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In a more natural organization of the marketplace, the owners are entirely responsible for the debts and liabilities of the entity they own. That, of course, would create excessive risk, suppressing economic activity.

this is why classical economists never spoke of “economics” but always of “political economy.”

Emerging out of this complexity — and justifying it — is a moral regime. Protection from liability comes with a burden: Poor decisions will be penalized by losses, while wise decisions are rewarded by greater wealth.

problem lies not with the market but with the political system that invented and presides over the limited liability corporation.

The political elite is responsible for the corporate elite in a unique fashion: The corporation was a political invention, so by definition, its behavior depends on the political system.

The goal is not so much to achieve something as to create the impression that it is achieving something, in other words, to demonstrate that the political system is prepared to control the entities it created.

Europe thus has a double crisis. As in the United States, there is a crisis between the financial and political systems. This crisis is not as intense as in the United States because of a deeper tradition of integration between the two systems in Europe. But the tension between masses and elites is every bit as intense. The second part of the crisis is the crisis of the European Union and growing sense that the European Union is the problem and not the solution. As in the United States, there is a growing movement to distrust not only national arrangements but also multinational arrangements.

The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:

(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.

Swartz, who committed suicide in January at age 26 (many believe because of his prosecution), said that “Moral Mazes” did an excellent job of “explaining how so many well-intentioned people can end up committing so much evil.”

Swartz engaged in an act of civil disobedience to liberate that knowledge, arguing that “there is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”

Upon investigating the matter, Manning discovered that none of the 15 had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions or suspected terrorist organizations. Manning had the allegedly anti-Iraqi literature translated and found that, contrary to what the federal police had said, the published literature in question “detailed corruption within the cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people.” When Manning reported this discrepancy to the officer in charge (OIC), she was told to “drop it,” she recounted.

The bureaucracy was telling him to shut up and move on (in accord with the five rules in “Moral Mazes”), but Snowden felt that doing so was morally wrong.

But wasn’t there arrogance or hubris in Snowden’s and Manning’s decisions to leak the documents? After all, weren’t there established procedures determining what was right further up the organizational chart? Weren’t these ethical decisions better left to someone with a higher pay grade? The former United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, argued that Snowden “thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us … that he can see clearer than other 299, 999, 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.”

The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision.

The media’s desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way that they, members of the corporate media, would not.

That generals always fight the last war must be amended to say that generals always believe the war they are fighting is the permanent war.

After the Cold War ended, the United States was in a singularly powerful position. The United States remains in a powerful position, but over time, other nations will increase their power, form alliances and coalitions and challenge the United States.

The idea that other nation-states will not challenge the United States seemed plausible for the past 20 years, but the fact is that nations will pursue interests that are opposed to American interest and by definition, pose a peer-to-peer challenge. The United States is potentially overwhelmingly powerful, but that does not make it omnipotent. 

It must also be remembered that asymmetric warfare and operations other than war always existed between and during peer-to-peer wars and systemic wars.

Asymmetric wars and operations other than war are far more common than peer-to-peer and systemic wars.

A military force can be shaped to fight frequent, less important engagements or rare but critical wars -- ideally, it should be able to do both. But in military planning, not all wars are equally important.

Ukraine drove this lesson home. There will be no war between the United States and Russia over Ukraine. The United States does not have interests there that justify a war, and neither country is in a position militarily to fight a war. The Americans are not deployed for war, and the Russians are not ready to fight the United States.

The greatest challenge to U.S. control of the sea is hostile fleets. The best way to defeat hostile fleets is to prevent them from being built. The best way to do that is to maintain the balance of power in Eurasia. The ideal path for this is to ensure continued tensions within Eurasia so that resources are spent defending against land threats rather than building fleets. Given the inherent tensions in Eurasia, the United States needs to do nothing in most cases. In some cases it must send military or economic aid to one side or both. In other cases, it advises. 

At that point, the United States intervened to block German hegemony. In World War II, the United States remained out of the war until after the French collapsed and it appeared the Soviet Union would collapse -- until it seemed something had to be done.

