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krystalxu

Why Germany's current-account surplus is bad for the world economy - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ys-current-account-surplus-bad

Germeny politics US trump policy economics economic

shared by krystalxu on 10 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • the stage is set for a clash between a protectionist America and a free-trading Germany.
  • demanded the renegotiation of another, the North American Free-Trade Agreement.
  • He is weighing whether to impose tariffs on steel imports into America, a move that would almost certainly provoke retaliation.
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  • There is much to envy in Germany’s model. Harmony between firms and workers has been one of the main reasons for the economy’s outperformance.
  • Mr Trump has grasped an inconvenient truth. He has admonished Germany for its trade surplus, which stood at almost $300bn last year, the world’s largest (China’s hoard was a mere $200bn).
  • put a stop to sales of German cars—may be self-defeating, but the fact is that Germany saves too much and spends too little.
  • this is not the result of a mercantilist government policy, as some foreigners complain.
  • the increase in national saving has come from firms and the government.
  • It is an instinct that helps explain Germany’s transformation since the late 1990s from Europe’s sick man to today’s muscle-bound champion.
  • An imminent free-trade deal between Japan and the European Union will add substance to her rhetoric (see article).
  • This is one reason why the populist AfD party remains on the fringes of German politics.
  • Exporters do not invest their windfall profits at home. And Germany is not alone; Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands have been piling up big surpluses, too.
  • For a large economy at full employment to run a current-account surplus in excess of 8% of GDP puts unreasonable strain on the global trading system.
  • Perhaps Germany’s bumper trade surplus will be eroded as China’s was, by a surge in wages.
  • the German instinct for caution is deeply rooted.
  • Germany’s structural budget balance has gone from a deficit of over 3% of GDP in 2010 to a small surplus.
  • The economy lags behind in its readiness for digitalisation, ranking 25th in the world in average download speeds.
  • Above all, it is long past time for Germany to recognise that its excessive saving is a weakness.
Javier E

Houellebecq and the Rise of Anti-Liberalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553754

liberalism religion rational culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Submission is still very clearly a dystopian novel—an increasingly popular genre these days—but, more than that, it is a meditation on the aimlessness of late-stage Western liberalism, where there is nothing much to be believe in, and nothing much to fight for, except the never-ending expansion of personal freedom.
  • Houellebecq is among a growing number of Western intellectuals flirting with anti-liberalism: Perhaps liberalism is not the unmitigated good most of us are raised to believe it is.
  • In an odd way, though, liberalism’s critics end up saying more about the resilience of liberalism than its demise.
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  • there is also a sense of envy, that Islam retains a vitality, conviction, and self-assuredness that Western liberalism and Western Christianity lost long ago
  • Houellebecq, who once called Islam “the stupidest religion,” has since read the Quran and apparently developed an appreciation for Islam, contributing to his own epiphany of sorts. “When, in the light of what I know,” Houellebecq says, “I reexamine the question whether there is a creator, a cosmic order, that kind of thing, I realize that I don’t actually have an answer.”)
  • In fiction and nonfiction alike, liberalism—referring here not to the left of American politics, but to the political order that privileges non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy—has come in for a beating, or at least a challenge.
  • This is a new global aristocracy, one defined by liberal ideas of “rational” education and sensibility.
  • insisting on yet more liberalism as a corrective has only made matters worse. “One of the liberal state’s main roles,” he writes, “becomes the active liberation of individuals from any limiting conditions.” Liberty, which he argues was once about freedom from “one’s own basest desires,” was redefined to encourage the ceaseless pursuit of those very same desires.
  • As a liberal who is critical of liberalism, I sympathize with these arguments but am, at the same time, unwilling to follow them to their logical conclusion.
  • Wherever I go and wherever I’ve lived, there are others, from all over the world, who I can easily connect with—“anywheres” of the center-left and center-right who share a similar disposition. They don’t really have a local community or “home” they feel particularly strongly about.
  • the diversity, paradoxically, reinforces a kind of cultural homogeneity. As Deneen puts it: “The identities and diversity thus secured are globally homogenous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms.
  • Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame. Liberalism, in dismantling traditional structures, encouraging “privatism,” and empowering an ever-expanding state, has created an existential crisis, he argues
  • Whether merit-based “aristocracies” are a good thing has long been debated. The historian Charles Wiltse, writing on Thomas Jefferson, pointed out the tension: “It is to the talented and the virtuous that the government is to be committed, a doctrine suggesting the Greek ideal of the wise man. The criticism of [John] Adams, that talents and virtue will, in the end, breed wealth and family, Jefferson seems to have ignored.”
  • Liberalism might be a better ideology (than whatever the alternatives might be) but it’s an ideology all the same. It’s a transformative project, as any belief system that views history as a progressive and bending arc must be.
  • All transformations, even largely good ones, come at a cost. Most Americans and Europeans, including those who benefit most from the liberal status quo, understand that something is not quite right. Take our unprecedented levels of inequality, which are only likely to grow.
  • But the incentives for meritocratic elites to do anything serious about it—Deneen suggests a rather unappealing “household economics” model while social democrats like Matt Bruenig propose “social wealth funds”—are limited. Liberals are the new conservatives.
  • Choice needs to be a means to something else, but to what? Legally based religious systems—which only Islam among the largest religions potentially offers—quite consciously seek to restrict choice in the name of virtue and salvation.
  • anti-sharia legislation has become an odd phenomenon—a sort of illiberal counter-illiberalism. This is not quite what Deneen, or for that matter Houellebecq, had in mind in thinking beyond, or after, liberalism.
  • In Europe, no populist party—and several, in Switzerland, Poland, and Hungary, have been in power—has managed to imagine something truly new.
  • What liberalism’s critics appear unable, or unwilling, to address is whether a lack of meaning is a worse problem to have than a lack of freedom.
Javier E

Opinion | What Have the Elites Ever Done for Fox? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fox-news-media-trump.html

elites establishment conservatism achievement

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • TUCKER: All right, but apart from capital financing, deregulation, access to global markets, a stable and predictable regulatory and legal environment, I.R.A.s and 401(k)’s, talented immigrants, global cities, good food, universities that are the envy of the world, record-making growth and a world in which there’s almost no chance of my children being conscripted to fight a war, what else have the elites done for us?
Javier E

Opinion | Trump Tries to Destroy, and Justice Roberts Tries to Save, What Makes America... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-roberts-shutdown.html

trump threat American idea politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • For me, the most disturbing thing about the Trump presidency is the way each week, like a steady drip of acid, Donald Trump tries to erode the thing that truly makes us great as a country and the envy of so many around the world — the independence and nonpartisan character of our courts, our military, our F.B.I., our Border Patrol and our whole federal bureaucracy.
  • Why is this so important? Because America’s core governing institutions were not built to be “conservative” or “liberal.” They were built to take our deepest values and our highest ideals and animate them, promote them and protect them — to bring them to life and to scale them.
  • They are the continuity that binds one generation of Americans to the next and the beacon for how we work together to build an ever more perfect union.
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  • At their best, these institutions have created the regulatory foundations and legal and security frameworks that have made America great — that have enabled innovation to be sparked, commerce to flourish and ideas to freely blossom
  • You cannot exaggerate how unusual it is for our chief justice and retired senior military officers to challenge Trump’s excesses the way they have. They were bred to keep themselves and their institutions out of politics at all costs. But they understand the greater costs of what Trump is doing.
  • I’ve spent four decades reporting from countries with weak institutions — like Russia, China, every Arab state, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela — where the arbitrary whims of the leader or his party are the basis of all decision-making, not the rule of law, built on independent institutions.
  • The independent, nonpartisan quality of our institutions is one of the biggest reasons so many people want to immigrate to America and why some people are even ready to build rafts out of milk cartons to get here.
  • biggest national security threat to our country today is from within (and it is only going to get worse in the next two years).
  • That threat is from a president without any shame or respect for the impartiality of our core institutions, who is backed by a party without any spine and by a network, Fox, without any integrity.This is not a test. This is a real, live emergency for our democracy.
manhefnawi

Compassionate Kings and Rebellious Princes | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...e-kings-and-rebellious-princes

