5)
The history and award process of the Nobel prize
The Nobel prize for economics is not one of the five original prizes
that Alfred Nobel created in his 1895 will. The economics prize was
added in 1969, but not by any of the Nobel prize-awarding institutions
(such as the Swedish Academy, the Norwegian parliament, etc.). It was
actually created by the Bank of Sweden. For this reason, it is not
really the "Nobel Prize for Economics." It's real name is "The Bank of
Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel." The
prize money does not come out of the Nobel inheritance, but is paid
for by the Bank of Sweden.
The creation of a Nobel prize in economics has raised many criticisms.
Some protest that the Bank of Sweden has no legal or moral right to
use Nobel's name. Others argue that a radical idealist like Alfred
Nobel would have never approved of an award defending capitalist
economics. Others claim that the award was created to legitimize
capitalism at a time of great social protest against it. These are, to
be sure, superficial criticisms, but there are more substantial ones
that can be leveled at the Nobel newcomer.
Perhaps the most troubling is that the selection process for economics
does not resemble the other five. Although the economics committee
boasts that it uses the same procedures, a closer look reveals this to
be untrue. In the other five categories, the process starts by
gathering nominations from as many as 3,000 scientists, which are then
assessed by 15-member prize committees. The committees must then argue
their own selections before a Nobel Assembly of 50 scientists before
reaching a final decision. Usually the discussion of a prize lasts
from 5 to 10 years before the prize is awarded.
There is a potentially weak link in this process: the 15-member prize
committee. It is free to select any nominations it wishes -- and with
thousands of scientists making the nominations, it basically has its
choice. And the committee is more expert in its scientific category
than the Nobel Assembly, so whatever case it makes is bound to be
persuasive. At any rate, the Nobel Assembly has generally rubber-
stamped the committee's recommendations.
Where the economics committee differs from the others is that it does
not seat 15 members, but only six -- nearly two-thirds smaller. This
greatly increases the possibility of bias. How much so becomes
apparent in Assar Lindbeck's own description of his committee's
selection process:
"So far, the proposals of the prize committee to the [Swedish] Academy
have been unanimous. A consensus has in fact developed quite
'automatically' within the committee, as if by some kind of invisible
hand." (6)
This is an astonishing admission, for two reasons. First, the
"invisible hand" is one of the most famous and sacred economic
concepts of the far right, and to say that an invisible hand guides
the committee's consensus is an open taunt to the left. Second, there
is probably no field of science as wracked by controversy as
economics. For the committee to advance unanimous recommendations year
after year is possible only if a perfect bias exists in the committee.
And even then, were six libertarians to sit on the committee, it is
still implausible that their proposals should be unanimous -- even
libertarians have bitter disputes. What is more likely is that the
"invisible hand" guiding the committee is the iron hand of Lindbeck
himself.
Why would committee members defer to Lindbeck? Because Lindbeck's
positions create a conflict of interest. Lindbeck serves in two
powerful positions: both as head of the Nobel committee and the
prestigious Institute for International Economic Studies. If you are a
Swedish economist and are serving either on the Nobel committee or in
the Nobel Assembly, you must kowtow to Lindbeck if you want your
research funded or your career advanced.
Circumstantial evidence? You bet. But the chain of implausibilities
required to believe that the committee is acting without bias is too
long to be seriously believed. And at any rate, even if it were, the
Bank of Sweden needs to initiate immediate reforms to correct a very
strong appearance of bias.
The extent of the bias
None of this is meant to suggest that the economists who've won Nobels
haven't been leaders in their fields. They have. (As for the validity
of those fields, well…) The point is that in any given year, the
number of economists eligible for a Nobel runs in the dozens. These
economists span the political spectrum, and hail from many different
schools of thought. Much of their work has an "apples and oranges"
quality, ranging from the economics of slavery to the economics of
bumblebees. Lining up their work and picking out "number one" is
therefore impossible; the committee actually has a group of possible
candidates, and selecting one is a judgment call. That the reward,
then, should go repeatedly to the Chicago School is a strong
indication of bias.
Could it be that the Chicago School is simply better than the others?
But as Robert Lucas himself has admitted, "The Keynesian orthodoxy
hasn't been replaced by anything yet." (7) One would think, therefore,
that Keynesians were well-represented in the Nobel department. That is
not so. Only a few neo-Keynesians have been honored, like Paul
Samuelson, James Tobin and Robert Solow. Other great Keynesians, like
Joan Robinson, Sir Roy Harrod and Nicholas Kaldor, have been
conspicuously blackballed. Also ignored have been distinguished
institutionalists like Hyman Minsky, Charles Kindleberger and Raymond
Vernon.
But the bias exists on numerous other levels than just the political.
Some of these are quite unseemly, like the fact that the prize has
been perfectly Eurocentric. In his original will, Alfred Nobel wrote:
"It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration
whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that
the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian
or not." Unfortunately, no Japanese economist has ever won the Nobel,
even though the Japanese have built one of the most highly functioning
economies in the world. Why? Apparently results in the real world do
not count as much as the fact that the Japanese do not generally
subscribe to neoclassical theory.
Another bias: the disproportionate number of winners who come not from
mainstream economics, but from the fringes. Examples include James
Buchanan, Herbert Simon, Ronald Coase, Douglass North, Friedrich von
Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. What is revealing is that even after these
individuals won their Nobels and received a world-wide burst of
academic attention, their ideas still remained on the fringe.
Sometimes it's not even the same fringe. As the old joke goes,
"Economics is the only field in which two people can win a Nobel Prize
for saying exactly the opposite thing." And this is no joke: the
libertarian Hayek shared his 1974 Nobel with the socialist Myrdal,
both for their theories on the business cycle. Ronald Simon won the
Nobel for his theories on "Bounded Rationality," which essentially
notes that people are not walking calculators and statistics manuals.
But then Lucas won a Nobel for "Rational Expectations," which presumed
largely that.
One would think that those economists who have forged a consensus
would be natural candidates for a Nobel prize. Awarding the prize to
fringe candidates suggests that the Nobel committee is judging
economic theory by a different yardstick than academia uses. But if
this yardstick were truly better, then the Nobel committee would be
awarding itself prizes.
Also curious is the timing of the Nobels, relative to the shifting
winds of consensus. During the 70s and 80s, when Rational Expectations
was all the rage, the committee steadfastly ignored Robert Lucas.
Instead, they waited until his theory had fallen out of favor with
academia, and then they awarded him the Nobel.
Lucas's award prompted the following Reuters news report:
"The Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, tipping Lucas as the winner in
its Tuesday edition, quoted an economist as saying such an award would
be very controversial, although Lucas's theories have dominated many
governments' recent economic policies." (8)
At this point, one wonders just what the Nobel committee's criteria
are. If it is awarding prizes for theories that A) have fallen out of
favor with mainstream economists; B) are controversial and C) are
widely practiced by the world's governments, then it is a wonder why
more Soviet economists have not been awarded the prize.
The shifting of academic consensus highlights the problem of even
having a Nobel prize for economics. There are many different schools
of thought, all opposed to each other, and many have enjoyed their
different heydays. This suggests that economics hasn't really advanced
to the stage yet where we can call any one of them undeniably true. So
what is the purpose of awarding a Nobel?
In his original will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the awards should
be given to those scientists who have "conferred the greatest benefit
on mankind." In other words, those who bring practical results to the
real world. Economics fails this criterion. Of course, it is unlikely
that any false theory could bring benefit to the world, and if various
economic theories pass in and out of academic fashion, it is
impossible that they could all be true and therefore beneficial.
The bias favoring useless theoretical models is just as bad as the
bias favoring right-wing economics. Samuelson -- himself a
conservative -- has an excellent suggestion for making the prize a
"more fitting memorial to Alfred Nobel:"
"Give it to people, not necessarily economists, who have improved a
nation's -- or the world's -- economic well-being. Among Americans,
why not ennobel former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker for
ending double-digit inflation, Ralph Nader for making corporations
more responsive to consumers, or engineer Jack Kilby for co-inventing
the integrated circuit?" (9)
The beauty of this suggestion is that it would force economists to
address real economic problems, if they were to continue winning
Nobels at all. Unfortunately, that would force economists to come to
grips with their methodology, as well as answer the hard questions
about their field's limitations. In other words, Samuelson's
enlightened proposal doesn't stand a chance.
Return to Main Page
Endnotes:
1. Reuters News Service, "Economics Prize 1995," October 10, 1995.
2. Assar Lindbeck et. al., Turning Sweden Around (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994).
3. Assar Lindbeck, "Principles For Successful Research: Assar's Ten
Commandments," Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm
University. http://www.iies.su.se/tencom.htm.
4. James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, "Economic Freedom and the Growth
of Less Developed Countries" Economic Reform Today no. 2, 1996,
http://www.usis.usemb.se/ERT/e20/gwa_E20.html. A publication of the
Center for International Private Enterprise.
5. Edward Herman, Triumph of the Market (Boston: South End Press,
1995), p. 41.
6. Quoted in Robert Kuttner, "The Visible Hand Guiding the Nobel Prize
in Economics," Business Week, November 12, 1990, p. 20.
7. Steven Pearlstein, "Chicago Economist Wins Nobel Prize: Lucas has
Focused on Theoretical Issues," San Jose Mercury News, Wednesday,
October 11, 1995, p. 4A.
8. Reuters News Service, "Nobel Economics Prize 1995," October 10,
1995.
9. Robert Samuelson, "Booby Prize," The New Republic, December 3,
1990, p. 18..
Alfred Nobel
Corbis-Bettmann
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born on Oct. 21, 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden,
and was the fourth son of Immanuel and Caroline Nobel. Immanuel was an
inventor and engineer who had married Caroline Andrietta Ahlsell in
1827. The couple had eight children, of whom only Alfred and three
brothers reached adulthood. Alfred was prone to illness as a child,
but he enjoyed a close relationship with his mother and displayed a
lively intellectual curiosity from an early age. He was interested in
explosives, and he learned the fundamentals of engineering from his
father. Immanuel, meanwhile, had failed at various business ventures
until moving in 1837 to St. Petersburg in Russia, where he prospered
as a manufacturer of explosive mines and machine tools. The Nobel
family left Stockholm in 1842 to join the father in St. Petersburg.
Alfred's newly prosperous parents were now able to send him to private
tutors, and he proved to be an eager pupil. He was a competent chemist
by age 16 and was fluent in English, French, German, and Russian, as
well as Swedish.
Alfred Nobel left Russia in 1850 to spend a year in Paris studying
chemistry and then spent four years in the United States working under
the direction of John Ericsson, the builder of the ironclad warship
Monitor. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Nobel worked in his
father's factory, which made military equipment during the Crimean
War. After the war ended in 1856, the company had difficulty switching
to the peacetime production of steamboat machinery, and it went
bankrupt in 1859.
Alfred and his parents returned to Sweden, while his brothers Robert
and Ludvig stayed behind in Russia to salvage what was left of the
family business. Alfred soon began experimenting with explosives in a
small laboratory on his father's estate. At the time, the only
dependable explosive for use in mines was black powder, a form of
gunpowder. A recently discovered liquid compound, nitroglycerin, was a
much more powerful explosive, but it was so volatile that it could not
be handled with any degree of safety. Nevertheless, Nobel in 1862
built a small factory to manufacture nitroglycerin, and at the same
time he undertook research in the hope of finding a safe way to
control the explosive's detonation. In 1863 he invented a practical
detonator consisting of a wooden plug inserted into a larger charge of
nitroglycerin held in a metal container; the explosion of the plug's
small charge of black powder serves to detonate the much more powerful
charge of liquid nitroglycerin. This detonator marked the beginning of
Nobel's reputation as an inventor as well as the fortune he was to
acquire as a maker of explosives. In 1865 Nobel invented an improved
detonator called a blasting cap; it consisted of a small metal cap
containing a charge of mercury fulminate that can be exploded by
either shock or moderate heat. The invention of the blasting cap
inaugurated the modern use of high explosives.