And in spite of operations in the Mediterranean, the main U.S. thrust didn't occur until 1944 in Normandy, after the German army had been badly weakened.

The balance-of-power strategy assumes that there are core allies who have an interest in aligning with the United States against regional enemies. When I say effective, I mean allies that are capable of defending themselves to a great extent. Allying with the impotent achieves little. By relevant, I mean allies that are geographically positioned to deal with particularly dangerous hegemons.

If we assume Russians to be dangerous hegemons, then the relevant allies are those on the periphery of Russia.

The point here is that NATO, which was extremely valuable during the Cold War, may not be a relevant or effective instrument in a new confrontation with the Russians.

And since the goal of an effective balance-of-power strategy is the avoidance of war while containing a rising power, the lack of an effective deterrence matters a great deal.

It is not certain by any means that Russia is the main threat to American power.

In these and other potential cases, the ultimate problem for the United States is that its engagement in Eurasia is at distance. It takes a great deal of time to deploy a technology-heavy force there, and it must be technology-heavy because U.S. forces are always outnumbered when fighting in Eurasia.

In many cases, the United States is not choosing the point of intervention, but a potential enemy is creating a circumstance where intervention is necessary. Therefore, it is unknown to planners where a war might be fought, and it is unknown what kind of force they will be up against.

In Ukraine, for example, had the United States chosen to try to defend eastern Ukraine from Russian attack, it would have been impossible to deploy that force before the Russians took over.

The United States will face peer-to-peer or even systemic conflicts in Eurasia. The earlier the United States brings in decisive force, the lower the cost to the United States.

Current conventional war-fighting strategy is not dissimilar from that of World War II: It is heavily dependent on equipment and the petroleum to power that equipment.

There need to be layers of options between threat and war. 

Ranges of new technologies, from hypersonic missiles to electronically and mechanically enhanced infantryman, are available. But the mindset that peer-to-peer conflict has been abolished and that small unit operations in the Middle East are the permanent features of warfare prevent these new technologies from being considered.

In crude political form, this Whiggish inclination toward progress was encapsulated in the functionalist view retailed by Norman Angell around the turn of the last century, which held that countries that traded with each other would develop economic self-interests too intertwined to justify war.

If markets had come to play a more prominent part in the industrial West, it was not because markets had just been invented. It was because social and political systems had evolved in which powerful elites were willing to tolerate institutions that diffused economic power and weakened the state at the expense of private enterprise. This was the core meaning of liberalism in its original formulation.

The Crash of 1929, the subsequent economic slump and, particularly, the duration of the Depression took most contemporaries completely by surprise. Indeed, the uniquely severe catastrophe of the 1930s is so unusual that modern analysts should be cautious in drawing lessons from it.

Conventional wisdom tends to treat President Hoover as a clueless advocate of laissez faire who refused to stimulate the economy in the dramatic downturn. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the heroic leader who both saved the day and transformed the American economy through his promotion of the New Deal. Conventional wisdom is still very much with us.

Hoover did not advocate “do-nothing” policies.

Roosevelt’s interventions were neither as thorough nor as systematically revolutionary as they have often been portrayed.

Above all, FDR’s worst policies were animated by a desire to repress business, by distrust of competition and a general disdain for the market. Those were, of course, precisely the qualities that made his policies extremely popular. FDR’s economic policies scored mixed successes at best, but his political strategy succeeded by any measure long before U.S. entry into World War II, and subsequent generations have not ceased to conflate the former with the latter.

So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded.

Even in America, where visceral support for individualism and self-reliance remains strong, this has always been so. In good times, economic systems are supported by inertia and utilitarian compromise that appeal to the broad center. In hard times abstract convictions tend to melt away. The American preference for the free market is neither as common nor as “American” as many suppose.

Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations.

It seems odd that humans in their day-to-day interactions think of buying or selling as the most natural of activities, recreating markets unprompted in the most dismal of circumstances. Yet there is something about the ideology of a market system, or of any generally decentralized order, that seems inconceivable to most people.

Economists have a hard time dealing with nationalism.

A severe economic crisis implicates the entire system of political economy, regardless of how narrow the source of that crisis may be. Thus those with long-simmering fears and resentments—as well as those with more venal or ideological motives—see crisis as an opportunity to strike out at the system.