Prince of Asturias Carlos Ferdinand Charles Godoy Spain

shared by manhefnawi on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • History may not repeat itself, but there is no gainsaying its fondness for close affinities
  • When in 1807 Ferdinand, heir to the throne, stood accused by his father, Charles IV of Spain, of sedition and seeking to usurp the royal title, the young prince fearfully recalled the analogous events two hundred and forty years previously
  • In 1568 Philip II had similarly confronted his recalcitrant son Carlos, resulting in the latter’s imprisonment and mysterious death seven months later
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  • while casting aspersions on his uncle’s illegitimate birth, often to his face, Carlos must at times have envied Don Juan’s bastard lineage and sound health
  • Don Juan of Austria
  • Another promising candidate was the widowed Mary Stuart, who escaped only to marry the despicable Darnley
  • Due to the possibility of armed insurrection in the north, Philip decided to visit his rebellious provinces in person
  • He now became openly vindictive, unstable and sullen, given to insults and unprovoked attacks on imaginary enemies
  • The threat of a divided royal house, with a maleficent Carlos rallying rebel support to his cause, was totally unacceptable to Philip
  • his father obviously had every intention of supplanting his rancorous heir-apparent should God give him another son
  • he intended to leave for Germany and the Netherlands, with or without his father’s permission
  • he stumbled down a decrepit flight of stairs in the dark, fracturing his skull
  • The strained relationship between Philip and his only son continued to deteriorate, but despite disturbing signs of the young man’s mental instability, the King remained phlegmatic
  • The King’s extended absences gave Carlos considerable latitude to prepare his escape
  • His inability to hold his tongue proved to be Philip’s salvation though at dreadful cost
  • Carlos rashly confided to Don Juan of Austria that he intended to leave Spain within the next few days. After some initial hesitation, Don Juan rode out to the Escorial on Christmas Day and informed Philip of the Prince’s decision
  • Meanwhile, Philip had returned to Madrid and was kept fully informed of his son’s designs; incredibly, he still hesitated to act
  • King Philip and five members of the Council of State made their way to the Prince’s bedchamber. The ingenious system of bolts and locks, which could be operated from his bed, had secretly been dismantled; and the startled Carlos was quickly disarmed. He guiltily assumed they had come to assassinate him, especially when his father seized a document listing the Prince’s enemies, with the King’s name at the head
  • The King was soon inured to suffering and private tragedies, and came to regard the unfounded attacks of his enemies as part of the burden he had been called upon to bear
  • Carlos’ mental equilibrium had always been precarious; and now he began to experience hallucinations. No visitors were allowed, and the Prince was kept under close surveillance, though the conditions of his detention were not too onerous
  • His fragile health was unable to withstand such sustained abuse, and an early death soon became inevitable. Philip resigned himself to his loss, and found spiritual comfort in blessing his dying
  • The death of the successor to the throne under such mysterious circumstances naturally gave rise to the wildest conjecture
  • Reasons of state were hinted at, which were assumed to involve a far-flung conspiracy of the son against his obdurate father
  • Ferdinand’s upbringing was similar to that of the ill-fated Carlos. Born on October 14th, 1784 at the Escorial, the young prince received scant affection from his parents, Charles IV and Maria Luisa, who finally ascended the throne in 1788 after a frustrating wait of twenty-three years
  • his suspicious nature and resentment towards his parents being evident from an early age
  • did not deter the calculating priest from further poisoning his charge’s distrustful mind. Ferdinand’s hatred was especially directed against his mother, Queen Maria Luisa
  • Ferdinand’s fears were not imaginary. In 1795, at the conclusion of an unsuccessful war against revolutionary France, Godoy - the monarchs’ ‘querido Manuel’ - had incredibly been granted the vainglorious title of ‘Prince of the Peace’
  • Ferdinand justifiably suspected that some machination on the part of his mother and Godoy might prevent his succession to the throne. By late 1807 his situation had become desperate
  • If the men who surround (Charles IV) here would let him know the character of Your Majesty as I know it, with what desire would not my father seek to tighten the bonds which should unite our two nations
  • Having already removed Charles’ brother from the throne of Naples, the French Emperor watched the unseemly squabbling among the Spanish Bourbons with a calculating eye to the future
  • unilateral commitment to refuse to marry ‘whoever she may be, without the consent of Your Majesty from whom alone I await the selection of my bride
  • Ferdinand’s enthusiasm at being related to the French Emperor was such that Beauharnais suggested that the Prince approach Napoleon directly in writing. Not only is it incredible that the heir-apparent would dare to discuss marriage plans with a foreign head of state; but equally so is the abject tone of the letter
  • The state in which I have found myself for some time, and which could not be hidden from the great penetration of Your Majesty
  • But full of hope in finding in Your Majesty’s magnanimity the most powerful protection
  • persistent rumours that he might appoint himself Regent on the King’s death, spurred the Prince of Asturias to frantic measures
  • august
  • The subsequent crisis, though outwardly similar to the events of 1568, was wider in scope and more tragic in its consequences. King Philip, criticized by many for his dispassionate attitude, never forfeited the esteem or the sympathy of the nation. In 1807 the position was the exact reverse; Charles IV at best was pitied as a dupe, while Maria Luisa and her paramour were held responsible for reducing Spain to the role of Napoleon’s subservient ally
  • Did Napoleon instigate the scheme to sow further dissension within the Spanish royal family, or did Beauharnais initiate it on his own account
  • Napoleon was delighted to receive Ferdinand’s letter and immediately grasped its mischief-making potential
  • Charles IV discovered his son’s treasonous correspondence
  • Godoy whose spies were everywhere
  • The ensuing scenes are reminiscent of those of 1568. The King angrily entered his son’s room, and was soon in possession not only of the damaging correspondence - apparently the Prince’s terrified gaze betrayed its hiding place - but also of the cipher needed to transcribe the coded letters
  • The Queen was distraught that Godoy was ill with a fever in Madrid at such a critical moment
  • The following day Ferdinand was formally placed under arrest with a guard of twenty-four elite soldiers
  • warning him of Godoy’s boundless ambitions and greed, enumerating his supposed crimes, his abuse of power and the royal confidence, his corruption and immorality
  • The most damning assertion was that Godoy had besmirched the King’s name and delivered Spain to her enemies
  • patriots anxious to ensure the orderly succession to the throne in the event of the King’s death
  • who imagined they had come to deliver their beloved prince from the pernicious influence of the royal favourite
  • Godoy pointed out to the King that a family reconciliation was imperative to prevent Napoleon from dividing the Spanish royal family. The King stubbornly refused to pardon his son, but finally agreed to let Godoy act as intermediary
  • Godoy saw his opportunity, and easily prevailed upon the terrified Prince to pen contrite letters to his parents, fully admitting his guilt
  • The King, moved by paternal compassion, granted his son a royal pardon, but insisted nevertheless that the other ‘conspirators’ be brought to trial and a full enquiry be convened
  • As Godoy had foreseen, Ferdinand’s immense popularity throughout the nation and the patriotic motives of the accused could only work to the detriment of the Santa Trinidad, as the reigning monarchs and the favourite were caustically referred to by the common people
  • On January 25th, 1808, to the acclaim of the public and the barely contained fury of the royal couple, the defendants were declared innocent
  • From the outset Godoy had been opposed to the trial; but this was one of the rare occasions on which both monarchs disregarded his counsel. To compound the initial error
  • Ferdinand’s defence, based on his right of legitimate succession to the throne, is persuasive as offered by Escoiquiz and the others at their trial. But whatever the provocation and dangers -real or imagined-one cannot forgive Ferdinand’s clandestine appeal to the French Emperor at such a critical moment, when Spain was threatened from outside
  • Being a King, you know how sacred are the rights of the throne; any approach of an heir apparent to a foreign sovereign is criminal
  • Napoleon assumed that the conduct and moral fibre of the Spanish royal family was representative of the entire nation
Javier E

A Unicorn Lost in the Valley, Evernote Blows Up the 'Fail Fast' Gospel - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...evernote-what-happened.html

silicon valley unicorn model failure

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • He published an unusually frank blog post aimed at Evernote’s users in January. The company’s foundation was not strong, he wrote, and its products had developed a “unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors.” It would take most of the year to get all that fixed, he wrote, adding that “undoubtedly we will still disappoint some of you.”
  • Evernote has a different, more mature goal. It expects to reach positive cash flow this year, with annual revenue of nearly $100 million. “We used to be a movement,” Mr. Small said. “When we were a movement, we weren’t a business.”
  • “The core business of Evernote is what most companies outside of Silicon Valley would look on with envy,” said Vincent Toolan, Evernote’s former chief financial officer. “The problem is it’s in Silicon Valley.”
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  • Evernote’s apps were still downloaded 50,000 times a day — user complaints and internal tumult notwithstanding.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: How to Live With the Coronavirus - 0 views

nymag.com/...live-with-the-coronavirus.html

christian culture war pandemic response life death christianist strategies pro-life

