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Two days ago I mentioned the " Goodbye to All That " essay by Mike Lofgren, a respected (including by me) veteran Congressional staffer who had worked for Republican legislators on defense and budget issues for nearly 30 years. If you have not read his essay yet, please read it now . And then, please return! Among the important aspects of his essay is that it goes beyond one now-conventional point of "the worse, the better" analysis: that the GOP's main legislative goal is to thwart Obama, and if that includes blocking proposals that might revive the economy, so much the better for the Republicans next year. More fundamentally, Lofgren argues that today's Republicans believe they are better off if government as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have "lost" the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are.
'People Don't Realize How Fragile Democracy Really Is' - James Fallows - Politics - The Atlantic
Editor’s Note : Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says he is surprised that customers weren’t more upset with Netflix’s digital shift. After all, he expected more upset, in his role as a pioneer, early in the game of forcing the digital shift.
The newsonomics of Netflix and the digital shift » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism
geography
A new Brookings Institution report provides an unprecedented glimpse into the lack of potential for transit to make a more meaningful contribution to mobility in the nation's metropolitan areas. The report, entitled Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America , provides estimates of the percentage of jobs that can be accessed by transit in 45, 60 or 90 minutes, one-way, by residents of the 100 largest US metropolitan areas. The report is unusual in not evaluating the performance of metropolitan transit systems, but rather, as co-author Alan Berube put it , "what they are capable of." Moreover, the Brookings access indicators go well beyond analyses that presume having a bus or rail stop nearby is enough, missing the point the availability of transit does not mean that it can take you where you need to go in a reasonable period of time.
Transit: The 4 Percent Solution | Newgeography.com
The government of Minnesota has shut down thanks to a $5 billion budget gap. Wisconsin public employees have been de-unionized so their salaries and benefits can be cut to close a budget gap. New Jersey just missed shutting down as a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor agreed that austerity cuts are needed (though there’s still going to be some wrangling over how the pain will be distributed).
The New Austerity and the EROI Squeeze « Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Is the austerity wave related to Peak Oil and a lower return on energy?
The classic and mainstream left position is: the current austerity wave is a direct result of the financial crisis and the need to bailout financial capital, and working people have to pay for this. Steady-state economists have a different explanation: the failure to extract cheap and abundant energy after Peak Oil, is the fundamental cause. This explanation means that even without a financial crisis and bailout, we would still face lower living standards.
Priorities in a declining empire « unsettling economics
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1954. “The Economic Crisis of the Tax State.” International Economic Papers, 4; reprinted in Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1991. The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press): pp. 99-140.
ScienceDaily (July 21, 2011) — For decades, scientists have known that DNA consists of four basic units -- adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. Those four bases have been taught in science textbooks and have formed the basis of the growing knowledge regarding how genes code for life. Yet in recent history, scientists have expanded that list from four to six. Now, with a finding published online in the July 21, 2011, issue of the journal Science , researchers from the UNC School of Medicine have discovered the seventh and eighth bases of DNA.
Researchers identify seventh and eighth bases of DNA
Elevation Partners co-founder and Facebook investor Roger McNamee, who is also a rock musician, gave an amazing talk recently where he goes over some of the biggest trends affecting the technology industry. Windows no longer provides measurable ROI to enterprises, who will shift spending to other products and services; this is a huge opportunity; Google is a victim of its own success: its search has become polluted by SEOs. What shows that Google has failed is all those "non-search" services that really solve a search problem, like Match.com or Realtor.com.
Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explains Why Social Is Over
Although the U.S. Constitution uses “Property” four times, it nowhere defines the term. What does it mean? I’ve been grappling with that question this summer, and been surprised to find commentators and cases arguing that “Property” counts as different things in different places. On some accounts, for instance, the word means only land in Article IV, § 3, general common law property in the Takings Clause, and all that plus welfare entitlements in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Giving constitutional property so many different definitions threatens the rule of law.
Agoraphilia
The most fundamental defining feature of the industrial revolution was that it made possible exponential economic growth – growth at a speed that implied the doubling of output every half-century or less. This in turn radically transformed living standards. Each generation came to have a confident expectation that they would be substantially better off than their parents or grandparents.
The industrial revolution as an energy revolution | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Jobs for a frugal economy
“What is needed is a way of creating jobs at less cost and use of oil. This could be done by encouraging the creation of sustainable ways of life by offering assistance to those who would like to live in the simpler, more cooperative ways that can be supported with renewable energy. The industrial niche is growing crowded even as it is being consumed with the depletion of the fossil fuels that made the Industrial Revolution possible in the first place. The opening we have is in the sustainable niche that supported human life prior to the industrial era, and will do so again after the fossil fuels are gone, and with the larger amounts of renewable energy that modern technology can make available on an ongoing basis. The cost of assisting those who would like to develop the sustainable niche will be small compared to creating jobs in the growth economy.Files are an outdated concept. As we go about our daily lives, we don't open up a file for each of our friends or create folders full of detailed records about our shopping trips. Create, watch, socialize, share, and plan — these are the new verbs of the Internet age — not open, save, close and trash. Clinging to outdated concepts stifles innovation.
Why files need to die - O'Reilly Radar
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India-China-Africa
Future
A surprising convergence result
Poor countries have access to new technologies already developed elsewhere so should grow more rapidly than richer economies. This is one of the implications of standard growth models, as well as of common sense. But in reality, there is no automatic tendency for economic "convergence" among countries at different levels of income. Convergence depends instead on a number of additional determinants. It is only those developing nations with the "appropriate" preconditions – for example, adequate schooling or physical investment – that manage to absorb new technologies sufficiently rapidly and therefore to catch up. In the language of growth economics, there is conditional convergence, but not unconditional convergence.The Tacoma Narrows Bridge completed in 1940 suffered catastrophic failure as a result of aeroelastic flutter. A few more words about failure, if you will. Some days ago in Complex Systems and Complex Failure I wanted to make the point that, while failures in complex systems may have simple beginnings, the actual collapse of the complex system is as complex as the system itself. There is a sense in which this is logically, even tautologically, true. A complex system can’t be said to have experienced catastrophic failure until it has been compromised across a broad range of functionality. H ere is my formulation from Complex Systems and Complex Failure :
Adaptation and Viability « Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon
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The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) - NYTimes.com
David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A.Income-Inequality
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (9781439266991): Kevin A. Carson: Books
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