RE: Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: utopianism??
No comrade, this is obscurantist thinking designed to distract us from stalinist mis-leadership of Proyect. Notice that he has told us to use power mowers, contributing to capitalist and state-socialist abuse of the natural environment. No mention of the merits of electric vs gasoline powered mowers not to mention green high tech manual mowers designed to same energy resources and improve the physical and emotional health of the worker-philosopher-poet. How could Proyect have fallen into such error!! -Original Message- From: Carl Remick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 2:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:29876] Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: utopianism?? From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] Any workers found reading Hal Draper will be buried up to their necks and a workers militia under the leadership of a tested commissar will drive over their heads with power lawnmowers. But what kind of lawnmowers, reel or rotary? Reels provide a better cut but rotary mowers produce better mulch -- hence, are probably the better choice if one wished to sustain, say, a red-green coalition. Carl _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
RE: Re: RE: PK endorses populism?
Is PK saying that radical ideas about economic policy fall within the realm of sociology and politics, i.e., outside the field of economic science, and therefore, in his quest of the ultimate prize for economic science, he can't afford to be distracted. Or is he saying simply saying that in pursuing radical ideas he would become politically black-balled from receiving the prize and he is too much of an opportunist to risk this? Or maybe both? -Original Message- From: Ben Day [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 9:21 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:29707] Re: RE: PK endorses populism? At 08:45 AM 8/20/2002 -0700, Devine, James wrote: Ben:[paraphrasing PK's possible thoughts] If one follows this line of thought one might well be led to some extremely radical ideas about economic policy, ideas that are completely at odds with all current orthodoxies. But I won't try to come to grips with such ideas in this column. Frankly, I don't have the time. I have to get back to my research - otherwise, somebody else might get that Nobel. J.D. - this was not a paraphrase, nor an attempt at humor on my part (god forbid) - these are Krugman's words from the article. Of course, they are an attempt at humor on his part, but one wishes in cases like this that he actually would draw out the policy implications. -Ben
The size of the bubble?
Here is a question for Doug Henwood or anyone else who may be able to answer. I apologize if this has already been discussed: In the stock market run-up in general, or for specific examples, e.g. Enron, World-Com, etc. 1] How much money was actually placed in the stock during the run-up of the stock by outside investors? 2] How does this compare with the capitalized value of the company at the high point of the stock? 3] For companies that ended up in bankrupcty what was the total transfer of outside investment into capital goods (perhaps now substantially depreciated) vs pure income transfers to corporate insiders? 4] To what degree has the bubble (aka new) economy been nothing more than an elaborate and calculated scheme to steal money from employees and middle class investors, or was it more fortuitous accident of history for those who got rich at every one else's expense? Anyone have estimates of these magnitudes? Have they been reported anywhere in the media?
RE: olds from the music front
Hey, as someone who is playing the Bach Brandenburg No.1 in a few weeks, I think his old music also is also still relevant (albiet at a more abstract level). In the early 1970's I had some connections to the G.I. antiwar movement. We connected up a group on the Corel Sea aircraft carrier with an anti-imperialist rock group and got their songs broadcast over the carrier radio station. Besides doing Woody Guthrie classics like The Banks Are Made of Marble (with a guard at every door), they had some original stuff. The one I liked the best was If Jesus Came to Berkeley (on a take care of business trip). -Original Message- From: Devine, James [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 12:12 PM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: [PEN-L:26247] olds from the music front It's amazing how old music is still relevant. I'm not talking about Bach, but about more profound (;-) country/rock music by singer-songwriter John Prine. I recently stuck his early-1970s album (named John Prine) and was hit by its relevance: there's a sad song about destroying Appalachia to get coal (Mr. Peabody's Coal train has towed it away.), a humorous one about the War on Drugs (Illegal Smile). There's a song about a drug-addict Vietnam War veteran (Sam Stone), which isn't quite relevant but still poignant. And there's a funny song with the following chorus: Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore; It's already overcrowded from your dirty little war; Jesus don't like killin' no matter what the reason for; Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore. This makes me feel much better about all those United We Stand bumper-stickers on those SUVs that cut me off on the freeway. Now I have something to sing (almost yodel). BTW, after the DarwinFish on my car induced a woman driving a car with a Darwin is Dead bumper sticker to give me quite a dirty look, I'm printing up a sticker that says: What Would Darwin Do? [in smaller letters:] use scientific method. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: (Fwd)
