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-rePost-Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Y2K, the Credit Crisis, and the Rosencrantz Fallacy

Scarlett Johansson sketch
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I think one big thing that is different here is that in most of those systems the snowball effect is less than in the financial system. But I have to say that I feel for the sentiment and hope that the small individual actions of each company/individual/Government end up to be enough to fix things!

But then it didn’t happen. January 1st 2000 went by, and pretty much nothing happened. While some people then pronounced that the whole Y2K thing had been a fraud, the truth was much more interesting and important. It hadn’t been a fraud; there had been real and consequential risks in important and complex systems. If those problems hadn’t have been addressed, many of the consequences imagined by the apocalypticists might well have happened. We could, in the limit, have been facing real breakdowns in societal fabric.
So, why didn’t the worst happen? In part what happened is this: People acted. While they were late, slow, stupid, and error-prone, they did what people do when a big enough alarm bell is rung loudly and long enough: They tried to figure out what they could do in the time they had to reduce their risk, and they did those things. They didn’t think other people would get there, but they knew they would.
Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed.

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-rePost–Seth's Blog: How big is your world?

I’ll pretend I have readers!hehe!
Guys let’s all try to help Jacqueline Novogratz and Acumen Fund in thier work!

My friend Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, is at the forefront of making the world smaller. She has the unique ability to combine the financial and the spiritual in a way that does justice to both.
Her new book, The Blue Sweater, publishes in the United States this week. It’s the work of a passionate amateur, an honest memoir of someone who has lived a life most of us can only dream of. When you read of Jacqueline’s experiences as a naive banker newly arrived in Africa, or her extraordinary efforts to connect people of similar spirit but different cultures, you can’t help but become emotionally involved in the positive energy that’s spreading everywhere.
It may seem like this book has little to do with what I write about all day, or what you focus on in your work, but nothing could be further from the truth. No matter what you do, the smaller world is coming to your doorstep. No matter how you spend your day, the living, breathing, interacting big world is going to touch your private one.
An anonymous donor has put up $75,000 in a matching grant–if you buy the book this week, $15 will be donated to Acumen (for each of the first 5,000 copies sold). I hope you’ll take advantage and order a copy today. Thanks.
Seth’s Blog: How big is your world?.

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rePost-Hope This Does Not Come To Pass-Foreign Policy In Focus | Asia: The Coming Fury

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I’ve admired Prof Bello for a long time. I’ve enjoyed stories about him tearing celebrity professors a new one(Celebrity professors/acamedics tend to be more in the communications field and tend to be less in the academic world!).But I sure hope he is wrong about this! Thanks to Angry Bear for the liunk

The Coming Fury
The sudden end of the export era is going to have some ugly consequences. In the last three decades, rapid growth reduced the number living below the poverty line in many countries. In practically all countries, however, income and wealth inequality increased. But the expansion of consumer purchasing power took much of the edge off social conflicts. Now, with the era of growth coming to an end, increasing poverty amid great inequalities will be a combustible combination.
In China, about 20 million workers have lost their jobs in the last few months, many of them heading back to the countryside, where they will find little work. The authorities are rightly worried that what they label “mass group incidents,” which have been increasing in the last decade, might spin out of control. With the safety valve of foreign demand for Indonesian and Filipino workers shut off, hundreds of thousands of workers are returning home to few jobs and dying farms. Suffering is likely to be accompanied by rising protest, as it already has in Vietnam, where strikes are spreading like wildfire. Korea, with its tradition of militant labor and peasant protest, is a ticking time bomb. Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago.
Walden Bello is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, and a professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.
Foreign Policy In Focus | Asia: The Coming Fury.

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Supply, Demand, and English Food

from Paul Krugman. His musings on bad English food.

So what does all this have to do with economics? Well, the whole
point of a market system is supposed to be that it serves consumers,
providing us with what we want and thereby maximizing our collective
welfare. But the history of English food suggests that even on so
basic a matter as eating, a free-market economy can get trapped for
an extended period in a bad equilibrium in which good things are not
demanded because they have never been supplied, and are not supplied
because not enough people demand them.
Supply, Demand, and English Food.

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Marginal Revolution: Sentences to ponder

The iPhone is a gadget that was released June ...
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I’ve been something of a nagger , telling friends to not mortgage their lives for “toys“. The newest cameras, laptops, other gadgets. Most think that doing what I was saying is a way of taking the fun out of their lives. This is not what I am trying to tell them.

