Decline of the Empire

Who's In Charge? — Michael Gazzaniga On Free Will

I've been doing some thinking over the last few weeks, and I've decided a few things—I am exercising whatever free will have

First, I am no longer interested in describing this predictable human atrocity or that one. I have done that lately out of feelings of overwhelming disgust, a typical human emotion. Political corruption? Destruction of the biosphere? Grotesque income and wealth inequality everywhere? Grinding, hopeless poverty in the "wealthy nations" (United States and Europe)? Partying Davos elites planning our future?

We all know about these ongoing human-caused catastrophes, and, predictably, they are all getting worse in what is now a global economy. Does more need to be said about how disgusting all this is?

No. Fuck that.

The only subject now worth my time is trying to explain how the human animal functions. In so doing, one attempts to explain to other "conscious" people why the human condition is basically a crock of shit. The few people who "get" that are the only ones worth talking to. Everybody else is part of the problem.

Toward that end, I would like to introduce the work of cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, who heads the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This Next One Is NOT A Joke

The Southern Education Foundation just released a report finding that 51% of American school children live in "low income" homes. Here's the WaPo version of the story (January 16, 2015).

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

That text is too abstract. Let's get real.

And when you read this next part of the story, if you are not heart-broken, then you don't have a heart.

Is This A Joke?

Read this New York Times article and then review Adventures In Flatland — Part II.

Also review my oceans posts covering this topic.

— Dave

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Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says

By Carl Zimmer

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

[Carl Zimmer, image left]

We may be sitting on the precipice of a major extinction event? May be?

A Simple Story

We live in complicated times, but I have a simple story to tell.

The phony housing boom in the U.S. went bust in 2008, two years after house prices peaked nationally.

The global economy went into severe recession because the global financial system is highly integrated, so massive bank fraud and bad debt rippled across the world's economies, crippling them in the process.

Central banks all over the world stepped in to re-inflate the global economy. The "stimulus" applied was massive and sustained.

Stimulus seemed to work for a while, especially in so-called "emerging" markets (China, India, Brazil, Russia, others). Those markets had plenty of room to grow.

The "mature" (OECD) economies never did bounce back, despite millions of mindlessly optimistic references to "the recovery," the creation of millions of low-paying jobs in the U.S, and GDP growth based on a host of dubious factors. The EU and Japan are a total disaster.

In 2015, the re-inflation phase has run its course. Commodity prices (crude oil, copper, etc.) are dropping precipitously, indicating that growth in the "emerging" markets has nearly ground to a halt.

There is no new economic frontier to exploit this time around and further stimulus is pointless and probably harmful.

Next stop? No growth or contraction of the global economy, accompanied by much-dreaded deflation.

Is this story true? Maybe. It certainly has the ring of truth. Time will tell. The direction of the global economy in the near future (in 2015) is the kind of thing it is easy to be wrong about.

But I will tell you this: that simple story is the cause of all the economic anxiety the world is currently experiencing. There is lots of anxiety because many observers fear this simple story is true.

First Reference To A Bail-Out

I call your attention to the Bloomberg editorial America's Going To Lose The Oil Price War (January 12, 2015).

There's a lot of blah, blah blah about when (not if) the American shale oil boom is going to go belly-up.

At $40/barrel?

Flatland Chart Of The Day

Forgettaboutit...

By 2035, almost everybody is dead ... and it looks like the die-off starts just about now.

But there's Good News — AGW won't be a problem and neither will the Sixth Extinction

Well, I told you 2015 would be another Big Year in Flatland, and here's more proof of that.

Flatland Chart of the Day

Looking For Clues (Oil Prices, Penance)

I haven't mentioned the collapsing oil price on DOTE, mainly because I don't know exactly why it's collapsing—the global crude oil demand data I want to see isn't there to be seen.

And since I've said in the past that oil would never be cheap again, and at current prices, crude oil is indeed cheap, I must do some penance. Mea culpa.

Hence this post. Also, I seem to be in a posting mood.

I've been looking for clues about oil prices. Here's one, from Platts.

Filter Bullshit, Focus On Outcomes

I am still working in a desultory way on Adventures In Flatland — Part IV, but it's not nearly publishable yet. I'll finish it eventually, but I don't know when.

Still, some of the stuff I discuss in that forthcoming essay is worth looking at on its own. Today I will discuss an excellent article by Lawrence Mitchell called The wealthy suffer from an ‘empathy gap’ with the poor that is feeding a rise in inequality (The Conversation, December 8, 2014). Some of this text is from my forthcoming essay. I am not concerned with the "empathy gap" itself in this post (the "first" problem discussed in Mitchell's article).

Let's start with the "second" problem as referenced below.

Fairness is no longer fair

The second problem is with our laws. Many of our laws take some idea of fairness as their starting point, following Aristotle. We see justice as some notion of fairness in terms of how opportunities are distributed.

Our sense of what is fair is structural or procedural, assuming that everyone has access to the same resources or jobs and the individual freedom to pursue them.

But we can’t, or won’t ...

2015 Will Be Another Big Year In Flatland

I see that human nature did not change when the clock struck midnight on December 31st

Of the near infinity of examples I could cite to back up that statement, I will choose one. It's called The End of Endless Growth: Part 1 (Vice, January 1, 2015). The article, which is by Nafeez Ahmed, serves up some pretty standard doomer stuff, the main source of which is—

The Great Transition by Mauro Bonaiuti, an economist at the University of Turin in Italy. Bonaiuti’s book applies the tools of complexity science to diagnose the real dynamic and implications of the global economic crisis that most visibly erupted in 2008.

Applies the tools of complexity science? To what? To these guys?