I bet some of this is at the OECD web site. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 11:01 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:24130] (Fwd) Pen-l'lers, I had this following query from one of my undergrad students. Any good suggestions? Reply off line to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Paul Phillips I was wondering if you have had time to consider an e-mail that I sent regarding internet sites or sources that I can look for about the economic conditions in France. More specifically I am looking for information on banking and finance infrastructure , balance of payments, fiscal and monetary policies, level of stability and inflation. I am sure that there must be an internet site I am just not sure where. I have gotten some info from a CIA factbook site and a France website any more directions that you could offer would be greatly appreciated. - Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage --- End of forwarded message ---
RE: RE: RE: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His tori cal Materialism
Yes, maybe someday quantum gravitons will be found. -Original Message- From: Davies, Daniel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, February 08, 2002 6:55 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: [PEN-L:22595] RE: RE: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His tori cal Materialism Fortunately for physics there is an independent determinant of mass, that is gravitational acceleration which, in turn, is determined by the gravitational field. So this provides a way out of this particular circularity. Albeit that this is hardly an unqualified triumph for physics, since the connection between gravitational and inertial mass is utterly mysterious. ___ Email Disclaimer This communication is for the attention of the named recipient only and should not be passed on to any other person. Information relating to any company or security, is for information purposes only and should not be interpreted as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any security. The information on which this communication is based has been obtained from sources we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness. All expressions of opinion are subject to change without notice. All e-mail messages, and associated attachments, are subject to interception and monitoring for lawful business purposes. ___
RE: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: Historical Materialism
Fortunately for physics there is an independent determinant of mass, that is gravitational acceleration which, in turn, is determined by the gravitational field. So this provides a way out of this particular circularity. Is it too much to claim that the concepts of labor, labor-power and the historically determined reproduction value of labor serve a similar function in political economy? -Original Message- From: Devine, James [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 10:17 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED] ' Subject: [PEN-L:22516] RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: Historical Materialism Ian Murray wrote: As Blaug and others have pointed out, the LTV [sic] has circularities of it's own. what circularities are those? and why is circularity bad, unless there is nothing to the theory but circularities? Physics and geometry, for example, both involve circularities (e.g. force is defined by mass times acceleration, but mass is defined by force/acceleration and acceleration is defined by force/mass). Are you following Blaug to accept Popperian falsification, a criterion that makes _all_ social science (or almost all) worthless? Carrol Cox wrote: I suspect I'm over my head here both re political economy epistemology, or whatever is at stake, But I think I'll butt in anyhow. In _German Ideology_ (I'm paraphrasing from memory) M/E claim they do have premises -- namely, actual living individuals. (Actual living is my insertion to allow for the repudiation of the abstract individual in the Theses on Feurerbach.) in the GI, ME are pretty clear that they're talking about actual living individuals, not abstract ones. I gloss this as affirming that wherever and whenever we find outselves we are already caught up in, constituted by, action (social relations), indepently of which we have no existence. So now the question is how, under given historical conditions, those actual individuals (defined by their social relations at any historical point) allocate their living activity; how do they transform their condition while reproducing it. And I think that starting out there, we get a LOV totally different from (e.g.) Ricardo's, and moreover, the only place to start is with that living human activity, whether or not following it up brings us back to our premises. In other words, we must _either_ hold to some form of LOV as fundamental, or we must place outselves outside of time and space, in a Platonic empyrean, examing the world from outside as Plato attempts to do in the _Republic_. Not only neoclassical but all bourgeois forms of political economy (economics) lead us back either to Plato or to William James's blooming buzzing chaos. (Quote not accurate but makes the point.) that makes sense to me. P.S. A philological note: _G.I._ does not, I think, have any independent validity as a source of Marx's or Engels's thought -- i.e. it is valid (as a source) only as corrected looking backward from their mature work. When used in isolation from or independently of that later work it makes one wish the mice had done a better job of criticism. yes, but the GI and THE THESES ON FEUERBACH present the clearest explanation of ME's materialist conception of history. -- Jim Devine
