Monthly Archives: January 2015

stupéfaction et tristesse / shock and sadness

Posted on by
Reply

An email I received this morning from the Research Network on Innovation in Boulogne-sur-Mer. This is a terrible tragedy that goes well beyond the loss of any of the brave individuals who were murdered.

Bonjour,

J’ai appris avec stupeur l’assassinat de notre collègue Bernard Maris dans les locaux du journal “Charlie Hebdo”. Bernard (ou oncle Bernard) a été depuis le début d’Innovations un soutien scientifique précieux de notre revue. Il a été depuis 1999 membre du comité scientifique, auteur et conseiller du bureau de la revue.

Bien à vous

Dimitri Uzunidis
Innovations

****************
Dear colleagues,

I have been shocked to learn that our colleague Bernard Maris was murdered in the office of the journal “Charlie Hebdo”, Paris. From the beginnings of Innovations, Bernard (uncle Bernard) has been a major scientific support for our journal. He has been a member of the Scientific Committee, author and advisor of the Editorial Board of Innovations.

Best regards,

Dimitri Uzunidis
Innovations

Réseau de Recherche sur l’Innovation
Research Network on Innovation

As it says in his just updated Wikipedia entry, “Bernard Maris (23 September 1946 – 7 January 2015) was a French economist, writer and journalist who was also a shareholder in Charlie Hebdo magazine. He was murdered in January 2015, in the Charlie Hebdo shooting at the headquarters of the magazine in Paris.”

MORE ON BERNARD MARIS: This is my edited Google translation of an AFP report.

Bernard Maris, iconoclastic economist of the left who was killed on Tuesday in the attack against the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, was a man “tolerant and benevolent”, recognized for the quality of his thought and his art extension. He was 68.

“He was a tolerant man, caring, friendly, full of humor and did not take himself too seriously,” said the clearly moved editor of Les Echos Dominique Seux who had debated with him every week on France Inter.

“Bernard Maris was a man of heart, culture and a high tolerance. He will be greatly missed,” Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France, said in a statement saluting Maris, who had sen appointed in 2011 to the General Council of the central bank.

A graduate of the Toulouse Institute of Political Studies in 1968, associate degree in economics in 1994, he recently completed his teaching career researcher at the University Paris after an earlier period at Toulouse I.

But as a recognized researcher, he was familiar to many for his many appearances on radio, television and in the press.

Shareholder of Charlie Hebdo since 1992, he wrote a weekly satirical weekly column signed “Uncle Bernard”. And what illustrated his talents as a difficult-to-chategorise populariser was his frequent description as a “journalist-economist”.

He has written numerous books with evocative titles including, in 1998, “Ah that economic Lovely War!”, and in 2010, “Marx, Marx oh, why have you forsaken me?”. But it was his “Anti-saving manual”, released in early 2000, where the first volume is devoted to the ants and the second to the grasshoppers, which was his most successful publication.

“Economics is so annoying! Must recognize that it is more pleasant to read poetry … And at the same time, it affects us all. Then my pleasure – outside the small personal and egocentric satisfaction of seeing my name in the media – is hearing it said by a viewer: ‘With you, we understand’,” he quipped in an interview with Telerama in 2008.

Originally from the southwest of France, he had kept a beautiful accent that made him recognizable in any debate. As an economist, he had long defended the thesis of economic decay, advocating the values ​​of a collaborative and participatory economy and criticizing the ravages of consumer society.

“I will again never wake up with Bernard Maris on a Friday morning …. Infinite sadness,” Tweeted a listener, amid a wave of tributes on the social network.

“At home there are Pedagogical Notebooks, Charlie Hebdo and Bernard Maris anti-saving manual …” added another, recalling the commitment deeply rooted on the left of this atypical personality.

“We can say that he was anti-liberal, left …, anarcho-Keynesian” describes Dominique Seux, insisting that he represented “the economic thinking of many French.”

Member of the scientific board of Attac, and the Green candidate in the 2002 legislative election, Bernard Maris was also a recognised university professor. In 2011, the President of the Senate Jean-Pierre Bel was surprised by Maris being asked to join the General Council of the Banque de France.