Nitroglycerin itself, however, remained difficult to transport and
extremely dangerous to handle. So dangerous, in fact, that Nobel's
nitroglycerin factory blew up in 1864, killing his younger brother
Emil and several other people. Undaunted by this tragic accident,
Nobel built several factories to manufacture nitroglycerin for use in
concert with his blasting caps. These factories were as safe as the
knowledge of the time allowed, but accidental explosions still
occasionally occurred. Nobel's second important invention was that of
dynamite in 1867. By chance, he discovered that nitroglycerin was
absorbed to dryness by kieselguhr, a porous siliceous earth, and the
resulting mixture was much safer to use and easier to handle than
nitroglycerin alone. Nobel named the new product dynamite ( from Greek
dynamis, "power") and was granted patents for it in Great Britain
(1867) and the United States (1868). Dynamite established Nobel's fame
worldwide and was soon put to use in blasting tunnels, cutting canals,
and building railways and roads.
Alfred Nobel, portrait by Emil Österman, 1915; in the Nobel
Foundation, Stockholm
Ann Ronan Picture Library/Image Select
In the 1870s and '80s Nobel built a network of factories throughout
Europe to manufacture dynamite, and he formed a web of corporations to
produce and market his explosives. He also continued to experiment in
search of better ones, and in 1875 he invented a more powerful form of
dynamite, blasting gelatin, which he patented the following year.
Again by chance, he had discovered that mixing a solution of
nitroglycerin with a fluffy substance known as nitrocellulose results
in a tough, plastic material that has a high water resistance and
greater blasting power than ordinary dynamites. In 1887 Nobel
introduced ballistite, one of the first nitroglycerin smokeless
powders and a precursor of cordite. Although Nobel held the patents to
dynamite and his other explosives, he was in constant conflict with
competitors who stole his processes, a fact that forced him into
protracted patent litigation on several occasions.
Nobel's brothers Ludvig and Robert, in the meantime, had developed
newly discovered oilfields near Baku (now in Azerbaijan) along the
Caspian Sea and had themselves become immensely wealthy. Alfred's
worldwide interests in explosives, along with his own holdings in his
brothers' companies in Russia, brought him a large fortune. In 1893 he
became interested in Sweden's arms industry, and the following year he
bought an ironworks at Bofors, near Varmland, that became the nucleus
of the well-known Bofors arms factory. Besides explosives, Nobel made
many other inventions, such as artificial silk and leather, and
altogether he registered more than 350 patents in various countries.
Nobel's complex personality puzzled his contemporaries. Although his
business interests required him to travel almost constantly, he
remained a lonely recluse who was prone to fits of depression. He led
a retired and simple life and was a man of ascetic habits, yet he
could be a courteous dinner host, a good listener, and a man of
incisive wit. He never married, and apparently preferred the joys of
inventing to those of romantic attachment. He had an abiding interest
in literature and wrote plays, novels, and poems, almost all of which
remained unpublished. He had amazing energy and found it difficult to
relax after intense bouts of work. Among his contemporaries, he had
the reputation of a liberal or even a socialist, but he actually
distrusted democracy, opposed suffrage for women, and maintained an
attitude of benign paternalism toward his many employees. Though Nobel
was essentially a pacifist and hoped that the destructive powers of
his inventions would help bring an end to war, his view of mankind and
nations was pessimistic.
By 1895 Nobel had developed angina pectoris, and he died of a cerebral
hemorrhage at his villa in San Remo, Italy, on Dec. 10, 1896. At his
death his worldwide business empire consisted of more than 90
factories manufacturing explosives and ammunition. The opening of his
will, which he had drawn up in Paris on Nov. 27, 1895, and had
deposited in a bank in Stockholm, contained a great surprise for his
family, friends, and the general public. He had always been generous
in humanitarian and scientific philanthropies, and he left the bulk of
his fortune in trust to establish what came to be the most highly
regarded of international awards, the Nobel Prizes. (See Nobel's
will.)
We can only speculate about the reasons for Nobel's establishment of
the prizes that bear his name. He was reticent about himself, and he
confided in no one about his decision in the months preceding his
death. The most plausible assumption is that a bizarre incident in
1888 may have triggered the train of reflection that culminated in his
bequest for the Nobel Prizes. That year Alfred's brother Ludvig had
died while staying in Cannes, France. The French newspapers reported
Ludvig's death but confused him with Alfred, and one paper sported the
headline "Le marchand de la mort est mort" ("The merchant of death is
dead.") Perhaps Alfred Nobel established the prizes to avoid precisely
the sort of posthumous reputation suggested by this premature
obituary. It is certain that the actual awards he instituted reflect
his lifelong interest in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology,
and literature. There is also abundant evidence that his friendship
with the prominent Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner inspired him
to establish the prize for peace.
Nobel himself, however, remains a figure of paradoxes and
contradictions: a brilliant, lonely man, part pessimist and part
idealist, who invented the powerful explosives used in modern warfare
but also established the world's most prestigious prizes for
intellectual services rendered to humanity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Biographies of Nobel include Michael Evlanoff and Marjorie Fluor,
Alfred Nobel: The Loneliest Millionaire (1969), focusing on his
personal relationships; and Kenne Fant, Alfred Nobel (1993; originally
published in Swedish, 1991), presenting Nobel through his
correspondence and his play, Nemesis.
Vid...@tcq.net
> "Harold Burton" <hal.i.bur...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:hal.i.burton-B264...@comcast.dca.giganews.com...
>
>
>
> > In article
> > <88ec7336-1eba-4980-9600-28c2a4d6e...@j22g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
> > Bret Cahill <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >> Friedman was an issue dodger just like all the remaining shills at GOP
> >> "thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
> >> School, etc.
>
> >> Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
> >> and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
>
> >> When you dodge issues that are fundamental to your field you are a
> >> fraud.
>
> > Care for some cheese with that whine?
>
> > Yeah, and let us know when you win a Nobel Prize.
>
> It's also a classic straw man. "I'll decide what issues should be
> fundamental to 'your field', so I can criticize you when you don't address
> them."
>
>
>
> > Love the sound of leftards whining.
>
> Well, there are plenty (a substantive majority, even) who are free marketers
> and have no quarrel with Friedman. The head of Obama's economic team is from
> U of Chicago.
>
> That said, there are indeed those who exist on the political fringe that
> have no idea how intertwined human behavior is with economic needs, and are
> thus doomed to criticze men like Friedman ad infinitum (and for the rest of
> us, ad nauseum) based on some Cliff Notes they read about him on some fringe
> socialist/communist/anarchist site.
>
> JG
he never had one success. but, he had lots of disasters. of course,
you are a chanter, reality is not one of your stronger suits:)
There is a great deal of psychological comfort to be found in a fully
fledged ideology such as laissez faire because it removes the need
for
critical thought. The ideology is used as an algorithm. All the
individual has to do in any situation is to ask what the ideology
requires by way of action. The fact that the action may be harmful or
the ideology objectively at odds with reality is emotionally
unimportant for the individual. What matters is that an answer has
been
found which is compatible with the ideology. This is especially
appealing to the less intellectually curious.
Psychologically, political ideologies are akin to religion and their
practitioners behave in an essentially religious manner. For example,
in the case of laissez faire, its disciples chant "let the market
decide" in the manner of Christians saying "God will provide."
Those amongst the elite who are not true believers in laissez faire
will, in most cases, toe the ideological line because they deem it
prudent to do so for their own careers and security. The few who
speak
out against it are simply sidelined.
ROBERT HENDERSON
orang...@googlemail.com
>
> - Show quoted text -
Instead of attacking Dr Friedman's reputation why not share your
vision of a successful economy?
Bret Cahill
By their own admission the "market" economists are too stupid to
answer a simple self evident truth:
"Does free speech precede each and every free trade?"
There is no way you can pretend to be a "market" economist and claim
to be too stupid to answer that question.
Bret Cahill
Bret Cahill
> >> "thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
> >> School, etc.
>
> >> Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
> >> and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
>
> >> When you dodge issues that are fundamental to your field you are a
> >> fraud.
>
> > Care for some cheese with that whine?
>
> > Yeah, and let us know when you win a Nobel Prize.
> It's also a classic straw man. "I'll decide what issues should be
> fundamental to 'your field',
The precondition of free markets is of no concern to free marketry?
Bret Cahill
orang...@googlemail.com
Ok, I'll bite. In a free market yes free speech can precede every
trade. Begin your sophism.
Bret Cahill
>
> > By their own admission the "market" economists are too stupid to
> > answer a simple self evident truth:
>
> > "Does free speech precede each and every free trade?"
>
> > There is no way you can pretend to be a "market" economist and claim
> > to be too stupid to answer that question.
>
> > Bret Cahill
>
> Ok, I'll bite. In a free market yes free speech can precede every
> trade. Begin your sophism.
It's not "can precede."
It's _must_ precede or your economic philosophy is a farce.
The truth is self evident.
If they cannot admit to a self evident truth -- and they cannot --
then they are outright frauds.
Bret Cahill
orang...@googlemail.com
> > > It's much worse than that.
>
> > > By their own admission the "market" economists are too stupid to
> > > answer a simple self evident truth:
>
> > > "Does free speech precede each and every free trade?"
>
> > > There is no way you can pretend to be a "market" economist and claim
> > > to be too stupid to answer that question.
>
> > > Bret Cahill
>
> > Ok, I'll bite. In a free market yes free speech can precede every
> > trade. Begin your sophism.
>
> It's not "can precede."
>
> It's _must_ precede or your economic philosophy is a farce.
why must it?
Vid...@tcq.net
i have many times over the years on the usenet. his reputation was a
facade and artificial, it needs attacking. he was a monster at heart.
Vid...@tcq.net
of course you are right. and, is every participant in a transaction
rational? of course not. our jails and metal institutions are full of
people who were looking out for their own self interests.
"our state and nation have experienced major declines resulting from
contemporary conservative leaders and their simplistic ideas. their
dour polices regularly fail to connect the dots, let alone comprehend
the space between them."
"The game of Darwinian economics and the enshrinement of market-
miracle
theology is really the systematic looting of the pockets and purses of
the middle class"
Jerry M. Landay of Bristol
orang...@googlemail.com
>
> - Show quoted text -
Nonsence. Friedman was one of the greatest advocates of freedom of his
generation. See his tv shows for details -
http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/
John Galt
"Bret Cahill" <BretC...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1c575d05-e3ae-4424...@d1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
Not directly. Free markets exist in Singapore, Hong Kong, China, now
Vietnam, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, all nations which different sorts
of personal expression are limited if you use the Bill of Rights as your
standard. The "rights" question is limited to if the buyer and seller are
able to commerce without regulation or precondition on their commerce.
As much of a supporter as I am of personal rights, it seems clear to me that
a free market transaction can occur between individuals who are not
permitted the right of free speech to the extent that I personally enjoy it.
JG
>
> Bret Cahill
>
>
orang...@googlemail.com
> On May 14, 11:37 pm, Bret Cahill <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > It's much worse than that.
>
> > By their own admission the "market" economists are too stupid to
> > answer a simple self evident truth:
>
> > "Does free speech precede each and every free trade?"
>
> > There is no way you can pretend to be a "market" economist and claim
> > to be too stupid to answer that question.
>
> > Bret Cahill
>
> of course you are right. and, is every participant in a transaction
> rational? of course not. our jails and metal institutions are full of
> people who were looking out for their own self interests.
So we should take everyone's money and belongings away from them and
supply them with the stuff you think they should have?
> "our state and nation have experienced major declines resulting from
> contemporary conservative leaders and their simplistic ideas. their
> dour polices regularly fail to connect the dots, let alone comprehend
> the space between them."
> "The game of Darwinian economics and the enshrinement of market-
> miracle
> theology is really the systematic looting of the pockets and purses of
> the middle class"
> Jerry M. Landay of Bristol
"Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more
urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government"
Milton Friedman
Mark M.