RE: Re: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: Historical Materialism
Re geometry. I think Goedel's paradox tends to refute your statement. Trying to get out of this box, however, has resulted in a tremendous series of advances in mathematics. I was impressed by this in reading a recent popular account of the history of mathematics leading up to the solution of Fermat's last theorem. Re physics. I made an analogy in my earlier email. Here is another F=ma is subsumed by law of the conservation of energy. Physics problems that can be solved with F=ma can all be solved much more generally and elegantly with the Hamiltonian approach to conservation of energy, which is a much more macro description of the problem. In Marx, is the analogy the macro conditions for the equivalence of economic aggregates. -Original Message- From: Justin Schwartz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 10:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:22518] Re: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: Historical Materialism Ian Murray wrote: As Blaug and others have pointed out, the LTV [sic] has circularities of it's own. what circularities are those? and why is circularity bad, unless there is nothing to the theory but circularities? Physics and geometry, for example, both involve circularities (e.g. force is defined by mass times acceleration, but mass is defined by force/acceleration and acceleration is defined by force/mass). This is a fundamental confusion. Firstly, you talk only about physics and not geometry. Geometry proceeds from independent axioms and postulates and does not involve circularities. Moreover, the fact that you can rewrite equations like F=ma with different variables on the left side of the equality does not make physics circular. In fact, the variables are implicitly defined in the context of the entire system of equation in which they appear. Are you following Blaug to accept Popperian falsification, a criterion that makes _all_ social science (or almost all) worthless? In defense of Popper, it does not. I am not a Popperian. And Popper was (despite the way he is usually taught) an early discoverer of what is called the Quine-Duhem thesis, that you can hold any proposition true by making appropriate adjustments elsewhere. The unobjecionable point he had tomake about falsificationsim is that a hypothesis sin;t worth much if you threat it as true come what may, amking it absolutely immune to testing. If all of social science is like that, then it is worthless. But that's not what I think of as good social science. I do rather suspect that some of the defenses of value theory one display lately have smacked of this vice, though. jks _ Join the world's largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
RE: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His torical Materialism
-Original Message- From: Devine, James [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 1:53 PM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: [PEN-L:22544] RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His torical Materialism Martin, could you please explain these points in greater detail? Martin Brown writes: Re geometry. I think Goedel's paradox tends to refute your [Justin's??] statement. ... which statement? and how does Goedel do so? I'm not great mathematician, but I think that Goedel says that geometry and many other sub-fields of mathematics, are, in some sense, circular, because they are not reducible to a set of primitive fundamentals that are in some sense self evidently true. If you wish there is always some degree of arbitrayness in these foundations. A lot of mathematical progress has been made by trying to get around these limitations by expanding mathematical logic to ever wider domains. Geometry to algebraic geometry to abstract geometry to topology, etc. Re physics. I made an analogy in my earlier email. Here is another F=ma is subsumed by law of the conservation of energy. Physics problems that can be solved with F=ma can all be solved much more generally and elegantly with the Hamiltonian approach to conservation of energy, which is a much more macro description of the problem. In Marx, is the analogy the macro conditions for the equivalence of economic aggregates. by the last, do you mean the total value = total price and total surplus-value = total profits+interest+rent conditions? Yes, sorry, should have been more specific. However, these are only meant to be analogies. I don't think there is any kind of necessary conceptual isomorphy between physics and economics. Jim Devine
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His torical Materialism
