09.29.08
Wrecking, wrecked
Wrecking, Wrecking, Wrecked
by Thomas Frank
A new era of American capitalism
Published on Monday, September 29, 2008 by American News Project
The End of Free-Market Fundamentalism?
video
But is it really? And where is American capitalism headed?
Amid the chaos and chatter about this week’s financial bailout, one clear theme emerged in some quarters: The era of free-market fundamentalism is over. But is it, really?
Olmert on territories
mxmail
Olmert says peace requires Israeli withdrawals
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ic6RWeorIMHJ_dmXOp7pIN3VWKiwD93GETMO0
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel will have to give up virtually all of the West Bank
and east Jerusalem if it wants peace with the Palestinians, Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert said in a farewell interview published Monday.
Strike-it-rich Wall Street
The End of the Strike-It-Rich Wall Street Culture
The Bailout and the Economy
By PETER MORICI
Read the rest of this entry »
Robin Hood-in-Reverse
September 29, 2008
And What to Do Instead
“Just Say No!” to the Robin Hood-in-Reverse Bailout
By JEFF GIBBS
Read the rest of this entry »
No on bailout
September 29, 2008
House and Global Investors Vote “No” on Paulson Bailout Black Monday?
By MIKE WHITNEY
Read the rest of this entry »
09.28.08
Invisible hand theories, markets, and economies
Having critiqued Wilson I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with the need for regulation. That’s not my point. Although I take seriously a number of left views on economies, I certainly would not reject out of hand ‘invisble hand’ thinking for the functioning of markets, not entirely. Note the distinction, economies and markets. The term ‘inivisible hand’ is loaded, and is, ironically, a design term like natural selection, used to refer to a supposed mechanical process. Be that as it may, the point, it seems, in Adam Smith’s reasoning is that attempts to overcontrol markets backfires. Leave them alone, more or less. Whether that is true or false, it applies to markets, not to economies which are generalized associations of economic agents in a cultural context. Those agents have policies and recommendations about how markets should function, and inject policy recommendations into the cultural economy, which then influence markets, on the basis of human decisions and/or consensus agreements in that cultural economy. The result, along with the institutions to accompany those decisions, are the ‘economy’, and that is larger than the market.
Thus an economy is a set of two schema:
1. the free agents who decide how markets should be set up
2. the resulting functioning of those markets.
Note how theorists omit factor #1, and presume to say that the mechanics of markets explains the whole. And then they presume to theorize freedom away in a statement of laws, and then, amazingly, apply all this to evolution in general. It’s not true that market mechanics explain that whole.
Consider the difference. Make a list of all the economies that have existed since, say, the Neolithic, or even the Paleolithic economies trading in obsidian. Note the relationships of factor #1 and factor #2. Note the obvious point. Purely capitalist ‘free markets’ have only existed since the Industrial Revolution. And the innovation we call capitalism, although gestating priorly, is thus a recent novelty, which resulted in part from the recommendations of policy agents. From people like Adam Smith. The trade inobsidian was probably the last unregulated market. With the rise of civilization the factor of regulation arises. The onset of capitalism was also associated with decisions by economic agents to lessen that regulation, to create artificially ‘free’ markets. And that set of initial conditions is the result of decisions of policy. Thus, against the backdrop of history, capitalist free markets are the result of regulation, that brand of it called ‘deregulation’. Thus derugulation is itself a form or regulation. !!
The point is that we don’t have a single continuous stream called the ‘evolution of markets’, but a broken up cultural stream consisting of the intervals of particular economies setting up finite intervals of ‘markets’.
You must have two theories of evolution then: the evolution of markets and the evolution of the cultural economies.
This difference explains why we are suddenly puzzled when the demand for regulation arises. We are free agents who flipped the switch on free markets, and might well need to flip them off. It is we, in the cultural economy, who must judge the behavior of markets, and change our decisions about them accordingly. The initial conditions of those market laws, are, wow, human decisions of the economic agents themselves.
Consider the case of Milton Friedman, an extreme version of the market/economy fallacy. He has the best math to explain markets. But what is he up to? Fascist coup in Chile to set the initial conditions for the kind of market he prefers!! Talk about regulation!
