The Math Scam

Only so much stuff can be forced inside human brain

By Stan Brin

Some of us are good at math, some of us struggle merely to get through it.

Whether we’re good at it or bad, few of us will ever again use anything we learned in calculus or trigonometry class ever again, not even once. After graduation, few will even be able to recognize such general terms as sine and cosine, much less be able to explain what they mean.

For those who want to become engineers, scientists or economists, math is the foundation of their careers. It’s vital, not to be questioned.

For the rest of us — and I include technicians and medical workers* among the rest of us — math is, more often than not, a painful and soul-breaking ritual that we are forced to endure if we hope to have a decent life.

The official line is that lots and lots of math is supposed to prepare us for work. It’s supposed to teach us to think logically. It’s also supposed to help America compete against Asian Tiger economies that are eating our national lunch.

Many Keynesians really hate the concept of liquidationism

I’m trying to grasp why

By John Aziz

Paul Krugman wrote:

One discouraging feature of the current economic crisis is the way many economists and economic commentators — apparently ignorant of what went on over the last 75 years or so of macroeconomic debate — have been reinventing old fallacies, imagining that they were coming up with profound insights.

The Bank for International Settlements has decided to throw everything we’ve learned from 80 years of hard thought about macroeconomics out the window, and to embrace full-frontal liquidationism. The BIS is now advocating a position indistinguishable from that of Schumpeter in the 1930s, opposing any monetary expansion because that would leave “the work of depressions undone”.

How Much To Save The Euro?

How much does it make sense for Germany to pay?

by Geoffrey Wood

Germany keeps being told that it must pay up to save the euro. But how much can Germany pay? No-one seems to have thought about that, but there is already concern about the possible size of bill – German bond yields rose soon after news of the Spanish bail out, even before it was announced where the money was going to come from. (And it was of course a bail out for Spain, regardless of what Spain’s prime minister says. If I borrow money and then lend it to someone else I’ve still borrowed it.)

There is though a more basic question. How much does it make sense for Germany to pay? What sort of bill would it be reasonable to present to them? In fact the best approximation one can arrive at is a bill of zero.

Why zero? What about all these exports that have been produced because Germany has a currency whose value is determined not just by Germany but also by less productive, higher cost, economies?  That link has artificially depressed the prices of German exports. These net exports resulting from Germany’s Eurozone membership are actually the problem.

Without change US will become a socialist nation

The Rest versus the old West

Moyo achieved a chemistry degree and MBA at Washington DC’s American University, a doctorate in economics from Oxford and a masters from Harvard before working as a consultant at the World Bank and then for nearly a decade at Goldman.

Economist Dambisa Moyo predicts in her new book that the West's economic dominance will collapse unless some very difficult choices are made.

By Andrew Cave

Dambisa Moyo is that rare type of person – an economist who makes waves. Her first book, Dead Aid, angered many in the charity sector by arguing that foreign aid has harmed Africa and should be phased out.

Her second, which is published in London on Thursday, accuses America and other Western powers of squandering their world economic dominance through a sustained catalogue of fundamentally flawed policies.

How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead goes so far as to predict that the US will be a “bona fide socialist welfare state” by the latter part of this century.

Peripheral Europe will never be like Germany

The End Of The Euro: What’s Austerity Got To Do With It?

By Simon Johnson

Most of the current policy discussion concerning the euro area is about austerity.  Some people – particularly in German government circles – are pushing for tighter fiscal policies in troubled countries (i.e., higher taxes and lower government spending).  Others – including in the new French government — are more inclined to push for a more expansive fiscal policy where possible and to resist fiscal contraction elsewhere.

The recently concluded G20 summit is being interpreted as shifting the balance away from the “austerity now” group, at least to some extent.  But both sides of this debate are missing the important issue.  As a result, the euro area continues its slide towards deeper crisis and likely eventual disruptive break-up.

