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The Political Scientist Who Debunked Mainstream Economics. By David Bollier “Picture a pasture open to all.” For at least a generation, the very idea of the commons has been marginalized and dismissed as a misguided way to manage resources: the so-called tragedy of the commons. In a short but influential essay published in Science in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the story a fresh formulation and a memorable tagline. “The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” wrote Hardin, proposing to his readers that they envision an open pasture: It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible in the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land.

The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. Over the past several decades, the tragedy of the commons has taken root as an economic truism. Why We Hate Cheap Things. The Egalitarian Program in Broad Strokes. Some of my Twitter critics say I put too much focus on welfare benefits, neglecting other components of an egalitarian agenda. While it's true that I focus the most on welfare, this is because welfare is the best and most effective way to reduce poverty.

Nonetheless, to appease these critics, let us lay out the basic structure of a broader egalitarian program. When gaming out egalitarianism in broad strokes, I think the best concept to start with is the national income, i.e. all of the income produced by the people of the country. The national income is distributed out either as (net of taxes) market income or welfare benefits. The first plank of an egalitarian program is to reduce the market income share and increase the welfare benefit share. This is done by increasing the tax level and expanding welfare benefits. I tend to focus most of my time on how precisely to expand welfare benefits. The final plank of an egalitarian program concerns capital income. Prof-Stephen-Hawking comments on Science AMA Series: Stephen Hawking AMA Answers! History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. Your Wallet or Your Life. Two individuals — both infected by the single-celled parasitic protozoa Toxoplasma gondii — “showed prompt, dramatic responses” after being started on a two-drug cocktail.

One of the drugs was pyrimethamine, also known by its brand name, daraprim. A recent dramatic medical advance? Not quite. This report — one of the earliest reported uses of the regimen for toxoplasmosis — appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1957. Daraprim has been a first-line treatment for toxoplasmosis — a serious threat to the immunocompromised and to the newborns of infected women — ever since. But when Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli saw daraprim, he didn’t see an immutably inexpensive, age-old drug — he saw a gold mine.

As the New York Times reported on Sunday, the former hedge fund manager’s pharmaceutical startup bought the drug last August. The phenomenon of soaring pharmaceutical price tags is also not limited to the genus of the generics. The case against equality of opportunity. "While we don’t promise equal outcomes, we have strived to deliver equal opportunity.

" – Barack Obama "Instead of focusing on equality of outcomes, we should be focusing on equality of opportunity. " – Paul Ryan "President Roosevelt … said there's no mystery about what it takes to build a strong and prosperous America: 'equality of opportunity. ... ' That still sounds good to me. " – Hillary Clinton "The opportunity gap is the defining issue of our time. " – Jeb Bush Everyone wants equality of opportunity. The only problem? Moreover, equality of opportunity is simply a bad goal. We shouldn't want a better underclass. Implementing equality of opportunity would be a totalitarian nightmare Imeh Akpanudosen/Getty Images On her 25th birthday, Megan Ellison — daughter of Larry Ellison, the fifth richest man in the world with an estimated net worth of $50 billion — inherited a massive sum, rumored at as much as $2 billion, and used it to finance films and boost her career as a producer.

The Unselfish Gene. Artwork: Geoffrey Cottenceau and Romain Rousset, Flamme, 2009 In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene, “If you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” By 2006, the tide had started to turn. Harvard University mathematical biologist Martin Nowak could declare, in an overview of the evolution of cooperation in Science magazine, “Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world.

Thus, we might add ‘natural cooperation’ as a third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and natural selection.” Why is this deep-rooted belief about human selfishness beginning to change? The belief in rational self-interest is based on long-standing, partly erroneous, and opposing assumptions. Communication. The 15-Word Fix for Tragically Misguided Logic (Needism) By Jag Bhalla This is diablog 7 between David Sloan Wilson (DSW, head of the Evolution Institute and author of Does Altruism Exist?) And me (JB). 1. JB: Humans basically can’t survive without cooperating (~economics) and sharing resources (~politics).

Both of which risk a “rational” doom through “tragedy of the commons” thinking. 2. JB: Garrett Hardin popularized this rational parable of herdsman destroying a public pasture. 3. 4. 5) DSW: My related collaboration showed that the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all social species map nicely onto Ostrom’s principles. 6) DSW: Ostrom’s work on modern group collaboration converges with Boehm’s work on the genetic evolution of human teamwork. 7) JB: Ostrom’s work illustrates how unrealistic and unrational economist-style thinking can sometimes be. 8) JB: No prudent community can allow freedom to create foreseeable collective doom. 9) JB: Surely pitting self-interest against collective self-preservation is stupid and irrational. The sharing economy is bullsh!t. Here’s how we can take it back. The sharing economy is bullshit. Airbnb is a rental broker. Uber and Lyft are unregulated cab services. Taskrabbit and similar “servant economy” enterprises let well-off people pay less well-off people to do their chores — without providing anyone the benefits and security of traditional employment.