The eonic effect, language, and the invisible hand
In trying to justify the invisible hand idea, Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism moves into dangerous terrain, The Invisible Hand of Regulation in the Evolution of Language. First, Arnhart is right to paint a more complex picture of Adam Smith whose views don’t correspond to those of most free market theorists, and his use of the term ‘invisible hand’ is marginal in his works, at best. It has been seized upon as a shibboleth, and notions he didn’t have.
Arnhart then embarks on some statements about the evolution of language that are completely false.
Smith speaks of how a man might be “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Thus, the idea of an invisible hand is the idea of an unintended order. Smith’s general argument is that all human institutions arise and change as systems of unintended order. It was this idea that Darwin picked up from Smith and the other Scottish philosophers as the basis for his insight into evolution as an unintended order in which apparent design could arise in the living world without the need for an intelligent designer.
Consider the case of language. In fact, Smith’s idea of the invisible hand as an unintended order was first stated in his essay on language–”Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages.” Language is an unintended order. Language is a highly regulated instrument for communication that has emerged from the verbal activity of millions of people over thousands of years without anyone having intended the outcome by deliberate design. So, for instance, those of us who speak English have inherited our language as a customary legacy of a long history of linguistic practices, and each of us contributes to the evolution of the English language by every utterance we make, without being able to predict or to intend the outcome. Our language has been enriched by a few great minds like William Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible and by the many small minds of ordinary people in ordinary speech.
This is a good example of the way Adam Smith’s original thinking about economies, whatever its merits, starts to become a universal generalization that is simply false. Now we have human institutions and language, both very different things, given the ‘invisible hand treatment’.
Consider first the evolution of language. It is false to say Darwin explained it. He confuses the ‘micro’ evolution of languages as they differentiate with the larger question of how language evolved as such. These are two different things, and we have no proof that ‘natural selection’, the invisible hand, could have produced such a complex new function in man. We have no proof that spontaneous order processes (what the blazes are those???) produced this function in man. Similar statements apply to human institutions. These again don’t just spontaneously evolve.
Here it is useful to give some consideration of the eonic effect, which shows some remarkable facts about the evolution of cultures and of language, indeed of art. We see that behind this invisible hand nonsense there lies a long-range ‘macro’ process or evolutionary driver that partitions into macro and micro levels. This macro processes touche on the issue of the emergence of institutions, and indirectly on the evolution of language. We can see, for example, that much of the linguistic art at the highest level springs not from spontaneous ordering, but from its association with this macro process.
Consider the Axial Age: a complex evolutionary acceleration associated with massive sudden advances in many areas, and much great poetry, for example, in the Greek Axial. This arises in tandem with the Axial interval and wanes immediately at the conclusion of the interval. This and many other examples shows us how the ratchet effect in development is accompanied by a macro driver. It is not spontaneous in the invisible hand sense.
It is important, essential to study the evidence of the eonic effect, because in the void of correct data, correctly seen, we will inject false explanations where they don’t belong and can do a lot of harm.
Questions of evolution are far more complex than we think and one reason the Adam Smith analogy gets so overused is that in our bewilderment we seize on a simplifying idea. And that is misleading oversimplification.
More from Wilson at Huffpost
David Sloan Wilson has second piece after his original The Invisible Hand ID Dead…, with commentary from Pigliucci, Arnhart, and here, here at Darwiniana, with a search box long list here
Pigliucci rightly criticizes the crypto-sociobiological arguments about human nature. And Arnhart in his strange inverted consistency seems right to point out the invisible hand mythology latent in Darwinism–he doesn’t call it a myth.
To Wilson, I would say you can’t change the rules in the middle of the game and still cling to Darwinian fundamentals. And in any case the application of Darwinism, or revised Darwinism, or any evolutionary theory to the context of an economic situation simply confuses the issue. But the discussion betrays the conscious/unconscious confusion of biological and economic theory.
Here is a comment I left at the Huffpost article site:
The polarization of evolutionary theory, Darwinism, along left/right lines here is confusing and counterproductive: the real issue is the hidden and incestuous match of classical liberalism and Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Trying to bail out basic Darwinism for post free-market ideology is a pointless exercise, Darwinism as such needs to be thrown out. The public needs to call the bluff on this attempted bailout of the maddeningly persistent Darwinism which left/liberals can’t see through or bring themselves to drop. Darwinism was always a peculiar clone of classical liberalism and invisible hand theories. Trying to make it safe for Huffington post liberals is an exercise in deceptive mental gymnastics.