It's important to understand the history of the Chicago School and the
Austrian School. It all traces back to the reaction of the international
bankers to Lincoln's Greenback monetary experiment during the civil war.
It took a few years, but the bankers managed to construct a comprehensive
PR campaign that took in hiring and firing of college professors, buying
newspapers, influencing the newspapers they didn't own, distributing
pamphlets, and of course purchasing politicians. The bankers set up their
own Monetary Commission outside of government, which wrote the Gold
Standard Act of 1900.
They didn't stop there. The bankers and their hirelings kept pushing and
produced the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Their organized efforts have
continued to this day. They fund and control both conservative and liberal
groups. To them ideology is just a tool. There are true believers in
libertarianism but they are tools of the money masters. There are liberal
non profit foundation people who believe in what they are doing and don't
know they are tools of the money masters. Both political parties are the
property of the bankers.
There is a huge intellectual prostitute class that was created back in the
late 1800's that operates on the free market principal. Instead of waiting
to be hired by wealthy owners, they start up think tanks on their own.
They identify what issues will benefit the wealthy at the expense of
working people. They create a propaganda organization to promote these
goals and then market the think tank to the rich by requesting donations.
The wealthy don't have to bother personally looking into which political
issues to fund any more than they have to personally learn how to handle
their tax returns.
Mark M.
Vid...@tcq.net
machavillion freedom. freedom to do what, to whom, for what? you are
a indoctrinated fool.
Vid...@tcq.net
> "Bret Cahill" <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote in message
liar, all countries you mention are police states, or quasi police
states. they do not have open markets either. thanks for showing us
what you are really about.
>
>
> > Bret Cahill
Vid...@tcq.net
> On 15 May, 07:03, Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
>
>
>
> > On May 14, 11:37 pm, Bret Cahill <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > > It's much worse than that.
>
> > > By their own admission the "market" economists are too stupid to
> > > answer a simple self evident truth:
>
> > > "Does free speech precede each and every free trade?"
>
> > > There is no way you can pretend to be a "market" economist and claim
> > > to be too stupid to answer that question.
>
> > > Bret Cahill
>
> > of course you are right. and, is every participant in a transaction
> > rational? of course not. our jails and metal institutions are full of
> > people who were looking out for their own self interests.
>
> So we should take everyone's money and belongings away from them and
> supply them with the stuff you think they should have?
>
typical response from a chanter. where did i ever say that. that
response could be construed as insane.
> > "our state and nation have experienced major declines resulting from
> > contemporary conservative leaders and their simplistic ideas. their
> > dour polices regularly fail to connect the dots, let alone comprehend
> > the space between them."
> > "The game of Darwinian economics and the enshrinement of market-
> > miracle
> > theology is really the systematic looting of the pockets and purses of
> > the middle class"
> > Jerry M. Landay of Bristol
>
> "Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more
> urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government"
> Milton Friedman
a fine machavillion, orwellian double speak. housing debacle anyone.
of course, you are so hard wired, you will not understand the
connotations of that example.
Vid...@tcq.net
very well put. all fascism is, is libertarianism in decay.
The Trucker
My own version of a successful economy is an economy in which
general quality of life is continually rising. The GDP says just about
nothing in this regard.
The Trucker
And this is where Friedman and the entire Libertarian philosophy finds
itself constantly in the ditch. I would object to the Friedman quote
above in that it assumes some sort holiness on the part of consumers. I
might remark that roaches are consumers too. But the notion that the
individuals of the society must guard against a malicious government is
totally correct. Government is a natural sociological happening arising
out of the desire for a social order in which we place restraints on the
actions of other individuals. Even if government is each of us standing
over a land claim protecting it and our belongings with a sharp stick,
such would still be a form of government. It would be a very inefficient
and stupid form of government but a government nonetheless.
The question really is, as Friedman rightly observes: how do we
control this thing called government such that it does not do us harm?
And this is where the "free market" folk seem to go in the ditch at all
times. It is not a question of whether or not there is to be a government
or a "free market", but instead, how to make government act in the best
interest of the members of the society. To what extent does a "free
market" actually serve the best interests of all the people? The "free
market" and the "economy" are not the gods served by governance. Nor is
every roach that is a consumer. Utilitarianism is the guideline for a
proper government. The "market" is a part of that and not the whole.
David Johnston
<BretC...@aol.com> wrote:
>Friedman was an issue dodger just like all the remaining shills at GOP
>"thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
>School, etc.
>
>Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
>and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
What's the issue?
The Trucker
That land ownership is the best recipient of direct taxation and that
there should be no other direct form of taxation.
John Galt
Good observation.
Is there *any* metric which actually measures real quality of life (which I
would define as a LOCAL equation, mean income after tax less mean (average
food + average rent + average utilities + average anything else which has to
happen monthly) necessities?
JG
The Trucker
You are looking at individual wealth as opposed to societal wealth. And
in a populated society individual wealth is anywhere and everywhere the
labor you can save yourself or the freedom you gain by commanding the
labor of others. Societal wealth, on the other hand, is the freedom from
harm, discomfort, and toil and the liberty that is shared among all.
There are two ways to achieve this societal wealth in a populated society
(there may be more but I do not know of them):
1. Technological advance and capital development
2. The division and specialization of land and labor
But the measurement of success is not the measurement of these things
directly. For the measurement of success we must turn to more direct
indicators of societal well being.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life
There is and will be much disagreement over the weight assigned to the
various measurements of "infant mortality", "longevity", "happiness", and
the like. But these are the things that actually represent the quality of
life; the success or failure of economic policy.
Bret Cahill
>
> > > > By their own admission the "market" economists are too stupid to
> > > > answer a simple self evident truth:
>
> > > > "Does free speech precede each and every free trade?"
>
> > > > There is no way you can pretend to be a "market" economist and claim
> > > > to be too stupid to answer that question.
>
> > > > Bret Cahill
>
> > > Ok, I'll bite. In a free market yes free speech can precede every
> > > trade. Begin your sophism.
>
> > It's not "can precede."
>
> > It's _must_ precede or your economic philosophy is a farce.
>
> why must it?
Try reading the rest of the post:
Bret Cahill
> >> >> "thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
> >> >> School, etc.
>
> >> >> Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
> >> >> and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
>
> >> >> When you dodge issues that are fundamental to your field you are a
> >> >> fraud.
>
> >> > Care for some cheese with that whine?
>
> >> > Yeah, and let us know when you win a Nobel Prize.
>
> >> It's also a classic straw man. "I'll decide what issues should be
> >> fundamental to 'your field',
>
> > The precondition of free markets is of no concern to free marketry?
>
> Not directly.
The direct effect of censorship is that free markets are impossible.
Are you saying that free marketeers do not care if we have free
markets or not?
This is certainly not true for GOP shill tank "market" economists.
That's why they dodge The Question:
They fear free speech and free markets more than anyone.
Bret Cahill
Econotron
is impossibility of its own) or without, because the true meaning of the
term "free" is different, when applied to the markets, from the one being
applied to the speech. The "freedom" of the markets has more to do with
symmetry, rather than range, presuming un-skewed legal and political
confines within which the markets are allowed to operate. The ranges of
those confines may be different from society to society, but they have
little to do with the markets' "freedom", while having everything to do with
the freedom of speech. This is your answer, and leave the Friedman alone.:-)
e.
Harold Burton
<238c918b-9318-4f99...@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
Vid...@tcq.net wrote:
> On May 14, 8:40 pm, Harold Burton <hal.i.bur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> >
> > Love the sound of whining leftards.
> >
> > Snicker.
>
> we are not whining, we are coming from a position of knowledge.
> something that alludes (sic) rightards.
Snicker.
Les Cargill
No, that's for-real - in order for the program to work, people have
to consume. Consumers have to be a priority or you get Soviet-style
"camel" products.
I find consumerism personally distasteful myself, but it's
better. It serves me better, too.
> I
> might remark that roaches are consumers too.
No, they are not. SFAIK, roaches do not have preferences - and the
negation of that proves that Friedman is correct. "Free to choose",
he said. Exactly. Now, a roach might not be completely
deterministic, but it's close. I think a PIC* is about as smart
as a roach.
*kind of very elementary microcomputer. Might be a Z80, or something
equally dumb.
Humans are smart enough that we kinda have to treat their behavior as
emergent phenomena - it's not sufficiently constrained to do
otherwise. Yeah, I know... but that is the best we can do right now.
> But the notion that the
> individuals of the society must guard against a malicious government is
> totally correct. Government is a natural sociological happening arising
> out of the desire for a social order in which we place restraints on the
> actions of other individuals. Even if government is each of us standing
> over a land claim protecting it and our belongings with a sharp stick,
> such would still be a form of government. It would be a very inefficient
> and stupid form of government but a government nonetheless.
>
I am not aware of any *false* dichotomy at that level between
individualism and "collectivist" government - government which
is not sworn to uphold individual freedom. So far as I know, there
cannot be such a false dichotomy. it is a valid "exclusive or" - you
have one, or you have the other. In implementation, we do have a hybrid,
but I'm pretty sure we'll be moving away from collective approaches
as quickly as scarcity is limited. If and only if a resource is
critical to life itself can it be held as a collective resource - and
then there are almost an infinity of "on the other hand" cases.
> The question really is, as Friedman rightly observes: how do we
> control this thing called government such that it does not do us harm?
That's really restated Hayek. Which is ... weird. Hayek came quite
late, in terms of economic application to government.
It's incredible that as cost conscious as our ancestors *were*, that
it took Hayek....
> And this is where the "free market" folk seem to go in the ditch at all
> times. It is not a question of whether or not there is to be a government
> or a "free market", but instead, how to make government act in the best
> interest of the members of the society.
That is quite simple, then - by constraining government to the absolute
minimal role. This is almost Euclidean in its proof - the next "straw"
of gummint over the minimum is one too many, therefore ....
Another thing this means, as in Sulla, is that statesmanship is greater
than simply pleasing the plebiscite. Enlightened self-interest is
*informed*, and the math is Hard.
> To what extent does a "free
> market" actually serve the best interests of all the people?
I find it incredible that anybody can ask that. A truly free market
signals consumer-producer relationships in an optimal manner.
What people mean colloquially is not what I would call a free
market. This means I never have to defend this belief, since there's
always another hand... but seriously, it's provable. It's
a variation on signaling theory, now ( this rigorous
analysis of signaling is, IMO, what caused what we think of as
Libertarianism). Godel to Bell Labs/Shannon to Von Neumann to Hayek....
A market is a "channel", and the more information....
> The "free
> market" and the "economy" are not the gods served by governance.
Historically, they are. Unfortunately.
> Nor is
> every roach that is a consumer. Utilitarianism is the guideline for a
> proper government. The "market" is a part of that and not the whole.
>
Utilitarianism is deprecated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism#Criticism_and_defense
The way I see it, if you have to invoke utiles in anything except
economic thought-experiments, you are doing it wrong and should do
nothing. At least this is a strong indicator that you should be very wary.
--
Les Cargill
Vid...@tcq.net
> "Bret Cahill" <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote in message
but, lying is free speech, and lying is involved in many
transactions. so if you outlaw lying in transactions, you no longer
have a free market. and if the wounded recipient of lying in a
transaction demands satisfaction, you no longer have a free market
because both parties were not rational. freidman knew this.
Vid...@tcq.net
> In article
> <238c918b-9318-4f99-9fcb-5004f3d2e...@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
>
> Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> > On May 14, 8:40 pm, Harold Burton <hal.i.bur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Love the sound of whining leftards.
>
> > > Snicker.
>
> > we are not whining, we are coming from a position of knowledge.
> > something that alludes (sic) rightards.
>
> Snicker.
Les Cargill
>
> machavillion freedom. freedom to do what, to whom, for what? you are
> a indoctrinated fool.