Yes, I guess I was supporting Jim in saying that it is not true that kind of economic theories under discussion are any more circular than geometry. Physics is less circular than the F=ma account Jim gave but I think good political economy can resemble the more holistic description of physics of my response. In the end it might be said that physics gets into some circularity when you get to problems of how to interpret the meaning of quantum mechanics at the microlevel and the problem of complexity at the macro level, but my point is that there has been a tremendous expansion of knowledge in the effort to get out from under the problem of circularity. In the example of quantum mechanics, Bohr and others started out using the complementary principle and energy conservation that made quantum mechanical computations dependent on thier agreement with classical physics for high quantum numbers. Getting out from under this circularity necessitated the discovery by DeBroglie and Schrodinger of the wave model of matter, the wave equation and imaginary (in the mathematical sense) quantum operators. This worked great for explaining the electronic structure of atoms but resulted in intractible problems of interpretation for the behavior of free electrons. Getting out of this box necessitated the concept of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality. This raised problems about quantum collapse, an issue that is still being struggle with today, etc. But enough about physics. -Original Message- From: ravi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 1:57 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:22545] Re: RE: Re: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His torical Materialism Brown, Martin - ARP (NCI) wrote: Re geometry. I think Goedel's paradox tends to refute your statement. are you talking about justin's statement that geometry does not involve circularities and proceeds by axiomatic enumeration? if so, why do you think gödel's theorem (i presume you are referring to the incompleteness theorem?) refutes that statement? i fail to see why the fact that arithmetic is not recursively axiomatizable is a demonstration of circularity... please explain, especially since this position conflicts with your (what i read as correct) response of pointing to the lack of circularity claimed in jim devine's post. --ravi
RE: Re: RE: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His tor ical Materialism
Yes I agree with you about math. I just don't agree that the simpler kind of circularity applies to political economy in the way you claim. -Original Message- From: Justin Schwartz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 4:56 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:22559] Re: RE: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His tor ical Materialism Martin Brown writes: Re geometry. I think Goedel's paradox tends to refute your [Justin's??] statement. ... which statement? and how does Goedel do so? I'm not great mathematician, but I think that Goedel says that geometry and many other sub-fields of mathematics, are, in some sense, circular, because they are not reducible to a set of primitive fundamentals that are in some sense self evidently true. That's not what logicians means by circularity. G's theorem is as I have explained here before) that for any formal system that is powerful enough to state simple arithemaetic, there is at least one true proposition in that system that is not provable within it. E.g., for arithemetric, you need set theory, etc. There is no implication of circularity, which is a matter of defining term A in terms of term B and vice versa. I met G and spoke to him when he was at the Institute and I was a Tigertown undergrad . . . . jks _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
(Unitended) Humor from the National Bureau of Economic Research
If anyone needs an example of the mis-use of cost-benefits analysis...Of course, if something this sloppy and shoddy had been done to justify (for example) increased environmental regulation, it would have been laughed at and dismissed by NBER economist types. This reminds me for three unrelated OP-EDS in the Washington Post yesterday. The columnists, ranging from Novak to Kuttner have just discovered, to their chagrin, that the Bush Administration is Pro-business, not pro-market. It seems at NBER if you are pro-big corporation, pro-military, pro-prison industy, pro-national security state, anything goes. At least the last paragraph of this abstract basically acknowledges that the whole thing is a sham. 2) FAVORABLE EFFECTS OF IMPRISONING DRUG OFFENDERS Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions associated with such incarceration. The number of Americans incarcerated on drug-related offenses rose 15-fold between 1980 and 2000, to its current level of 400,000. Despite this enormous increase, there has been no systematic, empirical analysis until now of the implications of the new, tougher drug laws for public safety, drug markets, and public policy. In An Empirical Analysis of Imprisoning Drug Offenders (http://papers.nber.org/papers/W8489), authors Ilyana Kuziemko and Steven Levitt find that the increase in the prison population on drug-related offenses led to reductions in time served for other crimes, especially for less serious offenses. This phenomenon is primarily attributable to the limited space available