Neo-Darwinism is dead. We should note that Pigliucci recently attended the Altenberg conference on evolution where a whole slew of post-darwinist theories came into the open. It’s over guys, OK? It would be nice if the liberal/left could get past the Darwin propaganda machine.
The clever fix of evolutionary theory in the work of group/kin selectionists, reflected in Wilson’s work, doesn’t on any account resolve the complexities of evolutionary ethics.
For a postdarwinian perspective seehttp://eonic-effect.net
and some commentary at Darwiniana blog
http://darwiniana.com/2008/09/21/if-the-invisible-hand-is-dead-so-is-darwinism-no-bailout-for-darwins-theory/
http://darwiniana.com/2008/09/21/darwinian-junk-theory-reaches-the-bailout-debate/
Would we be better off without the Darwin religion?
Debate: Would We Be Better Off Without Religion?
Atheist Media Blog
Dawkins site
http://atheistmedia.blogspot.com/2008/09/debate-would-we-be-better-off-without.html
Debate: Would We Be Better Off Without Religion?
August 19, 2008
St James Ethics Centre – Sydney, Australia
For the motion: Lyn Allison, Richard Ackland, and Vic Stenger
Against the motion: Ian Plimer, Suzanne Rutland, and John Lennox
While the world’s religions have inspired stunning acts of creation, they also have been implicated in some of the darkest deeds in human history.
If God cannot be blamed for such moments of evil, His priests and prophets at least have a case to answer.
So what might they say? That religion is unfairly blamed — and that we should look to other factors? Admit that there are problems but argue that on balance the good outweighs the bad? That there is no alternative; that people need religion like they need air?
http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/48233d8496b41f26/48dfb5de1ac39686/484573217c08a2f7/4e6bf3c4
Neo-Darwinism dead: an idea ready for take off
An idea ready for takeoff
by Ottawa Citizen
From Dawkins site
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/movies/story.html?id=b24ed389-0752-4cfd-8837-d6423abaab33
An idea ready for takeoff
Jay Stone, Canwest News Service
Meme is a word for an idea that takes off, relying on its power — there’s nothing as strong as an idea whose time has come, especially if it has a blog — to implant itself in the common consciousness.
It was coined by scientist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to account for such cultural phenomena as catchphrases. It has become a goal of the purveyors of new ideas that they will become memes, mostly because it sends one’s thoughts into the zeitgeist at atomic speed but partly, I suspect, because it’s also a good way to sell cornflakes.
“I’m a big believer in this concept of the meme: an idea that catches on in society,” Larry Charles was saying recently about his big new idea, which is that organized religion is a bad thing. “I think this has the potential to be a meme, to plant an idea in people’s minds that they haven’t had before. And in doing so shift the paradigm ever so slightly to start raising these questions.”
harles — whose long beard makes him look like half of ZZ Top — knows more than most about spreading ideas. He was one of the chief writers of Seinfeld, a TV show that was a fertile ground for catchphrases (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and later director of the Borat movie, which shifted a different paradigm, making us question what constituted fair play in the world of documentary film.
His new idea comes in the documentary Religulous, in which comedian/social commentator Bill Maher goes into the world of believers to question the bases of several of the world’s most prominent religions and to ask if, in fact, the very idea of faith isn’t just another way of saying you don’t want to think.
“Organized monotheistic religions served a purpose at one time in trying to explain us to ourselves and the world to us, and I think it’s kind of run its course,” says Charles, who adds that he agrees with Maher’s agnosticism.
“Now it is thwarting our need as a species to ask the relevant questions today.”
Whether Religulous becomes a meme when it opens Oct. 3 — and a bold notion it is, organized religion being one of the last taboos of serious inquiry — or just another drop in the bucket of documentary movies, depends on a lot of things, none of them especially predictable. Michael Moore, who is the godfather of this kind of aggressive, in-your-face filmmaking, hit the jackpot with Fahrenheit 9/11, a film that galvanized and coalesced growing public opinion about George W. Bush and his war on terrorism. But his follow-up, Sicko, a look at the ailing American health care system, disappeared quietly even though it seemed just as timely and addressed its subject with the same mixture of outrage, humour and a fondness for a little factual elasticity where needed.