You've shown repeatedly that you don't understand either of
Machiavelli nor Friedman.
--
Les Cargill
Les Cargill
> On Wed, 14 May 2008 21:23:56 -0700, orangatang1 wrote:
>
> My own version of a successful economy is an economy in which
> general quality of life is continually rising. The GDP says just about
> nothing in this regard.
>
I'm not sure it gets any better than that. *Declining* GDP means
nobody's* quality of life is improving. Improving GDP means
the potential for improved quality of life exists.
*maybe pirates, but they pay in violence, so ... nobody's.
I keep hearing stories from low-GINI index countries that
scare me. So I don't think that works, either.
--
Les Cargill
Les Cargill
> On Thu, 15 May 2008 23:23:30 +0530, John Galt wrote:
>
> You are looking at individual wealth as opposed to societal wealth.
One is simply the sum of the other.
> And
> in a populated society individual wealth is anywhere and everywhere the
> labor you can save yourself or the freedom you gain by commanding the
> labor of others.
For sufficiently interesting values of "command".
> Societal wealth, on the other hand, is the freedom from
> harm, discomfort, and toil and the liberty that is shared among all.
> There are two ways to achieve this societal wealth in a populated society
> (there may be more but I do not know of them):
>
> 1. Technological advance and capital development
> 2. The division and specialization of land and labor
>
Yup.
> But the measurement of success is not the measurement of these things
> directly. For the measurement of success we must turn to more direct
> indicators of societal well being.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life
>
It becomes subjective, therefore "spinnable". Try this:
1) Television advertising modulates people's comfort level to
improve the impact of commercials.
2) Therefore, turning off the TV can measurably make people happier
3) But creating demand helps keep the real cost of material goods
relatively low.
4) Therefore, there is a trade space of uncertain warp and weave
between TV or no TV.
I tend to turn off the TV, but I might be creating negative
externalities for other people by doing it. Indeed, I have been
on here for years talking about consumer fatigue. I think we are
in it up to our eyeballs.
> There is and will be much disagreement over the weight assigned to the
> various measurements of "infant mortality", "longevity", "happiness", and
> the like. But these are the things that actually represent the quality of
> life; the success or failure of economic policy.
>
And each of those will mire you in details forever. Improved
prenatal care actually inflates infant mortality figures - what
would have been a miscarriage is now an infant death. Yadda
yadda.
--
Les Cargilll
Vid...@tcq.net
sure i do. its you that is the chanter. so, if freidman says all
information is perfect, markets are perfect, and all persons involved
in a transaction are rational, and have correct, perfect information.
that is a straight shooter, who does not practice double speak. or, he
was a idiot, possibly insane not to understand his fellow human being,
and completely ignorant of history. which was he?
all fascism is, is libertarianism in decay.
> --
> Les Cargill
Les Cargill
> On May 15, 6:12 pm, Les Cargill <lcarg...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>> Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
>>> On May 15, 1:09 am, orangata...@googlemail.com wrote:
>> <snip>
>>
>>> machavillion freedom. freedom to do what, to whom, for what? you are
>>> a indoctrinated fool.
>> You've shown repeatedly that you don't understand either of
>> Machiavelli nor Friedman.
>>
>
> sure i do.
I wonder.
> its you that is the chanter.
I think the first thing I ever posted to sci.econ, back when
David ran it, was "... but people aren't rational." He advised me
to look up "normative assumption." Which I did. That was a good
day.
>
so, if freidman says all
> information is perfect, markets are perfect, and all persons involved
> in a transaction are rational, and have correct, perfect information.
I have to agree - this one thing of Friedman's continues
to bedevil people. I interpret it as being like the
frictionless billiard-ball physics of ninth graders - he
was simplifying the message to make it a mass message. But
he's going to the market as a source of information itself,
which is what was intended to impress people.
Indeed, I don't think you can talk about comparative
advantage without *im*perfect information. *People* are
*im*perfect. Groupthink happens; that is why we have
bubbles and whatnot.
But I don't really know what he intended with all that, and
it's largely beside the point. I think this
is a lot more interesting:
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004833.html
> that is a straight shooter, who does not practice double speak. or, he
> was a idiot, possibly insane not to understand his fellow human being,
> and completely ignorant of history. which was he?
Why, he might simply have been.... *im*perfect. :) Newton
was just absolutely insane at points, but his work is highly
useful. Old Milton was far from crazy.
> all fascism is, is libertarianism in decay.
>
Well okay then. And all up is down, and all blue is green. Bully! All
this stuff headends in human psychology, which is ... ugly.
"What's the ugliest part of your body? It could be your mind." - Frank
Zappa.
>> --
>> Les Cargill
>
--
Les Cargill
sinister
> Friedman was an issue dodger just like all the remaining shills at GOP
> "thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
> School, etc.
>
> Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
> and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
Actually, that's not _quite_ true.
Friedman (I'm assuming you're referring to Milton) said that the best tax
was the tax proposed by Henry George.
I have the impression that he wasn't as sympathetic to the Georgist program
as the quote attributed to him would indicate---he specifically called land
value taxation "the least bad tax"---but he at least understand and partly
approved of the program.
>
> When you dodge issues that are fundamental to your field you are a
> fraud.
>
>
> Bret Cahill
>
>
John Galt
Yea, I am, since that's essentially what matters. If a society is full of
people who feel that their disposal income is rising, then they're happy.
Disposable income can rise because wages increase, taxes fall, the cost of
goods falls, or because the goverment picks up the tab for something they
are used to paying for (which is opposed to "taxes fall").
In your societal discussion below, ISTM that skew enters the picture.
Societal wealth can increase while individual wealth decreases for the
majority of the population.
JG
The Trucker
> The Trucker wrote:
>> On Thu, 15 May 2008 23:23:30 +0530, John Galt wrote:
> <snip>
>>
>> You are looking at individual wealth as opposed to societal wealth.
>
> One is simply the sum of the other.
That actually seems irrelevant and incorrect and it indicates a
probable failure to communicate.
>> And
>> in a populated society individual wealth is anywhere and everywhere the
>> labor you can save yourself or the freedom you gain by commanding the
>> labor of others.
>
> For sufficiently interesting values of "command".
>
>> Societal wealth, on the other hand, is the freedom from harm,
>> discomfort, and toil and the liberty that is shared among all. There
>> are two ways to achieve this societal wealth in a populated society
>> (there may be more but I do not know of them):
>>
>> 1. Technological advance and capital development 2. The division and
>> specialization of land and labor
>>
>>
> Yup.
>
>> But the measurement of success is not the measurement of these things
>> directly. For the measurement of success we must turn to more direct
>> indicators of societal well being.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life
>>
>>
> It becomes subjective, therefore "spinnable". Try this:
Mean, and median longevity is not subjective or spinnable.
Infant mortality is not. The number of hours employed outside the home is
not. There are quit a few metrics that simply are not in and of themselves
subjective. The subjectiveness is in the weights of the different non
subjective measures.
> 1) Television advertising modulates people's comfort level to
> improve the impact of commercials.
> 2) Therefore, turning off the TV can measurably make people happier
I do not have a TV.
> 3) But creating demand helps keep the real cost of material goods
> relatively low.
That is simply wrong -- the broken window fallacy.
> 4) Therefore, there is a trade space of uncertain warp and weave
> between TV or no TV.
All of that may even be of interest to you. It sure as hell is of no
interest to me at all. But the opportunity to spend time watching TV
or not _is_ of interest to just about everyone. Its called freedom.
Assuming all other metrics equal we would measure the time spent not
working outside the home and see that as a measure of freedom.
> I tend to turn off the TV, but I might be creating negative
> externalities for other people by doing it. Indeed, I have been
> on here for years talking about consumer fatigue. I think we are
> in it up to our eyeballs.
That is part of why focusing on consumption is a mistake. There are a
great many of us who do not need any more consuming. What we want is to
have MORE FREEDOM, MORE LEISURE, and be healthier. So you can escape
by weighting the different non spinnable metrics. But you really can't
do that either. If you have the freedom to move about then you can select
the economy that scores best on YOUR selected weights. The measurement of
the economy is not the province of Milton or of the Republicans or the
Democrats or the Nazis. It can be individualized. Based on the weights
selected by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Intelligence_Unit
the US economy ranks significantly below Scandinavia.
>> There is and will be much disagreement over the weight assigned to the
>> various measurements of "infant mortality", "longevity", "happiness", and
>> the like. But these are the things that actually represent the quality of
>> life; the success or failure of economic policy.
>>
>
> And each of those will mire you in details forever. Improved
> prenatal care actually inflates infant mortality figures - what
> would have been a miscarriage is now an infant death. Yadda
> yadda.
Another seemingly ridiculous diversion.
The Trucker
NO. That seems to be what matters _TO_YOU_.
> If a society is full of
> people who feel that their disposal income is rising, then they're happy.
NO. If people say they are happy then they are happy. It is not up to
you to tell them what makes them happy.
> Disposable income can rise because wages increase, taxes fall, the cost
> of goods falls, or because the goverment picks up the tab for something
> they are used to paying for (which is opposed to "taxes fall").
If disposable income is a measure of freedom or of security or of other
things that people hold dear then it is a good indicator of overall
"goodness". That is true enough. But why not just measure the overall
goodness and blow off the religious orthodoxy.
> In your societal discussion below, ISTM that skew enters the picture.
> Societal wealth can increase while individual wealth decreases for the
> majority of the population.
Let me say that I do not believe that the claim you have made can be true
unless you select some very strange metrics. When we look at the actual
metrics chosen by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Intelligence_Unit
I do not see how your claim can ever be correct. You can certainly select
different metrics, but I do not see how you can do so in such a way as to
support the statement you have made. Perhaps you can illustrate.
John Galt
You're suggesting that people will be happy with declining individual wealth
as long as they see in the newspapers that societal wealth is growing?
Seriously?
>
>> If a society is full of
>> people who feel that their disposal income is rising, then they're happy.
>
> NO. If people say they are happy then they are happy. It is not up to
> you to tell them what makes them happy.
You're suggesting that people will be happy with less money to spend next
year than they do this year?
Seriously?
>
>> Disposable income can rise because wages increase, taxes fall, the cost
>> of goods falls, or because the goverment picks up the tab for something
>> they are used to paying for (which is opposed to "taxes fall").
>
> If disposable income is a measure of freedom or of security or of other
> things that people hold dear then it is a good indicator of overall
> "goodness". That is true enough. But why not just measure the overall
> goodness and blow off the religious orthodoxy.
Hm? If you ask Joe Sixpack what his first responsibility is to, you think
he's going to say something OTHER than his family? (Assuming you're not
going to cloud the question by dragging in a military attack on the US.)
Sorry. Lessons learned from life. If I don't take care of my own, nobody
else will, and if they try, they won't do a particularly good job as I see
it.
>> In your societal discussion below, ISTM that skew enters the picture.
>> Societal wealth can increase while individual wealth decreases for the
>> majority of the population.
>
> Let me say that I do not believe that the claim you have made can be true
> unless you select some very strange metrics.
How about one where the vast majority of the increase in personal wealth
flows to the upper 1% of wages earners, while wealth growth is slightly
negative to the other 99%?
JG
Vid...@tcq.net
> Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> > On May 15, 6:12 pm, Les Cargill <lcarg...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> >> Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> >>> On May 15, 1:09 am, orangata...@googlemail.com wrote:
> >> <snip>
>
> >>> machavillion freedom. freedom to do what, to whom, for what? you are
> >>> a indoctrinated fool.
> >> You've shown repeatedly that you don't understand either of
> >> Machiavelli nor Friedman.
>
> > sure i do.
>
> I wonder.
>
show me why i do not. i wonder, means you have nothing.
> > its you that is the chanter.
>
> I think the first thing I ever posted to sci.econ, back when
> David ran it, was "... but people aren't rational." He advised me
> to look up "normative assumption." Which I did. That was a good
> day.