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • in the absence of certainty, out of a modicum of caution, and facing the risk of a breakdown in the health-care system, we’ve taken (belated) steps to put life first.
  • In my view, it’s the only call a decent society can make. It’s what it really means to be pro-life.
  • There are costs to this collective exercise in empathy and compassion. You contemplate the rising chances of a long and devastating global depression. You look ahead to months and months more of quarantine, empty streets, crippled businesses, shrinking retirement savings, and rising poverty. And you realize that our choice for life over wealth is a little more complicated. There will come a point at which we will have to risk some lives to reopen and save the economy.
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  • if the UK’s GDP falls by more than 6.4% per person as a result of the lockdown, more years of life will be lost than saved.”
  • (there’s a great takedown of the argument here).
  • Let’s just agree nonetheless that in principle, at some point, there will be a crossover moment when quarantine and lockdown cease to have the net-positive impact they are now having. The question is simply when that cross-over occurs, and how we can get there soonest.
  • If we declare victory before we achieve it, we could have the worst of both worlds — a burst in new infections leading to a second shutdown, a collapse of faith in the authorities, more deaths, and a deeper depression.
  • Letting up on an epidemic before it has run its course can create a second wave, as in 1918, and as feared in China right now, that would take the country down in the fall of an election year.
  • At the same time, if quarantine and social distancing are stretched out too long, we could be losing more lives in the aggregate than we would be saving. We could also be risking ever-more extremist politics or even civil disorder
  • What matters is the timing. Getting that right is the single biggest challenge as we go forward. But that requires a huge amount of data we don’t yet have: specifically, a much better sense of just how widespread COVID-19 is in the broader population.
  • we need equipment we don’t yet have: tests for the virus that are quick and easy and ubiquitous; and, perhaps more importantly, serological tests, to see who is now immune and can return to work and normal life.
  • If we’re luckier still, we could get a breakthrough in treatments as doctors and nurses understand this disease better and we buy some time.
  • If we’re lucky and we find out more people have already gotten COVID-19 without the worst symptoms than we now believe, then the return to semi-normal could come more quickly
  • At best, we could get the virus to peak at a level that does not overwhelm our medical system and manage economically until a vaccine is available. At best.
  • The goal is not to “beat” the virus, because it can’t be beaten. Now that it’s a pandemic, it’s here to stay
  • The goal is not to fight it, or wage war on it.  COVID-19 is not a rival military. The goal is to find the optimal path to living with it.
  • I want Anthony Fauci making that decision. Right now, as complete a shutdown as possible is the only sane option.
  • if we make that collective pro-life decision — and, mercifully, we are — we are also saying something quite profound about who we are as Americans. We are saying that the lives of the elderly, and the poor, and the vulnerable matter more, when all is said and done, than our GDP.
  • In this century, the Evangelical right has embraced the cult of prosperity, the efficacy of torture, and the denial of health care to the poor. They upped the ante in 2016, of course, by embracing a pagan worshipper of Mammon, with a sideline in philandery, cruelty, gluttony, pride, deceit, envy, insatiable greed, and the foulest abuse of women
  • In an apparent attempt to defend a president who clearly dismissed and for too long ignored the greatest threat to the U.S. since 9/11, they’ve decided to embrace what they once called the “culture of death.”
  • The correct response to COVID-19, many pastors have declared, is to let it rip.
  • The elderly, instead of protecting themselves, should sacrifice what’s left of their lives to save the jobs of the young and to help Trump keep the economy going. Wealth, it appears, is far preferable to life — or at least when a Republican is president.
  • But if by ignoring “social distancing,” we individually and collectively guarantee someone’s death down the line, why is that not a kind of indirect killing?
  • Yes, Christians should not cower in constant fear of death. But we don’t have to embrace it either. I’m trying to think of a version of the Gospels where Jesus meets a leper and tells him not to worry, he’s going to die some day anyway, and make the best of it; or when he tells Martha and Mary to suck it up, and accept that Lazarus is dead, and move on. He didn’t. In fact, he risked and lost his own life by raising Lazarus from the dead.
Javier E

Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Stree... - 2 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/74ec4c99e72deda4a64da10692a15bf6

economics history literature good evil theory philosophy philosophers Bible Gilgamesh Adam Smith