A new Moore film, called Slacker Uprising — about Moore’s attempts to rally the vote against Bush in the 2004 election — was made available free this week on the Internet (at www.SlackerUprising.com), an example of how a desire for influence can trump even the money a filmmaker could earn from a commercial distribution.
The ultimate meme in the documentary world came from Al Gore, whose An Inconvenient Truth addressed the problem of the degraded environment at just the right time. Other movies — Leonardo di Caprio’s The 11th Hour, say, or the brilliant Canadian documentary Sharkwater about the disappearance of a species — didn’t ignite the same worldwide movement. The topic of teaching evolution in American schools couldn’t be more current, but Ben Stein’s movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed floundered in the cultural waters, meming only to the converted.
Religulous is extremely provocative: Maher is out in the world mocking people’s beliefs and Charles says, “My filmmaking philosophy can simply be boiled down to: try not to get punched in the face.”
It raises legitimate questions about the role of religion, both historically and now, and if it doesn’t catch on, Charles has another idea: he has a 14-hour cut of the film and a plan for a TV series of half-hour episodes. Every week, Maher could come into your living room to challenge another believer on how it is that God can hear everyone’s prayers, or why homosexuals are so feared by the devout.
At the very least, it would get people talking. Charles has been discussing Religulous with audiences at film festivals — a dialogue that’s not happening in organized religion. “There is no dialogue. This the way it is, and that’s that.”
Religion, perhaps, was the ultimate meme.
Keith Ward on God
Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, By Keith Ward
by Laurence Phelan
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/why-there-almost-certainly-is-a-god-by-keith-ward-942327.html
Gee on Reinventing the Sacred
Hail, ceaseless complexity
An argument that complex systems transcend natural law, and thus are symbolically sacred.
Reinventing the Sacred Read the rest of this entry »
Palin on evolution
Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy
Her faith views are strong and sometimes controversial. Her aides say she seeks to share but not impose her faith; her critics say she has ‘a fine-tuned sense of how far to push.’
Thurman plan
Robert Thurman outlines a plan for Tibetan autonomy in his book Why the Dalai Lama Matters
Fastest August Sea Ice Retreat On Record
Arctic Saw Fastest August Sea Ice Retreat On Record, NASA Data Show
ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2008) — Following a record-breaking season of arctic sea ice decline in 2007, NASA scientists have kept a close watch on the 2008 melt season. Although the melt season did not break the record for ice loss, NASA data are showing that for a four-week period in August 2008, sea ice melted faster during that period than ever before.
Mother Of A Goose
Mother Of A Goose! Giant Ocean-going Geese With Bony-teeth Once Roamed Across SE England
ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2008) — A 50 million year old skull reveals that huge birds with a 5 metre wingspan once skimmed across the waters that covered what is now London, Essex and Kent. These giant ocean-going relatives of ducks and geese also had a rather bizarre attribute for a bird: their beaks were lined with bony-teeth.
America’s Fall From Power
Common Dreams
A Shattering Moment in America’s Fall From Power
The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over
by John Gray
Read the rest of this entry »
Foreclosing on the Free Market
Foreclosing on the Free Market: How to Remedy the Subprime Catastrophe
September 28, 2008 It’s now official. In January 2008, the American Dialect Society selected ‘subprime’ as 2007′s Word of the Year. ‘Everyone is talking about subprime,’ said Wayne Glowka, a society spokesman. ‘It’s affecting all kinds of people in all kinds of places.’
Naming new species
gnxp
When someone finds an animal, vegetable or mineral new to science, the
discoverer gets the privilege of giving it a name. Most of the time,
it’s done soberly, responsibly and carefully — but not always.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94886658
Spreading crisis
RG mail
Few Good Scenarios in View as Crisis Spreads
By JON HILSENRATH, JOANNA SLATER and JUSTIN LAHART
The Wall Street turmoil is shaking an already-weakened U.S. economy
and could hit households and businesses in the form of fewer loans and
higher interest rates in the months ahead — in turn sending
unemployment higher and corporate profits lower.