No Peak Oil in Sight

We've Got an Unprecedented Upsurge in Global Oil Production Underway

The global oil boom underway represents the most significant increase in any decade since the 1980s.

By Mark Perry

In the tradition of resource economist Julian Simon, here are some of the conclusions and predictions from new research just published by Harvard Research Fellow Leonardo Maugeri, titled "Oil: The Next Revolution; The Unprecedented Upsurge of Oil Production Capacity""

1. Contrary to what most people believe, oil is not in short supply and oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption. From a purely physical point of view, there are huge volumes of conventional and unconventional oils still to be developed, withno “peak-oil” in sight. The full deployment of the world’s oil potential depends only on price, technology, and political factors. More than 80 percent of the additional production under development globally appears to be profitable with a price of oil higher than $70 per barrel.

A Guidebook for the Urban Age

Cities may rise and fall, but the concept of the city can't be unmade

By NATE BERG

The city is both ambiguous and defined, with endless quirks but also finite borders. It's housing and politics and slang and disease and a zillion other things, a fractal-like creature that becomes more complex the closer you look. Delving in is exciting but also a little intimidating. None of that dissuaded P.D. Smith, author of the new book City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, an impressively comprehensive look at this very broad topic.

Culture Matters

Why the West is Best

By Bruce S. Thornton

Occasionally, the mainstream media will let slip something that reveals the incoherence of multiculturalist orthodoxy. Not long ago, the New York Times reported on an Indian casino in California that had begun purging its rolls of members deemed insufficiently Indian. At the end of the story, an official from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, himself an Indian, remarked: “The tribe has historically had the ability to remove people. Tolerance is a European thing brought to the country. We never tolerated things. We turned our back on people.”

Such honesty about the Western origins of goods like tolerance is rare these days among the media, academic, and popular-culture purveyors of multicultural “diversity.” For them, other cultures are just as good as, if not better than, the West’s—but at the same time, these cultures allegedly endorse Western ideals such as tolerance, gender equality, human rights, political freedom, and the other universal boons to which people everywhere aspire. They deem it Eurocentric or racist to assert the superiority of the West because it originated those goods, even as they castigate the West for its racist, sexist, imperialist, and colonialist crimes. But as Ibn Warraq shows in his thoughtful and compelling new book, the ideals that even multicultural relativists profess have their origin and highest development in the West.

The forgotten man

There are still Hans Littens around the world today

by Hans Nilssen
In the Berlin courtroom, Adolf Hitler's face burned a deep, furious red.

The future dictator was not accustomed to this kind of scrutiny.

But here he was, being interrogated about the violence of his paramilitary thugs by a young man who represented everything he despised - a radical, principled, fiercely intelligent Jewish lawyer called Hans Litten.

The Nazi leader was floundering in the witness stand. And when Litten asked why his party published an incitement to overthrow the state, Hitler lost his composure altogether.

"That is a statement that can be proved by nothing!" he shouted.

Litten's demolition of Hitler's argument that the Nazis were a peaceful, democratic movement earned the lawyer years of brutal persecution.

Germany Has To Stay

Unscrambling the omelet

By Francois Chauchat

In his Reuters column last week (see here), and his recent Daily, Anatole argues that it may be more logical for Germany to leave the eurozone, rather than Spain or Italy. Germany is indeed the main outlier in economic terms; if it were removed, intra-euro zone economic dispersion would be much lower. However a scenario where Germany is the only country that exits is not just improbable—it is also undesirable:

·                     Germany has long been considered by the other Europeans as the main vector of reforms, and a catalyst for change in France and Southern Europe. While Germany hardly fits the Anglo-Saxon ideal of a flexible, free-market economy (although more so since the inception of Gerhard Schroeder's reforms), the country is a more acceptable model for Europe's laggards than that provided by the US or the UK. If Germany leaves, which textbook would guide the economic policy of the South? Mao's red book?

What Will Germany Do?

