Afghanistan: Violating the prime directive again. Does Austerity Promote Economic Growth? - Robert J. Shiller. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW HAVEN – In his classic Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits(1724), Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch-born British philosopher and satirist, described – in verse – a prosperous society (of bees) that suddenly chose to make a virtue of austerity, dropping all excess expenditure and extravagant consumption. What then happened? The Price of Land and Houses falls; Mirac’lous Palaces, whose Walls, Like those of Thebes, were rais’d by Play Are to be let; . . . . The building Trade is quite destroy’d Artificers are not employ’d; . . .
Those, that remain’d, grown temp’rate strive Not how to spend, but how to live . . . That sounds a lot like what many advanced countries have been going through, after financial-crisis-induced austerity plans were launched, doesn’t it? Fable of the Bees developed a wide following, and generated substantial controversy, which continues to this day. Pandit Does Davos, 0.1% Gloat, Madness Reigns: Jonathan Weil. Sometimes a single fact stands out amid all the clutter, offering a flash of insight and clarity. Here is one of them: Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit is a co-chairman of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland. At first blush, the notion might seem almost ho-hum, a non-event. Upon further consideration, this looks like it can’t possibly be right. Then it turns out, much to our amazement, that the story is accurate, confirming once again that our world is stark mad.
You really have to wonder why anyone outside of Citigroup would pick Pandit to lead anything. It’s one thing for Citigroup to blow itself up so spectacularly that it needs multiple taxpayer bailouts to stay afloat. It’s stunning when you think about it: How does Pandit, who owes much of his fortune to the American public’s largess, wind up being showcased as a paragon of leadership and free enterprise, little more than a year after the U.S. Global Elites Right Man. Misplaced expectations for change in Israel Noam Sheizaf.
It is one of those peculiarities of the Israeli political system that right now, under a stable government and a strong prime minister, there is almost a consensus in the Knesset that a date for early elections will be called soon. Conventional wisdom suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to avoid the battle over the 2013 budget, especially since Israel seems to be facing the prospect of an economic slow-down. Add to that the possible electoral victory by President Barack Obama in the U.S. elections in November which could hurt the Israeli Prime Minister in the local polls, calling elections now seems like an easy way out (the other potential political game changer -- an attack on Iran -- will not be discussed here). Wanting to capitalize on his current popularity, Benjamin Netanyahu is having his Likud party hold its national primaries this week -- one he is likely to win.
Of all these developments, the last two have generated the most excitement. Why are so many Americans in prison? - Inside Story Americas. The US has the highest prison population in the world - some of whom have been subjected to lengthy sentences for relatively minor crimes. And that population has surged over the past three decades. Although there has been a slight reduction in the past year, more than two million people are either incarcerated in prison or in jail awaiting trial. The US has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, with 743 people incarcerated for every 100,000 Americans. No other nation even comes close to these figures. One explanation for the boom in the prison population is the mandatory sentencing imposed for drug offences and the "tough on crime" attitude that has prevailed since the 1980s. But it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes US prison policy. These long sentences are leading to an ageing prison population - with eight per cent of prisoners now over the age of 55.
A black male is seven times more likely to be imprisoned than a white male. Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America. A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades.
It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
Why are so many Americans in prison? - Inside Story Americas. The Nature of Oil: Reconsidering American Power in the Middle East. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. New York: Verso, 2011. Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Robert Vitalis, American Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006. For most of those who consider themselves politically liberal, oil—along with environmental degradation and foreign occupation—form a kind of political axis of evil on the American political landscape.
In the past few years, three new books in Middle Eastern studies have complicated this picture considerably. Robert Vitalis’ American Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier effectively destroys the notion that ARAMCO represented a benevolent corporation committed to the “social uplift” of its employees. Of the three books, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil makes the most far-reaching claims for the importance of oil.
Mainstream Economics as Ideology: An Interview with Rod Hill and Tony Myatt — Part I. Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John and Fredericton (respectively). Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com. Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington. Philip Pilkington: Your book seems to me a much needed antidote to the mainstream economics textbooks and can either be read alone or together with them. Tony Myatt: That’s correct. Delightfully for us, Mankiw replied to these students in his New York Times column, saying “I don’t view the study of economics as laden with ideology…It is a method rather than a doctrine….a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.” Our perspective is that there is an ideology that pervades mainstream economics, especially in the way it is currently practiced and taught.
The point is that it is more difficult to argue that there is a bias in neoclassical economics itself. Sadik J. Al-Azm: Time Out of Joint. There is a strong injunction in Arab Islamic culture against shamateh, an emotion—like schadenfreude—of taking pleasure in the suffering of others. It is forbidden when it comes to death, even the violent death of your mortal enemies. Yet it would be very hard these days to find an Arab, no matter how sober, cultured, and sophisticated, in whose heart there was not some room for shamateh at the suffering of Americans on September 11. I myself tried hard to contain, control, and hide it that day. And I knew intuitively that millions and millions of people throughout the Arab world and beyond experienced the same emotion. I never had any doubts, either, about who perpetrated that heinous crime; our Islamists had a deep-seated vendetta against the World Trade Center since their failed attack on it in 1993.
As an Arab, I know something about the power of vengeance in our culture and its consuming force. In the end, no. Terrorism, Joseph Conrad once wrote, is an act of madness and despair. Sanctions v. negotiations on Iran. (updated below – Update II) One of the most significant foreign policy controversies of the 2008 presidential election centered around Barack Obama’s pledge ”to meet separately, without precondition” with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. That seemingly off-the-cuff vow in response to a questioner at a July, 2007, Democratic primary debate was used first by Hillary Clinton, and then by John McCain, to depict Obama as naive, irresponsible, radical and — most ominously — overly sympathetic to America’s enemies (some liberal pundits echoed some of the same criticisms, while Mitt Romney is still trying to exploit that statement for those ends).
But we have now a great irony: America’s increasingly tense and dangerous conflict with Iran is characterized (one could even say caused) by the unwillingness of the Obama administration to engage meaningfully with Iran’s leaders. Should You "Friend" the Facebook IPO? The media hype is starting: Rumors abound that Facebook will soon announce plans to sell shares to the public. Whispers set a $100 billion price tag as a possible valuation for the social media giant; it would be the largest internet initial public offering (IPO) ever, and the fourth largest IPO of any type. Interest is intense; after all nearly 800 million users spend hours daily on the site, trading pictures, political banter, recipes, reconnecting with old friends and searching for new ones.
No website has captured the imagination and time of so many across the globe. Pundits say we can only imagine the advertising, data mining, and related revenue that could be generated. The value of networks, it's said, rises exponentially with their size. Facebook is a unique property and represents a unique opportunity for investors. Bottom Line Steer clear of this IPO. Growth is sure to slow. Avoid the Bubble Land Valuation Since growth is expected, compare it to other Internet leaders. David G.