at penal institutions. However, despite this reduction in time served, other crimes did not increase more than a few percent. The authors also find that incarcerating drug offenders was almost as effective in reducing violent and property crime as was incarcerating other types of offenders. Furthermore, as a consequence of increases in punishments for drug-related crimes, cocaine prices are 10-15 percent higher today than they were in 1985. This jump in price implies that cocaine consumption fell, perhaps as much as 20 percent. The reduction in cocaine use begins to address the long-standing question of whether the enormous costs related to tougher punishment for drug offenses yield similarly large benefits to society. Previous studies suggest that the costs of current levels of incarceration across all crime categories far exceed societal benefits. However, in the case of drug offenders, the authors find that the cost-benefit calculations might be more favorable, because incarceration not only lowers crime, but also drug consumption. Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions associated with such incarceration. The authors stress that their figures are speculative and may not include other relevant costs and benefits. They also do not explore other, potentially more effective ways of reducing drug usage rather than incarceration. (Les Picker) Martin L. Brown Chief, Health Services and Economics Branch Applied Research Program Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences National Cancer Institute 6130 Executive Blvd, Rm. EPN-4005 Bethesda, MD 20892-7344 Phone: 301-496-5716 Fax: 301-435-3710 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Re: Re: state power theory of money
I believe that the father has also advocated for abolishen of the FDA. While I don't agree with father or son on this at all, I do think it can be argued that in addition (but not instead of) its regulatory role, the FDA would serve the public interest a lot better by providing a lot more information about the products it regulates. If individual drug companies are allowed to promote drug directly to the consumer the FDA should also be obligated to present balanced information about those same drugs, including information about non-drug or cheaper drug alternative that might be just as good, including much wider publicity of the information that FDA accumulates on adverse drug reactions or ineffective drugs through post-market surveillance and post-market clinical studies. Such a role is very consistent with the whole Arrow, Stigletz, Alerloff stuff about information asymmetry, etc. (and one would think with the Friedman father and son if they really believe in the virtues of perfect markets) Of course it won't happen in the U.S. without a lot of agitation because, if done right, this would dramatically reduce drug industry profits. In the early days of the tobacco wars, there was a period during which tobacco companies were allowed to continue advertising on TV but anti-smoking ads were also put on the air during prime time. This has been shown to be the single most effective approach to reducing smoking. After a while this policy was substituted by ban on tobacco advertising along with a major decrease in the anti-smoking ads. If I remember correctly, the latter coincided with decisions that TV stations had no obligation to carry public service announcements as part of the to serve the public interest component of their license. The current situation is coming close to ludicrous. The other day I noticed a direct to consumer ad for Lipitor followed immediately by one for Zocar. Hey, you can't take them both! (For those who don't know, these are two of the best selling statin drugs for the control of high cholesterol). -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 10:51 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:21288] Re: Re: state power theory of money Back in the 1960s, I spent a couple of afternoons with him at his apartment. He had a good sense of humor. He also thought that his father was too liberal. He wanted to abolish the FDA. Companies that sold bad medicine would be punished in the market place. William S. Lear wrote: On Wednesday, January 9, 2002 at 20:03:44 (-0800) Steve Diamond writes: David Friedman, the anarcho-capitalist son of Milton, has a piece arguing for private money. ... This is the same idiot who in his book *Hidden Order* argues that Americans give gifts in non-cash form because of a hostility to money which he claims is typical of our society. (p. 331) Bill -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Re: iraq sanctions: letters to the nation
I don't get it. Lot's of journals are now using web sites to publish extended material that is too expensive to print in hardcopy. How is this different? -Original Message- From: Rakesh Bhandari [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 3:31 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:21146] Re: iraq sanctions: letters to the nation I would strongly recommend that people cancel their Nation subscriptions. Go to the Against the Current, In These Times, The Progressive, Z Magazine, etc. Rakesh I didn't mean to exclude News and Letter, and of course i wasn't talking about monthly theoretical journals like rrpe, mr, csn, nst, science and society, race and class, etc. rb
RE: Optimism from the IMF re Argentina in Sept.
