Journalisme. Journalisme. How Our Economy Was Overrun by Monsters and What to Do About It - Umair Haque. Simon Singh on TV: Libel Reform Campaign - Richard Dawkins. American Civil Liberties Union | My "top ten" books every student of International Relations should read. Last week Tom Ricks offered us his "Top Ten list" of books any student of military history should read. The FP staff asked me to follow suit with some of my favorites from the world of international politics and foreign policy. What follows aren't necessarily the books I'd put on a graduate syllabus; instead, here are ten books that either had a big influence on my thinking, were a pleasure to read, or are of enduring value for someone trying to make sense of contemporary world politics.
But I've just scratched the surface here, so I invite readers to contribute their own suggestions. 1). Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War. An all-time classic, which I first read as a college sophomore. 2). Combines biology and macro-history in a compelling fashion, explaining why small differences in climate, population, agronomy, and the like turned out to have far-reaching effects on the evolution of human societies and the long-term balance of power. 3). 4). 5). 6). 7). 8). 9). A 2×2 Grid to Understanding Some of the Ideological Concerns of Privatization, Especially as it Pertains to Parking. LA Magazine has a big profile of Donald Shoup, the economist who has been writing about the pricing and allocation of parking spaces. Matt Yglesias summarizes Shoup’s approach, and Peter Frase has sharp, additional comments about pricing parking for the left and left neoliberals to consider. I took a copy of Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking out from the New York Occupy Wall Street library a week before Bloomberg raided and destroyed the library, so it looks like I’ll have the time to really dig into it in 2012.
But there’s interesting implications about Shoup’s experiment for privatization and the allocation of government services we should discuss now. I have a longer essay on privatization that’ll eventually see the light of day, but for now I want to contrast two different parking space pricing regimes and turn them into a grid that can help us understand the issues at play. (In addition to the normal graphs and charts, Rortybomb 2012 is going to feature a lot more grids.) How Subsidized Capitalism Hurts Innovation. Last week I posted on our more active university blog about how subsidized capitalism damages both the funding and popular understanding of the central role of public services in building economies and societies.
The post was just a first poke for the new year into a huge hole in Anglo-American capitalism's theory of itself. This theory ignores the extent to which it has spent the conservative 1980-2010 period absorbing public resources into its own revenues. Most of this theory's public apologists denounce public spending, which has helped massively reduce their tax obligations -- tax avoidance has become a major profit strategy -- while justifying private appropriation as putting public money to better use. The New York Times has a good example of the problem. Caterpillar is spending $426 million building a new factory in North Carolina. It has gotten the state to pay $51 million in various incentives, including $5.3 million in direct costs to train future Caterpillar workers. The capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011.
AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy.
Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable. The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power.
The Zurich team can. 1. Who pays the Tesco CEO's wages of £6.9m a year? We do | Zoe Williams. The first time I heard the phrase "state-subsidised corporate super-profits" was last June, at a conference of the pressure group Compass, in a discussion about meeting child poverty targets by 2020 (the title was intended as a bleak joke, I think). Someone in the audience said that the very existence of "in-work benefits" was evidence of the government subsidising the bloated profits of huge corporations.
This was underlined by the arcane terminology – a "working family tax credit". Why a "tax credit" and not a "benefit"? Clearly, because otherwise some smart-Alec might have said that if a company is paying a worker less than it takes to break through the breadline, and that's legal, then there's something wrong with the minimum wage. However, this was a lefty conference, full of lefties, and this is the sort of thing they say. The next time I heard it, it was July and a reported observation, specifically about pay in supermarkets, from the editor of MoneyWeek, Merryn Somerset Webb.