Recently, Bernard Maris had drawn fire, including from the left, for the devaluation of the euro.

Always working on several fronts, in 2014 he had published, “Houellebecq Economist” (Flammarion). He saw, indeed, in the novels of the provocative writer, a lucid analysis of economic reports, the world of work and deindustrialization.

Bernard Maris defended the memory of the writer Maurice Genevoix, great witness of the war of 14-18. He was married to Maurice’s daughter, Sylvie, with whom he had two children.

Is there more to this story?

Posted on by
Reply

Or is this all there is?

A DETAINED Indonesian refugee who beat his Australian spouse to death with a child’s ­bicycle should be released into the community and given $350,000 compensation for seven years of “arbitrary” detention, the Australian Human Rights Commission has found.

John Basikbasik, 51, a former West Papuan independence ­activist, has been repeatedly deemed too dangerous for release following decades of violent offending fuelled by alcohol. His offences include the manslaughter of his de facto wife in 2000 and numerous assaults during his seven-year jail term from 2001. He has been held in detention since 2007.

Mental health experts have ­assessed him as having a high or moderate risk of reoffending, citing his impulsive personality and lack of “insight” into his crimes. Basikbasik had failed to adapt to a Western lifestyle, one said.

HRC president Gillian Triggs accused successive federal governments, dating back to the Howard era, of breaching the man’s human rights by holding him in immigration detention rather than monitoring him in the community.

There are certainly a lot of crazies about, that’s for sure.

The arrogance and ignorance of atheism

Posted on by
Reply

There is an article in The Australian today that is supposedly a reply to another that had originated in The Wall Street Journal in this case arguing the case for atheism. I dealt with the earlier article here under the heading, And who created the God particle? But this latest effort is so superficial that if this is the best that the atheist community can come up with, there is no case to answer for any of us who cannot see how the world we inhabit ever came to be. You don’t wish to believe in even the possibility that we are the conscious outcome of something in the universe, that made the world as it is so that we could have a home to live in, then don’t. But your belief is a matter of will, not of evidence and probability.

The title is typical of someone arrogant enough to believe that everything that has been brought together must absolutely have been for the benefit of humans. It is a reflection of the article itself, Why did the almighty create mosquitoes? Since he cannot think why mosquitoes were created, he does not believe there was a conscious attempt to allow the world to exist. Instead he comes down to this:

As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-prize winner in the field, put it at the turn of the century, the more plausible, if daunting, hypothesis is that we are part not of a “universe” but of a “multiverse”, in which universes come and go with infinite variations. We just happen to be in one in which things worked out this way.

Instead of some creator, we have a fantastic expansion of what is out there that has allowed us to have come into existence, built on a will to believe that it just happened by itself. This is what he is forced to resort to:

The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of infinite or finite possible universes (including the universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. The various universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes or “alternate universes”.

He thus finds it more plausible that there are an infinite number of universes – in some versions an infinite number of parallel universes that exist even at the same time as our own – but in one of these, simply by chance, things turned out just so, which has allowed you and I to come into existence. There is a will to disbelieve. He finds it preferable to believe that it just happened by itself, in one of the trillions of universes that have meandered through time. That is a belief system, based on no evidence at all.

So let me again mention the famous Higgs boson. The wikipedia discussion of the Higgs boson, the “God particle”, is hilarious because it never actually gets around to explaining what its hypothesised existence is needed for, or why it got the name it has. Here’s why it has been hypothesised:

The Higgs boson, or “God particle,” is believed to be the particle which gives mass to matter.

Got that? The issue is how did pure energy become matter. The big bang was all energy but no mass. The Higgs boson apparently existed at the moment of the big bang and allowed at least some of that energy to be turned into mass, into matter, into the things we are made of. You can hypothesise this as yet undiscovered particle so that you can live without the thought that we are here by design, for reasons unknown to us, and probably never knowable. Why the universe should be created with this embedded principle is a question that anyone with an inquiring disposition would immediately turn into the notion of a presence that had something in mind when the process was begun.