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?
  • The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.
  • most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.
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  • He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.
  • Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer
  • “The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”
  • Outside of our history, we have nothing more.
  • The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.
  • History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.
  • Almost all of the key concepts by which economics operates, both consciously and unconsciously, have a long history, and their roots extend predominantly outside the range of economics, and often completely beyond that of science.
  • That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.
  • stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”
  • “The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”
  • contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,
  • I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.
  • Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.
  • is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.
  • mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?
  • we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).
  • In this sense, “the study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insight, unless complemented and completed by a study of metaeconomics.”17
  • The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.
  • I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.
  • We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I
  • argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.
  • In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.
  • I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.
  • This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.
  • Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)
  • The Economy of Good and Evil
  • from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.
  • the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?
  • The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor
  • Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?
  • All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.
  • idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”
  • The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep
  • Masters of the Truth
  • Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?
  • Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.
  • The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.
  • The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus
  • We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).
  • When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.
  • By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.
  • the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.
  • there is no mention of either money or war; for example, not once does anyone in the whole epic sell or purchase something.5 No nation conquers another, and we do not encounter a mention even of the threat of violence.
  • Gilgamesh becomes a hero not only due to his strength, but also due to discoveries and deeds whose importance were in large part economic—direct gaining of construction materials in the case of felling the cedar forest, stopping Enkidu from devastating Uruk’s economy, and discovering new desert routes during his expeditions.
  • Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.
  • is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.
  • But labour is unlike any other commodity. The work environment is of no concern for steel; we do not care about steel’s well-being.16
  • But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.
  • As Joseph Stiglitz says, One of the great “tricks” (some say “insights”) of neoclassical economics is to treat labour like any other factor of production. Output is written as a function of inputs—steel, machines, and labour. The mathematics treats labour like any other commodity, lulling one into thinking of labour like an ordinary commodity, such as steel or plastic.
  • Even the earliest cultures were aware of the value of cooperation on the working level—today we call this collegiality, fellowship, or, if you want to use a desecrated term, comradeship. These “lesser relationships” are useful and necessary for society and for companies because work can be done much faster and more effectively if people get along with each other on a human level
  • But true friendship, which becomes one of the central themes of the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from completely different material than teamwork. Friendship, as C. S. Lewis accurately describes it, is completely uneconomical, unbiological, unnecessary for civilization, and an unneeded relationship
  • Here we have a beautiful example of the power of friendship, one that knows how to transform (or break down) a system and change a person. Enkidu, sent to Gilgamesh as a punishment from the gods, in the end becomes his faithful friend, and together they set out against the gods. Gilgamesh would never have gathered the courage to do something like that on his own—nor would Enkidu.
  • Due to their friendship, Gilgamesh and Enkidu then intend to stand up to the gods themselves and turn a holy tree into mere (construction) material they can handle almost freely, thereby making it a part of the city-construct, part of the building material of civilization, thus “enslaving” that which originally was part of wild nature. This is a beautiful proto-example of the shifting of the borders between the sacred and profane (secular)—and to a certain extent also an early illustration of the idea that nature is there to provide cities and people with raw material and production resources.
  • started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.
  • Even today, we often consider the domain of humanity (human relations, love, friendship, beauty, art, etc.) to be unproductive;
  • Both heroes change—each from opposite poles—into humans. In this context, a psychological dimension to the story may be useful: “Enkidu (…) is Gilgamesh’s alter ego, the dark, animal side of his soul, the complement to his restless heart. When Gilgamesh found Enkidu, he changed from a hated tyrant into the protector of his city. (…)
  • To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We
  • this moment of rebirth from an animal to a human state, the world’s oldest preserved epic implicitly hints at something highly important. Here we see what early cultures considered the beginning of civilization. Here is depicted the difference between people and animals or, better, savages. Here the epic quietly describes birth, the awakening of a conscious, civilized human. We are witnesses to the emancipation of humanity from animals,
  • The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.
  • The price we pay for independence from the whims of nature is dependence on our societies and civilizations. The more sophisticated a given society is as a whole, the less its members are able to survive on their own as individuals, without society.
  • The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.
  • Human life in the city gains a new dimension and suddenly it seems more natural to take up issues going beyond the life span of an individual. “The city wall symbolizes as well as founds the permanence of the city as an institution which will remain forever and give its inhabitants the certainty of unlimited safety, allowing them to start investing with an outlook reaching far beyond the borders of individual life.
  • The wall around the city of Uruk is, among other things, a symbol of an internal distancing from nature, a symbol of revolts against submission to laws that do not come under the control of man and that man can at most discover and use to his benefit.
  • “The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47
  • If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”
  • can be said that Enkidu was therefore happy in his natural state, because all of his needs were satiated. On the other hand, with people, it appears that the more a person has, the more developed and richer, the greater the number of his needs (including the unsaturated ones).
  • the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53
  • Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.
  • Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.
  • The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.
  • is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.
  • Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.
  • this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.
  • If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.
  • If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.
  • How does this affect economics?
  • us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.
  • Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.
  • Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.
  • By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil
  • Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.
  • A similar motif appears a thousand years after the reversal, which is well known even to noneconomists as the central idea of economics: the invisible hand of the market.
  • A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.
  • Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.
  • immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77
  • After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.
  • In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh
  • The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81
  • It is simpler to observe the main features of our civilization at a time when the picture was more readable—at a time when our civilization was just being born and was still “half-naked.” In other words, we have tried to dig down to the bedrock of our written civilization;
  • today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.
  • the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax
  • is there something from it that is valid today? Have we found in Gilgamesh certain archetypes that are in us to this day?
  • The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.
  • We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.
  • Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.
  • Gilgamesh had a wall built that divided the city from wild nature and created a space for the first human culture. Nevertheless, “not even far-reaching works of civilization could satisfy human desire.”
  • Friendship shows us new, unsuspected adventures, gives us the opportunity to leave the wall and to become neither its builder nor its part—to not be another brick in the wall.
  • with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.
  • to change the system, to break down that which is standing and go on an expedition against the gods (to awaken, from naïveté to awakening) requires friendship.
  • For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,
  • The thought that humanity comes at the expense of efficiency is just as old as humanity itself—as we have shown, subjects without emotion are the ideal of many tyrants.
  • The epic later crashes this idea through the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Friendship—the biologically least essential love, which at first sight appears to be unnecessary
  • less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.
  • human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.
  • For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.
  • Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It
  • They practiced money lending, traded in many assets (…) and especially were engaged in the trading of shares on capital markets, worked in currency exchange and frequently figured as mediators in financial transactions (…), they functioned as bankers and participated in emissions of all possible forms.
  • As regards modern capitalism (as opposed to the ancient and medieval periods) … there are activities in it which are, in certain forms, inherently (and completely necessarily) present—both from an economic and legal standpoint.7
  • As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:
  • Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.
  • Jews believe in historical progress, and that progress is in this world.
  • For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?
  • Hebrew religiosity is therefore strongly connected with this world, not with any abstract world, and those who take pleasure in worldly possessions are not a priori doing anything wrong.
  • PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.
  • The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at
  • There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12
  • about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.
  • What’s more, economic progress has almost become an assumption of modern functional societies. We expect growth. We take it automatically. Today, if nothing “new” happens, if GDP does not grow (we say it stagnates) for several quarters, we consider it an anomaly.
  • however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.
  • Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,
  • This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.
  • Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.
  • Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.
  • economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.
  • REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.
  • Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21
  • As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,
  • The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.
  • The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,
  • The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),
  • THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.
  • This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.
  • manliness and strength,28 knowledge and intelligence,29 wisdom and understanding, vigilance and performance, fame and renown (fame which overcomes enemies because “a thousand men would not be able to stand firmly in his presence”);30 the hero is a good shepherd (who takes care of his subordinates), is a copper-clad rampart, the shield of the land, and the defender of heroes.
  • Each of us probably has a sort of “hero within”—a kind of internal role-model, template, an example that we (knowingly or not) follow. It is very important what kind of archetype it is, because its role is dominantly irrational and changes depending on time and the given civilization.
  • The oldest was the so-called Trickster—a fraudster; then the culture bearer—Rabbit; the musclebound hero called Redhorn; and finally the most developed form of hero: the Twins.
  • the Egyptian ruler, just as the Sumerian, was partly a god, or the son of a god.31
  • Jacob defrauds his father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing of the firstborn. Moses murders an Egyptian. King David seduces the wife of his military commander and then has him killed. In his old age, King Solomon turns to pagan idols, and so on.
  • Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.
  • The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32
  • We do not have to go far for examples. Noah gets so drunk he becomes a disgrace; Lot lets his own daughters seduce him in a similar state of drunkenness. Abraham lies and (repeatedly) tries to sell his wife as a concubine.
  • the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.
  • To a certain extent it can be said that the Hebrews—and later Christianity—added another archetype, the archetype of the heroic Sufferer.35 Job
  • Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress
  • For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.
  • the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods
  • This is very important for democratic capitalism, because the Jewish heroic archetype lays the groundwork much better for the development of the later phenomenon of the hero, which better suits life as we know it today. “The heroes laid down their arms and set about trading to become wealthy.”
  • in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).
  • RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.
  • Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an
  • The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39
  • Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.
  • 44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.
  • which for the methodology of science and economics is very important because disorder and chaos are difficult to examine scientifically.43 Faith in some kind of rational and logical order in a system (society, the economy) is a silent assumption of any (economic) examination.
  • THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,
  • From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.
  • Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.
  • Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.
  • I was there when he set heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep (…) Then I was the craftsman at his side.47
  • There are more urgings to gain wisdom in the Old Testament. “Wisdom calls aloud in the street (…): ‘How long will you simple ones love your simple ways?’”49 Or several chapters later: “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”50
  • examination is not forbidden. The fact that order can be grasped by human reason is another unspoken assumption that serves as a cornerstone of any scientific examination.
  • then, my sons, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways (…) Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord.
  • the rational examination of nature has its roots, surprisingly, in religion.
  • The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began. When there were no oceans, I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains were settled in place,
  • The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:
  • The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:
  • MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:
  • Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.
  • The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.
  • Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53
  • He invented (fictitiously and completely abstractly!) a framework that was generally accepted and soon “made into” reality. Marx invented similarly; he created the notion of class exploitation. Through his idea, the perception of history and reality was changed for a large part of the world for nearly an entire century.
  • Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we
  • How does this relate to economics? Reality itself, our “objective” world, is cocreated, man himself participates in the creation; creation, which is somewhat constantly being re-created.
  • Our scientific models put the finishing touches on reality, because (1) they interpret, (2) they give phenomena a name, (3) they enable us to classify the world and phenomena according to logical forms, and (4) through these models we de facto perceive reality.
  • When man finds a new linguistic framework or analytical model, or stops using the old one, he molds or remolds reality. Models are only in our heads; they are not “in objective reality.” In this sense, Newton invented (not merely discovered!) gravity.
  • A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).
  • Keynes enters into the history of economic thought from the same intellectual cadence; his greatest contribution to economics was precisely the resurrection of the imperceptible—for example in the form of animal spirits or uncertainty. The economist Piero Mini even ascribes Keynes’s doubting and rebellious approach to his almost Talmudic education.63
  • God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61
  • in this viewpoint it is possible to see how Jewish thought is mystical—it admits the role of the incomprehensible. Therefore, through its groundedness, Jewish thought indulges mystery and defends itself against a mechanistic-causal explanation of the world: “The Jewish way of thinking, according to Veblen, emphasizes the spiritual, the miraculous, the intangible.
  • The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.
  • What’s more, history seems to be based on morals; morals seem to be the key determining factors of history. For the Hebrews, history proceeds according to how morally its actors behave.
  • The Sumerians believed in dualism—good and evil deities exist, and the earth of people becomes their passive battlefield.
  • GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.
  • This was not about moral-human evil, but rather a kind of natural evil. It is as if good and evil were not touched by morality at all. Evil simply occurred. Period.
  • the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.
  • Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65
  • discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence
  • The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.
  • sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To
  • It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.
  • Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).
  • The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.
  • This principle stands directly against the self-fulfilling prophecy,80 the well-known concept of social science. Certain prophecies become self-fulfilling when expressed (and believed) while others become self-contradicting prophecies when pronounced (and believed).
  • If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.
  • Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.
  • back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.
  • Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.
  • If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the Lord your God will keep his covenant of love with you, as he swore to your forefathers. He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers.
  • Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,
  • From today’s perspective, we can state that the moral dimension entirely disappeared from economic thought for a long time, especially due to the implementation of Mandeville’s concept of private vices that contrarily support the public welfare
  • Without being timid, we can say this is the first documented attempt to explain the economic cycle. The economic cycle, the explanation of which is to this day a mystery to economists, is explained morally in the Old Testament.
  • But how do we consolidate these two conflicting interpretations of the economic cycle: Can ethics be responsible for it or not? Can we influence reality around us through our acts?
  • it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.
  • THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.
  • Kant, the most important modern thinker in the area of ethics, answers on the contrary that if we carry out a “moral” act on the basis of economic calculus (therefore we carry out an hedonistic consideration; see below) in the expectation of later recompense, its morality is lost. Recompense, according to the strict Kant, annuls ethics.
  • Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.
  • Job’s friends try to show that he must have sinned in some way and, in doing so, deserved God’s punishment. They are absolutely unable to imagine a situation in which Job, as a righteous man, would suffer without (moral) cause. Nevertheless, Job insists that he deserves no punishment because he has committed no offense: “God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”94
  • But Job remains righteous, even though it does not pay to do so: Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.95 And till I die, I will not deny my integrity I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.96
  • He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?
  • morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.
  • This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.
  • So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.
  • the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly
  • constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.
  • In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.
  • the mining of enjoyment must not come at the expense of exogenously given rules. “Judaism comes therefore to train or educate the unbounded desire … for wealth, so that market activities and patterns of consumption operate within a God-given morality.”102
  • The Epicureans acted with the goal of maximizing utility without regard for rules (rules developed endogenously, from within the system, computed from that which increased utility—this was one of the main trumps of the Epicurean school; they did not need exogenously given norms, and argued that they could “calculate” ethics (what to do) for every given situation from the situation itself).
  • The Stoics could not seek their enjoyment—or, by another name, utility. They could not in any way look back on it, and in no way could they count on it. They could only live according to rules (the greatest weakness of this school was to defend where exogenously the given rules came from and whether they are universal) and take a indifferent stand to the results of their actions.
  • To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.
  • Their relationship to the law was not supposed to be one of duty,105 but one of gratitude, love. Hebrews were to do good (outgoing), because goodness (incoming) has already been done to them.
  • This is in stark contrast with today’s legal system, where, naturally, no mention of love or gratefulness exists. But God expects a full internalization of the commandments and their fulfillment with love, not as much duty. By no means was this on the basis of the cost-benefit analyses so widespread in economics today, which determines when it pays to break the law and when not to (calculated on the basis of probability of being caught and the amount of punishment vis-à-vis the possible gain).
  • And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord set his affection on your forefathers and loved them….
  • the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.
  • The Hebrews, originally a nomadic tribe, preferred to be unrestrained and grew up in constant freedom of motion.
  • Human laws, if they are in conflict with the responsibilities given by God, are subordinate to personal responsibility, and a Jew cannot simply join the majority, even if it is legally allowed. Ethics, the concept of good, is therefore always superior to all local laws, rules, and customs:
  • THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.
  • Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,
  • The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.
  • The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:
  • In addition, they were aware of a thin two-way line between owner and owned. We own material assets, but—to a certain extent—they own us and tie us down. Once we become used to a certain material
  • This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.
  • One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”
  • SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM
  • regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.
  • In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126
  • Such provisions can be seen as the antimonopoly and social measures of the time. The economic system even then had a clear tendency to converge toward asset concentration, and therefore power as well. It would appear that these provisions were supposed to prevent this process
  • Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.
  • These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.
  • Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.
  • Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.
  • “Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135
  • In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.
  • With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.
  • Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.
  • ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.
  • Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.
  • The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”
  • To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”
  • Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”
  • there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:
  • In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157
  • Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.
  • In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,
  • Today the position and significance of money and debt has gone so far and reached such a dominant position in society that operating with debts (fiscal policy) or interest or money supply (monetary policy) means that these can, to a certain extent, direct (or at least strongly influence) the whole economy and society.
  • In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.
  • As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.
  • money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever
  • Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.
  • MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)
  • Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.
  • labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.
  • LABOR AND REST: THE SABBATH ECONOMY
  • The Jews as well as Aristotle behaved very guardedly toward loans. The issue of interest/usury became one of the first economic debates. Without having an inkling of the future role of economic policy (fiscal and monetary), the ancient Hebrews may have unwittingly felt that they were discovering in interest a very powerful weapon, one that can be a good servant, but (literally) an enslaving master as well.
  • It’s something like a dam. When we build one, we are preventing periods of drought and flooding in the valley; we are limiting nature’s whims and, to a large extent, avoiding its incalculable cycles. Using dams, we can regulate the flow of water to nearly a constant. With it we tame the river (and we can also gain
  • But if we do not regulate the water wisely, it may happen that we would overfill the dam and it would break. For the cities lying in the valley, their end would be worse than if a dam were never there.
  • If man lived in harmony with nature before, now, after the fall, he must fight; nature stands against him and he against it and the animals. From the Garden we have moved unto a (battle)field.
  • Only after man’s fall does labor turn into a curse.168 It could even be said that this is actually the only curse, the curse of the unpleasantness of labor, that the Lord places on Adam.
  • Both Plato and Aristotle consider labor to be necessary for survival, but that only the lower classes should devote themselves to it so that the elites would not have to be bothered with it and so that they could devote themselves to “purely spiritual matters—art, philosophy, and politics.”
  • Work is also not only a source of pleasure but a social standing; It is considered an honor. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings.”170 None of the surrounding cultures appreciate work as much. The idea of the dignity of labor is unique in the Hebrew tradition.
  • Hebrew thinking is characterized by a strict separation of the sacred from the profane. In life, there are simply areas that are holy, and in which it is not allowed to economize, rationalize, or maximize efficiency.
  • good example is the commandment on the Sabbath. No one at all could work on this day, not even the ones who were subordinate to an observant Jew:
  • the message of the commandment on Saturday communicated that people were not primarily created for labor.
  • Paradoxically, it is precisely this commandment out of all ten that is probably the most violated today.
  • Aristotle even considers labor to be “a corrupted waste of time which only burdens people’s path to true honour.”
  • we have days when we must not toil connected (at least lexically) with the word meaning emptiness: the English term “vacation” (or emptying), as with the French term, les vacances, or German die Freizeit, meaning open time, free time, but also…
  • Translated into economic language: The meaning of utility is not to increase it permanently but to rest among existing gains. Why do we learn how to constantly increase gains but not how to…
  • This dimension has disappeared from today’s economics. Economic effort has no goal at which it would be possible to rest. Today we only know growth for growth’s sake, and if our company or country prospers, that does not…
  • Six-sevenths of time either be dissatisfied and reshape the world into your own image, man, but one-seventh you will rest and not change the creation. On the seventh day, enjoy creation and enjoy the work of your hands.
  • the purpose of creation was not just creating but that it had an end, a goal. The process was just a process, not a purpose. The whole of Being was created so…
  • Saturday was not established to increase efficiency. It was a real ontological break that followed the example of the Lord’s seventh day of creation. Just as the Lord did not rest due to tiredness or to regenerate strength; but because He was done. He was done with His work, so that He could enjoy it, to cherish in His creation.
  • If we believe in rest at all today, it is for different reasons. It is the rest of the exhausted machine, the rest of the weak, and the rest of those who can’t handle the tempo. It’s no wonder that the word “rest…
  • Related to this, we have studied the first mention of a business cycle with the pharaoh’s dream as well as seen a first attempt (that we may call…
  • We have tried to show that the quest for a heaven on Earth (similar to the Jewish one) has, in its desacralized form, actually also been the same quest for many of the…
  • We have also seen that the Hebrews tried to explain the business cycle with morality and ethics. For the Hebrews,…
  • ancient Greek economic ethos, we will examine two extreme approaches to laws and rules. While the Stoics considered laws to be absolutely valid, and utility had infinitesimal meaning in their philosophy, the Epicureans, at least in the usual historical explanation, placed utility and pleasure in first place—rules were to be made based on the principle of utility.
  • CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTILITY AND PRINCIPLE The influence of Jewish thought on the development of market democracy cannot be overestimated. The key heritage for us was the lack of ascetic perception of the world, respect to law and private…
  • We have tried to show how the Torah desacralized three important areas in our lives: the earthly ruler, nature,…
  • What is the relationship between the good and evil that we do (outgoing) and the utility of disutility that we (expect to) get as a reward (incoming)? We have seen…
  • The Hebrews never despised material wealth; on contrary, the Jewish faith puts great responsibility on property management. Also the idea of progress and the linear perception of time gives our (economic)…
  • the Hebrews managed to find something of a happy compromise between both of these principles.
  • will not be able to completely understand the development of the modern notion of economics without understanding the disputes between the Epicureans and the Stoics;
  • poets actually went even further, and with their speech they shaped and established reality and truth. Honor, adventure, great deeds, and the acclaim connected with them played an important role in the establishment of the true, the real.
  • those who are famous will be remembered by people. They become more real, part of the story, and they start to be “realized,” “made real” in the lives of other people. That which is stored in memory is real; that which is forgotten is as if it never existed.
  • Today’s scientific truth is founded on the notion of exact and objective facts, but poetic truth stands on an interior (emotional) consonance with the story or poem. “It is not addressed first to the brain … [myth] talks directly to the feeling system.”
  • “epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers.”5 Truth and reality were hidden in speech, stories, and narration.
  • Ancient philosophy, just as science would later, tries to find constancy, constants, quantities, inalterabilities. Science seeks (creates?) order and neglects everything else as much as it can. In their own experiences, everyone knows that life is not like that,
  • Just as scientists do today, artists drew images of the world that were representative, and therefore symbolic, picturelike, and simplifying (but thus also misleading), just like scientific models, which often do not strive to be “realistic.”
  • general? In the end, poetry could be more sensitive to the truth than the philosophical method or, later, the scientific method. “Tragic poems, in virtue of their subject matter and their social function, are likely to confront and explore problems about human beings and luck that a philosophical text might be able to omit or avoid.”8
Javier E