Oil sands and devastation
RG mail
Will Canada’s petroleum boom be an ecological bust?
By Rob Gillies Read the rest of this entry »
Sweden could teach U.S. something about free-market values
RG mail
Vancouver Sun September 25, 2008
Sweden could teach U.S. something about free-market values
The bailout that is being discussed in Washington is similar to the bank
rescue package put in place by Sweden 16 years ago Read the rest of this entry »
Pakistani troops fire on US helicopters
RG mail
Agence France Presse September 25, 2008
Pakistan military fires at US choppers
Kabul — Pakistani troops fired at two US helicopters from the NATO-led force
in Afghanistan Thursday, causing no damage but accusing them of crossing the border amid escalating tensions in the area.
Read the rest of this entry »
09.27.08
The Old Testament: teaching the controversy
The current debate over teaching the controversy is the object, no doubt, of unreasonable obstruction from the Darwin establishment, who, however, are understandably afraid the resulting ‘controversy’ being taught will be one-sided, or directed solely at making Darwinism look weak while the ID gambit lurks in the background. But I think dialecticians, in the science tribe, should devise a genuine methodology for teaching the controversy. Religionists have gotten away too long with an uncritical stance on, say, the Old Testament, whose enigma is understood neither by scientific humanists nor adherents of Biblical faith.
IN the study of world history the history indicated in the Old Testament shows a structure, in among other things, its correlation (at its core period) with the Axial Age interval. This shows its direct association with the issues of the eonic effect, whose ‘evolutionary model’ puts this history in the rubric of ‘evolution’, as redefined in the method of World History And The Eonic Effect as ‘eonic evolution’.
So ‘teaching the controversy’ should work both ways. Religionists can challenge Darwinism, and scientists can attempt to annex the Old Testament/Axial phase as ‘eonic evolution’ in the general ‘eonic evolution’ of civilization via the drumbeat eonic sequence depicted in the eonic model/eonic effect.
[The argument is cast in the 'stream and sequence' terminology of the text, quid vide, but its basic meaning is that the 'cultural stream' of Canaanite/Israelite history intersects the 'eonic sequence' in the Axial interval.]
Selection from World History And The Eonic Effect
The Old Testament As Eonic Data
One of the most remarkable cases of the eonic effect is reflected in the Old Testament. Historians are beginning to close in on the Old Testament period, to produce an account that finally begins to make sense of the confusing history and scholarship here. Read the rest of this entry »
The Predator State
As markets tumble and prices soar, and especially as the wages of ordinary workers lag inflation, the free-market dogmas that have governed the country over the last generation are increasingly under fire. If markets are so good, how come we’re paying almost $4 for gas? If private enterprise does the work of the angels, what happened to all the good jobs?
THE PREDATOR STATE
How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too
By James K. Galbraith
Comes now James K. Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, to denounce and, he hopes, to refute just about everything you thought was true about the virtues of private markets. In “The Predator State†Galbraith argues that the Reagan revolution and all that followed was essentially a fraud. What remains of it? Nothing
Shiva seal: evolutionary enlightenment?
The previous post on ‘evolutionary enlightenment’ is ambiguous, and we are left with the question of the ‘evolution’ of the shaman, yogis, and a host of other types.
This cylinder seal is two millenia BCE, and shows us the antiquity of such practices. At what point in the Paleolithic did this evolve?
Source
New blog: the new evolutionary enlightenment
La nueva Ilustración Evolucionista / The new Evolutionary Enlightenment, new blog on ‘evolutionary psychology’.
The term ‘evolutionary enlightenment’ is dangerous usage in a landscape of so many rival claimants, from Buddhists to New Agers, to the word ‘enlightenment’.
It seems doubtful if (to cite the blurb at the site) this ‘enlightenment’ could be ‘darwinian’.
Kant, recall, asked ‘What is Enlightenment?’. Cagey.
Is moral freedom inside or outside of nature?
ID is ineligible for consideration as science because theories that allow for the possibility of forces outside of nature can’t be tested or falsified.
The question is meaningless unless someone can define ‘nature’.
Rather than consider the creationist issue on this, consider Kant’s approach: Is the ‘freedom’ required ‘ordinary moral consciousness’ insider or outside of nature?
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