Decline of the Empire

Voting With Their Noses

Some sort of rant is in order here, but I'm not sure I'm up to it... Here we go.

The title came to mind as I reacted to recent CEPR post by Dean Baker called If the Economy Fell Into Recession, Would Anyone Notice? The quick and dirty answer is that most of those voting this year would ask

Are you telling me we're not in recession? Are you fucking kidding me?

And they would be right to ask those questions. There are lots of signs of an economic slowdown, and you can read the CEPR post for those. Here I'll quote the first and final sentences.

The prospect of Donald Trump getting the Republican presidential nomination is dominating media attention these days, with some cause, but this has meant that evidence of a weakening economy has been largely ignored...

And now the final sentences.

Anyhow, the spate of weak economic reports deserve more attention than they have gotten. It could be bad news for lots of people.

By the way, I actually don't think a recession is likely, just exceptionally slow growth. The use of the R word was click bait to get you away from the Trump stories.

Economic "weakness" (Dean Baker's word) could be bad news for a lot of people. Could be? Dean doesn't think an actual recession is likely. He only used the R word as click bait. 

Thank God for small favors!

The Revolution WILL Be Televised!

Despite Bernie winning primary after primary in western states, the mainstream media long ago declared Hillary the winner. She has their full support. Successful shills love the status quo.

Now, our beloved corporate-owned MSM has naturally turned their full attention to the all-important (to them) question of whether Bernie's supporters will vote for Hillary if she runs against Trump. The MSM thinks they will! (That's what I call a congruent output.)

Personally, I think many (if not most) of those young people supporting Bernie will not turn out in November to vote for Hillary. In fact, celebrity Bernie campaigner Susan Sarandon upped the ante. She was articulating the thoughts of some Bernie voters when she told MSNBC's Chris Hayes that she has not closed the door on voting for Der Trumpenfuhrer!

Chris Hayes was clearly taken aback by this Leninist heresy (heterodoxy?)

And why would she vote for The Donald? Because, if Trump were to win, the revolution would start immediately. Gil Scott-Heron was wrong. The revolution will be televised 

It's scary, but I no longer give a shit what happens. There is no X is worse than Y — it's all bad.

Or, as Jim would say, it's all good.

 

The Hillary Victory Fund

Having explored the neolithic roots of kleptocracy yesterday, I will descend into the gutter today to look at some of the consequences. We're talking about elites here. What kinds of things do these people do?

It will cost more than four times the average income in San Francisco to have dinner next to Hillary Clinton and the Clooneys there next month.

For two seats at the head table with Clinton, George Clooney and his wife, attorney Amal Clooney, at an April 15 fundraiser, a couple must contribute or raise a whopping $353,400 — a huge ticket price for a hard-dollar fundraiser.

The Bay Area fundraiser, hosted at the home of venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, is one of two events starring the Clooneys. On April 16, Clinton and the Clooneys will reunite at the Clooney Los Angeles mansion, where tickets cost $33,400 per person to dine at the table with one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples.

Both events raise money for the Hillary Victory Fund...

Hillary Victory Fund?

The Neolithic Roots Of Kleptocracy

Some time back I ran across a short paper called Cereals, appropriability, and hierarchy, which is an academic study of the origins of social stratification (elites, hierarchies) in complex human societies. That Voxeu summary is itself based on a more comprehensive study of the same name (pdf).

Back in the 1990's, I had looked into this subject through the lens of the great social scientist Gerhard Lenski. I also read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (1997). Quoting from the longer study (p. 10)—

Lenski (1966) sought to integrate functionalist theories ... with contact theories for explaining social stratification.  He contends that hunter gatherers were egalitarian because they could produce no surplus (above subsistence needs).

Considering technology as progressing from horticulture to agriculture to industry, he argues that technological advancement generates surplus of goods and services, and that social "power" then emerges to determine the distribution of nearly all of the surplus possessed by a society (p. 44).

Long story short, the emergence of "power" (elites, hierarchy, social stratification) followed from the creation of surplus in neolithic (early farming) societies. With surplus, there is stuff to steal (appropriate). By contrast, hunter-gatherers lived hand to mouth, and thus there was little (if any) social stratification in such societies.

Satisfied with this explanation of the neolithic roots of kleptocracy, I gave no more thought to the subject over these last 20 years. And then I came across the update to the theory referenced in the introduction.

Climate Change As Tragedy

I took an interest in anthropogenic climate change in the late 1990's, about a decade after James Hansen first testified before the U.S. senate about the dangers of global warming. It is now 20 years later, and Hansen's role in publicizing the issue has been much reduced. In 2016, Hansen can only make a video on youtube about the dangers of 2°C of warming and hope people will watch it. To date, about 30,500 people have watched it, including me. I've embedded the video below. You can find a transcript here.

The video explains the implications of a recent paper written by Hansen and 18 co-authors called Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming is highly dangerous (pdf). The paper compares what happened during the Eemian interglacial (~120 kya) to what is happening today, and finds many things to worry about (see the paper).

Threats To The Global Economy

I thought you might find this amusing. This is the Economist Intelligence List of threats to the global economy for April, 2016. The colored circle (w/score) denotes the "intensity" of the threat.