Anti-market movements, whether pushed by Populists or Progressives in the United States or the various forms of socialism in Europe, took for granted that vigorous political action was the only way to impose order and bring social harmony to an unfettered market economy. But the specific remedies and the zeal with which reformers sought to repudiate the past belie ideological origins more than technocratic ones.

He had mastered the politics of trust.

Roosevelt deserves credit for largely resisting these ideological enthusiasms. On balance, he dealt with the crisis pragmatically and forthrightly.

If FDR had left out the high-flying rhetoric and only pursued an attenuated New Deal—namely the financial policies that economists now agree truly helped us out of the Depression—would he be as celebrated a figure as he is today? Not likely.

The end of World War II furnishes still more evidence that political images leave a wider trace in historical memory than actual policies.

Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy. Had there been a lingering recession and a continuation of older, harmful regulations into the 1946–48 period, Truman, not his predecessor, would have been blamed. Yet Truman’s stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.

In any event, we would do well to bear in mind how important, yet also how unnatural, the modern system of impersonal finance and trade really is. If we would preserve that system as a basis for our prosperity, we must recognize that many of the regulatory solutions we apply to our current crisis may themselves induce responses that can generate new crises. History suggests, too, that fears of the market and the political pressures it generates will wax and wane as crises deepen or ease. Patience and prudence are, therefore, the best watchwords for government amid the many trials and errors we will surely endure in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon.

Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life.

the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States.

From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much.

From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite.

Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system.

A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both.

There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened.

The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt.

Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.

What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.

The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks

One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government

The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods.

Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.

The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.

The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated.

The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.

This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes.

The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.

China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both.

In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy.

In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more.

In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased.

In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance.

In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists

It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries.

In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation

Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy.

Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China.

Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites.

This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own.

The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis.

The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.

The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.

You may also Apply a Standard or Basic theme from the previous window. The Standard Windows 7 theme is more preferred as its gives a neutral look than the classy windows old theme.

Right click on ” Computer” and select “Properties” from the right click menu. Click on ” Advanced System Settings ” from the left pane to open up the ” System Properties ” window. Select the “Advanced” tab from it. Then Under ” Performance ” click ” Settings “. Choose ” Custom: ” Options From it. Now un tick all the options (Choose “Adjust for best performance“) and select only the last four options (actually three are preferable  you may un- tick the second option out of the last four). Take a look at the screen shot below.

Open up ” Programs and Features ” from Control Panel. Click the ” Turn Windows features on or off ” from the left pane. Now uncheck all the Feature that you don’t use in Windows 7 and restart the system for the changes to take effect.

If you’ve got a new ssd for your system, then you’d definitely consider checking out this guide which explains 9 tweaks to properly speed up, optimize your ssd and prolong the life of your ssd, while getting the best performance from it.

Right click on the sidebar and choose ” Properties “. On the properties windows untick the check box showing ” Start sidebar when Windows Starts “ From now on windows sidebar won’t start when windows 7 start up.

Aero Snap will help you to maximize, minimize and resize the windows just by dragging and dropping it into the screen corners. I dont advice to turn it off as the Aero Snap feature really helps to speed up working with windows by arranging them side by side. But, if you are not a regular user of the same, you may proceed by turning of aero snap in windows 7. Open the Windows 7 ” Control Panel ” and double-click on ” Ease of Access Center ” icon. Now click on the ” Make it easier to focus on tasks ” seen at the bottom in there Now untick the check box saying ” Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen ” . Right click on the Windows 7 taskbar and select ” Properties “. Now untick the ” Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop ” option from there. That will now disable the Aero Snap in Windows 7.

The Aero Peek feature in Windows 7 helps you to peek through all open windows by hiding all other windows and showing only the outlines of all windows. Aero Peek is similar to the ” Show Desktop ” Feature in XP and Vista. If you have followed step 3 then Aero Peek will be automatically disabled. If not, Right Click the Taskbar and choose Properties. Un-select the ”Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop” option. The aero peek feature will now be disabled in windows 7.