>
i no nothing of that post. i have spent the last decade on
alt.politics.economics. and many people are not rational. we have been
thru this before.
> >
> so, if freidman says all
>
> > information is perfect, markets are perfect, and all persons involved
> > in a transaction are rational, and have correct, perfect information.
>
> I have to agree - this one thing of Friedman's continues
> to bedevil people. I interpret it as being like the
> frictionless billiard-ball physics of ninth graders - he
> was simplifying the message to make it a mass message.
crap.
But
> he's going to the market as a source of information itself,
> which is what was intended to impress people.
>
markets are not self policing, markets are people. people lie, steal,
and cheat. so if you are going to the markets for information, you may
well be lied to, stolen from, and cheated.
> Indeed, I don't think you can talk about comparative
> advantage without *im*perfect information. *People* are
> *im*perfect. Groupthink happens; that is why we have
> bubbles and whatnot.
>
so markets are not perfect, self policing, self righting. and markets
are made up of good people, and bad people.
markets implode on a regular basis, and must be bailed out by
government, hardly a free market. and if we do not bail them out, we
get 1929 or worse.
> But I don't really know what he intended with all that, and
> it's largely beside the point. I think this
> is a lot more interesting:
>
it was pure machavillian, orwellian double speak. this definition is
as good as it gets.
"The game of Darwinian economics and the enshrinement of market-
miracle
theology is really the systematic looting of the pockets and purses of
the middle class"
Jerry M. Landay of Bristol
> http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004833.html
>
> > that is a straight shooter, who does not practice double speak. or, he
> > was a idiot, possibly insane not to understand his fellow human being,
> > and completely ignorant of history. which was he?
>
> Why, he might simply have been.... *im*perfect. :)
that is my point. and he built a cult around imperfection that he
knew was not as advertised. pure machavillian in nature.
Newton
> was just absolutely insane at points, but his work is highly
> useful. Old Milton was far from crazy.
>
milton was not crazy. he knew exactly what he was doing. that is why
you do not understand the machavillian snooker he pulled on you.
> > all fascism is, is libertarianism in decay.
>
> Well okay then. And all up is down, and all blue is green. Bully! All
> this stuff headends in human psychology, which is ... ugly.
>
its where libertarian societies end up. the u.k. under thatcher,
chile, the u.s.a., all police states.
> "What's the ugliest part of your body? It could be your mind." - Frank
> Zappa.
>
our state and nation have experienced major declines resulting from
contemporary conservative leaders and their simplistic ideas. their
dour polices regularly fail to connect the dots, let alone comprehend
the space between them.
richard a. swanson
Vid...@tcq.net
> "Bret Cahill" <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote in message
but, there is that insinuation that all taxes on unproductive wealth
is bad. which is one of the basis of neo-liberalsim.
The Trucker
NO. I am disputing your assertion that individual wealth is measured in
disposable income. You are assuming that we all have this fascination with
disposable income; that it equates to individual wealth. Some individuals
do not agree. But I seem to have hung myself with my own noose here. I
earlier claimed that individual wealth was the ability to command the
labor of others and that would infer that disposable income is indeed the
measure of individual wealth. I know what I said was wrong because it is
possible to be wealthy or poor without any others to command. I normally
state it as the labor foregone OR the command of labor. My bad.
But bottom line is that individual wealth is individual. I have said many
times that it is actually the amount of leisure regardless of how it
arises. But, here again, that is my individual assessment.
>>
>>> If a society is full of
>>> people who feel that their disposal income is rising, then they're happy.
>>
>> NO. If people say they are happy then they are happy. It is not up to
>> you to tell them what makes them happy.
>
> You're suggesting that people will be happy with less money to spend next
> year than they do this year?
>
> Seriously?
Absolutely! I have less disposable income this year than last and I am
much happier than I was last year. It isn't even close. That is not
necessarily true for other people and obviously not true for you. But
this is the broader point I am trying to make. It is strange that many of
the same people that claim that there is no such thing as a "common good"
will typically try to claim that disposable income is the defining metric
of wealth or happiness or goodness.
>>
>>> Disposable income can rise because wages increase, taxes fall, the cost
>>> of goods falls, or because the goverment picks up the tab for something
>>> they are used to paying for (which is opposed to "taxes fall").
>>
>> If disposable income is a measure of freedom or of security or of other
>> things that people hold dear then it is a good indicator of overall
>> "goodness". That is true enough. But why not just measure the overall
>> goodness and blow off the religious orthodoxy.
>
> Hm? If you ask Joe Sixpack what his first responsibility is to, you think
> he's going to say something OTHER than his family? (Assuming you're not
> going to cloud the question by dragging in a military attack on the US.)
>
> Sorry. Lessons learned from life. If I don't take care of my own, nobody
> else will, and if they try, they won't do a particularly good job as I see
> it.
But what if we had national health insurance like in Canada this year but
your disposable income (after your share of NHI) was 1% less and the
quality of care was better than what you had last year. You would have to
agree I think (based on what you've written) that your family was better
off because of it though your disposable income is less.
>>> In your societal discussion below, ISTM that skew enters the picture.
>>> Societal wealth can increase while individual wealth decreases for the
>>> majority of the population.
>>
>> Let me say that I do not believe that the claim you have made can be
>> true unless you select some very strange metrics.
>
> How about one where the vast majority of the increase in personal wealth
> flows to the upper 1% of wages earners, while wealth growth is slightly
> negative to the other 99%?
You are just doing the same thing again in that you are insisting on your
one particular measuring stick. Societal wealth is not measured with that
particular stick but for _YOU_. You can assign all the other metrics a
weight of zero and make yours a weight of one and then you can get where
you want to be. The problem is that you have then abandoned the concept
of societal wealth. And you are back to your claim that all that matters
is your particular metric.
My position is that disposable income can, in fact, decrease for the
majority while societal wealth is increasing. That can be so if the
longevity, health, and happiness and general freedom of the majority
increases in spite of the decrease in disposable income.
Les Cargill
>
> markets are not self policing, markets are people. people lie, steal,
> and cheat. so if you are going to the markets for information, you may
> well be lied to, stolen from, and cheated.
>
>
A market is nothing more than I have dollars, you have oranges, and we
trade them. That is all it is, iterated over all comparable activities.
<snip>
--
Les Cargill
Les Cargill
> On Thu, 15 May 2008 19:23:44 -0400, Les Cargill wrote:
>
>> The Trucker wrote:
>>> On Thu, 15 May 2008 23:23:30 +0530, John Galt wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> You are looking at individual wealth as opposed to societal wealth.
>> One is simply the sum of the other.
>
> That actually seems irrelevant and incorrect and it indicates a
> probable failure to communicate.
>
What I have seen it refer to is like microbanking and the like. Well,
if you inventory its results, the laws of addition still apply. it's
just being clever about adapting services to customers you are not used
to serving.
It has a vaguely colonial feel to it.
If they are using it to describe accreted "public goods" service from
antitrust and rot like *that*, it's a lie. Rockefeller was
much richer after they broke up Standard. I suppose the money just
appeared out of nowhere?
>>> And
>>> in a populated society individual wealth is anywhere and everywhere the
>>> labor you can save yourself or the freedom you gain by commanding the
>>> labor of others.
>> For sufficiently interesting values of "command".
>>
>>> Societal wealth, on the other hand, is the freedom from harm,
>>> discomfort, and toil and the liberty that is shared among all. There
>>> are two ways to achieve this societal wealth in a populated society
>>> (there may be more but I do not know of them):
>>>
>>> 1. Technological advance and capital development 2. The division and
>>> specialization of land and labor
>>>
>>>
>> Yup.
>>
>>> But the measurement of success is not the measurement of these things
>>> directly. For the measurement of success we must turn to more direct
>>> indicators of societal well being.
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life
>>>
>>>
>> It becomes subjective, therefore "spinnable". Try this:
>
> Mean, and median longevity is not subjective or spinnable.
Short of longevity being bounded by some economically
interesting quantity, it's totally irrelevant. We spend
horrifying amounts on Medicare.
I certainly enjoy freedom *from* the tender embrace of modern
retail medicine. When I can get away from it.
> Infant mortality is not.
The US has an artificially high incidence of infant mortality
as an artifact of premature births, because we have
a more-sophisticated health system and because of societal
constraints on having children.
The number of hours employed outside the home is
> not. There are quit a few metrics that simply are not in and of themselves
> subjective. The subjectiveness is in the weights of the different non
> subjective measures.
>
>> 1) Television advertising modulates people's comfort level to
>> improve the impact of commercials.
>> 2) Therefore, turning off the TV can measurably make people happier
>
> I do not have a TV.
>
>> 3) But creating demand helps keep the real cost of material goods
>> relatively low.
>
> That is simply wrong -- the broken window fallacy.
>
Rot. It's bloody well fact. Price a VCR in 1980. Again in 1990.
Again in 2000. Why is that? Price an automobile in 1900, 1940, 1980,
2000 ( you have to subtract out the cost of regulatory toys ) and
it's a slower curve, but quite similar, waving hands at equivalences.
Absent rent payments, everything is like that.
>> 4) Therefore, there is a trade space of uncertain warp and weave
>> between TV or no TV.
>
> All of that may even be of interest to you.
This is called an example, a thought-experiment.
> It sure as hell is of no
> interest to me at all. But the opportunity to spend time watching TV
> or not _is_ of interest to just about everyone. Its called freedom.
> Assuming all other metrics equal we would measure the time spent not
> working outside the home and see that as a measure of freedom.
>
>> I tend to turn off the TV, but I might be creating negative
>> externalities for other people by doing it. Indeed, I have been
>> on here for years talking about consumer fatigue. I think we are
>> in it up to our eyeballs.
>
> That is part of why focusing on consumption is a mistake. There are a
> great many of us who do not need any more consuming. What we want is to
> have MORE FREEDOM, MORE LEISURE, and be healthier.
You should be able to do that, then. Move someplace cheap,
live on less. Ada Oklahoma (I just happen to be familiar with it )
is cheap, has great water, clean air and not much else. Fishin'.
It is a nice place.
> So you can escape
> by weighting the different non spinnable metrics. But you really can't
> do that either. If you have the freedom to move about then you can select
> the economy that scores best on YOUR selected weights. The measurement of
> the economy is not the province of Milton or of the Republicans or the
> Democrats or the Nazis. It can be individualized. Based on the weights
> selected by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Intelligence_Unit
> the US economy ranks significantly below Scandinavia.
>
And a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
That index measures infantilism, not livability. I know Scandinavians.
They're just as grumpy as we are, just about different things. They
don't particularly *like* their little socialist paradises. Which are,
after all, overwhelmingly based on rents.
Scandinavian societies are really hard on ambitious people. But
that's the point, isn't it?
This being said, the pragmatic Swiss really do a good job of dealing
a lot of issues - health care, the like.
>>> There is and will be much disagreement over the weight assigned to the
>>> various measurements of "infant mortality", "longevity", "happiness", and
>>> the like. But these are the things that actually represent the quality of
>>> life; the success or failure of economic policy.
>>>
>> And each of those will mire you in details forever. Improved
>> prenatal care actually inflates infant mortality figures - what
>> would have been a miscarriage is now an infant death. Yadda
>> yadda.
>
> Another seemingly ridiculous diversion.
>
Uh huh. Fertility drugs, delayed pregnancy, other factors lead to
increased numbers of low birth weight babies, who overwhelmingly
bias upwards infant mortality rates.
You can't metrify happinefs. Jefferson shoulda stuck with
"property".
--
Les Cargill
John Galt
We may be splitting hairs here, but that's not quite what I meant.
Disposable income gives the SENSE of individual wealth, which may or may not
be demonstrable on paper. BUT, since people are not likely to be convinced
that the paper is more important to them than the emotion, the point is
somewhat moot, I'd argue.