To live in certainty that we are not the conscious creation of some other presence in the universe is so empty that I cannot understand how anyone cannot see just how improbable such a belief must be. Certainly more improbable that assuming some creator, whose characteristics, and original aims and intentions are unlikely, ever to be known.

Invaders from planet stupid

Posted on by
Reply

A very interesting post by Steve Hayward at Powerline with the title, First they came for the Sociologists. But in spite of its title, the post is mostly about economics.

The one field in the social sciences where there is the least presence of post-modern oppression-“privilege” types is Economics, which prompts me to propose the theorem that the presence of politically correct nonsense in an academic department is inversely proportional to the emphasis placed on rigorous regression modeling in the discipline (or knowledge of ancient languages).

I personally think modern economics is well to the left as an academic subject. The veneer of bourgeois respectability is important to economists if their economics message is to influence the political class. Mainstream economics is no longer about the need for free markets, but the importance of controlling free markets. It may be disciplined by various sets of data, but economic theory is no longer Adam Smith. It is, instead, the nearest thing to Marxism that still retains that overlay of markets, best represented by Keynesian theory. Keynes disarmed the Marxists of his time by siding with them over Say’s Law, which had perennially been the province of the economics far left and central to their critique of capitalism.

I have half a chapter on this in my Free Market Economics, beginning with the notion of “perfect competition”. “Perfect” implies that this is the ideal, and is contrasted with “imperfect” competition. Perfect markets cannot exist, given its definition (e.g. perfect knowledge). All other markets are imperfect, which leaves much room for intervention at every turn.

But even with my continuous criticism of mainstream theory, I believe there is only one economics. The “political economy” department at Sydney is merely a cop out. Whatever sociological version of economics that might be taught, unless they also do supply and demand and marginal analysis along with the full panoply of mainstream theory, it is useless, other than as a leftist critique of markets. This is a quote from Greg Mankiw who was on the other end of these barbarian invaders:

Those who attended either of the sessions I was involved with at the ASSA meeting know that the audience included some hecklers. During the first session, I was the target. During the second, Larry Summers was. (At one point, the moderator Bob Hall threatened to call security.) Here is a Washington Post article about the hecklers.

After the first session was over, one of the hecklers came up to me and asked, “How much money have the Koch brothers paid you?” My answer, of course, was “not a penny.”

I don’t find it odd that people disagree with me. I am always open to the possibility that I am wrong about lots of things, and I much enjoy talking with students and colleagues who have views different from mine. But I do find it odd that people who disagree with me are sometimes quick to question my sincerity. If I am wrong, it is sincere wrong-headedness, not the result of being on some plutocrat’s payroll, as some on the left want to believe.

The hecklers probably limit their own effectiveness by questioning the motives of those who disagree with them. I have found that to convince other people, it is usually best not to assume your own moral superiority but rather to talk with them as equals who just happen to have a different point of view.

Personally I think Greg was too mild in his criticism of these know-nothings. I disagree about a lot, but I am never in doubt that the economists I deal with know a lot more about economies than their non-economist critics, a lot lot more and within a proper contextual setting. The true worry is how sympathetic the Washington Post article is to these invaders from the planet stupid.

You would think this would get more attention

Posted on by
Reply

Roger Simon quotes from a New Year’s day speech by the President of Egypt:

I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing—and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before.It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!

That thinking—I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!

Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible!

I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.

All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.

An interesting comments thread at the original source for the quote.

And then there is this from Daniel Pipes, An Arab Prince Denounces Islamism. This is about Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, the crown prince of Bahrain, who understands the danger better than just about anyone. As Pipes make clear:

Salman’s remarks fit into a growing trend among Muslim politicians directly to confront the Islamist danger. Two recent examples:

In an important conceptual breakthrough, the nearby United Arab Emirates government has placed the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and many other non-violent groups on its terrorism list on the grounds that they engage in incitement, funding, and the other precursors of terrorism.