The first social media suicide | News | The Guardian - 0 views

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  • Océane was oppressed by the trite and uncaring relations she observed between human beings. She poured scorn on the empty flirtation of social media, their desperate popularity theatre. She had no interest in the artificial animation of alcohol or drugs (though she constantly smoked cigarettes). The dulled existence of the Parisian suburbs, where no one seemed able to engage with anything consequential, depressed her (on the wall behind her as she made her last speech hung a poster with the words NEW YORK PARIS LONDON HONG KONG).
  • For a generation so fully embedded in social media, celebrity was not remote or atypical. It was latent in everyone. Schoolgirls debated with each other how they would deal with its burdens – paparazzi, extreme wealth, film-star boyfriends – when they grew up
  • . Social media, after all, supplied a publicity machinery with a reach and power previously available only to truly famous people, and now the condition of the celebrity was everyone’s condition. Suddenly everyone was broadcasting their life to the world, and measuring their worth on the basis of the libidinal pulses that came back – as only celebrities had before. Suddenly, the celebrity’s grief over privacy was everyone’s, and everyone was afflicted by her insecurity: do people realise there’s nothing behind it all except my own frail and disappointing humanity?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Océane’s death was also intended as a kind of detonation, which would “take out” others apart from herself. On their side, the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were also, let us not forget, bent on their own destruction: they, too, were suicidal. All these people were young, and nearly all of them had grown up in the racialised ghettos of Paris and Brussels. All of them felt some kind of despair about the reality they lived in Europe, and all of them, crucially, decided that the only significant asset they had, in their negotiation with it, was their own existence.
  • If mid-20th-century western societies achieved a startling level of consensus, it was due to their extraordinary expansion of the share in the social surplus – to which the destruction (by war) of previous wealth concentrations, and the transformation of “labour” into “jobs”, were essential
  • Today, as western societies reverse those advances and drift back towards 19th-century arrangements, it should not be surprising that the malaise of that era is returning, too. This malaise is felt most keenly by the young, who have seen nothing during their lifetimes save the progressive re-exclusion of the majority from society’s wealth, and who embark on adulthood with very little hope that they will be able to “make it” as their parents and grandparents did. They have a strong sense, in fact, that now-ageing generations have taken everything for themselves, bequeathing to the young nothing but the burden of their own sins.
  • Malaise takes on particularly acute forms in the Parisian suburbs, where work has been informalised and automated almost into nothing; in the most depressed areas, a quarter of young women and nearly half of young men are without jobs. But there too, unemployment is only a symptom of the wider casting-out from French society, whose would-be universalism disguises one of the most consolidated power systems in the western world
  • militant Islam is spreading among French youth not just through the radicalisation of Muslims, but also through the conversion of non-Muslims, who wish for themselves the activist power it supplies
  • It was not, in other words, that they were Muslim, and therefore they wanted to destroy reality and themselves; it was rather that they wanted to destroy reality and themselves – and to rediscover, in the process, some kind of chivalry and nobility – and therefore they embraced the trenchant power of radical Islam.
  • There are many moments in history when young people have dreamed of glamorous self-destruction rather than embarking, drearily, on adulthood. But those who actually die are the exceptions. Far greater numbers are touched by the same current of despair, but are nevertheless held back from the ultimate act by life’s natural defences. These survivors are not left unscathed, however. They live astride the line between life and death, harbouring a kind of sentimental envy for those who have gone.
  • I saw traits in her common to a lot of people these days – and possibly to myself, even if they are most pronounced in the young: she was subdued, serious, intermittently funny, distracted by constant electronic tics, slightly unavailable to herself. In so many respects, Océane seemed entirely normal, and I sensed that her online exploit, too, would become more customary over time.
tsainten

How the US went from having one of the worst Covid responses to being a global leader i... - 0 views

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  • . And the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan helped fund the vaccination effort too. According to the White House, there are now 70,000 sites around the country where people can get vaccines.
  • When Biden came into office, the country was experiencing about 3,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of new cases per day, only about 15 million people were vaccinated and there was a scarce supply of shots. To turn it around, Biden's team brought a fresh urgency and a desire to lean on the scientific experts who had been ignored so much in the previous year.
  • The Trump team disputes that there was no long-term plan, saying they handed the Biden administration the playbook.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "I have to say it's frustrating when they spend all of their time disparaging what we did. They say we didn't have a plan. We had 65 plans," said Paul Mango, a former Trump administration official who helped oversee the operation.
  • "He's impatient," Fauci said of the President. "He asks specific questions, 'Well, what about this? Why aren't we doing this? Are we doing the best in that?' In a non-confrontative way, but more of a way that's positively trying to get the best out of everybody."
  • But Biden met that goal on day 58 and upped the ante -- doubling the target to 200 million shots in 100 days, and then exceeding that number as well.
  • We have to always start with access, making sure that people can get vaccinated in places where they are comfortable and where they trust the people who are vaccinating them," says Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of the White House Covid-19 Equity Task Force.
  • In April, the Food and Drug Administration and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended temporarily pausing use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after rare, one-in-a-million, cases of blood clots were found. The Biden team insisted this would not affect their supply or vaccination targets, and the vaccine is now back in use.
  • In 100 days, the US has gone from being heavily criticized for its Covid-19 response -- with over 570,000 recorded deaths, the highest number in the world -- to the envy of the world on vaccinations, with an inoculation rate more than four times the global average.
  • "I don't think that people understand what's in it for them," said Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor at George Washington University who is a CNN medical analyst. Wen said she also thinks the administration should have prioritized teachers for vaccination earlier in order to help schools open sooner.
brookegoodman

The Personality Traits that Led to Napoleon Bonaparte's Epic Downfall - HISTORY - 0 views

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history

shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise and fall are one of the most spectacular in recorded history. The French general and statesman turned self-appointed emperor revolutionized the nation’s military, legal and educational institutions. But after some of his most audacious expansionist campaigns failed, he was forced to abdicate and was ultimately exiled in disgrace.
  • A close look behind the heroic portraits and beneath the gorgeous uniforms reveals some surprising things about the great little man. (He was small.) Perhaps most striking? The number of complexes he suffered from, including class inferiority, money insecurity, intellectual envy, sexual anxiety, social awkwardness and, not surprisingly, a persistent hypersensitivity to criticism. Taken in whole, these traits drove his stark ambition, undermined his grandiose endeavors—and ultimately crippled his historic legacy.
  • He became brutally aware of social barriers when, at the age of nine, he left home and entered the military academy at Brienne in northern France. His foreign origins, atrocious French (he had grown up speaking a Corsican Italian patois) and dubious noble status laid him open to the taunts of his schoolmates.
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  • He welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, when he was a month short of his 20th birthday—not just because he was a republican, but also because by removing class barriers it opened up new prospects politically and personally. But when he found himself in revolutionary Paris five years later, 26-year-old general Napoleon faced an alarming world governed by two things he had never had much experience of: money and sex.
  • The lure of making money briefly eclipsed his military ambitions as he speculated on buying and selling the properties of émigré or guillotined nobles, and importing often-smuggled luxuries such as coffee, sugar and silk stockings. Although his dislike of what he called “men of business” never left him, neither did his determination never to be short of ready cash. When he came to power he always had with him a cassette of gold coins. He also saw money as the key to achieving the goals he set himself, creating new institutions and building public works.
  • His sexual insecurity and distrust of women only deepened his unwillingness or inability to engage with others, hampering his diplomatic relations, which he saw as showdowns in which he had to be seen to win. He could never see that a judicious concession might win him greater advantages; had he prolonged the peace of Amiens by allowing Britain to keep Malta in 1803, for example, he could have used the respite to reinforce his position, rebuild France’s economy and his navy.
  • As appalled as he was by Josephine’s promiscuity, Napoleon was entranced by her supposedly aristocratic background. He would be even more excited by that of his second wife, the Austrian archduchess Marie-Louise. As she was a great-niece of the late Marie-Antoinette, he would refer to his ‘uncle’ king Louis XVI and reveled in the fact that his father-in-law was the Emperor of Austria.
  • He continued to build on this image so successfully that he could turn a less-than-glorious episode in Egypt into the stuff of legend and persuade many in France that he was the predestined savior of the nation. This enabled him to seize power and begin rebuilding France from the ruins of the Revolution.
  • While he was destroying the might of Austria, Russia and Prussia by his spectacular victories at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, he received reports from Paris that people were longing for an end to the fighting so they could get on with their lives. By then, his extraordinary luck, leading from triumph to triumph, had begun to make him believe his own propaganda, that he was the darling of destiny. Yet the aura of glory could not mask an underlying frailty.
  • While he was on the retreat from Moscow, a group of generals tried to seize power by announcing he had been killed in battle. The plot failed, but it revealed to Napoleon that his whole edifice of imperial glory had feet of clay. On hearing of his death, nobody reacted as they would have had he been a real monarch—by saying ‘the Emperor is dead, long live the Emperor’ and proclaiming his son’s accession to the throne.
  • He went on fighting a battle that was long lost, desperate for a resounding victory he believed might redeem what, for all the bluster, was his irredeemably low self-esteem. Ironically, it was only after he had lost his throne and was even denied the courtesy of being addressed as a monarch by his British jailers on the island of Saint Helena, that he managed to recover this and project an image of grandeur in defeat that still fascinates people today.
rerobinson03