> Some individuals
> do not agree. But I seem to have hung myself with my own noose here. I
> earlier claimed that individual wealth was the ability to command the
> labor of others and that would infer that disposable income is indeed the
> measure of individual wealth. I know what I said was wrong because it is
> possible to be wealthy or poor without any others to command. I normally
> state it as the labor foregone OR the command of labor. My bad.
>
> But bottom line is that individual wealth is individual. I have said many
> times that it is actually the amount of leisure regardless of how it
> arises. But, here again, that is my individual assessment.
Sure. Not everyone values leisure. I don't. I like toys. If my company gave
me a choice bewtween an extra weeks vacation and a raise of a week's wage,
I'd take the wage. Hell, I have five weeks of vacation already that I rarely
use.
>
>>>
>>>> If a society is full of
>>>> people who feel that their disposal income is rising, then they're
>>>> happy.
>>>
>>> NO. If people say they are happy then they are happy. It is not up to
>>> you to tell them what makes them happy.
>>
>> You're suggesting that people will be happy with less money to spend next
>> year than they do this year?
>>
>> Seriously?
>
> Absolutely! I have less disposable income this year than last and I am
> much happier than I was last year. It isn't even close. That is not
> necessarily true for other people and obviously not true for you. But
> this is the broader point I am trying to make. It is strange that many of
> the same people that claim that there is no such thing as a "common good"
> will typically try to claim that disposable income is the defining metric
> of wealth or happiness or goodness.
Obvously everyone has different circumstances. If I were a single guy, I can
see having less and being happier. However, with a family and one kidlet
left home, I'm happier when I can afford to give her more opportunity. Since
I travel on business, this usually translates to dragging them along so they
can see cool places while I do whatever it is I have to do for work.
For example: We were living in India for a year (mid 06 to mid 07), and had
a great driver. A driver can make or break an expat's experience in a
chaotic place like India. Anyway, the driver is getting married in November,
and wants us to be guests of honor at his wedding. Well, being a guest of
honor at a Hindu wedding in a village is not an opportunity that pops up
every day, so we want to go. It's not cheap, but because of disposable
income, we get to do it.
>
>>>
>>>> Disposable income can rise because wages increase, taxes fall, the cost
>>>> of goods falls, or because the goverment picks up the tab for something
>>>> they are used to paying for (which is opposed to "taxes fall").
>>>
>>> If disposable income is a measure of freedom or of security or of other
>>> things that people hold dear then it is a good indicator of overall
>>> "goodness". That is true enough. But why not just measure the overall
>>> goodness and blow off the religious orthodoxy.
>>
>> Hm? If you ask Joe Sixpack what his first responsibility is to, you think
>> he's going to say something OTHER than his family? (Assuming you're not
>> going to cloud the question by dragging in a military attack on the US.)
>>
>> Sorry. Lessons learned from life. If I don't take care of my own, nobody
>> else will, and if they try, they won't do a particularly good job as I
>> see
>> it.
>
> But what if we had national health insurance like in Canada this year but
> your disposable income (after your share of NHI) was 1% less and the
> quality of care was better than what you had last year. You would have to
> agree I think (based on what you've written) that your family was better
> off because of it though your disposable income is less.
Well, you're phrasing your question carefully to dictate a response. At 1%,
my disposable income would actually increase and I'd get health care. No
brainer. 3% would be a push.
>
>>>> In your societal discussion below, ISTM that skew enters the picture.
>>>> Societal wealth can increase while individual wealth decreases for the
>>>> majority of the population.
>>>
>>> Let me say that I do not believe that the claim you have made can be
>>> true unless you select some very strange metrics.
>>
>> How about one where the vast majority of the increase in personal wealth
>> flows to the upper 1% of wages earners, while wealth growth is slightly
>> negative to the other 99%?
>
> You are just doing the same thing again in that you are insisting on your
> one particular measuring stick. Societal wealth is not measured with that
> particular stick but for _YOU_. You can assign all the other metrics a
> weight of zero and make yours a weight of one and then you can get where
> you want to be. The problem is that you have then abandoned the concept
> of societal wealth. And you are back to your claim that all that matters
> is your particular metric.
Actually, my claim is that the majority of Americans will look at it the way
I do. There is very little sense of community responsibility left among
Americans. Even charity is done at arms length, by writing a check instead
of actually DOING anything for anyone. Thus, I have to conclude that the
majority will judge as "better" any policy decision which improves *their*
own personal lot, and that the definition of "lot" is usually financial.
>
> My position is that disposable income can, in fact, decrease for the
> majority while societal wealth is increasing. That can be so if the
> longevity, health, and happiness and general freedom of the majority
> increases in spite of the decrease in disposable income.
I think that view, to some extent, ignores who we are. "Protestant Work
Ethic" is in our DNA. This isn't Sweden, and never will be.
JG
John Galt
"Les Cargill" <lcar...@cfl.rr.com> wrote in message
news:482d182d$0$31757$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
> The Trucker wrote:
>> On Thu, 15 May 2008 19:23:44 -0400, Les Cargill wrote:
<snip>
>
>> So you can escape
>> by weighting the different non spinnable metrics. But you really can't
>> do that either. If you have the freedom to move about then you can
>> select
>> the economy that scores best on YOUR selected weights. The measurement
>> of
>> the economy is not the province of Milton or of the Republicans or the
>> Democrats or the Nazis. It can be individualized. Based on the weights
>> selected by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Intelligence_Unit
>> the US economy ranks significantly below Scandinavia.
>>
>
> And a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
>
> That index measures infantilism, not livability. I know Scandinavians.
> They're just as grumpy as we are, just about different things. They
> don't particularly *like* their little socialist paradises. Which are,
> after all, overwhelmingly based on rents.
>
> Scandinavian societies are really hard on ambitious people. But
> that's the point, isn't it?
Amen.
I'm on my way to Sweden next week to attend my nephew's graduation from high
school. He is the valedictorian, and wants to be a doctor. While I'm
traveling to Sweden, he's also traveling there -- from the US. He's finally
got his US citizenship, because he wants out of Sweden for exactly that
reason -- he's ambitious. (His mom wants out of there too, but she's saddled
with an unambitious husband who is satisfied with the state of affairs, but
also grumpy about them.)
JG
Clave
news:_%8Xj.86115$Uf4....@en-nntp-08.dc1.easynews.com...
<...>
> Actually, my claim is that the majority of Americans will look at it the
> way I do. There is very little sense of community responsibility left
> among Americans. Even charity is done at arms length, by writing a check
> instead of actually DOING anything for anyone. Thus...
Hang on there -- you're going from "my claim is" to "thus" without anything
in
between but your own personal anecdotes?
Frickin' no-content hand-waving sheesh.
Jim
John Galt
"Clave" <ClaviusNo...@cablespeed.com> wrote in message
news:Er6dnX2__7r-vLDV...@cablespeedwa.com...
How would there be any other? These are simply observations of society as we
all make them, just as we all attempt to build generalizations from those
observations.
>
> Frickin' no-content hand-waving sheesh.
Consistent with your response. I suspect this question distills down to
personal experience on either side of the argument. If you have another way
to approach the issue other than snark, feel free to take a shot.
JG
John Galt
<retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:tj8q24punnraomov9...@4ax.com...
> On Fri, 16 May 2008 07:58:05 +0530, "John Galt"
>
>>> NO. If people say they are happy then they are happy. It is not up to
>>> you to tell them what makes them happy.
>>
>>You're suggesting that people will be happy with less money to spend next
>>year than they do this year?
>>
>>Seriously?
>
>
Wealth? Who said anything about wealth? I'm talking about raising families.
I'm talking about food on the table, enough money for your kid to play
Little League, having your kid's birthday party at Chuckie Cheese, or maybe
if you can afford piano lessons for your daughter. At the lower and middle
class layers of society, you're damn right money is tied to happiness. If it
wasn't, money wouldn't be continually cited as one of the primary causes of
divorce.
>
> I"ve been around some of the richest most powerful people in the
> country and I can tell you most certainly that is not true.
Granted. I completely agree that once the necessities and the little
luxuries, such as those piano lessons, are covered, money doesn't buy you
squat in the way of emotional happiness.
JG
orang...@googlemail.com
> On May 15, 1:17 am, orangata...@googlemail.com wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On 15 May, 07:03, Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
>
> > > On May 14, 11:37 pm, Bret Cahill <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > > > It's much worse than that.
>
> > > > By their own admission the "market" economists are too stupid to
> > > > answer a simple self evident truth:
>
> > > > "Does free speech precede each and every free trade?"
>
> > > > There is no way you can pretend to be a "market" economist and claim
> > > > to be too stupid to answer that question.
>
> > > > Bret Cahill
>
> > > of course you are right. and, is every participant in a transaction
> > > rational? of course not. our jails and metal institutions are full of
> > > people who were looking out for their own self interests.
>
> > So we should take everyone's money and belongings away from them and
> > supply them with the stuff you think they should have?
>
> typical response from a chanter. where did i ever say that. that
> response could be construed as insane.
>
> > > contemporary conservative leaders and their simplistic ideas. their
> > > dour polices regularly fail to connect the dots, let alone comprehend
> > > the space between them."
> > > miracle
> > > theology is really the systematic looting of the pockets and purses of
> > > the middle class"
> > > Jerry M. Landay of Bristol
>
> > urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government"
> > Milton Friedman
>
> of course, you are so hard wired, you will not understand the
> connotations of that example.- Hide quoted text -
again, you offer no thoughts of your own. you wait for someone else to
say something and then spew abuse. what type of response are you
expecting?
Vid...@tcq.net
wrote:
> "John Galt" <whoisjohng...@bluebottle.com> wrote in message
the idiot does not know whats coming to america with the upcoming
generations, its not the so-called rugged individualism that allows us
to be picked off one at a time. collective action is in the cards. i
hope his nephew is ready for
a swedish style economy is coming to the u.s.a. soon.
John Galt
<retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:nr8r2450outt2op4i...@4ax.com...
> On Fri, 16 May 2008 13:04:11 +0530, "John Galt"
> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>>
>><retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
>>news:tj8q24punnraomov9...@4ax.com...
>>> On Fri, 16 May 2008 07:58:05 +0530, "John Galt"
>>> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> NO. If people say they are happy then they are happy. It is not up
>>>>> to
>>>>> you to tell them what makes them happy.
>>>>
>>>>You're suggesting that people will be happy with less money to spend
>>>>next
>>>>year than they do this year?
>>>>
>>>>Seriously?
>>>
>>>
>>> Do you honestly believe wealth and happiness are related. LOL.
>>
>>Wealth? Who said anything about wealth? I'm talking about raising
>>families.
>>I'm talking about food on the table, enough money for your kid to play
>>Little League, having your kid's birthday party at Chuckie Cheese, or
>>maybe
>>if you can afford piano lessons for your daughter. At the lower and middle
>>class layers of society, you're damn right money is tied to happiness. If
>>it
>>wasn't, money wouldn't be continually cited as one of the primary causes
>>of
>>divorce.
>
>
Then feed me more than your personal anecdotes in refutation. I KNOW poor
people can be happy -- I've spent no shortage of time educating their
children. That said, the idea you're proposing, that people don't care about
giving their children "things" as cited, and they're just as happy if they
cannot if they can, is absurd.
JG
Some of the happiest people I know are very poor. I used
> to tend bar for some of the richest and most powerful and can tell you
> money was a long way from delivering happiness for them.
>
>
Vid...@tcq.net
they simply said it better than i can. of course, you never refute it.
Vid...@tcq.net
> On Fri, 16 May 2008 13:04:11 +0530, "John Galt"
>
>
>
>
> ><retrogro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
> >news:tj8q24punnraomov9...@4ax.com...
> >> On Fri, 16 May 2008 07:58:05 +0530, "John Galt"
> >> <whoisjohng...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
> >>>> NO. If people say they are happy then they are happy. It is not up to
> >>>> you to tell them what makes them happy.
>
> >>>You're suggesting that people will be happy with less money to spend next
> >>>year than they do this year?