The government of Egypt issued an INTERPOL arrest bulletin for Yusuf al-Qaradawi, 88, the hugely influential spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, for “incitement and assistance to commit intentional murder, helping … prisoners to escape, arson, vandalism and theft.”

This new tendency has great importance. As I often say, radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution. Now, we may add another influential leader, indeed a crown prince, to the ranks of those Muslims who wish to find a solution.

Gramscian prescriptions

Posted on by
Reply

This is from a much longer post on Gramscian Damage by Eric Raymond which is interesting even if you don’t know what “Gramscian” means. It’s a wicked world out there, as he explains:

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.

He also linked to an earlier post of his, Suicidalism, which has a convenient list of ways in which we are ruining our own culture by adopting ideological positions that no other society would ever come close to copying. Why we create such rabid enemies from among our own citizens, I do not know. But all this is much too familiar to need to have to argue about since you can come across each of these sentiments pretty well everywhere across the West:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.

Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying
with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

But we might still save our selves in the end, since none of these are true while all are pernicious as more and more people are beginning to find out. In the meantime, read both of his posts.

Keynes and Keynesian Economics in Light of the Financial Crisis

Posted on by
Reply

The economic societies of the United States meet over the first few days of the year, with the meeting this year in Boston. This is the full conference program which is gigantic. My interest is what is being said about the sad state of economic theory and its inability to provide guidance on how to find our way out of the present low state of our economies. This was the part of the conference I was most interested in myself:

Keynes and Keynesian Economics in Light of the Financial Crisis

So in its own way, you might say that these issues were on the agenda. However, not only was this the sole manifestation across the hundreds of papers given during the conference, but this was also not in any way part of the mainstream program, only tucked away as part of the program devoted to the history of economic thought. Clearly, none of this is of any genuine interest to virtually the entire profession. Nevertheless, all credit to Robert Dimand for putting the session together, and for treating this as the serious contemporary issue it is. These were the papers found in this session.

Keynes and Financial Crises
ROBERT DIMAND (Brock University)

The global economic and financial crisis that began in 2007 has renewed interest in Keynes’s analysis of whether the economic system is self-adjusting and of his proposals for ending depression. This analysis is complemented by Keynes’s more specific accounts of financial crisis, notably in his incisive “The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse in Money Values” (in his Essays in Persuasion, 1931) and his Harris Foundation Lectures, a body of work that is much less well-known.

Keynes, Wages and Employment in Light of the Great Depression
HARALD HAGEMANN (Universität Hohenheim)

The wage-employment relationship is one of the central and most controversial issues in the General Theory. . . . and etc for another 200 or so words.

James Meade and Keynesian Economics
SUE HOWSON (University of Toronto)

James Meade (1907-1995), although Oxford-educated, was one of the very first Keynesians, a member of the Cambridge “circus” which met to analyze and criticize Keynes’s just published Treatise on Money in the early months of 1931. Not only did he use Keynesian ideas in his writings throughout his long career; he was a major player in the implementation of Keynesian policies in Britain during and immediately after World War II. My paper will discuss his encounters with Keynes and his use and development of Keynesian economics in his own academic and policy work.

Not that you should think that Keynesian economics was mentioned nowhere else. It showed up one more time, under “Heterodox Macroeconomics”, a session put on by the Union for Radical Political Economics. But I do love his first line, which is something the rest of the profession would prefer to forget. I’ve put it in bold just because, and left the rest in just to see how tedious this stuff can be.