Sentences to ponder
Recent research by economists Amy Finkelstein, Erzo Luttmer, and Matthew Notowidigdo suggests that you’ll get a bigger bang for your consumer buck by spending while you’re healthy, before old age starts to take the fun out of life’s indulgences.
Here is more. I worry about the asymmetry between gaining happiness and avoiding pain. Surely money for the young is better for the former but how about the latter?
Marginal Revolution: Sentences to ponder.

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Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others. In biographies of Cézanne, Louis-Auguste invariably comes across as a kind of grumpy philistine, who didn’t appreciate his son’s genius. But Louis-Auguste didn’t have to support Cézanne all those years. He would have been within his rights to make his son get a real job, just as Sharie might well have said no to her husband’s repeated trips to the chaos of Haiti. She could have argued that she had some right to the life style of her profession and status—that she deserved to drive a BMW, which is what power couples in North Dallas drive, instead of a Honda Accord, which is what she settled for.
But she believed in her husband’s art, or perhaps, more simply, she believed in her husband, the same way Zola and Pissarro and Vollard and—in his own, querulous way—Louis-Auguste must have believed in Cézanne. Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
“Sharie never once brought up money, not once—never,” Fountain said. She was sitting next to him, and he looked at her in a way that made it plain that he understood how much of the credit for “Brief Encounters” belonged to his wife. His eyes welled up with tears. “I never felt any pressure from her,” he said. “Not even covert, not even implied.” ♦

Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

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One Word Mood Changer Of The Day

Map of nations using English as an official la...
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A Thank You To Kottke here:
Mamihlapinatapai, a most succinct word.

It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…'”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.

Heartbreaking. I wish we had an English word for that feeling. (via cyn-c)

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Can't We All Just Get Along–Where is the love? — Crooked Timber

Barack Obama and Michelle Obama
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A part of me was reluctant to post this (I found this January 9), But then I realized nobody reads this blog and what the hell! Great read, in the same vein as the previous post about this same issue.

I think if the revolutionary Jesus of the New Testament ever thought his ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ message would be perverted and abused in this way, he’d have given us a few reminders like ‘judge not lest ye be judged’ or reminded his followers of the special power of religious hierarchy to corrupt. Oh, hang on, he did already!
I’ve sat with the Rick Warren inauguration thing for days, hoping to feel less angry and betrayed, hoping to see a chink of light in the reasoning behind it – anything beyond the tortuous over-thinking and callous calculation it betrays. I give up. Why couldn’t Obama give the people who voted for him one perfect day of happiness? God knows things are gloomy enough besides. And God knows too many people have spent the last 8 years excluded from the party. We live in a fully imperfect world the other 364 days, and reason says Obama can only disappoint us in the future, no matter how hard he tries. So why not share this one beautiful day of unadulterated happiness?
Here’s what it comes down to. The religious fundamentalists simply don’t want other people to be happy. The only joy they can conceive of is that which they allow. There’s no rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s for them. The law of their angry God is inadequate by itself, and needs to be enforced by the laws of men and the power of the state. Their joy is won only in a zero sum game. Sharing it destroys it. Why else do they fight so hard to exclude gay people from the ‘sanctity’ of marriage?
But we’re not two year-olds. We are grown-ups who know that sharing our precious toys doesn’t ruin them forever. If marriage is so great – and I think it is – then why hoard it? Why keep the light under a bushel? There is something so selfish and grasping about the religious right’s vendetta against gay marriage. It’s unworthy of anyone who professes to follow Christ.
I keep on keeping on in the Catholic Church, mostly because it’s what I was brought up in and where I most feel the pain and joy of just being alive. I’ve even been lucky enough to find a home from home in a Catholic community that not just welcomes but celebrates every person in it. But days like today force me to ask myself if it’s even the right thing to continue to associate myself with an institution whose leadership behaves so shamefully. If I believe Barack Obama should dissociate himself from Rick Warren’s Prop 8 hatefulness, what right do I have to keep going to a church I love but that doesn’t fully love all its members?
I can’t argue myself into it, or perhaps even justify politically and intellectually why I should go on enjoying my community of faith. But I do feel it comes down to the joy. The happiness for and amongst others I experience there, and the practical hope that I can keep on doing my bit (whenever I truly figure out what that is). Shutting down or shutting off that profound source of joy would make me feel the bad guys have won. The religious right don’t have a monopoly on happiness, and we shouldn’t let them think they can.
Where is the love? — Crooked Timber.

I’ve been trying to avoid this issue but reading the above quoted passage I’d like to write donw my views. Whenever I like to censor myself, or hide within my personal beliefs I sometimes have to read the xkcd comic about dreams and silently whisper to myslef FucK ThaT ShiT!

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