Double click the ” Power Options ” in the Control panel. Click the down arrow showing ” Show Additional Plans ” to see the ” High Performance ” power plan.

Now just activate the ” High Performance ” plan and that’s it. You may go for the advanced settings for further tweaking if you want.

For disabling thumbnails in Windows 7, Double Click on ” Computer ” >click on the “Organize” drop-down menu and select the “Folder and Search options” Under ‘Files and Folders’ section, go to the “View” tab and tick the check box showing “Always show icons, never thumbnails” checkbox.

To Disable The Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7, Right click on desktop and choose “Personalize”. Click the Screen Saver link ” From the Screen Saver drop down menu, Set it to “None” and click “Apply” and then “OK”. Now click on “Desktop Background” link. From the “Location” drop down menu select “Solid Colors” and pick one color and click “OK”.

Type ” msconfig ” in the “RUN” option from start menu press [Enter] to open up the System Configuration Utility. Now navigate to the “StartUp” tab. Untick the Entries which are not needed

To disable the system sounds in Windows 7, Type mmsys.cpl in RUN From the Windows 7 Startmenu search box and press [Enter]. Navigate to the “Sounds” tab. Now from under “Sound Scheme:” select “No Sounds” > Click “Apply” > “OK”.

Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon.

Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people.

the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.

But it’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require.

During the recession of 1981-82, Democratic politicians demanded that a Republican president set a balanced budget as his top priority. Ronald Reagan disregarded this advice. He held firm to his tax cuts: once the economy returned to prosperity, there would be time then to deal with the deficit. Today, the positions are reversed.

eading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.

Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefits were designed as anti-Depression defenses, “automatic stabilizers” as economists called them.

Those who denounce unemployment insurance as an invitation to idleness in an economy where there are at least five job seekers for every available job are not just hardening their hearts against distress. They are rejecting the teachings of Milton Friedman, who emphasized the value of automatic stabilizers fully as much as John Maynard Keynes ever did.

Non-Tea Party Americans may marvel that any group can think of itself as egalitarian when its main political goals are to cut off government assistance to the poorest and reduce taxes for the richest.

The U.S. political system is not a parliamentary system. Power is usually divided. The system is sustained by habits of cooperation, accepted limits on the use of power, implicit restraints on the use of rhetoric.

But more important than Lanier’s hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, “Future” is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and Lanier’s own “You Are Not a Gadget.”

Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.

So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.

If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way.

And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot.

So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that’s less hassle than the previous thing, there’s still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that’s easier?

And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don’t get paid, because, after all, it’s fun to drive.

Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible.

I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.

It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism.

There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.

Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.

And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote “Gadget” I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that’s where it happens the most right now.

The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, “Oh, what an incredible life. She’s this incredibly lucky person who’s worked really hard.” And that’s all true. She’s in her 20s, and it’s great that she’s found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that’s worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success.

But for someone who’s out there, a star with a billion views, that’s a crazy low expectation. She’s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they’re not even making it into the 1 percent.

I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It’s really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it’s just not a way you can build a society.

The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you’re living in the slum or something, so you’re desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That’s what’s called development. But this is the opposite of that. It’s taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.

The way society actually works is there’s some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That’s the thing we’re destroying, and that’s really the thing I’m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.

I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians.

You’re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don’t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?

All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.

Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn’t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they’ll see it’s not true.

And that is doesn’t concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we’ll really be fine. I’m actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I’m the most modest person in the conversation.

Let’s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars?

Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.

I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.

So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.

Higher levels of female obesity correlated with higher levels of gender inequality in each nation Of course, that’s not the impression you will get from the admonishments of public-health agencies and wellness businesses.

Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends are not nearly as unanimous as Bloomberg makes out. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain.

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets.

‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence

In rich nations, obesity is more prevalent in people with less money, education and status. Even in some poor countries, according to a survey published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, increases in weight over time have been concentrated among the least well-off. And the extra weight is unevenly distributed among the sexes, too.

