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Everything posted by JayB
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-Where is the crisis? College has been getting more expensive for decades, and the percentage of people getting degrees has been increasing right along with it. 5% of the population was getting degrees at the civilizational apex that you lust after, and very few of them were women or minorities. Now 30% of the population is getting degrees, most of them are women, and there are more minorities enrolled in universities than ever before. This is armageddon? This is what I get in every single conversation I have with people. "X is getting worse." -No it's not. Look at the data for X. X is getting better." "Well, what about Y?" This isn't Panglossian, it's perspective informed by actually taking the time to acquaint oneself with history. Life is better in more ways for more people now than at any other time in human history, and we have both more wealth and more tools to deal with whatever problems we have than we've ever had before.
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Woah Duane Gish! Let's take these one a time! Let's take education for starters: Where's the crisis of access? When have opportunities for everyone to pursue a degree regardless of race or sex been better?
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Can't imagine why folks of a particular political persuasion ate this stuff up: ""Reality, of course, is different. Having lived in both worlds [the United States and Syria], I can tell you this in all honesty; I have never once encountered any problem here on account of my sexuality that I would not have encountered were I straight as an arrow. I have never once been attacked or beaten or even screamed at for being a lesbian in an Arab land. On the other hand, I have had dung thrown at me in America for wearing a hijab, been attacked and struck by strangers for being an Arab." http://dscriber.com/watch/3648-amina-araf-gay-girl-blogger-disappears-in-syria
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because, of course, you can't think of moments in our nation when neither obesity or hunger were systemic problem. There was a time - but all things being equal it was worse than the present. Cold war, race riots, more pollution, vastly more poverty all over the globe, imprisoned behind the iron curtain etc, etc, etc. No thanks. I'll take the present, fatties included.
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it's somewhat like claiming one can't think of better times than during the great depression. Perhaps you ought to consider the reality of others and stop ogling at your belly button. Do you think you can handle that? Well - there's tens of millions of Indians and Chinese who have to been lifted from poverty far more severe than anything people in the US have had to endure for ages since whatever recent economic golden age you are pining for, so no sale for me. When you are making these comparisons, you can't yank bits and pieces out of different points of time like you are at some sort of historical buffet to craft a utopia of your choosing. At least not if the goal is to make real comparisons between time A and time B, vs coming to the surprising conclusion that the present falls short of a time and a place that never actually existed.
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Voting for "effect." Effect in this case = establish. "affect" change would be altering or modifying the said changes.
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I can make plenty of determinations and use empirical data to support them, but whenever I get in these conversations with people and I start cranking through the litany of things that are better than they used to be at some arbitrary point in the past - the response is never to challenge the numbers but to assert that something like, say, having fewer women die in childbirth or the eradication of smallpox is not "good" in any objective sense, and then go on to cite the litany of problems that we now have the luxury (in my view) of worrying about. Like obesity. Exhibit A. Problem - yes. Better problem to have than chronic mass hunger or starvation? Yes. Next.
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"A Gay Girl in Damascus': how the hoax unfolded For months Tom MacMaster convinced thousands of readers – including some media organisations – that his hoax blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was genuine." Here were examine how events unfolded which led to the diary being exposed as the work of the a married American man studying at the University of Edinburgh: February 19, 2011: MacMaster posts the first item on the blog, pretending to be Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari. The first posts introduce the author as a lesbian of American and Syrian parents, born in the US and now living in Damascus. February to April, 2011: MacMaster gives sporadic updates from his character, ranging from political analysis and hard news accounts of the brutal repression of the country’s pro-democracy movement to love poetry and Mills and Boon-esque homosexual memoirs." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8572884/A-Gay-Girl-in-Damascus-how-the-hoax-unfolded.html Best Summary: "It would be nice if "Amina Arraf" existed. As niche constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a fiction – a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at No. 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each other's diversity." http://articles.ocregister.com/2011-06-17/news/29675338_1_lesbian-assad-bashar
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The question bears repeating: what kind of freedom allows the kind of massive growth and consolidation of wealth and power, the rigidification of class inequalities, and the near-paralysis in our ability to solve urgent and growing problems? What kind of freedom reduces humanity's better instincts and aspirations to "stuff" that the people with access can "appreciate" over a glass of wine (or coconut water) while computers and bond-traders decide how to run society? We've traded politics, progress, and the expansion of our definition of freedom for efficiency targets and "consumer choice" while real power becomes more concentrated and the access to education, health, space becomes more restricted to the ability to pay? Where does the will to solve problems that impact us collectively come from in this configuration? "Market democracy" has failed us; it's failed in the conflagration of the financial collapse, it's failing us in the deepening crises it's caused, it's failing us in our ability to address the mounting ecological catastrophe and in our ability to exercise control over a bloated national security state at home and abroad. Trading away an engagement with our collective future by narrowly defining freedom as lifestyle consumption is a grotesque perversion which you need to address Jay, if only through an explication of your irrational fear of "the mob" and your dogged defense of an increasingly indefensible status quo. Maybe we should just read each other passages from the Paul Ehrlich v Julian Simons debate from the 70's? No need to point out to a Critical Studies jockey like yourself that better and worse are incredibly subjective - but for me it's hard to look at any arbitrary point in the past and find someplace where I'd like to make time stand still, much less any time in history where the global aggregate of misery and suffering was lower. Market democracy has failed compared to what? Things worse relative to when?
