The author demonstrates that there is far more to economics than Thomas Carlyle's “dismal science”. And she does so with all the style and panache that you would expect from the author of the 1998 bestseller, “A Beautiful Mind”
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in title, tags, annotations or urlCenturies of trial and error | The Economist - 0 views
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In lesser hands Ms Nasar's story might have degenerated into a series of pen portraits: tittle-tattle for the middlebrow. But she unifies her account with a series of big questions. How, for example, did humanity escape from the grinding poverty that has been its lot through most of human history? Why was a static society replaced by a dynamic one? And how best to cope with the booms and busts that have been capitalism's peculiar contribution to human life?
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In Marx's view the capitalist system, for all its ability to unleash productive power, was haunted by a contradiction: the drive to increase profits would immiserate the poor and lead to crises of overproduction
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Mis-Educating the Young - The New York Times - 0 views
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While in school, her thinking was station to station: take that test, apply to that college, aim for a degree. But in young adulthood, there are no more stations. Everything is open seas. Your main problems are not about the assignment right in front of you; they are about the horizon far away. What should you be steering toward? It requires an entirely different set of navigational skills.
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one of the oddest phenomena of modern life. Childhood is more structured than it has ever been. But then the great engine of the meritocracy spits people out into a young adulthood that is less structured than it has ever been.
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There used to be certain milestones that young adults were directed toward by age 27: leaving home, becoming financially independent, getting married, buying a house, having a child. But the information economy has scrambled those timetables. Current 20-somethings are much less likely to do any of those things by 30. They are less likely to be anchored in a political party, church or some other creedal community.
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What the 'Invisible' People Cleaning the Subway Want Riders to Know - The New York Times - 0 views
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, without adequate training or special equipment.
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Instead, the cleaning crews were given a few rags, a bucket of cleaning solution and, according to several workers, a simple set of instructions: “Clean it like it’s your house.”
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turned to contractors to help undertake the monumental task of scouring the trains in the nation’s largest transit system.
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Free Market - Econlib - 0 views
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Free market” is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society.
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Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services
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Both parties undertake the exchange because each expects to gain from it. Also, each will repeat the exchange next time (or refuse to) because his expectation has proved correct (or incorrect) in the recent past.
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Microeconomics - Econlib - 0 views
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The motivating force for the change came from the macro side, with modern macroeconomics being far more explicit than old-fashioned monetary theory about fluctuations in income and employment (as well as the price level).
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The strength of microeconomics comes from the simplicity of its underlying structure and its close touch with the real world. In a nutshell, microeconomics has to do with supply and demand, and with the way they interact in various markets.
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Public finance (see public choice) looks at how the government enters the scene. Traditionally, its focus was on taxes, which automatically introduce “wedges” (differences between the price the buyer pays and the price the seller receives) and cause inefficiency.
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The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care
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Health care in the U.S. relies on an “invisible army” of caregivers — mostly women. For many, stunted careers, lost earnings and exhaustion are part of the fallout.
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“If society wants us to keep caring for others, it’s going to have to show a little more care for us.”
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My Mom Believes In QAnon. I've Been Trying To Get Her Out. - 0 views
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An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.
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“The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”
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By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.
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Why Democrats Are Angry At Wall Street : NPR - 1 views
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"They never get a second chance. They're just not in a position in an economy like this, where Wall Street writes the rules, where they can get ahead."
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That anger has been magnified at a time when banks have seen their profits soar during the pandemic, in part, thanks to strong actions by the Federal Reserve to support markets.
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They want to push the country's largest financial institutions to be agents of social change.
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Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in | World news | The Guardian - 1 views
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Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political.
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accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.
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Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative.
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Mexico's President Appears To Hold Key Majority In Elections : NPR - 0 views
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but fell short of a two-thirds majority as some voters boosted the struggling opposition, according to initial election results.
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will have to rely on votes from its allies in the Workers Party and Green Party,
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The results give the president sufficient budgetary control to continue his train and refinery-building plans and cash handout programs,
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Opinion | The Social Sciences' 'Physics Envy' - The New York Times - 0 views
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Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.
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Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.
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it’s not even a good description of how the “hard” sciences work. It’s a high school textbook version of science, with everything messy and chaotic about scientific inquiry safely ignored.
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Twitter blocks 70,000 QAnon accounts after US Capitol riot - 0 views
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Twitter says it has suspended more than 70,000 accounts associated with the far right QAnon conspiracy theory following last week’s U.S. Capitol riot.
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“These accounts were engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service,”
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Twitter’s sweeping purge of QAnon accounts, which began Friday, is part of a wider crackdown that also includes its decision to ban President Donald Trump from the service over worries about further incitement to violence.
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Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views
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ft of recent books have been full of the need for renewed rage against the oppression of women. The demonization of “white men” has intensified just as many working-class white men face a bleak economic future and as men are disappearing from the workforce. It is as if the less gender discrimination there is, the angrier you should become.
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You see it in the gay-rights movement too. I get fundraising emails all the time reminding me how we live in a uniquely perilous moment for LGBTQ Americans and that this era, in the words of Human Rights Campaign spokesperson Charlotte Clymer, is one “that has seen unprecedented attacks on LGBTQ people.