A choice of Break-Up or Break-Down

By Anatole Kaletsky

Now that the Greek election is over, with the pro-bailout parties gaining enough seats for a slim majority, Europe can return to the regular cycle of panic, relief, disappointment and renewed panic, that we have observed for the past two years. This time, however, the relief rally may be even shorter than usual, since the market's attention will soon shift from Athens to Madrid, Paris and, above all, Berlin. Since Greece has no chance of meeting its financial targets, the new government will soon need significant new concessions from the troika. Assuming that Germany resists such concessions, as well as the much larger ones that will soon be required by Spain, the fundamental contradiction of the euro project will again be brought into focus. A single currency can only be sustained within a fiscal and political union that can mutualise and monetize the debt— something that Germany refuses even to discuss.

People Matter

Merchants of Despair

by Bruce S. Thornton

A ruling idea of the last two centuries has been materialism: the notion, as arch-materialist Daniel Dennett asserts, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” One consequence of this belief has been the rise of antihumanism—the stripping from people of their transcendent value and a reduction of them to mere things in the world to be studied, understood, reshaped—and ultimately controlled.

The zombies are everywhere

When your Credit card stops working

By Bill Bonner

Florida; Nobody knows anything in Florida. They’re all retired down there. They don’t have to think anymore.

And one of the things they don’t think about very much is the zombie wars. You know what’s happening. The productive sector of our economy is being eaten alive by the unproductive, zombie sector — including many of those retirees in Florida.

Which is probably a good point to make a distinction. There are honest retirees…and zombies. The honest ones worked hard, saved their money…and now they live off the fruits of their own labor.

The dishonest ones live on disability…Social Security…bailouts and government contracts. That is, they live off the fruits of someone else’s labor.

“Hold on, Bill,” we hear you saying. “You can’t condemn a person for living on Social Security. After all, we all pay into the system. It’s not free. You have to earn it.”

Reason, Desire and Divine Intervention

Merkel, Party Of "Nein"

"Ah, nowadays we are all of us so hard up, that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay."

                                                                                              -Oscar Wilde
By Mark J. Grant
There are those that wait and hope and pray that there will be Divine Intervention. They cling to the belief that Germany, in the end, will back down and retreat and agree to bail everyone out. Germany’s GDP is only $3.2 trillion and this expectation, believed in by more than a few, is not only ridiculous in my opinion but a mathematical impossibility.  If you just take the example of Spain where $125 billion has been pledged to fix its banks and you put it in perspective the situation becomes clearer. As with many things, if they are discussed in the platitude it seems reasonable but when taken down to the hard numbers; a different opinion emerges. If you take just this $125 billion for Spain and consider that the United States has a GDP twelve times that of Spain and that the equivalent number would be $1.27 trillion which is $577 billion more than that was authorized by Congress for our TARP program then you begin to see the enormity of what is taking place in Europe. Next consider that Germany’s GDP is 22.3% of America’s and try to imagine what the troubled nations on the Continent are asking of Germany and why they keep saying “No.”

Fragile Things Have A Tendency To Break

Will German guilt overcome German fiscal responsibility?

By Jeff Harding

Europe is a fine example of the dangers of governments that become too involved with their economies. On the one hand their politicians try to “run the economy” and on the other hand they are fiscally irresponsible, the results of which harm economic growth. It is like watching a slow motion car crash in the making as these governments try to solve the problems they created.

 Last week that in the Rome mini-summit with Merkel, Monti, Hollande, and Rajoy, they agreed to promote a new round of funding for measures to stimulate economic growth to offset the “ravages” of so-called austerity. This €130 billion funding will be another waste of money, much of which will be German money. There is another summit this week. They are worried.

Making the World Safe for Islamism

What has the U.S. won after 30 years of intervention in the Mideast?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

Sixteen months after the United States abandoned its loyal satrap of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, to champion democracy in Egypt, the returns are in.

Mohammed Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, is president of Egypt, while the military has dissolved the elected parliament that was dominated by the Brotherhood, and curbed his power.