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Odds of finding high scores for all of the stuff you cited earlier as being more important than GDP are much better for the top 20 than the bottom 20. Dredge up the scatter plot that shows an inverse correlation between the statistical aggregate of your choosing and all of the EFI scores and we then we'll be getting somewhere.
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The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can appreciate all that stuff *and* appreciate not having to travel to fro in a Dodge Stratus.
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Great scold of Pottery-Barn and boutique-produce Progressivism- hold thy tongue! I see the smoking ruins of a great many greater Seattle area dinner party conversations strewn about the ends of once languid and peaceful dinner tables* in your future. *tastefully distressed and constructed from timbers salvaged Quaker barns at an equalitarian community of local artisans.
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Oh, they most certainly did. We just called it deregulation, privatization, corporate offshoring, union-busting, and tax cuts. Too subjective for you? Guessing most of the time was spent parsing the gendero-lexical oppression encoded in the linguistic roots of the character between the words "union" and "busting"?
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Nope. The more easy it is to purchase, say, a superior Japanese made car without the Big 3/UAW making it harder or more expensive the more economic freedom I have. Agreed. Very concrete.
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-It's clearly subjective. In my personal definition, the less statutory restraints there are on your ability to earn and spend money in ways that don't directly harm anyone else, the more economic freedom you have. I meant specifically. Specific is one thing, objective is another. We're talking ideas here - so it's not like you're going to get an objective definition of economic freedom that's derived from the atomic radius of zinc and stored in a French vault next to the platinum alloy Ur-Kilogram. Didn't they cover this stuff in your many undergraduate Critical Studies symposia on "Problematizing the Heteronormative Reflexality of Conjunctions in the English Language," etc, etc, etc?
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Comeon Jay you aren't this dogmatic are you? Where does a business owner find information on the viability of a new method of promotions? Shit, most small business owners I know don't have the time to do in depth cube monkey level research. Per this paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1863466 and my personal experience, that's rare. I'd be particularly surprised at a liquor/beer store. anyways, groupon as a company is a scam Trial and error. Bet the farm on a single If you're the the type that will be the farm on a single Groupon promo you will probably be out of business soon anyways..
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-It's clearly subjective. In my personal definition, the less statutory restraints there are on your ability to earn and spend money in ways that don't directly harm anyone else, the more economic freedom you have. -The methods used to calculate the values plotted on the chart above can be found here: http://www.heritage.org/Index/
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The data look the same irrespective of what time period you choose to look at. The scattering of the individual countries about the regression-line will vary over time, but not the fact that when you look across the globe, economic freedom and prosperity are positively correlated with one another. Given the roster of countries at the top of the index of economic freedom - your odds of plotting economic freedom and any of the even-more-nebulous-and-more-difficult-to-reliably-quantify factors you cite above and finding an inverse correlation is quite small - but let us know what you find.
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Seems like a key function of any viable business is the ability to independently determine whether something is or isn't good for the said business.
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Given that all of the above were both present and had a more significant role before the reforms introduced under Schroeder were enacted - you'd expect the weakening of them under the said reforms to have undermined rather than enhanced their economic performance. Then it might be worth comparing Germany to another country with a similar set of policies - like Japan - and evaluate the extent to which they've established that they are the magic formula. Then perhaps extend the sample to Europe, or the entire world, and draw correlations between economic liberalism and economic performance....
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I think the actual chronology goes from war-time rationing and price controls, to full-tilt liberalization, to a gradual cartelization/socialization at some point in 10-20 years thereafter, followed by a round of liberalizing reforms initiated under Schroeder. Post War Liberalization: "The German Miracle: Another Look Germany has cut government spending and its economy is growing smartly. It's not the first time that market-friendly policies have led the nation out of crisis." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575461873411742404.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Schroeder Reforms: "Schröder Reforms Bear Fruit in German Recovery By Christian Reiermann Once the sick man of Europe, Germany is currently enjoying an economic recovery, with fewer people out of work and solid growth. And unemployment is likely to remain low -- largely thanks to unpopular labor reforms pushed through by the last chancellor, Gerhard Schröder." http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,528757,00.html
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""The White House issued a statement saying it was against a full repeal of ethanol subsidies, indicating it could use its veto power if the amendment continued to advance in Congress." That is all.
