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" 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

"My colleague Jamie Robins and I are working on a book that provides a cohesive presentation of concepts of, and methods for, causal inference. Much of this material is currently scattered across journals in several disciplines or confined to technical articles. We expect that the book will be of interest to anyone interested in causal inference, e.g., epidemiologists, statisticians, psychologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, computer scientists… The book is divided in 3 parts of increasing difficulty: causal inference without models, causal inference with models, and causal inference from complex longitudinal data. We are making drafts of selected book sections available on this website. The idea is that interested readers can submit suggestions or criticisms before the book is published. To share any comments, please email me or visit @causalinference on Facebook. To cite the book, please use "Hernán MA, Robins JM (2018). Causal Inference. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC, forthcoming.""

We need to take a hard look at what parts of the world are critical to the security of the West and rethink how to make its alliances work again. The following geopolitical reality is still true today: The United States has to ensure that no power hostile to its interests can assert exclusive control over Eurasia, including the European rimland. Today preventing China's domination of Eurasia should be our overarching strategic objective, and to achieve this we need to focus on three fundamentals: 1) Prioritize Eurasia and stop draining our military resources in secondary theaters; 2) invest in allies who see their interests directly aligned with ours and are willing to assume the attendant risk; and 3) decouple U.S. strategic industries from China's and redefine the rules of international trade to ensure equitable competition.

"Right now, the biggest impediment to thinking about the future of the humanities is that, thanks to this entrenched narrative of decline-because we've been crying wolf for so long-we already think we know what's going on. The usual suspects-student debt, postmodern relativism, vanishing jobs-are once again being trotted out. But the data suggest something far more interesting may be at work. The plunge seems not to reflect a sudden decline of interest in the humanities, or any sharp drop in the actual career prospects of humanities majors. Instead, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying-in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market. And something essential is being lost in the process."

"When it seems like people are voting against their interests, I have probably failed to understand their interests. We cannot begin to understand Election 2016 until we acknowledge the power and reach of socialism for white people. Americans with good jobs live in a socialist welfare state more generous, cushioned and expensive to the public than any in Europe. Like a European system, we pool our resources to share the burden of catastrophic expenses, but unlike European models, our approach doesn't cover everyone."

"That said, there's another factor driving the reaction of Clinton's supporters, and the best way I can find to approach it is to consider one of the more thoughtful responses from that side of the political landscape, an incisive essay posted to Livejournal last week by someone who goes by the nom de Web "Ferrett Steinmetz." The essay's titled The Cold, Cold Math We'll Need to Survive the Next Twenty Years, and it comes so close to understanding what happened last Tuesday that the remaining gap offers an unsparing glimpse straight to the heart of the failure of the Left to make its case to the rest of the American people. At the heart of the essay are two indisputable points. The first is that the core constituencies of the Democratic Party are not large enough by themselves to decide who gets to be president. That's just as true of the Republican party, by the way, and with few exceptions it's true in every democratic society.  Each party large enough to matter has a set of core constituencies who can be counted on to vote for it under most circumstances, and then has to figure out how to appeal to enough people outside its own base to win elections. That's something that both parties in the US tend to forget from time to time, and when they do so, they lose. The second indisputable point is that if Democrats want to win an election in today's America, they have to find ways to reach out to people who don't share the values and interests of the Left. It's the way that Ferrett Steinmetz frames that second point, though, that shows why the Democratic Party failed to accomplish that necessary task this time. "We have to reach out to people who hate us," Steinmetz says, and admits that he has no idea at all how to do that. "

"My take on this issue is that the neoliberal use of identity politics continue and extends the cultural inculcation of individuals seeing themselves engaging with other in one-to-one transactions (commerce, struggles over power and status) and has the effect of diverting their focus and energy on seeing themselves as members of groups with common interests and operating that way, and in particular, of seeing the role of money and property, which are social constructs, in power dynamics."

"The core of the revolt against global integration, though, is not ignorance. It is a sense, not wholly unwarranted, that it is a project carried out by elites for elites with little consideration for the interests of ordinary people - who see the globalisation agenda as being set by big companies playing off one country against another. They read the revelations in the Panama Papers and conclude that globalisation offers a fortunate few the opportunities to avoid taxes and regulations that are not available to the rest. And they see the disintegration that accompanies global integration, as communities suffer when big employers lose to foreign competitors."