The military and the mullahs will fight for the future of a country that is home to one in four Arabs. The soldiers who have dominated Egypt since the ouster of King Farouk in 1952 show no willingness to surrender what they have long controlled of the state and economy.

Yet in the long run, the Brotherhood — whose claim to guide the nation’s destiny is rooted in a faith 1,400 years old — is likely to prevail.

Angela Merkel is no Adolf Hitler

Today’s radical anti-Merkel lobby echoes Margaret Thatcher, who also wanted to use Euro structures to neuter wicked Germany.

Politicians of the right and left, both pro-EU and sceptical, have united in a new strident campaign to make Germany submit and surrender any form of self-interest, economic or political, to the ‘remorseless logic’ of an overarching European Union. In other words, whether it likes it or not, Germany needs to fund a fiscal stimulus as a pain-free escape from the crisis. 

by Bruno Waterfield  

Austerity über alles?

Recently, the left British magazine the New Statesman decided to liken contemporary Germany to its Nazi-era predecessor. ‘[Chancellor Angela] Merkel is the most dangerous German leader since Hitler’, the NS claimed. ‘Europe’s austerians have blood on their hands. Suicide rates are up by 40 per cent in Greece; the birthplace of Western democracy is being remorselessly reduced to the status of a developing country.’

And not only does German economic policy literally kill people, it also fuels extremism. To sustain this absurd jackboot theme, the NS also blames Merkel for the rise of the far right across Europe. Germany, without a significant neo-fascist party of its own, is somehow at fault for being ‘relaxed about the rise of anti-austerity, neo-Nazi parties across the EU’. What is Merkel supposed to do? Invade France to fight Le Pen? Get the EU to outlaw far-right parties?

The New Statesman stops short of calling for military intervention – but only just – in a polemic that makes Merkel personally responsible for all Europe’s woes. ‘In denial and bent on austerity über alles, Merkel is destroying the European project, pauperising Germany’s neighbours and risking a new global depression. She must be stopped’, the NS says.

Anatole Kaletsky, a widely syndicated Reuters columnist, has also joined the campaign to force Germany to nourish the credit-starved Euro economy. Asking ‘Can the rest of Europe stand up to Germany?’, Kaletsky attacked the Germans for refusing to sign up to measures designed to save the Euro at the expense of Germany’s economy and political sovereignty.

‘One country poses an existential threat to Europe – and it is not Greece, Italy or Spain. Every serious proposal to resolve the Euro crisis since 2009 – […] jointly guaranteed Eurobonds, a pan-European bailout fund, quantitative easing by the European Central Bank – has been vetoed by Germany, and this pattern looks likely to be repeated’, he opined. ‘[The] question is not whether Europe will agree to live under German leadership, but whether Germany will agree to live under EU leadership – or whether the other nations must form a united front against Germany to prevent the destruction of Europe, as they have repeatedly in the past.’

Gene Transfer Is Neither Unnatural Nor Dangerous

The transformation of wild plants and animals into the foods we eat today is – by far – the single most dramatic experiment in genetic engineering the human species has undertaken

By Michael Eisen

Last week I wrote about the anti-science campaign being waged by opponents of the use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture. In that post, I promised to address a series of questions/fears about GMOs that seem to underly peoples’ objections to the technology. I’m not going to try to make this a comprehensive reference site about GMOs and the literature on their use and safety (I’m compiling some good general resources here.)

I want to say a few things about myself too. I am a molecular biologist with a background in infectious diseases, cancer genomics, developmental biology, classical genetics, evolution and ecology. I am not a plant biologist, but I understand the underlying technology and relevant areas of biology. I would put myself firmly in the “pro GMO” camp, but I have absolutely nothing material to gain from this position. My lab is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. I am not currently, have never been in the past, and do not plan in the future, to receive any personal or laboratory support from any company that makes or otherwise has a vested interest in GMOs. My vested interest here is science, and what I write here, I write to defend it.

