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Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ernist-thinking-exploding.html

capitalism power society

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17
     
    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Steve Bosserman

The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious - Samir Chopra | Aeon E... - 0 views

aeon.co/...-is-nonsensical-and-pernicious

intellectual property

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • A general term is useful only if it subsumes related concepts in such a way that semantic value is added. If our comprehension is not increased by our chosen generalised term, then we shouldn’t use it. A common claim such as ‘they stole my intellectual property’ is singularly uninformative, since the general term ‘intellectual property’ obscures more than it illuminates. If copyright infringement is alleged, we try to identify the copyrightable concrete expression, the nature of the infringement and so on. If patent infringement is alleged, we check another set of conditions (does the ‘new’ invention replicate the design of the older one?), and so on for trademarks (does the offending symbol substantially and misleadingly resemble the protected trademark?) and trade secrets (did the enterprise attempt to keep supposedly protected information secret?) The use of the general term ‘intellectual property’ tells us precisely nothing.
  • Property is a legally constructed, historically contingent, social fact. It is founded on economic and social imperatives to distribute and manage material resources – and, thus, wealth and power. As the preface to a legal textbook puts it, legal systems of property ‘confer benefits and impose burdens’ on owners and nonowners respectively. Law defines property. It circumscribes the conditions under which legal subjects may acquire, and properly use and dispose of their property and that of others. It makes concrete the ‘natural right’ of holding property. Different sets of rules create systems with varying allocations of power for owners and others. Some grants of property rights lock in, preserve and reinforce existing relations of race, class or gender, stratifying society and creating new, entrenched, propertied classes. Law makes property part of our socially constructed reality, reconfigurable if social needs change.
  • ‘Property’ is a legal term with overwhelming emotive, expressive and rhetorical impact. It is regarded as the foundation of a culture and as the foundation of an economic system. It pervades our moral sense, our normative order. It has ideological weight and propaganda value. To use the term ‘intellectual property’ is to partake of property’s expressive impact in an economic and political order constructed by property’s legal rights. It is to suggest that if property is at play, then it can be stolen, and therefore must be protected with the same zeal that the homeowner guards her home against invaders and thieves.
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  • What about the common objection that without ‘intellectual property’ the proverbial starving artist would be at the mercy of giant corporations, who have existing market share and first-mover advantage? It is important to disaggregate the necessity and desirability of the protections of the various legal regimes of copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets from that of the language of ‘intellectual property’. Current copyright, patent, trade-secret and trademark law do not need to be completely rejected. Their aims are rather more modest: the reconfiguration of legal rules and protections in an economy and culture in which the nature of creative goods and how they are made, used, shared, modified and distributed has changed. Such advocacy is not against, for instance, copyright protections. Indeed, in the domain of free and open-source software, it is copyright law – through the use of artfully configured software licences that do not restrain users in the way that traditional proprietary software licences do – that protects developers and users. And neither do copyright reformers argue that plagiarists be somehow rewarded; they do not advocate that anyone should be able to take a copyrighted work, put their name on it, and sell it.
  • This public domain is ours to draw upon for future use. The granting of temporary leases to various landlords to extract monopoly rent should be recognised for what it is: a limited privilege for our benefit. The use of ‘intellectual property’ is a rhetorical move by one partner in this conversation, the one owning the supposed ‘property right’. There is no need for us to play along, to confuse one kind of property with another or, for that matter, to even consider the latter kind of object any kind of property at all. Doing so will not dismantle the elaborate structures of rules we have built in order to incentivise artistic and scientific work. Rather, it will make it possible for that work to continue.
Steve Bosserman

When the state is unjust, citizens may use justifiable violence | Aeon Ideas - 0 views

aeon.co/...s-may-use-justifiable-violence

philosophy politics police

shared by Steve Bosserman on 03 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Here’s a philosophical exercise. Imagine a situation in which a civilian commits an injustice, the kind against which you believe it is permissible to use deception, subterfuge or violence to defend yourself or others. For instance, imagine your friend makes an improper stop at a red light, and his dad, in anger, yanks him out of the car, beats the hell out of him, and continues to strike the back of his skull even after your friend lies subdued and prostrate. May you use violence, if it’s necessary to stop the father? Now imagine the same scene, except this time the attacker is a police officer in Ohio, and the victim is Richard Hubbard III, who in 2017 experienced just such an attack as described. Does that change things? Must you let the police officer possibly kill Hubbard rather than intervene?
  • Most people answer yes, believing that we are forbidden from stopping government agents who violate our rights. I find this puzzling. On this view, my neighbours can eliminate our right of self-defence and our rights to defend others by granting someone an office or passing a bad law. On this view, our rights to life, liberty, due process and security of person can disappear by political fiat – or even when a cop has a bad day. In When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (2019), I argue instead that we may act defensively against government agents under the same conditions in which we may act defensively against civilians. In my view, civilian and government agents are on a par, and we have identical rights of self-defence (and defence of others) against both. We should presume, by default, that government agents have no special immunity against self-defence, unless we can discover good reason to think otherwise. But it turns out that the leading arguments for special immunity are weak.
Steve Bosserman

We are heading for a New Cretaceous, not for a new normal | Aeon Ideas - 0 views

aeon.co/...retaceous-not-for-a-new-normal

climate change

shared by Steve Bosserman on 30 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • So while we prattle about ‘the new normal’, we need to recognise that there was nothing ‘normal’ about the Holocene. Expert analysis of how human civilisation developed during the Holocene’s 10,000-year benign spell is only now becoming common knowledge. The geneticist David Reich leads the way, with his myth-busting account Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018), using research based on ancient DNA to link human movement with language development. Such deep knowledge of the period argues that our problem is not confined to post-industrial-era CO2 emissions (global warming, in any case, probably began with forest clearance for early agriculture), but insists that the Holocene was a freakish gift to humanity that we have exploited and taken for granted. We are now assisting at its funeral.
Steve Bosserman

Millennials are struggling. Is it the fault of the baby boomers? - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ers-intergenerational-fairness

boomers millennials

shared by Steve Bosserman on 02 May 18 - No Cached
  • Anthropologist Helen Fisher inelegantly described the maturing of this huge postwar bulge in the population as “like a pig moving through a python”, changing society as we grew older on a scale never known before. We challenged the Victorian puritanism, censorship, class snobbery and inhibitions of the establishment. Full employment put money in the pockets of managers and factory workers alike. In spanking new houses with inside lavatories and proper bathrooms, hire purchase allowed him (and less so, her) to spend, spend, spend as if, overnight, everyone had become a toff. It could only get better. Yet today, “baby boomer” is a toxic phrase, shorthand for greed and selfishness, for denying the benefits we took for granted to subsequent generations, notably beleaguered millennials, who reached adulthood in the early years of this century. So, where did it all go so very wrong?
Steve Bosserman

Could a Basic Income Plan End Poverty in Washington, D.C.? - 0 views

undark.org/...yd-blog-universal-basic-income

universal basic income

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 May 18 - No Cached
  • The 86-page report, from the District’s Office of the Budget Director, applies evidence-based methodology and economic forecasting to compare two approaches to alleviating poverty: a negative local income tax (similar to the federal earned-income tax credit for poor families) versus a straightforward cash grant, known as guaranteed or universal basic income (UBI for short).
  • “There are certainly a lot of advantages to a UBI program,” one of the researchers, Susanna Groves, a senior budget analyst for the city, said on a recent episode of “The Basic Income Podcast.” “It doesn’t have a social stigma attached to it. It provides a benefit for everyone and could really help. But what we found is that a negative income tax was a more feasible approach for the District to provide a minimum income benefit.”
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