“Sharing” has been appropriated and stripped of all meaning by people trying to sell you things, much like sustainability was. A recent piece in The Nation indicted the so-called sharing economy on multiple counts: The sharing economy is a nice way for rapacious capitalists to monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous, and to evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.

Of course, platforms like Airbnb and Spinlister, an app for sharing bicycles, do demonstrate something positive: People are willing to share, even with strangers. And sharing, real sharing, is important. Hence this series. Class differences. University of California, Irvine, professor Paul Piff, PhD, starts his courses on class differences by asking students about their consumer habits: Do they shop at J.C. Penney or Neiman Marcus? What kind of car do they drive, if they drive at all? What is their preferred breakfast, a fruit smoothie from Starbucks or a Dunkin' Donut? "As people reconstruct their days, it's clear that in every single decision they make, class is an essential feature," says Piff.

The implications are larger than breakfast choice, he adds. But until the last decade or so, the concept of class has generally eluded psychological inquiry. Yet several factors make the psychology of class an increasingly important topic to study, some researchers say. Studying the psychology of class is also important because it puts a contextual spin on what has largely been an individually oriented view of psychological processes, says Michael Kraus, PhD, who studies class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hazel Kyrk. Hazel Kyrk (1886 – 1957) was an American economist. §Biography[edit] §Early years[edit] Hazel Kyrk was born in 1886 in Ashley, Ohio. She was the only child of Elmer Kryk, a drayman, and Jane Kyrk, a homemaker. She attended Ohio Wesleyan University from 1904 to 1906. She later received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. §Career[edit] Kyrk served as principal economist in the United States Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Home Economics between 1938 and 1941.

In 1943 Kyrk was appointed as chair of the Consumer Advisory Committee to the Office of Price Administration. §Death and legacy[edit] Hazel Kyrk died in 1957 West Dover, Vermont. §Works[edit] §[edit] Films - WE THE ECONOMY. Middle class Americans: Not so wealthy by global standards - Jun. 11, 2014. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) The numbers seem to back it up. Americans' average wealth tops $301,000 per adult, enough to rank us fourth on the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth report. But that figure doesn't tell you how the middle class American is doing.

Americans' median wealth is a mere $44,900 per adult -- half have more, half have less. That's only good enough for 19th place, below Japan, Canada, Australia and much of Western Europe. "Americans tend to think of their middle class as being the richest in the world, but it turns out, in terms of wealth, they rank fairly low among major industrialized countries," said Edward Wolff, a New York University economics professor who studies net worth.

Why is there such a big difference between the two measures? Super rich Americans skew average wealth upwards. Related: Where in the world are the super rich? This schism secures us the top rank in one net worth measure -- wealth inequality. Related: Rich, really rich, and ultra rich. Poverty Is Not Inevitable: What We Can Do Now to Turn Things Around by Dean Paton. The Economy: Under New Ownership by Marjorie Kelly. How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities. posted Feb 19, 2013 Employees at Equal Exchange, the oldest and largest fair-trade coffee company in the nation. It is also a worker-owned cooperative. Photo by Paul Dunn. Pushing my grocery cart down the aisle, I spot on the fruit counter a dozen plastic bags of bananas labeled “Organic, Equal Exchange.” My heart leaps a little. I’d been thrilled, months earlier, when I found my local grocer carrying bananas—a new product from Equal Exchange—because this employee-owned cooperativeme outside Boston is one of my favorite companies.

I happen to know a bit more than the average shopper about Equal Exchange, because I count myself lucky to be one of its few investors who are not worker-owners. Maneuvering my cart toward the dairy case, I search out butter made by Cabot Creamery, and pick up some Cabot cheddar cheese. Something is dying in our time. Like what you’re reading? Interested? Humans Need Not Apply. The Danger of Financial Jargon. The most important mystery of ancient Egypt concerned the annual inundation of the Nile floodplain.

The calendar was divided into three seasons linked to the river and the agricultural cycle it determined: akhet, or the inundation; peret, the growing season; and shemu, the harvest. The size of the harvest depended on the size of the flood: too little water, and there would be famine; too much, and there would be catastrophe; just the right amount, and the whole country would bloom and prosper. Every detail of Egyptian life was shaped by the flood. Even the tax system was based on the level of the water, which dictated how successful farmers would be in the subsequent season. But the priests were cheating, because they had something else, too: Nilometers. The world is full of priesthoods. Sometimes the language of finance really is obscure, and does hide the truth. The language of money works like that, too. Many people don’t have that advantage. A hedge is a physical thing. For the Love of Learning: John Oliver on the Wealth Gap and Inequality.

It Matters How Rich the Rich Are. John Aziz at The Week argues that it does not matter how rich the rich are. I believe he is wrong for a number of reasons. The Impoverished Do Suffer Because the Rich Are Rich Aziz opts for the Econ 101 move to take on the idea that we should want to know how rich the rich are (not unlike the old "grow the pie" saw): Focusing on how immeasurably rich the rich may be is putting the cart before the horse. The impoverished do not suffer because the rich are rich. Economics is not a zero sum game. There is not a predetermined amount of wealth in society to be divvied up and redistributed. This is a clever bit of rhetoric, but nothing more than that. Aziz's point is that we don't need to change the distribution in order to improve the plight of the poor because new wealth can be created that can do so.

