Yes, Virginia, Rich People Are Not the Same as You and Me. They Cheat More. When middle class and low income people complain about the lousy ethics among what passes for our ruling classes, they usually shrug it off as jealousy, class warfare, and/or the sensationalism.
Guess what? Conventional wisdom is right. The video below from PBS (hat tip Scott) presents research by Dacher Keltner, Paul Piff, and other academics at UC Berkeley into absolute and relative poverty. Milton Friedman’s Distortions. Milton Friedman is quite a revered figure – among economists, conservatives, libertarians and some leftists – partly, of course, because he was a prolific economist, but also in large part due to his debating skills.
He is generally perceived as able to shut down arguments from the left with simple, easy to understand, often amusing one liners. However, I have always found him unconvincing, and here I hope to show why. There will be, of course, numerous conceptual disagreements which I will try not to discuss in this post: the phony market-government dichotomy, where government is some exogenous entity; the general idea that self interest will lead to the best of all outcomes; the invocation of the mythical ‘free market.’ Wall Street Hiring More Ex-Government Prostitutes Officials to Assure it Gets its Way.
The infamous James Carville quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” seems more applicable to official Washington than the much-maligned Paula Jones.
Ben White at Politico (hat tip Paul Tioxon) provided an update on the revolving door, Wall Street edition. It’s so mind-numbingly common for a government figure to land a job with some Big Financial Firm You Heard Of that it’s hard to keep track. Most of us notice only the really high profile examples, such as former SEC chairman Mary Shapiro taking a board seat at financial-services heavyweight General Electric. 3D Printed Guns (Documentary) America's poor kids. Not-So-Smart ALEC: The Right Wing vs. Renewable Energy.
Yves here.
This post is useful not simply for its discussion of the economics of green energy but also for showing how think tanks fabricate findings to support their political message. By Frank Ackerman, senior economist at Synapse Energy Economics, and a senior research fellow at GDAE at Tufts University. Cross posted from Triple Crisis Renewable energy is clean, sustainable, non-polluting, reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, improves the health of communities surrounding power plants, and protects the natural environment.
Who could be against it? Answer: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobbying group that is active in drafting and advocating controversial state legislation. When it comes to energy, ALEC wants to speed up the permitting process for mines, oil and gas wells, and power plants – and to eliminate all state requirements for the use of renewable energy. The ALEC/BHI energy analysis begins with wild overstatement of the costs of wind energy. Washington’s Blog: War in Gaza = War Over Natural Gas? As Professor Michel Chossudovsky noted in 2009, gas may be a central reason for the war over Gaza as well: This is a war of conquest.
Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon’s Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21, 2007).The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline. (Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001).The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities.
(See Map below). Map 3. Blogs - Adam Curtis - HE'S BEHIND YOU. Jeffrey Sachs: Paul Ryan, American Values and Corporatocracy. My new book, The Price of Civilization, describes why America needs a "mixed economy," one where a more effective federal government regulates business and invests alongside the business sector.
The Bottom Line: Healthcare. Obama Administration Seeks to Strengthen Rupert Murdoch. Lawmakers Call for Stricter Gun Control Even As They Subsidize Gun Industry. By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
You can follow him at One of the consequences of the tragedy at Sandy Hook is an ardent debate over gun control laws all over the country. In Massachusetts, for instance, which has an assault weapons ban, Governor Deval Patrick, along with members of the legislature, is now trying to figure out how to close gun loopholes. Rep. David Linsky says he wants to go over “every single line, every single comma of our gun laws” to prevent ownership of the kinds of gun used in Connecticut. Blogs - Adam Curtis - HOW TO KILL A RATIONAL PEASANT. Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.