>
> >>>Seriously?
>
> >> Do you honestly believe wealth and happiness are related. LOL.
>
> >Wealth? Who said anything about wealth? I'm talking about raising families.
> >I'm talking about food on the table, enough money for your kid to play
> >Little League, having your kid's birthday party at Chuckie Cheese, or maybe
> >if you can afford piano lessons for your daughter. At the lower and middle
> >class layers of society, you're damn right money is tied to happiness. If it
> >wasn't, money wouldn't be continually cited as one of the primary causes of
> >divorce.
>
> to tend bar for some of the richest and most powerful and can tell you
> money was a long way from delivering happiness for them.
he is a aristocrat, he simply cannot understand that there is more to
life than just compiling wealth thru exploitation unproductively.
John Galt
<retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:tu8r24d6v6t4nn37h...@4ax.com...
> But they had national health care so virtually all had their health.
> They had universal education so virtually all had basic education.
> Safety nets removed the most severe want. They found real joy in life
> and community in ways most Americans would envy.
If you're claiming that national health and education leads to happiness,
then you're affirming that money at that level leads to happiness. I agree.
>
> Happiness comes from community. The sad fact of America is money is
> destroying community. People buy TVs, home theaters, and cacoon
> themselves away, too many not even knowing their neighbors. And then
> they watch Oprah, Dr. Phil and get therapy because their lives are
> "empty" and lack "meaning".
I am unaware of any sociologic studies that show that the "destruction of
community" in America has to do with $$$. The sociologic study done by
Putnam and published in BOWLING ALONE clearly showed that diversity is one
of the culpable factors.
That said, I bemoan the loss of the front-porch patio style of builidng
homes. Why don't people (of any income bracket) want those anymore?
JG
John Galt
<retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:uelr249j7ifpgou1o...@4ax.com...
> On Fri, 16 May 2008 21:39:06 +0530, "John Galt"
> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>>
>><retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
>>news:tu8r24d6v6t4nn37h...@4ax.com...
>>> On Fri, 16 May 2008 13:04:11 +0530, "John Galt"
>>> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> I"ve been around some of the richest most powerful people in the
>>>>> country and I can tell you most certainly that is not true.
>>>>
>>>>Granted. I completely agree that once the necessities and the little
>>>>luxuries, such as those piano lessons, are covered, money doesn't buy
>>>>you
>>>>squat in the way of emotional happiness.
>>>
>>>
>>> Some of the happiest people I've met were impoverished Costa Ricans.
>>> But they had national health care so virtually all had their health.
>>> They had universal education so virtually all had basic education.
>>> Safety nets removed the most severe want. They found real joy in life
>>> and community in ways most Americans would envy.
>>
>>If you're claiming that national health and education leads to happiness,
>>then you're affirming that money at that level leads to happiness. I
>>agree.
>
> money bears very little correlation with contentment or happiness. But
> you said that yourself, above.
Yes.
>
>>> Happiness comes from community. The sad fact of America is money is
>>> destroying community. People buy TVs, home theaters, and cacoon
>>> themselves away, too many not even knowing their neighbors. And then
>>> they watch Oprah, Dr. Phil and get therapy because their lives are
>>> "empty" and lack "meaning".
>>
>>I am unaware of any sociologic studies that show that the "destruction of
>>community" in America has to do with $$$.
>
> I wasn't saying money has to do with it.
OK.
>
>>The sociologic study done by
>>Putnam and published in BOWLING ALONE clearly showed that diversity is one
>>of the culpable factors.
>
> Diversity?? That's a very odd interpretation for me.
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/04/the_downside_of_diversity/
> But I see it's out there. It looks more like a correlation than a
> cause. Interesting though.
Yep.
>
>
>>That said, I bemoan the loss of the front-porch patio style of builidng
>>homes. Why don't people (of any income bracket) want those anymore?
>
> Another great book to go with "Bowling Alone" - "The Great Good
> Place".
> http://www.amazon.com/Great-Good-Place-Bookstores-Community/dp/1569246815/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210963816&sr=8-1
Thanks.
JG
John Galt
<retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:atlr24t6tj9j6dme6...@4ax.com...
> entertainment is shipped in via cable and net flicks.
Sad.
JG
Mark M.
> On Sat, 17 May 2008 00:33:29 +0530, "John Galt"
> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>
>><retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
>>news:atlr24t6tj9j6dme6...@4ax.com...
>>
>>>On Fri, 16 May 2008 21:39:06 +0530, "John Galt"
>>><whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>That said, I bemoan the loss of the front-porch patio style of builidng
>>>>homes. Why don't people (of any income bracket) want those anymore?
>>>
>>>
>>>Now we cacoon. Our homes are self sufficient little feifdoms. All our
>>>entertainment is shipped in via cable and net flicks.
>>
>>Sad.
>
>
>
> can do to save the better things and improve things. I hold an open
> house every month for my neighbors and friends just so we stay in
> touch and get to know each other. New people are almost forcefully
> dragged to the event. Every organization I belong to I push beer or
> coffee or potluck get togehters after the business is concluded so our
> relationships are about more than the "work".
>
> I was a rugged individualist for 45 years, making it on my own. I'm
> sad it took me so long to find that people and community are where the
> joy is. But at least I found out.
>
> We have political pollsters working at finding wedge issues to divide
> us, interest groups looking for ways to inflame our biases, and
> advertisers working on making us feel superior or inferior to others
> (depending on their product). That's billions being spent to make us
> fraction and faction. This is the real problem in America I think.
> (It's also why Obama's message is working. - But that's a different
> story.)
Well said. Thanks.
Mark M.
Harold Burton
<93a9a454-c30c-4a50...@d45g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
Vid...@tcq.net wrote:
> On May 15, 5:49 pm, Harold Burton <hal.i.bur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > In article
> > <238c918b-9318-4f99-9fcb-5004f3d2e...@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
> >
> > Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> > > On May 14, 8:40 pm, Harold Burton <hal.i.bur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > > Love the sound of whining leftards.
> >
> > > > Snicker.
> > > we are not whining, we are coming from a position of knowledge.
> > > something that alludes (sic) rightards.
> > Snicker.
> typical, you have refuted nothing, which means you have nothing.
Snicker.
Vid...@tcq.net
in some time in the past, like maybe pre industrialization, some
quaint village somewhere, in some corner of the world, you could be
right. todays modern society, i will say, you and i have been over
this before.
> <snip>
> --
> Les Cargill
Vid...@tcq.net
>
> Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> > On May 15, 5:49 pm, Harold Burton <hal.i.bur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > In article
> > > <238c918b-9318-4f99-9fcb-5004f3d2e...@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
>
> > > Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> > > > On May 14, 8:40 pm, Harold Burton <hal.i.bur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > > > Love the sound of whining leftards.
>
> > > > > Snicker.
> > > > we are not whining, we are coming from a position of knowledge.
> > > > something that alludes (sic) rightards.
> > > Snicker.
> > typical, you have refuted nothing, which means you have nothing.
>
> Snicker.
is that the snicker of a hysterical crank that cannot refute that
miltons nobel was actually fraud:)
sinister
<Vid...@tcq.net> wrote in message
news:81d31276-b0d6-41ce...@e39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
> On May 15, 7:54 pm, "sinister" <sinis...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>> "Bret Cahill" <BretCah...@aol.com> wrote in message
>>
>> news:88ec7336-1eba-4980...@j22g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
>>
>> > Friedman was an issue dodger just like all the remaining shills at GOP
>> > "thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
>> > School, etc.
>>
>> > Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
>> > and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
>>
>>
>> Friedman (I'm assuming you're referring to Milton) said that the best tax
>> was the tax proposed by Henry George.
>>
>> I have the impression that he wasn't as sympathetic to the Georgist
>> program
>> as the quote attributed to him would indicate---he specifically called
>> land
>> value taxation "the least bad tax"---but he at least understand and
>> partly
>> approved of the program.
>>
>>
>>
>> > When you dodge issues that are fundamental to your field you are a
>> > fraud.
>>
>
> but, there is that insinuation that all taxes on unproductive wealth
> is bad. which is one of the basis of neo-liberalsim.
Correct. That's why I wrote "wasn't as sympathetic as..."
To me the phrase "least bad" is like "lesser evil," when in fact land value
taxation is just (in the sense of a remedy, with the absence of the remedy
being unjust) because the landowner otherwise reaps the income of land by
denying others access to that which nature or society (but not the
landowner) provided.
Les Cargill
> <retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
> news:tu8r24d6v6t4nn37h...@4ax.com...
>> On Fri, 16 May 2008 13:04:11 +0530, "John Galt"
>> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>
>>>> I"ve been around some of the richest most powerful people in the
>>>> country and I can tell you most certainly that is not true.
>>> Granted. I completely agree that once the necessities and the little
>>> luxuries, such as those piano lessons, are covered, money doesn't buy you
>>> squat in the way of emotional happiness.
>>
>> Some of the happiest people I've met were impoverished Costa Ricans.
>> But they had national health care so virtually all had their health.
>> They had universal education so virtually all had basic education.
>> Safety nets removed the most severe want. They found real joy in life
>> and community in ways most Americans would envy.
>
> If you're claiming that national health and education leads to happiness,
> then you're affirming that money at that level leads to happiness. I agree.
>> Happiness comes from community. The sad fact of America is money is
>> destroying community. People buy TVs, home theaters, and cacoon
>> themselves away, too many not even knowing their neighbors. And then
>> they watch Oprah, Dr. Phil and get therapy because their lives are
>> "empty" and lack "meaning".
>
> I am unaware of any sociologic studies that show that the "destruction of
> community" in America has to do with $$$.
This is the standard line about sprawl. There is some truth to that; my
sister has people on her street she has never seen, in roughly ten
years. Dallas suburbs are like that.
> The sociologic study done by
> Putnam and published in BOWLING ALONE clearly showed that diversity is one
> of the culpable factors.
>
>
> That said, I bemoan the loss of the front-porch patio style of builidng
> homes. Why don't people (of any income bracket) want those anymore?
>
> JG
>
>
>
>
Air conditioning and television. We actually have a screen porch in back
(in Fla); we use that a lot. I spend a lot of time in the garage with
the door open.
But any sort of "street culture" has always run contrary to the
central tendency of Americans to be prigs.
--
Les Cargill
ruet...@outgun.com
> Friedman was an issue dodger just like all the remaining shills at GOP
> "thank" tanks like Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, the Chicago
> School, etc.
>
> Friedman would never address the land issues raised by the Georgists
> and he'ld never touch the "free markets w/o free speech" issue either.
>
> fraud.
>
> Bret Cahill
You have to love the F-Twist as well - nevermind how silly and
unrealistic the assumptions are, as long as the model is a good
predictor. And what happens when the model fails to predict well?
Nevermind that, the real world is too complex to expect so much of the
models. LOL.
Les Cargill
> entertainment is shipped in via cable and net flicks.
It's not about money. It's about priggishness - Puritanism. I played
as a musician through college in a small town. Lively scene, good
people, rarely any trouble. Came back five years
later, they were all but *two* burnt to the ground. I don't think
any were proven to be arson, but nothing would surprise me.
Puritanism is the dread fear that somebody, somewhere is having
a good time...
--
Les Cargill
Les Cargill
> On Sat, 17 May 2008 00:33:29 +0530, "John Galt"
> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>> <retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
>> news:atlr24t6tj9j6dme6...@4ax.com...
>>> On Fri, 16 May 2008 21:39:06 +0530, "John Galt"
>>> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> That said, I bemoan the loss of the front-porch patio style of builidng
>>>> homes. Why don't people (of any income bracket) want those anymore?
>>>
>>> Now we cacoon. Our homes are self sufficient little feifdoms. All our
>>> entertainment is shipped in via cable and net flicks.
>> Sad.