In that scenario, we would have to say that the suffering of the impoverished could be lessened by 1) increasing production, or 2) changing the distribution. Assessing Government Policy. Bitcoin is Gamification. Sick of this market-driven world? You should be | George Monbiot. To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life.

It calls on you not to be ashamed. I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe. What About Me? We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identities are shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism.

Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Pocket: Log In. Followership. Followership refers to a role held by certain individuals in an organization, team, or group. Specifically, it is the capacity of an individual to actively follow a leader.[1] Followership is the reciprocal social process of leadership.[2] The study of followership (part of the emerging study of Leadership psychology) is integral to a better understanding of leadership, as the success and failure of groups, organizations, and teams is not only dependent on how well a leader can lead, but also on how well the followers can follow.[3] Specifically, followers play an active role in organization, group, and team successes and failures.[4] Effective followers are individuals who are considered to be enthusiastic, intelligent, ambitious, and self-reliant.[1] The emergence of the field of followership has been attributed to the scholar Robert Kelley.[4] Kelley[3] described four main qualities of effective followers, which include: Followership Patterns (Types)[edit] References[edit]

Money & Debt: Crash Course World History 202. Scientists: Rich People, Poor People May Have Shared Common Ancestor. Why do we value gold? Are Bitcoins and Unusual Hats the Future of Currency? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios. Why You Should Bribe Your Kids: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast. The Great Philosophers 8: Theodor Adorno. Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty – review. Why Everybody Who Doesn’t Hate Bitcoin Loves It: Full Transcript. THE FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHER: Foundations vs 'Castles in the Air' Collared or Untied: Reflections on Work in American Culture. The evils of meritocracy. Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World.

Why No Sustained Protests (Yet)? | Activism, Perspectives. Our Cubicles, Ourselves: How the Modern Office Shapes American Life - Rebecca J. Rosen. ‘Slomo’ ‘Slomo’ Three Rules to Make Sure Economic Data Aren’t Bunk. The Economy of Smallness: Making Economic Exchange a Loving Human Interaction by Abby Quillen. The Philosophers' Mail. Four Myths About Poverty - The Chronicle Review. In the Name of Love. Search Results | Minnesota Video Vault. All kids should take 'Poverty 101' Video: Dr. Donna Beegle | Watch Face to Face Online | KACV Video. All kids should take 'Poverty 101'

Criticism of capitalism. Poverty in America Is Mainstream. Are we witnessing an open source finance revolution? Economist Richard Wolff Debunks "Bar Stool Economics" Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks. Virginia Eubanks: Deconstructing the Digital Divide. Rich People Actually Don't Create The Jobs. The Myth of Virtual Currency. Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User - Ian Bogost. Michel Bauwens: Four Scenarios for the Collaborative Economy. A New Workplace Manifesto: In Praise Of Freedom, Time, Space, And Working Remotely. The Mental Burden of a Lower-Class Background.

Those People. The Myth of Virtual Currency. Richard Wolff on The Campbell Conversations | WRVO Public Media. Art as Therapy. Michael Sandel: Why we shouldn't trust markets with our civic life. Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim. Declining Faith in Hard Work and Capitalism. Bounded rationality. Cognitive bias. List of cognitive biases. Encore: Taming Capitalism Run Wild. THE ECONOMY: Time For Companies To Pay Their Employees More.

Companies Need To Pay People More. New Study of Foragers Undermines Claim That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots | Cross-Check. What Isn’t for Sale? - Michael J. Sandel. The Glory of the Commons by Timothy Noah. Economy and psychology. Riz Khan: Status anxiety in the age of austerity. Nick Hanauer. The Darwin Economy. How Class Works. The Cost of Inequality www.thersa.org/__data/assets/file/0019/1017208/20130221StewartLansley.mp3. Adam Davidson: What we learned from teetering on the fiscal cliff. Dan Pallotta: The way we think about charity is dead wrong.

02 - Epicurus on Happiness - Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. Ken Robinson - The Element. Machines Can't Flow: The Difference Between Mechanical and Human Productivity - Linda Stone. Beyond the Culture of Contest: Michael Karlberg. The Persuaders | FRONTLINE. Rachel Botsman: The currency of the new economy is trust. Bondsy and the Modern Myth of Barter. The Ascent of Money. A Crumbling Cultural Story by David Korten — Agenda for a New Economy.

Can There Be “Good” Corporations? by Marjorie Kelly. Cooperatives: A Counterpoint to Corporatism - Pt.1: Professor Stefano Zamagni. Marxian Economics - An intensive introduction. Wealth Inequality. The Problem of Corporate Purpose_Lynn A. Stout.