"How the 'emotional contagion' of memes makes them the internet's moral conscience By Allie Volpe Aug 27, 2018, 11:30am EDT Illustration by Alex Castro & Keegan Larwin SHARE Newly single, Jason Donahoe was perusing Tinder for the first time since it started integrating users' Instagram feeds. Suddenly, he had an idea: follow the Instagram accounts of some of the women he'd been interested in but didn't match with on the dating service. A few days later, he considered taking it a step further and direct messaging one of the women on Instagram. After all, the new interface of the dating app seemed to encourage users to explore other areas of potential matches' online lives, so why not take the initiative to reach out? Before he had a chance, however, he came across the profile of another woman whose Tinder photo spread featured a meme with Parks and Recreation character Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Ben Schwartz) leaning into the face of Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) with the caption: hey I saw you on Tinder but we didn't match so I found your Instagram you're so beautiful you don't need to wear all that makeup ahah I bet you get a lot of creepy dm's but I'm not like all those other guys message me back beautiful btw what's your snap "I was like, 'Oh shit, wow,'" Donahoe says. Seeing his potential jerk move laid out so plainly as a neatly generalized joke, he saw it in a new light. "I knew a) to be aware of that, and b) to cut that shit out … It prompted self-reflection on my part." THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MEMES STRIKE A CULTURAL CHORD AND CAN GUIDE AND EVEN INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR Donahoe says memes have resonated with him particularly when they depict a "worse, extreme version" of himself. For Donahoe, the most successful memes are more than just jokes. They "strike a societal, cultural chord" and can be a potent cocktail for self-reflection as tools that can guide and even influence behavior. In the months leading up to the 2016 US

"Regardless of its provenance, the idea that debt and war are the two primary ways to control a nation is a great insight into the current geopolitical situation, especially the rise of China. China has benefited from the world order created by American military dominance, with its 11 carrier groups and hundreds of military bases straddling the globe. China is motivated by national pride and economic self-interest to extend its sphere of influence, but many of its thinkers are ideologically opposed to replicating the American model, a militarism that they still call 'Western imperialism'. "

"The above summary does not do justice to Martyanov's truly seminal book. I can only say that I consider this book as an absolutely indispensable "must read" for every person in the USA who loves his/her country and for every person who believes that wars, especially nuclear ones, must be avoided at all costs. Just like many others (I think of Paul Craig Roberts), Martyanov is warning us that "the day of reckoning is upon us" and that the risks of war are very real, even if for most of us such an event is also unthinkable. Those in the USA who consider themselves patriots should read this book with special attention, not only because it correctly identifies the main threat to the USA, but also because it explains in detail what circumstances have resulted in the current crisis. Waving (mostly Chinese made) US flags is simply not an option anymore, neither is looking away and pretending that none of this is real. Martynov's book will also be especially interesting to those in the US armed forces who are observing the tremendous decline of US military power from inside. Who better than a former Soviet officer could not only explain, but also understand the mechanisms which have made such a decline possible?"

"We use the word "authority" to mean lots of things - police and state actors are "the authorities", an expert may be "an authority on the matter, etc. But I want to suggest that it is very useful to think of authority as a characteristic of information in a social context. In particular, information is "authoritative" when some community of people to coordinate upon it and behave as if it were true, regardless of whether or not the information is in fact true, or even of whether the individuals doing the behaving personally believe it to be true. If information is authoritative, members of the community behave as if the information is true even despite strong, often opposing interests in the question. When we claim that someone "is an authority", we are claiming that the information they produce will (or should) alter behavior within some human community. Authority subsists in the relationship between information and behavior in a social context."

"This work presents the first compressive and independent analysis of the contributions of one of the most important public officials in American history.  As a graduate student more than a decade ago, I began to investigate the role that Marriner S. Eccles played during the 1930s, as both a special assistant to the secretary of the Treasury and as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I was intrigued that Eccles, as a Republican businessman from Utah-and yes a Mormon-became the New Deal's most forceful advocate of Keynesian policy.  Since that time I have come to learn far more about his participation in those years, and, indeed, a good deal more about the vexed political and economic milieu in which his career as a public servant unfolded.  Although this work is clearly intended to amplify the contributions that Eccles made in important policy areas, it also seeks to correct some inaccuracies that have frequently been conveyed about the details of his participation. Moreover, his fiscal and monetary interests were so extensive that it would not be too far afield to view what follows as a history of the New Deal with Eccles as the focal point."