The story might go like this: being poor is stressful, and stress makes you eat, and the cheapest food available is the stuff with a lot of ‘empty calories’, therefore poorer people are fatter than the better-off. These wheels-within-wheels are required because the mantra of the thermodynamic model is that ‘a calorie is a calorie is a calorie’: who you are and what you eat are irrelevant to whether you will add fat to your frame. The badness of a ‘bad’ food such as a Cheeto is that it makes calorie intake easier than it would be with broccoli or an apple.

More importantly, ‘things that alter the body’s fat metabolism’ is a much wider category than food. Sleeplessness and stress, for instance, have been linked to disturbances in the effects of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain that the body has had enough to eat.

If some or all of these factors are indeed contributing to the worldwide fattening trend, then the thermodynamic model is wrong.

According to Frederick vom Saal, professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, an organic compound called bisphenol-A (or BPA) that is used in many household plastics has the property of altering fat regulation in lab animals.

BPA has been used so widely — in everything from children’s sippy cups to the aluminium in fizzy drink cans — that almost all residents of developed nations have traces of it in their pee. This is not to say that BPA is unique.

Contrary to its popular image of serene imperturbability, a developing foetus is in fact acutely sensitive to the environment into which it will be born, and a key source of information about that environment is the nutrition it gets via the umbilical cord.

It’s possible that widespread electrification is promoting obesity by making humans eat at night, when our ancestors were asleep

consider the increased control civilisation gives people over the temperature of their surroundings.

Temperatures above and below the neutral zone have been shown to cause both humans and animals to burn fat, and hotter conditions also have an indirect effect: they make people eat less.

A study by Laura Fonken and colleagues at the Ohio State University in Columbus, published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that mice exposed to extra light (experiencing either no dark at all or a sort of semidarkness instead of total night) put on nearly 50 per cent more weight than mice fed the same diet who lived on a normal night-day cycle of alternating light and dark.

A virus called Ad-36, known for causing eye and respiratory infections in people, also has the curious property of causing weight gain in chickens, rats, mice and monkeys.

xperiments by Lee Kaplan and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston earlier this year found that bacteria from mice that have lost weight will, when placed in other mice, apparently cause those mice to lose weight, too.

It might be that every one of the ‘roads less travelled’ contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn’t a simple school physics experiment.

In a capitalistic quest for new markets and cheap materials and labour, Europeans take control of the economy in the late 18th or early 19th century. With taxes, fees and sometimes violent repression, their new system strongly ‘encourages’ the farmer and his neighbours to stop growing their own food and start cultivating some more marketable commodity instead – coffee for export, perhaps. Now that they aren’t growing food, the farmers must buy it. But since everyone is out to maximise profit, those who purchase the coffee crop strive to pay as little as possible, and so the farmers go hungry. Years later, when the farmer’s children go to work in factories, they confront the same logic: they too are paid as little as possible for their labour. By changing the farming system, capitalism first removes traditional protections against starvation, and then pushes many previously self-sufficient people into an economic niche where they aren't paid enough to eat well.

Eighty years later, the farmer’s descendants have risen out of the ranks of the poor and joined the fast-growing ranks of the world’s 21st-century middle-class consumers, thanks to globalisation and outsourcing. Capitalism welcomes them: these descendants are now prime targets to live the obesogenic life (the chemicals, the stress, the air conditioning, the elevators-instead-of-stairs) and to buy the kinds of foods and beverages that are ‘metabolic disturbers’.

Wells memorably calls this double-bind the ‘metabolic ghetto’, and you can’t escape it just by turning poor people into middle-class consumers: that turn to prosperity is precisely what triggers the trap.

The ‘unifying logic of capitalism’, Wells continues, requires that food companies seek immediate profit and long-term success, and their optimal strategy for that involves encouraging people to choose foods that are most profitable to produce and sell — ‘both at the behavioural level, through advertising, price manipulations and restriction of choice, and at the physiological level through the enhancement of addictive properties of foods’ (by which he means those sugars and fats that make ‘metabolic disturber’ foods so habit-forming).