8 Reasons Why Rome Fell - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...8-reasons-why-rome-fell

shared by rerobinson03 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The most straightforward theory for Western Rome’s collapse pins the fall on a string of military losses sustained against outside forces. Rome had tangled with Germanic tribes for centuries, but by the 300s “barbarian” groups like the Goths had encroached beyond the Empire’s borders.
  • 410 the Visigoth King Alaric successfully sacked the city of Rome. The Empire spent the next several decades under constant threat before “the Eternal City” was raided again in 455, this time by the Vandals. Finally, in 476, the Germanic leader Odoacer staged a revolt and deposed the Emperor Romulus Augustulus.
  • it was also crumbling from within thanks to a severe financial crisis.
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  • Constant wars and overspending had significantly lightened imperial coffers, and oppressive taxation and inflation had widened the gap between rich and poor
  • the Western Empire seated in the city of Milan, and the Eastern Empire in Byzantium, later known as Constantinople. The division made the empire more easily governable in the short term, but over time the two halves drifted apart.
  • Most importantly, the strength of the Eastern Empire served to divert Barbarian invasions to the West. Emperors like Constantine ensured that the city of Constantinople was fortified and well guarded, but Italy and the city of Rome—which only had symbolic value for many in the East—were left vulnerable.
  • With such a vast territory to govern, the empire faced an administrative and logistical nightmare. Even with their excellent road systems, the Romans were unable to communicate quickly or effectively enough to manage their holdings.
  • Rome struggled to marshal enough troops and resources to defend its frontiers from local rebellions and outside attacks, and by the second century the Emperor Hadrian was forced to build his famous wall in Britain just to keep the enemy at bay.
  • ineffective and inconsistent leadership only served to magnify the problem.
  • Civil war thrust the empire into chaos, and more than 20 men took the throne in the span of only 75 years, usually after the murder of their predecessor.
  • The political rot also extended to the Roman Senate, which failed to temper the excesses of the emperors due to its own widespread corruption and incompetence. As the situation worsened, civic pride waned and many Roman citizens lost trust in their leadership.
  • The Barbarian attacks on Rome partially stemmed from a mass migration caused by the Huns’ invasion of Europe in the late fourth century. When these Eurasian warriors rampaged through northern Europe, they drove many Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire.
  • In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army and killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the Battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378. T
  • 410, when the Goth King Alaric moved west and sacked Rome.
  • The decline of Rome dovetailed with the spread of Christianity, and some have argued that the rise of a new faith helped contribute to the empire’s fall.
  • Christianity displaced the polytheistic Roman religion, which viewed the emperor as having a divine status, and also shifted focus away from the glory of the state and onto a sole deity.
  • For most of its history, Rome’s military was the envy of the ancient world.
  • Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Roman citizenry, emperors like Diocletian and Constantine began hiring foreign mercenaries to prop up their armies. The ranks of the legions eventually swelled with Germanic Goths and other barbarians, so much so that Romans began using the Latin word “barbarus” in place of “soldier.” While these Germanic soldiers of fortune proved to be fierce warriors, they also had little or no loyalty to the empire, and their power-hungry officers often turned against their Roman employers
kaylynfreeman

The Land That Failed to Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-rules.html

Politics US policy

shared by kaylynfreeman on 20 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.
  • in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility
  • The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.
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  • During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
  • China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.
  • China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.
  • The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.
  • Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.
  • Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.
  • American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”
  • The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise
  • At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy
  • mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.
  • In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.
  • party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant
  • The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.
  • These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”
  • They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.
  • The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs
  • the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”
  • even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.
  • China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.
  • It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.
  • Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries
  • The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.
  • Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.
  • Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain
  • Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.
  • In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.
  • The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.
  • The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.
  • The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.
  • “The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”
  • “The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”
  • China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.
  • Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.
  • both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.
  • Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.
  • there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.
  • Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.
  • Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.
  • Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.
  • n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must
  • Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning
  • The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.
  • In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.
  • Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?
  • The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.
  • kaylynfreeman on 08 Feb 21
     
    "In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture - and that to survive and surpass the United States it must. Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump's America is in retreat while China's moment is just beginning"
Javier E

How Covid-19 Signals the End of the American Era - Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...merican-era-wade-davis-1038206

decline us collapse American Century history crisis trump culture pandemic

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.
  • Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history.
  • But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.
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  • At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.
  • For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”
  • As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.
  • Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.
  • More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding.
  • With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families
  • The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.
  • Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.
  • At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing
  • But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken.
  • The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.
  • COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease
  • s a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average.
  • The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care.
  • What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.
  • How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community?
  • Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy.
  • The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.
  • American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society.
  • That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.
  • even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.
  • The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat.
Javier E

Opinion | Rod Rosenstein Was Just Doing His Job - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...enstein-family-separation.html

conformity trump politics us government

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Rosenstein’s complicity in this machine was ugly, but it was by no means unique. Top officials at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services all played a role. They were all sowing chaos, inflicting cruelty and causing unfathomable trauma at the behest of a small, vicious cadre up top
  • his argument was this: The jail time for these misdemeanors was usually a matter of days. So why were these parents not being reunited with their children afterward? “What became clear,” he told me, “is that they never had any intention of reuniting them until the parent gave up and was deported, if ever.”
  • The federal judge in San Diego agreed, saying the government’s behavior “shocks the conscience,” that the separation policy violated due process and that all separated families had to be reunited within 30 days.
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  • But Trump’s policy was something altogether different. It was child abuse, plain and simple. “That’s why it’s so chilling,” Gelernt told me. “D.O.J. officials apparently declined to exempt even cases with a baby.
  • When the number of immigrants surged at the border in 2014, President Barack Obama responded by building more detention facilities and holding families indefinitely — though still together — and faced a legal backlash.
  • what galls Gelernt now, after seeing the Times report about the inspector general’s investigation, is that his suspicions were right all along: Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly told the local U.S. attorneys.
  • note what Rosenstein did not deny: That he refused his U.S. attorneys permission to automatically exempt undocumented immigrants with young children from prosecution.
  • what we have lately learned about Rosenstein is that he is a very canny political operator. He has a gift for threading needles that even a tailor would envy.
  • While serving in the Trump Justice Department, for instance, he wrote a memo recommending the removal of James Comey as the head of the F.B.I., and he later defended his boss, William Barr, after he misled the public about the results of the Mueller investigation
  • But he also had the presence of mind to appoint Robert S. Mueller in the first place — and, though he has denied it, to question Trump’s own presence of mind. (It has been reported that he suggested secretly recording Trump’s ravings in order to expose him as unfit to lead.)
  • when it was Rosenstein’s turn, he did nothing to stop government-orchestrated cruelty. Instead, he simply did his job.
Javier E

Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...omsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

doomsday Collapse rich prepper history crisis Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
  • In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
  • Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
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  • When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
  • Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”
  • Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co-founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. “Some of my friends were, like, ‘The breakdown of society is imminent. We should stockpile food,’ ” he said. “I tried to. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem.” I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common. “Lots of money and resources,” he said. “What are the other things I can worry about and prepare for? It’s like insurance.”
  • Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”
  • How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures,
  • “When you do that, it’s pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias,” he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios.
  • In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history.
  • A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).
  • Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”
  • In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
  • I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me
  • In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.
  • “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
  • The C.E.O. of another large tech company told me, “It’s still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event.” He went on, “But, having said that, I actually think it’s logically rational and appropriately conservative.”
  • “Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S., logistics, and weather forecasting,” he said, “and those systems are generally dependent on the Internet, and the Internet is dependent on D.N.S.”—the system that manages domain names. “Go risk factor by risk factor by risk factor, acknowledging that there are many you don’t even know about, and you ask, ‘What’s the chance of this breaking in the next decade?’ Or invert it: ‘What’s the chance that nothing breaks in fifty years?’ ”
  • “Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution,” he told me recently.
  • “People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”
  • By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”
  • many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.
  • The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled.
  • r the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said
  • Johnson said, “If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
  • “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
  • The movement received another boost from the George W. Bush Administration’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former Times reporter, who chronicled his turn to prepping in his book “Emergency,” told me, “We see New Orleans, where our government knows a disaster is happening, and is powerless to save its own citizens.”
  • Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid three million dollars for one of Hall’s condos. Allen said he worries that America faces a future of “social conflict” and government efforts to deceive the public. He suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed to enter the country in order to weaken the population. When I asked how friends usually respond to his ideas, he said, “The natural reaction that you get most of the time is for them to laugh, because it scares them.” But, he added, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”
  • d G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”
  • That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
  • If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “Trump Apocalypse.”
  • In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year
  • Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.
  • The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”
  • Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.”
  • Top to bottom, the island chain runs roughly the distance between Maine and Florida, with half the population of New York City
  • In a recent World Bank report, New Zealand had supplanted Singapore as the best country in the world to do business.
  • “Kiwis used to talk about the ‘tyranny of distance,’ ” Wall said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes convertible. “Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset.”
  • American clients have also sought strategic advice. “They’re asking, ‘Where in New Zealand is not going to be long-term affected by rising sea levels?’ ”
  • In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.”
  • An American hedge-fund manager in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic—recently bought two houses in New Zealand and acquired local residency. He agreed to tell me about his thinking, if I would not publish his name. Brought up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, that he expects America to face at least a decade of political turmoil, including racial tension, polarization, and a rapidly aging population. “The country has turned into the New York area, the California area, and then everyone else is wildly different in the middle,” he said. He worries that the economy will suffer if Washington scrambles to fund Social Security and Medicare for people who need it. “Do you default on that obligation? Or do you print more money to give to them? What does that do to the value of the dollar? It’s not a next-year problem, but it’s not fifty years away, either.”
  • He said, “This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending.” He laughed, and added, “Unless I’m one of those freaks.”
  • Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.
  • Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
  • As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ 
  • As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the “larger circle of empathy,” he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. “The easy question is, How do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?”
woodlu

Just like modern humans, honeybees avoid each other amid plagues | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...-avoid-each-other-amid-plagues

social

shared by woodlu on 29 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • A recent study by Michelina Pusceddu of the University of Sassari, in Italy, and six colleagues found that honeybees in hives infected by parasites implement their own form of lockdowns.
  • They achieve a degree of compliance that human public-health officials would envy.
  • more bees succumb each year to the ominously named Varroa destructor. A parasitic mite, it attaches itself to bees’ bodies and helps itself to their stored energy resources.
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  • Bees live in ordered communities that depend on social interactions. Their hives are split into sections.
  • It enters a colony by hitchhiking on foragers, but needs to reach the nursery near the centre to reproduce.
  • Once larvae in mite-infested cells emerge as young bees, they carry the newborn parasites with them throughout the hive, infecting other bees.
  • authors set up six colonies, half of which were infected with the mite. They studied two common activities: the “waggle dance”, which forager bees perform to communicate the site of a newly discovered food source, and “allogrooming”, when bees clean debris or parasites (including mites) from each other’s bodies.
  • In the Varroa-free group, waggle dances and allogrooming both occurred throughout the hive
  • By contrast, in infected colonies, most waggling occurred by the sides of the entrance, keeping potentially infected foragers far from brood cells.
  • allogrooming was concentrated in the centre of the hive, where parasite removal had the greatest impact.
  • Limiting where waggle dances are performed could reduce awareness of where to find food, and focusing allogrooming efforts in brood cells may worsen forager bees’ hygiene
Javier E