Why don't you send this to the IMF fax listed and ask them to explain why their prediction was so wrong. -Original Message- From: Ken Hanly [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 11:23 AM To: pen-l Subject: [PEN-L:20835] Optimism from the IMF re Argentina in Sept. IMF Loan Agreement Good for Argentina A Letter to the Editor By Thomas C. Dawson Director, External Relations Department International Monetary Fund Los Angeles Times September 15, 2001 We differ strongly with Mr. Weisbrot's characterization of Argentina's latest loan agreement with the IMF as helping Argentina dig itself into a deeper hole(Community `Helpers' Such as IMF Make a Junkie of Argentina, Sept. 5). It is his prescription of default and devaluation that would see Argentina digging itself deeper. Yes, there are risks in the new program, but Argentina's recipe for reform is the right one, well deserving of strong international support. And the new agreement has already begun to restore confidence domestically. In recent days, Argentine depositors have not only stopped withdrawing money from the banks but begun to return money to the financial system. Mr. Weisbrot is wrong for a number of reasons. First, Argentina's currency board enjoys widespread support in the country. And given Argentina's highly dollarized economy-most debts of firms and households are denominated in dollars-a devaluation would have a devastating impact on companies' balance sheets, with a likelihood of large-scale bankruptcies and unemployment. Second, Argentina has no option to a zero-deficit policy because of its loss of access to financial markets. This reality would hold even if there were a devaluation or an involuntary debt restructuring: in fact, experience shows that the latter would result in loss of access for several years. With no inflows, there can be no deficit. Third, the government is taking steps to protect the poor from the worst of the adjustment, by safeguarding key social programs, strengthening the social safety net, and limiting cuts in wages and pensions. Argentina's program-as crafted by Argentina and not the IMF-will build on the country's very good record of economic transformation over the last decade. As Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo recently said, under a zero-deficit rule, Argentina will be able to adjust more easily to external shocks without continuously having to shift the burden on to the productive and efficient private sector. IMF EXTERNAL RELATIONS DEPARTMENT Public Affairs: 202-623-7300 - Fax: 202-623-6278 Media Relations: 202-623-7100 - Fax: 202-623-6772
RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Stupid profit rate question
My brother use to work for government lab. They developed some kind of communications technology that was then to be commercialized by one of the big defense companies. DOD instituted a new program allowing the research labs to bid against the defense companies to do the actualy production. My brother's unit successfully bid and got the job. This is when the problems started. The technology was a small piece of a larger unit produced by the defense company. The company began a campaign of villification against the government unit (through Congressional and Pentagon contacts) and also stone-walled on any collaboration that was crucial to make the products work together. They were also many months behind schedule in doing there part of the job while my brother's unit was on schedule and below cost. I see similar things in my area of health research; e.g. our most efficient activities are in-house government production, next is contracting-out where we have direct over-sight, next is cooperative agreements where we play a partnership role with grant-funded research, last is unrestricted grant-funded research. The latter is 80% of the NIH activities because it is claimed that this is the best way to get innovative science done. -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 11:17 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:20588] Re: Re: Re: Re: Stupid profit rate question I was not advocating contracting out. I only mentioned it because Max suggested difficulties of running a production unit. On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 10:45:32PM -0500, Max B. Sawicky wrote: 12/11/01 8:43:48 PM, William S. Lear [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tuesday, December 11, 2001 at 18:04:18 (- 0500) Max Sawicky writes: The Gov would have to organize a competitive bidding system, . . . Why have bidding? Why not just set up a public company that hires staff to run things. The board would be publicly accountable. mbs: fine but that's a different animal -- a public enterprise, the same as nationalization. Perelman was talking about contracting out. Perhaps simply owning the intellectual property of the company and having companies freely use it to produce things (with strings, of course) would be the best. No need for contracts, competitive bids. mbs: the intellectual prop is most appropriate for public ownership. the commodity-type manufacture lends itself to contracting, though even so you need a fairly sophisticated arrangement to get the best deal. All the fuss about the vacinnation contracts indicates some of the sort of problems that can come up. Gov wants the cheapest price, but in a decreasing cost context this favors the big boys. Little boys complain, others point out using a sole source has other risks, thin market means few bidders and questions about whether the lowest costs are attained, political interference, etc. etc. play unless you pay us handsome profits? This is where a public company (really, industry) would come in handy. mbs: agreed. even pro-privatization types of the more sophisticated sort say the Gov should always reserve part of production to a public entity that can be ramped up if the contractors screw up. problem here is in a perceived emergency there isn't time to start up a new govt enterprise, especially in an era when ideology says if you can find it in the Yellow Pages, you don't need public employees and agencies. I'm not exaggerating. This is literally a test used in Washington to evaluate the potential for privatization. Talk about the Stone Age. mbs -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: RE: Re: Re: Stupid profit rate question
I agree from my experience. People may or may not be aware that Bush's head of OMB, Mitchell Daniels, is aggressively promoting increased levels of contracting out, including substituting contracted out professionals to replace government career individuals. -Original Message- From: Max Sawicky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 3:38 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:20611] RE: Re: Re: Stupid profit rate question Sorry if I misinterpreted. I agree that corporate influence is an eternal problem, but it is the least interesting one analytically. Even if without any such influence, there is an intrinsic problem of contracting in some areas simply because running a contract system has costs, both government and vendors are self-interested, and some public services are too complicated or too risky for contracting to be feasible. You could have the same sort of problems if a socialist Gov was dealing with an independent cooperative and nobody except the Gov owned capital. mbs Max, I never intended to implement contracting out would be easy. You gave a number of examples of government screw-ups. Won't they be almost inevitable so long as the government is permeated with corporate influence? Max B. Sawicky wrote: MP suggested contracting was an easy alternative, tho he didn't advocate it. I said it isn't easy. --- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
RE: If Economics isn't Science, What is it?