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Might I suggest some actual precedents: when all gay sex was criminal, when many were left by their government to die of AIDS, when no gay relationships were recognized in the law, when gay service members were hounded out of their mission, when the federal government pursued a purge of anyone suspected of being gay. All but the last one occurred in my adult lifetime. But today we’re under “unprecedented” assault?
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The stimulus bill includes a tax break for the 1% (opinion) - CNN - 0 views
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We face a frightening pandemic. More than 100,000 American have been infected with Covid-19, while tens of millions more continue to shelter at home. Meanwhile, the markets are crashing.
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While health care workers and local governments frantically race against the clock to keep up with the escalating medical caseloads while trying to keep themselves and their families safe, Congress was still able to find the time to give money away to rich people.
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Now here is what changed in the historic $2 trillion stimulus bill. Previously, if a married couple had depreciation deductions that exceeded their real estate business income, the couple could claim that "loss" to write off taxes on a maximum of $500,000 in income from other sources, like wages from a day job.
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California Is Booming. Why Are So Many Californians Unhappy? - The New York Times - 0 views
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For all its forward-thinking companies and liberal social and environmental policies, the state has mostly put higher-value jobs and industries in expensive coastal enclaves, while pushing lower-paid workers and lower-cost housing to inland areas like the Central Valley. This has made California the most expensive state — with a median home value of $550,000, about double that of the nation — and created a growing supply of three-hour “super commuters.” And while it has some of the highest wages in the country, it also has the highest poverty rate based on its cost of living, an average of 18.1 percent from 2016 to 2018. That helps explain why the state has lost more than a million residents to other states since 2006, and why the population growth rate for the year that ended July 1 was the lowest since 1900.“What’s happening in California right now is a warning shot to the rest of the country,”
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“It’s a warning about income inequality and suburban sprawl, and how those intersect with quality of life and climate change.” You can see this in California economic forecasts for 2020, which play down the threat of a global trade war and play up the challenge of continuing to add jobs without affordable places for middle- and lower-income workers to live.
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As the economy picked up and housing costs resumed their rise, lower-paid service and professional workers moved to distant exurbs, while homelessness spiraled to the point that local political leaders are all but declaring they are out of solutions.
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U.S. and Iran Are Trolling Each Other - in China - The New York Times - 0 views
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As tensions between the United States and Iran persist after the American killing of a top Iranian general this month, the two countries are waging a heated battle in an unlikely forum: the Chinese internet.The embassies of the United States and Iran in Beijing have published a series of barbed posts in recent days on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media site, attacking each other in Chinese and in plain view of the country’s hundreds of millions of internet users.
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The battle has captivated people in China, where diplomatic rows rarely break into public view and the government often censors posts about politics.
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Iran, for its part, has for years sought to hinder the flow of information from the West more broadly, blocking Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
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List of biggest threats to the US in 2020: Iran, Russia, China, ISIS - Business Insider - 0 views
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Russia has launched a vast propaganda and disinformation campaign in Europe to undermine the liberal democracies that have opposed its expansionist agenda, actively backs armed militias in eastern Ukraine, and performs provocative military exercises and patrols.
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During Trump's three years in power, US relations with Iran have fallen to their worst point in decades.Tensions reached a new low on January 3 when a US drone assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the nation's top military commander and a revered figure in the country.
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China continues to rebuild and modernize its military, and expand its influence beyond its borders. The nation — which is projected to become the world's biggest economy by around 2050 — has broadcasted the new might of the People's Liberation Army with huge live-fire military exercises.It continues to wage economic war on the US, using an army of hackers and spies to steal vital economic information, part of the backdrop for Trump's trade war.
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The Middle East Isn't Worth It Anymore - WSJ - 0 views
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If Iran’s retaliation for the Trump administration’s targeted killing of Tehran’s top commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, had resulted in the deaths of more Americans, Washington was, as Mr. Trump tweeted, “locked and loaded” for all-out confrontation.
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Why does the Middle East always seem to suck the U.S. back in? What is it about this troubled region that leaves Washington perpetually caught between the desire to end U.S. military involvement there and the impulse to embark on yet another Middle East war?
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Previously, presidents of both parties shared a broad understanding of U.S. interests in the region, including a consensus that those interests were vital to the country—worth putting American lives and resources on the line to forge peace and, when necessary, wage war.
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Donald Trump is the moderate candidate in the 2020 presidential election - Washington Times - 0 views
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Washington has a way of capturing presidents more than they conquer its bureaucracy — in current parlance, President Trump has become an alligator more than he has drained the swamp.
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If one of the terribly serious six lands in the Oval Office, don’t look for that to change. With moderate revisions, Nancy Pelosi endorsed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. None of the Democratic aspirants could end the festering confrontation with China without winning fundamental reforms in its socialist market economy, which the Chinese Communist Party simply won’t tolerate, or facing a revolt within their own party in Congress.
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The economy entered 2020 in reasonably good shape, but thanks to Boeing’s problems and the coronavirus lockdown of China we will be lucky to get 2 GDP percent growth this year. A cooling economy means the improvements in wages and wealth of lower income Americans Mr. Trump bragged about in his State of the Union address will diminish.
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