So, without further ado:

Question 1: Isn’t transferring genes from one species to another unnatural and intrinsically dangerous?

The most striking thing about the GMO debate is the extent to which it contrasts “unnatural” GMOs against “natural” traditional agriculture, and the way that anti-GMO campaigners equate “natural” with “safe and good”.  I’ll deal with these in turn.

The problem with the unnatural/natural contrast is not that it’s a mischaracterization of GMOs – they are unnatural in the strict sense of not occurring in Nature – rather that it is a frighteningly naïve view of traditional agriculture.

The vast majority of the people are cannon fodder in this financial debacle

If It Doesn’t Work - Keep Trying It Until It Does

by Bill Buckler

Those running the big investment banks and trading floors today bear an uncanny resemblance to the generals on both sides of the conflict in WWI. There is an old military saying about the folly of fighting the “next” war by the methods of the last war. In modern times, the best illustration of the truth of that adage is what happened on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918.

When 1914 dawned, Europe had not seen a continental war for a century. Most of the generals and the vast majority of their political masters on both sides had not noticed that the years since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 had seen what was and remains the greatest technological revolution in the history of the world. Both sides had seen the US Civil War of 1861-65, a war which proved beyond all shadow of a doubt that a frontal assault on an established defensive position was almost guaranteed to fail. Both sides completely ignored the lesson. The literal “cannon fodder” on both sides paid a gruesome price.

The result of this stubborn ignorance, as the history books so voluminously recount, was the antithesis of “bliss”. It was mass carnage. When an attack by 50,000 men proved impotent to the task, the numbers were raised to 100,000 and then 250,000. When an hour of preliminary shelling of the target proved insufficient, it was raised to an entire morning and then to a day and then to the best part of a week. The “big” battalions got bigger and Bigger and BIGGER. The trenches proliferated. The barbed wire proliferated. The casualties proliferated. The destruction proliferated.

Free Market Ecology

The history of human civilisation has been one of triumph over the limits of nature

by John Aziz

These gargantuan global conferences where the emissaries of governments meet in hallowed halls to thrash out a global planning agenda — dressed in the clothes of ecology, or sustainable development, or whatever the buzzword of the day — are a waste of time.

They are a waste of time for the taxpayer, who has to stump up to pay for such efforts. They are a waste of time for the protestors who swarm to such events holding placards and shouting slogans. They are a waste of time for the ecologists who — whether right or wrong — believe that the present shape of human civilisation is unsustainable. Possibly the only group that really benefits are the self-perpetuating bureaucratic classes, who often take home huge salaries they could never earn in the private sector.

And the Malthusian targets of the bureaucracy have a history of missing.

The Guardian notes:

Rio+20 was intended as a follow up on the 1992 Earth Summit, which put in place landmark conventions on climate change and biodiversity, as well as commitments on poverty eradication and social justice. Since then, however, global emissions have risen by 48%, 300m hectares of forest have been cleared and the population has increased by 1.6bn people. Despite a reduction in poverty, one in six people are malnourished.

If these bureaucratic classes knew the first thing about economics or markets, they would begin to question whether such conferences — and all the promises, intergovernmental commissions, and regulatory pledges they spawn — are necessary. The more I question, the more I come to believe that all that is needed to halt any man-made ecological crises are free markets and free speech.

The history of human civilisation has been one of triumph over the limits of nature. While we have had our ups and downs, recent projections of imminent ecological ruin — such as those in the 1970s produced by Ehrlich and Holdren and the Club of Rome, or earlier by Keynes, Malthus and Galton (etc) — have all failed to materialise. But the trend goes back much further, into the distant past. Throughout our history our species has done what has been necessary to survive. Humanity has lived on this planet for upwards of 500,000 years, and through that time, we have survived a myriad of climate changes — solar variation, atmospheric variation, cycles of glaciation, supervolcanoes, gamma ray bursts, and a host of other phenomena.