In the last few weeks I have read Dava Salyor's Gallileo biography, reread two great science classics, Gamov's Birth and Death of the Sun (orginally published in 1939), David Bohm's great Quantum Mechanics textbook (1954) and took a look at my son's current cell biology textbook. I must say, if one criteria for science is a field that produces a continuous (but dialetic) accretion of knowledge throught theoretical development and empirical testing, the track record of economics is pretty pathetic compared to physics and biology. For example, comparing my son's cell biology textbook to the one that I used 30 years ago, there is an order of magnitude advance in the detail, comprehensiveness, theoretical foundation and empirical evidence of the knowledge presented. And this is an undergraduate class! Can anything like this be said of undergraduate textbooks in economics. Both Gallileo and Gamov have some very unflattering things to say about the philosophers of there time, as did Marx. I think the economics of the last 50 years is a lot closer to this kind of philosophy than to anything that looks like science. -Original Message- From: ravi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 1:17 PM To: Pen-L Mailing List Subject: [PEN-L:19959] If Economics isn't Science, What is it? recently someone forwarded a bit to the list about the Nobel prize in economics and whether it was meaningful, etc. reading through klemke, hollinger, rudge: introductory readings on the philosophy of science, i came across a piece that might be of interest. i have reproduced sections from the piece below. my apologies if this is old or uninteresting stuff: If Economics isn't Science, What is it? -Alexander Rosenberg In a number of papers, and in Microeconomic Laws, I argued that economic theory is a conceptually coherent body of causal general claims that stand a chance of being laws. My arguments elicited no great sigh of relief among economists, for they are not anxious about the scientific respectability of their discipline. But others eager to adopt or adapt microeconomic theory to their own uses have appealed to these and other arguments which attempt to defend economic theory from a litany of charges that are as old as the theory itself. Among these charges, the perennial ones were those that denied to economic theory the status of a contingent empirical discipline because it failed to meet one or another fashionable positivist of Popperian criterion of scientific respectability. With the waning of positivism these charges have seemed less and less serious to philosophers, although they have retained their force for the few economists still distracted by methodology. But among philosophers charges that economics does not measure up to standards for being a science have run afoul of the general consensus that we have no notion of science good enough to measure candidates against. This makes it difficult to raise the question of whether economics is a science, and tends to leave economists, and their erstwhile apologists like me, satisfied with the conclusion that since there is nothing logically or conceptually incoherent about economics, it must be a respectable empirical theory of human behavior and/or its aggregate consequences. The trouble with this attitude is that it is unwarrantably complacent. It is all well and good to say that economics is conceptually coherent, and that there are no uncontroversial standards against which economics may be found wanting, but this attitude will not make the serious anomalies and puzzles about economic theory go away. These puzzles surround its thoroughgoing predictive weakness. the ability to predict and control may be neither necessary nor sufficient criteria for cognitively respectable scientific theories. But the fact is that microeconomic theory has made no advances in the management of economic processes since its current formalism was first elaborated in the nineteenth century. And this surely undermines a complacent conviction that the credentials of economics as a science are entirely in order. For a long time after 1945 it might confidently have been said that Keynesian macroeconomics was a theory moving in the right direction: although a macro theory, it would ultimately provide the sort of explanatory and predictive satisfaction characteristic of science. But the simultaneous inflation and unemployment levels of the last decade and the economy's imperviousness to fiscal policy have eroded the layman's and the economist's confidence in the theory. Moreover the profession's reaction to the failures of Keynesian theory is even more disquieting to those who view economic theory as unimpeachably a scientific enterprise. For a large part of the response to its failures has been a return the microeconomic theories which it was sometimes claimed to supersede. The diagnosis offered for the failure of the Keynesian theory has been that it does not
RE: Re: Aziz on Iraq