One possible response, of course, is to decide that no obesity policy is possible, because ‘science is undecided’. But this is a moron’s answer: science is never completely decided; it is always in a state of change and self-questioning, and it offers no final answers. There is never a moment in science when all doubts are gone and all questions settled,

Faced with signs of a massive public-health crisis in the making, governments are right to seek to do something, using the best information that science can render, in the full knowledge that science will have different information to offer in 10 or 20 years.

The acute, sudden-onset reactions tend to be caused by antibodies called immunoglobulin E (IgE).

A food intolerance is NOT the same as a food allergy. Many people incorrectly use the words interchangeably. A food allergy is when the body's immune system reacts abnormally to specific foods. No allergic reaction takes place with a food intolerance.

Lactose intolerance This causes diarrhoea and abdominal symptoms (bloating and pain) after milk is drunk or dairy products are eaten.

Direct effects of foods and additives Certain foods and chemicals in foods may directly affect the body and cause symptoms.

Food avoidance Some people, especially children, may develop physical symptoms such as feeling sick and diarrhoea if they eat, or are offered, foods they have come to dislike.

The symptoms of food intolerance occur usually a few hours after eating the food. Allergic reactions happen much more quickly.

Food intolerances are never life-threatening. Some allergies are as they can cause anaphylaxis.

In the western world, 6-8 children in 100 and 3-4 adults in 100 are thought to have a food allergy. In the UK, 2 babies in 100 develop an allergy to protein in cow's milk (cow's milk protein allergy). The number of people with food allergies seems to be rising.

Symptoms

Symptoms of an allergic reaction can include: Atopic eczema (classical eczema) that is seen in allergy-prone (atopic) families - often those with hay fever and asthma too. Gastro-oesophageal reflux which is vomiting that is generally effortless. Loose and/or frequent stools (poo). Constipation. Blood or mucus in the stools. Redness around the anus. Tiredness. Pallor. Poor growth. This is often seen in children with a non-IgE food allergy. Young children, particularly those with digestive symptoms, should be regularly weighed. Weight should be plotted on a growth chart. This allows medical professionals such as GPs and health visitors to see if growth is slow.

Symptoms of a food intolerance vary widely and can include: Bloating and abdominal pain. Diarrhoea or loose stools (poo). Skin rashes and itching. Some of these symptoms are the same as those that can be caused by a non-IgE food allergy. So this shows how complicated it can be to determine whether you have an allergy or an intolerance.

Skin prick test. This is usually done in a specialist hospital allergy clinic. Because an anaphylactic reaction is possible, there needs to be access to resuscitation equipment including adrenaline.

Blood tests. Blood tests can detect if your blood contains specific IgE antibodies. So, if you had allergic reactions to peanuts, your blood might contain antibodies to peanuts.

If a non-IgE food allergy is suspected, elimination and challenge can be used to try to confirm the diagnosis of allergy. This is only really appropriate when it seems clear which foodstuff is causing the problem.

You may see many commercial companies offering allergy testing, particularly on the internet. Be very wary of these. The following tests have no medical evidence behind them - that is, they cannot be relied upon to give any accurate results.

The only real treatment for food allergy and intolerance is to avoid that food. This is very important if an anaphylactic reaction has occurred.

Dieticians are qualified health professionals. They can assess, diagnose and treat diet and nutrition problems.

f you have a food allergy or intolerance, after seeking medical advice, a dietician can be a useful person to see for further help and advice.

Coeliac disease is NOT a food allergy, nor is it a food intolerance. It is an autoimmune disease which means that the immune system (which normally protects the body from infections) mistakenly attacks itself.

The Kremlin was forced to start an accelerated political restructuring in 2012 -- one entailing a countrywide effort to devise programs to plan for Russia's future.

The Kremlin launched a major domestic anti-corruption campaign that began targeting the government in an attempt to curb behavior that has had a long-term decaying effect on the country.

Russians believe good health to be an important aspect of one's ability to lead, and Putin's back trouble caused many in the Kremlin to panic. The Russian media and the Russian people had never seen Putin falter due to ill health. This was in stark contrast to his predecessor, former President Boris Yeltsin, who was plagued with health issues that negatively impacted his ability to run the country.

Though Russia has a formal electoral process to choose its leaders, in reality Putin makes the choices regarding leadership.