>
>
> can do to save the better things and improve things. I hold an open
> house every month for my neighbors and friends just so we stay in
> touch and get to know each other. New people are almost forcefully
> dragged to the event. Every organization I belong to I push beer or
> coffee or potluck get togehters after the business is concluded so our
> relationships are about more than the "work".
>
That is a really good idea.
> I was a rugged individualist for 45 years, making it on my own. I'm
> sad it took me so long to find that people and community are where the
> joy is. But at least I found out.
>
> We have political pollsters working at finding wedge issues to divide
> us, interest groups looking for ways to inflame our biases, and
> advertisers working on making us feel superior or inferior to others
> (depending on their product). That's billions being spent to make us
> fraction and faction. This is the real problem in America I think.
> (It's also why Obama's message is working. - But that's a different
> story.)
The pollsters, interest groups and advertisers are successful as
far as it goes, but they work from relatively false premises.
America is a young country. Where I live, the first phone line
in the courthouse was put in in 1950.
--
Les Cargill
sbm...@shaw.ca
> In article
> <238c918b-9318-4f99-9fcb-5004f3d2e...@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
>
> Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> > On May 14, 8:40 pm, Harold Burton <hal.i.bur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Love the sound of whining leftards.
>
> > > Snicker.
>
> > we are not whining, we are coming from a position of knowledge.
> > something that alludes (sic) rightards.
>
> Snicker.
Don't feed the troll.
sbm...@shaw.ca
> >> <snip>
>
> >>> machavillion freedom. freedom to do what, to whom, for what? you are
> >>> a indoctrinated fool.
> >> You've shown repeatedly that you don't understand either of
> >> Machiavelli nor Friedman.
>
> > sure i do.
>
> I wonder.
>
> > its you that is the chanter.
>
> I think the first thing I ever posted to sci.econ, back when
> David ran it, was "... but people aren't rational." He advised me
> to look up "normative assumption." Which I did. That was a good
> day.
>
> >
> so, if freidman says all
>
> > information is perfect, markets are perfect, and all persons involved
> > in a transaction are rational, and have correct, perfect information.
>
> I have to agree - this one thing of Friedman's continues
> to bedevil people. I interpret it as being like the
> frictionless billiard-ball physics of ninth graders - he
> was simplifying the message to make it a mass message. But
> he's going to the market as a source of information itself,
> which is what was intended to impress people.
>
> Indeed, I don't think you can talk about comparative
> advantage without *im*perfect information. *People* are
> *im*perfect. Groupthink happens; that is why we have
> bubbles and whatnot.
>
> But I don't really know what he intended with all that, and
> it's largely beside the point. I think this
> is a lot more interesting:
>
> http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004833.html
>
> > that is a straight shooter, who does not practice double speak. or, he
> > was a idiot, possibly insane not to understand his fellow human being,
> > and completely ignorant of history. which was he?
>
> Why, he might simply have been.... *im*perfect. :) Newton
> was just absolutely insane at points, but his work is highly
> useful. Old Milton was far from crazy.
>
> > all fascism is, is libertarianism in decay.
>
> Well okay then. And all up is down, and all blue is green. Bully! All
> this stuff headends in human psychology, which is ... ugly.
>
> "What's the ugliest part of your body? It could be your mind." - Frank
> Zappa.
>
> >> --
> >> Les Cargill
>
> --
> Les Cargill
He took one look at Pinochet's Chile, and lamented; "Political
freedom, once established, tends to destroy economic freedom." In
other words, to have a healthy economy you have to be run by a
ruthless dictator.
Case closed.
sbm...@shaw.ca
> <retrogro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
>
> news:nr8r2450outt2op4i...@4ax.com...
>
>
>
> > On Fri, 16 May 2008 13:04:11 +0530, "John Galt"
>
> >><retrogro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
Dear God..they let a Randroid teach their children? <shudder>
The only subjects Randroids are suitable for teaching are Sociopathy
101.
orang...@googlemail.com
> On May 15, 6:12 pm, Les Cargill <lcarg...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> > > On May 15, 1:09 am, orangata...@googlemail.com wrote:
> > <snip>
>
> > > machavillion freedom. freedom to do what, to whom, for what? you are
> > > a indoctrinated fool.
>
> > You've shown repeatedly that you don't understand either of
> > Machiavelli nor Friedman.
>
> information is perfect, markets are perfect, and all persons involved
this is just rubbish. information does not have to be perfect for
trade to be free. all that is required is for someone to want to sell
something and someone else to want to buy it. perfect information is
not necessary.
> in a transaction are rational, and have correct, perfect information.
> that is a straight shooter, who does not practice double speak. or, he
> was a idiot, possibly insane not to understand his fellow human being,
> and completely ignorant of history. which was he?
> all fascism is, is libertarianism in decay.
>
wrong. fascism requires a strong central government. libertarians want
the state to be a small as possible. it is socialists, like you, who
want a strong government. in fact it is socialism that requires a
strong state. a small state is not capable of taking a large fraction
of everone's income by force (this is called 'tax').
every regulation imposed by government restricts freedom. clearly some
regulations are necessary, but libertarians want as few restrictions
on their personal freedom as possible. this includes being free to
earn their own money and spend their own money. socialists (like you)
want the state to forcably take other people's money and spend it.
thus transfering power from the individual to the state.
John Galt
<retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:76nr24pve2icfvukf...@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 17 May 2008 00:33:29 +0530, "John Galt"
> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>><retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
>>news:atlr24t6tj9j6dme6...@4ax.com...
>>> On Fri, 16 May 2008 21:39:06 +0530, "John Galt"
>>> <whoisj...@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>That said, I bemoan the loss of the front-porch patio style of builidng
>>>>homes. Why don't people (of any income bracket) want those anymore?
>>>
>>>
>>> Now we cacoon. Our homes are self sufficient little feifdoms. All our
>>> entertainment is shipped in via cable and net flicks.
>>
>>Sad.
>
>
> can do to save the better things and improve things. I hold an open
> house every month for my neighbors and friends just so we stay in
> touch and get to know each other. New people are almost forcefully
> dragged to the event. Every organization I belong to I push beer or
> coffee or potluck get togehters after the business is concluded so our
> relationships are about more than the "work".
I think you're on to something, actually. The only communities that seem to
do things like this are those that either (1) have some sort of sports-teams
for their kids, and (2) those that have some concern with crime, and form
neighborhood watch groups.
>
> I was a rugged individualist for 45 years, making it on my own. I'm
> sad it took me so long to find that people and community are where the
> joy is. But at least I found out.
>
> We have political pollsters working at finding wedge issues to divide
> us, interest groups looking for ways to inflame our biases, and
> advertisers working on making us feel superior or inferior to others
> (depending on their product). That's billions being spent to make us
> fraction and faction. This is the real problem in America I think.
I concur.
JG
John Galt
"Les Cargill" <lcar...@cfl.rr.com> wrote in message
news:482e1a2d$0$12896$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
Even worse, it's not uncommon to talk to people who live a few miles from
brothers and sisters they only see once or twice a year.
JG
John Galt
<sbm...@shaw.ca> wrote in message
news:9f2d3d6b-acdd-4f8b...@w34g2000prm.googlegroups.com...
If you're referring to somebody who follows the philosophy of Ayn Rand, I do
not.
You know what they say about people who assume.
JG
Clave
news:dfiXj.74847$pm2....@en-nntp-04.dc1.easynews.com...
>
> <retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
>> On Fri, 16 May 2008 13:04:11 +0530, "John Galt"
>>
>>>
>>><retro...@comcast.net> wrote in message
Look who's demanding more than anecdotes.
Jim
Les Cargill
>
> He took one look at Pinochet's Chile, and lamented; "Political
> freedom, once established, tends to destroy economic freedom." In
> other words, to have a healthy economy you have to be run by a
> ruthless dictator.
>
> Case closed.
Rot. Economic freedom is a special case of political freedom.
--
Les Cargill
John Galt
"Clave" <ClaviusNo...@cablespeed.com> wrote in message
news:MrudnfUySZKUq7PV...@cablespeedwa.com...
That was pretty much the response I figured I'd get.
JG
>
> Jim
>
>
John Galt
Generally speaking, it's best not use the Cliff Notes when quoting Friedman.
http://www.cbe.csueastbay.edu/~sbesc/frlect.html
JG
Vid...@tcq.net
> On 16 May, 00:28, Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
>
> > On May 15, 6:12 pm, Les Cargill <lcarg...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > > Vide...@tcq.net wrote:
> > > > On May 15, 1:09 am, orangata...@googlemail.com wrote:
> > > <snip>
>
> > > > machavillion freedom. freedom to do what, to whom, for what? you are
> > > > a indoctrinated fool.
>
> > > You've shown repeatedly that you don't understand either of
> > > Machiavelli nor Friedman.
>
> > sure i do. its you that is the chanter. so, if freidman says all
> > information is perfect, markets are perfect, and all persons involved
>
> this is just rubbish. information does not have to be perfect for
> trade to be free.
of course its rubbish. thank you. then if you are dealing with a
cheat and a liar, you are free to be fleeced, or is there a way to get
recourse once you discover you have been cheated?
all that is required is for someone to want to sell
> something and someone else to want to buy it. perfect information is
> not necessary.
>
of course that is what is really meant by free markets, free to be
fleeced, lied to, and cheated.
> > in a transaction are rational, and have correct, perfect information.
> > that is a straight shooter, who does not practice double speak. or, he
> > was a idiot, possibly insane not to understand his fellow human being,
> > and completely ignorant of history. which was he?
> > all fascism is, is libertarianism in decay.
>
> wrong. fascism requires a strong central government. libertarians want
> the state to be a small as possible.
ROTFLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! everywhere
libertarianism is even partially tried, unemployment sky rockets,
indebtedness soars, the wealth gap explodes, economic debacles are
everywhere. and at the same time jails bulge with the losers, and a
police state rises. see thatchers u.k., pinochets chile, the u.s.a.
the last 30 years. on top of that, the free market, self reliant, self
responsible, rugged individual, born with a silver spoon in their
mouths as they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps with tax
payer dollars warriors come with their hands out for a bailout every
time. see 1929, 1987, 1998 or9, 2001, 2007-08, and counting.
it is socialists, like you, who
> want a strong government.
you mean the founding fathers, and the amendments that were made to
the constitution in the early years of america. the amendments were
made close to the period of the founding of this country. libertarians
are handmaidens to the fascists. fascism is simply libertarians in
decay.
in fact it is socialism that requires a
> strong state.
you do not even understand what you are talking about.
what is the definition of a crank? one who gives out advise that
makes no sense at all.
what is the definition of a crank? one who accepts, or embraces
advise that makes no sense at all.
a small state is not capable of taking a large fraction
> of everone's income by force (this is called 'tax').
>
yep, its working in somalia.
> every regulation imposed by government restricts freedom.
fredom to steal you mean.
clearly some
> regulations are necessary,
then its not a free market.
but libertarians want as few restrictions
> on their personal freedom as possible.
our jails and mental institutions are full of people who will agree
with you.
this includes being free to
> earn their own money and spend their own money.
its not your money. its the governments money. you get to use it on
their conditions.
socialists (like you)
> want the state to forcably take other people's money and spend it.
> thus transfering power from the individual to the state.
definition of a cult:Confusing Doctrine Encouraging blind acceptance
and rejection of logic through complex lectures on an incomprehensible
doctrine, Chanting and Singing Eliminating non-cult ideas through
group repetition of mind-narrowing chants or phrases
Clave
It's what you fucking *deserve*, hypocrite.
Jim
John Galt
Give it a rest. You criticized my position because it was anecdotal. The
proper response would have been with a non-anecdotal refutation. You passed
on the opportunity to respond constructively, using instead a personal
attack, and now you continue with further content-free flame-throwing.
Do you have a purpose for your participation in USENET, or do you just get a
woody from being an ass?
Free free to vent. You appear to have plenty of anger. Entertain us a bit.
JG
Clave
Bullshit. The burden was on you and you abandoned it.
Jim