As we would expect, the ongoing and dramatic global temperature spike in 2016 did not make the list, but Donald Trump did 

It was so hot last month that large parts of the Arctic averaged more than 18°F (10°C) above normal. Not only did last month easily set the record for lowest February Arctic sea ice extent, as the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reported, but Arctic sea ice growth has been almost flat for over a month during a time when it normally soars to its annual maximum (2nd graph below).

•  China experiences a hard landing
•  Russia's interventions in Ukraine and Syria precede a new "cold war"
•  Currency volatility culminates in an emerging markets corporate debt crisis
•  Beset by external and internal pressures, the EU begins to fracture
•  "Grexit" is followed by a euro zone break-up
•  Donald Trump wins the US presidential election
•  The rising threat of jihadi terrorism destabilises the global economy
•  The UK votes to leave the EU
•  Chinese expansionism prompts a clash of arms in the South China Sea
•  A collapse in investment in the oil sector prompts a future oil price shock

Maybe That Was A Mistake

I'm thinking I made a mistake publishing that updated Flatland model without any context. I read that silly New Yorker article and thought "this is ridiculous! Surely we can do better than that nonsense."

I assumed that if folks had actually read and (to some large extent) understood the first three Flatland essays, that model I put up and briefly explained would make sense, at least upon some reflection. I mean, we already know what confirmation bias is, right? We know about filtering of threatening information, right? And so on.

Now I'm not so sure that was a good assumption to make.

What I know for sure is that anyone who hadn't read and thought about those Flatland essays would think I'm some kind of nut job. Which is OK with me. At my age, there's little left to do on this Earth other than write this blog, play music and watch humans fuck-up. And in the United States, they're doing a lot of fucking up this year.

Here's jazz singer Gretchen Parlato. She's great.

Have a nice weekend.

 

How Do We Know What We Know?

I will quote from Jill LePore's After The Fact (The New Yorker, March 21, 2016 issue). She's talking about the views of Michael Lynch, who is introduced in this quote.

Most of what is written about truth is the work of philosophers, who explain their ideas by telling little stories about experiments they conduct in their heads, like the time Descartes tried to convince himself that he didn’t exist, and found that he couldn’t, thereby proving that he did.

Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”)

Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes.

It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know.

I Google, therefore I am not.

Lynch thinks we are frighteningly close to this point: blind to proof, no longer able to know. After all, we’re already no longer able to agree about how to know. (See: climate change, above.) Lynch isn’t terribly interested in how we got here. He begins at the arrival gate. But altering the flight plan would seem to require going back to the gate of departure.

My Flatland model is the gate of departure.

Capitalist Elites Want Cheap Labor

George Carlin thought religion was the greatest bullshit story of all time, and that's probably true. But in contemporary times, I think National "Public" Radio is the greatest bullshit story.

Get this — Not only does NPR consistently represent "establishment" interests while pretending to serve public interests, but it also gets the public (through its local affiliates) to pay for it! My local affiliate tells me every single day just how great "public" radio is. How could I possibly live without it?

These earnest local boosters know of course that some time soon now they will be begging for their jobs, and at that time they will repeatedly remind me that the outstanding, in-depth NPR programming they provide to the Pittsburgh area is very, very expensive.

And you know what? People do pay for it. I think that's a great bullshit story.

Today I will deconstruct some "free trade" bullshit from National "Public" Radio. I enjoy doing this kind of thing and it passes the time. This story is ostensibly about those Carrier air conditioning layoffs which made a political splash in February. I've included the video in the deconstruction.

Freudian Slip?

New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait is really, really put out about Donald Trump. He doesn't seem upset by the decades-long screwing of the American people which gave rise to Donald Trump. At least, he neglected to mention it.

Didn't I say something before about sowing and reaping?

Anyway, here's the last paragraph of Chait's story with an amusing psychological grammar lesson for you. Note the colored highlighting in the text.

A huge majority of the public finds Trump repellent. Some of his current unpopularity is the soft opposition of Republican voters who are currently listening to anti-Trump messaging from party sources and would return to the fold if he wins the nomination. But there is simply no evidence that the country that elected Barack Obama twice, and which is growing steadily more diverse, stands any likelihood of electing Trump. He can and must be defeated through democratic means. He is spreading poisons throughout the system that could linger beyond his defeat. Anybody who cares about the health of American democracy should hope for its end as swiftly as possible.

In the last two sentences, the only possible antecedent references for its are the system and American democracy, where "the system" is a clear reference to America's political system. 

Doing the substitutions, we get—

Anybody who cares about the health of American democracy should hope for [our political system's] end as swiftly as possible.

OR

Anybody who cares about the health of American democracy should hope for [American democracy's] end as swiftly as possible.

Freudian slip?

Think of Chait's "mistake" this way: America's political system is in hospice care and taking huge amounts of drugs to ease the suffering.  The media is doling out those drugs every day. That's the true meaning of our seemingly endless 2-year circus. America's current "democracy" needs to be put out of its misery as soon as possible.

I hope the end will be merciful, but I fear it will not be. Trump is an un-electable buffoon whose bubble will burst. Probably. It is Chait's hysterical defense of an utterly corrupt political system which is most worrisome to me. All these idiots will heave a sigh of relief when Hillary is elected. 

Oh, the irony! Chait is right about one thing: the dis-ease in American "democracy" will not end with Donald Trump.