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We've covered this ground before in the campaign finance reform thread. The issue isn't "limiting state power", it's dealing with the huge disparity in access to it. It's not about tariffs, subsidies, and tax-exemptions on principle (at various times and places they've been the cornerstone of economic development), it's about who they benefit. As long as there is a need to enact and enforce laws, whether it's through a nation-state or the PTA, there will be incentive to rig the game. Since, at this point in human evolution it's obvious we still need laws and organizational mechanisms to express our collective will, promote our interests, and resolve conflicts, in other words engage in politics, we need government. Sorry, your market utopia is a pipe-dream. Power will exist regardless of the instruments through which it is exercised. Doing away with the modern liberal democratic state doesn't do away with power, it does away with the citizenry's capacity to curb it. Liberal democracies within capitalism at least offer the potential to limit the exercise of power by the economically powerful over the less powerful through oversight, regulation, etc. Drowning our government in the bathtub doesn't dispel power, it abdicates it to those who already have power in society. That our own government has been highjacked by capital doesn't mean government is essentially corrupt in principle, it means that greater balance need to be brought to the political field. But really, what did happen to the role of democracy in liberal thought, Jay? Are so cynical to think that the dysfunctional American system is proof of the corruption of any form of governance or are you so dazzled by the mathematical certainty of your models or convinced by the pure visions of wizened little Austrians that you're incapable of seeing how spectacularly free-market fundamentalism is failing us? I'd be the last guy to argue for dismantling the legal architecture of liberalism/liberal-democracy - it's good stuff. All I'm arguing for is getting rid of or minimizing as many of the instruments that the big monkeys "the powerful" can get their hands on to run to manipulate the market and/or society in a manner that's to their liking. Getting rid of prohibition, various exemptions from competition, and handouts of public money to private economic interests in whatever form would be a good start. I think that the key difference in our perspective is that I don't exclude people who get paid via tax revenues from the list of private economic interests who have an incentive to funnel as much of the public dough as possible into their own hands. Anyone who can look at a legislative session in California and conclude that, say, the Prison Guards Union is any less self interested than ExxonMobil has a primitive innocence about them that would make Rousseau do a double take. Is it *really* surprising that programs that ostensibly started out to help the little guy (in the dubious conventional narrative) - like farm subsidies - wound up being gorged on by massive agribusiness cartels? That programs intended to promote things like "home ownership" metastasized into a financial/construction cartel that siphoned off public money transferred the risk back onto the public till? Etc, etc, etc. Add "Energy Independence," "Home Ownership," "The Children," etc to the list of nostrums that scoundrels hide behind. Large concentrations of economic power can and will manipulate the levers within the political sphere as long as they have access to the control room. As I said, I don't have a problem with subsidies and other forms of protection on principle. No modern nation-state ever successfully industrialized without them. There are any number of fledgling industries and projects that could use the breaks currently turning into money shoveled into Exxon shareholders' pockets. How the money is used is a matter of transparency, oversight, and enforcement. None of these have been high priorities for a government captured, at least partially through campaign financing, by the very industries its supposed to regulate. Why assume the historical inevitability of a wind cartel or an electric car cartel because our oil companies have used policy to their advantage in the past? Look instead of the vast gains those industries made, recognize those resources could be better used elsewhere, limit fraud, abuse, and undue access to the political system, and get this fucking show on the road. I am, admittedly, a partisan. I think we do, as a society, have the capacity and the information available to make good choices in certain areas about where we can make investments in our future and guide industrial policies that can provide broad benefits to our society. It's not necessary to invoke the screaming meemies (CENTRAL PLANNING!) every time someone says this. The Germans have essentially "beat" the race to the bottom by investing in and "protecting" their workers and doing the opposite of what free market utopians told them they had to do. It's hard not to think we got duped. I supposed I'd have to disagree on the chronology. I think that the way things normally happen is that industries normally get big and prosper in the teeth of opposition from entrenched interests and their water-carriers in government - then use the same tools to secure protection for themselves. WRT to Germany - they're doing pretty well but that's generally being the case since the mid 19th century - the only exceptions being when they were busy waging war or happened to be stuck behind the iron curtain. They've cycled through a variety of economic regimes since the Iron Chancellor invented the welfare state as a mode of social control (think contemporary communists saw this for what it was more clearly than anyone else) back in the 1870's. There's quite a bit more to "The Wealth of Nations" than formal economic policy, although there are plenty of examples where the policies are so bad that no collection of humans could ever prosper under them.
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One more.. "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good." Same as it ever was.
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if only the "tolerable administration of justice" didn't cover slavery in all its many forms "From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own." " * There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished." "This disposition to admire, and almost to worship , the rich and powerful, and to despise , or , at least neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." ~same guy. I think you'd enjoy reading his stuff if you haven't already.