Opinion | Social Media Makes Teens Unhappy. It's Time to Stop the Algorithm. - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...algorithms-kids-discovery.html

social media teens children algorithm culture policy US

shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • As our children’s free time and imaginations become more and more tightly fused to the social media they consume, we need to understand that unregulated access to the internet comes at a cost. Something similar is happening for adults, too. With the advent of A.I., a spiritual loss awaits us as we outsource countless human rituals — exploration and trial and error — to machines. But it isn’t too late to change this story.
  • There are numerous problems with children and adolescents using social media, from mental health deterioration to dangerous and age-inappropriate content
  • the high schoolers with whom I met alerted me to an even more insidious result of minors’ growing addiction to social media: the death of exploration, trial and error and discovery. Algorithmic recommendations now do the work of discovering and pursuing interests, finding community and learning about the world
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  • Kids today are, simply put, not learning how to be curious, critical adults — and they don’t seem to know what they’ve lost.
  • These high school students had become reliant, maybe even dependent, on social media companies’ algorithms.
  • Their dependence on technology sounds familiar to most of us. So many of us can barely remember when we didn’t have Amazon to fall back on when we needed a last-minute gift or when we waited by the radio for our favorite songs to play. Today, information, entertainment and connection are delivered to us on a conveyor belt, with less effort and exploration required of us than ever before.
  • What the kids I spoke to did not know is that these algorithms have been designed in a way that inevitably makes — and keeps — users unhappy.
  • A report by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that users could be served content related to suicide less than three minutes after downloading TikTok. Five minutes after that, they could come across a community promoting eating disorder content. Instagram is awash with soft-core pornography, offering a gateway to hard-core material on other sites (which are often equally lax about age verification). And all over social media are highly curated and filtered fake lives, breeding a sense of envy and inadequacy inside the developing brains of teenagers.
  • Social media companies know that content that generates negative feelings holds our attention longer than that which makes us feel good.
  • If you are a teenager feeling bad about yourself, your social media feed will typically keep delivering you videos and pictures that are likely to exacerbate negative feelings.
  • It is not a coincidence that teenage rates of sadness and suicide increased just as algorithmically driven social media content took over children’s and adolescents’ lives.
  • The role that social media has played in the declining mental health of teens also gives us a preview of what is coming for adults, with the quickening deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning in our own lives. The psychological impact of the coming transition of thousands of everyday basic human tasks to machines will make the effect of social media look like child’s play.
Javier E

Reading in the Time of Books Bans and A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...book-bans-humanities-ai.html

reading books fear types analysis evaluation history culture

shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • We are in the throes of a reading crisis.
  • While right and left are hardly equivalent in their stated motivations, they share the assumption that it’s important to protect vulnerable readers from reading the wrong things.
  • But maybe the real problem is that children aren’t being taught to read at all.
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  • . In May, David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods
  • As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?
  • While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.
  • There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.
  • the fact that the present situation has a history doesn’t mean that it isn’t rea
  • the reading crisis isn’t simply another culture-war combat zone. It reflects a deep ambivalence about reading itself, a crack in the foundations of modern consciousness.
  • Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.
  • Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.
  • Fun and fundamental: Together, those words express a familiar utilitarian, utopian promise — the faith that what we enjoy doing will turn out to be what we need to do, that our pleasures and our responsibilities will turn out to be one and the same. It’s not only good; it’s good for you.
  • Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment.
  • It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented
  • Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages.
  • His despair mirrors his earlier exhilaration and arises from the same source. “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”
  • Reading is a relatively novel addition to the human repertoire — less than 6,000 years old — and the idea that it might be available to everybody is a very recent innovation
  • Written language, associated with the rise of states and the spread of commerce, was useful for trade, helpful in the administration of government and integral to some religious practices. Writing was a medium for lawmaking, record-keeping and scripture, and reading was the province of priests, bureaucrats and functionaries.
  • For most of history, that is, universal literacy was a contradiction in terms. The Latin word literatus designated a member of the learned elite
  • Anyone could learn to do it, but the mechanisms of learning were denied to most people on the grounds of caste, occupation or gender.
  • According to Steven Roger Fischer’s lively and informative “A History of Reading” (2003), “Western Europe began the transition from an oral to a literate society in the early Middle Ages, starting with society’s top rungs — aristocracy and clergy — and finally including everyone else around 1,200 years later.”
  • . The print revolution catalyzed a global market that flourishes to this day: Books became commodities, and readers became consumers.
  • For Fischer, as for many authors of long-range synthetic macrohistories, the story of reading is a chronicle of progress, the almost mythic tale of a latent superpower unlocked for the benefit of mankind.
  • “If extraordinary human faculties and powers do lie dormant until a social innovation calls them into life,” he writes, “perhaps this might help to explain humanity’s constant advancement.” “Reading,” he concludes, “had become our union card to humanity.”
  • For one thing, the older, restrictive model of literacy as an elite prerogative proved to be tenacious
  • The novel, more than any other genre, catered to this market. Like every other development in modern popular culture, it provoked a measure of social unease. Novels, at best a source of harmless amusement and mild moral instruction, were at worst — from the pens of the wrong writers, or in the hands of the wrong readers — both invitations to vice and a vice unto themselves
  • More consequential — and more revealing of the destabilizing power of reading — was the fear of literacy among the laboring classes in Europe and America. “Reading, writing and arithmetic,” the Enlightenment political theorist Bernard Mandeville asserted, were “very pernicious to the poor” because education would breed restlessness and disconte
  • “It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Frederick Douglass writes in his “Narrative of the Life” recalling the admonitions of one of his masters, whose wife had started teaching young Frederick his letters. If she persisted, the master explained, their chattel would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”
  • “As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”
  • The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it.
  • Douglass’s literary genius resides in the way he uses close attention to his own situation to arrive at the essence of things — to crack the moral nut of slavery and, in this case, to peel back the epistemological husk of freedom.
  • He has freed his mind, but the rest has not followed. In time it would, but freedom itself brings him uncertainty and terror, an understanding of his own humanity that is embattled and incomplete.
  • Here, the autobiographical touches on the mythic, specifically on the myth of Prometheus, whose theft of fire — a curse as well as a blessing bestowed on a bumbling, desperate species — is a primal metaphor for reading.
  • A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards
  • Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.
  • Apostles of reading like to quote Franz Kafka’s aphorism that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” By itself, the violence of the metaphor is tempered by its therapeutic implication.
  • Kafka’s previous sentence: “What we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide.”
  • Are those the books you want in your child’s classroom? To read in this way is to go against the grain, to feel oneself at odds, alienated, alone. Schools exist to suppress those feelings, to blunt the ax and gently thaw the sea
  • That is important work, but it’s equally critical for that work to be subverted, for the full destructive potential of reading to lie in reach of innocent hands.
  • Roland Barthes distinguished between two kinds of literary work:
  • Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
  • he is really describing modalities of reading. To a member of the slaveholding Southern gentry, “The Columbian Orator” is a text of pleasure, a book that may challenge and surprise him in places, but that does not undermine his sense of the world or his place in it. For Frederick Douglass, it is a text of bliss, “bringing to crisis” (as Barthes would put it) his relation not only to language but to himself.
  • If you’ll forgive a Dungeons and Dragons reference, it might help to think of these types of reading as lawful and chaotic.
  • Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you.
  • Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive.
  • Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.
  • The point is not to choose between them: This is a lawful publication staffed by chaotic readers. In that way, it resembles a great many English departments, bookstores, households and classrooms. Here, the crisis never ends. Or rather, it will end when we stop reading. Which is why we can’t.
Javier E

Fun is dead. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...fun-is-dead

fun joy pleasure social media work US

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.
  • Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.
  • Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative
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  • Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, often sleazy sweaters.
  • Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.
  • Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. Look at me having so much FUN!
  • “I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”
  • Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all.
  • What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and over-apped, incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: babymoons and lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.
  • Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, a coach, a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.
  • Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.
  • “The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”
  • For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to several studies, it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.
  • Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “party coach” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.)
  • Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle holiday fatigue, relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.
  • Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation
  • Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon.
  • Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to Twitter (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.
  • Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots
  • “So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.”
  • His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.
  • Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure
  • ow do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite free time and “sports activity” (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.
  • “That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s “The Play Lady,” who organizes unorganized play for adults
  • Catherine Price, the author of “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,” believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”
  • To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,”
  • Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than libraries.
  • “We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”
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