Keynes is Dead — Long Live Marx
ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH

Many liberal/progressive economists envisioned a new dawn of Keynesianism in the 2008 financial meltdown. More than five years later, it is clear that the much-hoped-for Keynesian prescriptions are completely ignored. Why? Keynesian economists’ answer: “neoliberal ideology,” which they trace back to President Reagan. Using a Marxian method of inquiry, this study argues, by contrast, that the rise/dominance of neoliberalism has much deeper roots than pure ideology, that the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal economics started long before Reagan was elected President and that the Keynesian reliance on the ability of the government to re-regulate and revive the economy through policies of demand management rests on an optimistic perception that the state can control capitalism. Contrary to such hopeful perceptions, public policies are more than simply administrative or technical matters of choice. More importantly, they are class policies—hence, continuation/escalation of neoliberal policies under the Obama administration, and frustration of Keynesian/liberal economists. The study further argues that the Marxian theory of unemployment, based on his theory of the reserve army of labor, provides a much robust explanation of the protracted high levels of unemployment than the Keynesian view, which attributes the plague of unemployment to the “misguided policies of neoliberalism.” Likewise, the Marxian theory of subsistence or near-poverty wages provides a more cogent account of how or why such poverty levels of wages, as well as a generalized predominance of misery, can go hand-in-hand with high levels of profits and concentrated wealth than the Keynesian perceptions, which view high levels of employment and wages as necessary conditions for an expansionary economic cycle.

The largest single problem with economic theory today is that economists do not even know they have a problem. But the second most important problem is that what ought to have been the most important part of the entire program was relegated to students of the history of economic thought, which is the one area of economic theory economists are trying to rid themselves of. It’s as if these are issues so completely settled that no one any longer has to waste their time thinking about any of it at all.

AND LET ME JUST ADD THIS: From the Wall Street Journal, The Depression That Was Fixed by Doing Nothing. Before Keynes, there was no such thing as a Keynesian stimulus, but recessions got fixed anyway:

Beginning in January 1920, something much worse than a recession blighted the world. The U.S. suffered the steepest plunge in wholesale prices in its history (not even eclipsed by the Great Depression), as well as a 31.6% drop in industrial production and a 46.6% fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Unemployment spiked, and corporate profits plunged.

What to do? “Nothing” was the substantive response of the successive administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding. Well, not quite nothing. Rather, they did what few 21st-century policy makers would have dared: They balanced the federal budget and—via the still wet-behind-the-ears Federal Reserve—raised interest rates rather than lowering them. Curiously, the depression ran its course. Eighteen months elapsed from business-cycle peak to business-cycle trough—following which the 1920s roared.

That was what they did, but with the low state of economic knowledge today, there is little likelihood anyone will understand why it worked.

Yet another eccentric English genius

Posted on by
Reply

Another film about an English eccentric, this one about a hundred years after William Turner. I must confess that I haven’t yet come across a single person I know who liked Mr. Turner. It seems to me there are an awful lot of people who go to the cinema, who seem to think that the central character must be of noble character, stirling virtue, and personally likeable. Or perhaps they are looking for a simple plot, along the lines of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again just before the credits but immediately after a fifteen minute car chase. I will only say that if you have seen St. Vincent and you liked it, you should ignore any advice I might give you about going to the movies.

The film under review this time is The Imitation Game (Rotten Tomatoes, critics 89% and the audience 95%; IMDb 8.4). Based on a true story, and therefore, of course, almost certainly false at every moment of drama in the plot, it was still fun and engaging. And although filled with many modern pieties, put on display to flatter the moral vanity of the audience, I nevertheless found none of it cloying or in the way of the plot. The story is based around the life of Alan Turing, about whom I knew about as much as I knew about Turner. It provided interesting detail and a rounded human story, embedded in the drama surrounding the winning of the war against the Nazis. Like Turner, Turing was a genius, driven by his obsessions. Unlike Turner, it seems, it is a film that is likely to generate more sympathy for the central character.

The background of most of the film is the effort required to break the Enigma code. Fascinating to see the effort up on screen. I don’t know how much of the drama shown was particularly accurate, but it didn’t worry me all that much either. It drove the story along, neatly structured around flashbacks and flash forwards. I have been to Bletchley Park and spent a very full day there a couple of years ago. If you are ever in the vicinity, it is well worth your time. In the meantime until you do get there yourself, this is a film likely to keep you satisfied, although I am a bit sore given all the flak I have been getting from people to whom I have recommended Mr. Turner, which, by the way, is a recommendation I completely stand by still.