Scott Ritter -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 10:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:19171] Re: Aziz on Iraq Ken Hanly wrote: Interesting that Aziz is a Roman Catholic! (From the Telgraph UK) originally, as I understand it, the Ba'ath movement was secularist. It only officially embraced Islam later, out of opportunism. So Aziz' Catholicism doesn't surprise me that much. His claims are not supported by Richard Butler, the former head of the UN weapons inspection team, who last week said Iraq retains large stockpiles of chemical weapons. but Scott (whose last name I've forgotten) who was a leader of the arms inspection in Iraq now is telling everyone that these stockpiles don't exist or are trivial. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: Re: Re: Re: Greider and Takings Ideology
When I taught at Howard U. here in DC I use to take the interminable route 70 bus up Georgia Ave (before the last Metro line was finally built there). That was a good lesson in social reality. The route was (deliberately?) under-served. Every bus (non-air-conditioned in the Summer) was packed like a sardine can; people often could not get on or off at their stop, often resulting in heating arguments and near violence between passengers and driver. When I taught at night I drove. On my way home I often hit the red light at a very constricted intersection of North Capitol and New York Avenue. I would often hear what I (naively) thought were nieghborhood kids shooting off fire crackers. After the local news featured this intersection as one of the hot spots of the local crack wars I changed by route home. I have always been a user of mass transit (still am) including local buses as well as subway trains. The class stratification between car / subway / bus has always been striking. Of course the buse services, even where they are relatively good, are also less convenient and generally more brutish then the other modes. This creates a self-perpetuating system of transportation class segregation in the U.S. I think this has a lot more to do with the alleged aversion of Americans to mass transit than the love of the automobile. -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 12:41 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:18081] Re: Re: Re: Greider and Takings Ideology At 12:32 PM 10/4/01 -0400, you wrote: I dunno, when I lived in Hyde Park, a drawbridge would have been better to get from this ivory (now endangered) tower, through the free-fire zone to the public transit stop. Besides, I think it's probably still possible to ignore social difference by driving to work there to the well-protected parking lots from the toney suburbs. right. Profs wouldn't take public transportation and would drive in from the suburbs. Those who live in Hyde Park would drive through the DMZ. why endangered? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Send good stuff on Afghanistan to my son
My son has put up a web page on terrorism, Afghanistan, etc. at: http://sonewmedia.com/resources/war2001/ If you have good stuff send it to him at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: Max Sawicky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 8:19 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:17479] RE: Bombing Afghanistan.. The U.S. is not merely bombing. It's going to invade and depose the government. Or at least Bush implied that it's going to. The speech was very specific in its open- endedness. Afghanistan is the first target, but implicitly about 7 other countries are fair game as well. But in any case it's hard to know what the Gov thinks it is going to do. Check the State Dept reports on terrorism. I took a spin through them last night. The chief offenders, according to the reports, are Iran and Syria, mostly for hosting Palestinian-related groups. Both are particularly tough nuts, for different reasons. Iran because it's a huge country, Syria because it is deeply entwined in conflict with Israel. The Saudi's have explicitly warned against any attack on Syria. State says Hamas is funded by individual benefactors in Saudi Arabia. Sudan gets honorable mention because OBL's business interests are there. Of course there are also Iraq, which had the best reason to support the attack, assuming its role could be concealed, and Pakistan, a country that seems ripe for destabilization and chaos. The complexity of all this makes Vietnam look pretty simple. I watched my neighbor's boy grow up. He used to cut my lawn (well-compensated, naturally). Nows he's in the Marines. My mission is to prevent him from getting killed to satisfy an ill-considered, politically-driven strategic objective. I'm not quite sure how to do it yet, but I'm pretty sure 'hands off Afghanistan' is not going to do the trick. mbs
Fallwell and Robertson express solidarity with bin Laden
Todays Washington Post reports, in the entertainment section, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame the attack on the World Trade Center on the ACLU, abortionist, People for the American Way and federal judges throwing God out of the public square. Falwell said God continues to life the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve. Jerry that's my feeling, said 700 Club host Pat Robertson. A White House official called the remarks inappropriate. -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 7:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:17060] (un)productive labor At 01:40 PM 9/13/01 -0500, you wrote: Jim Devine wrote: * I disagree with Adam Smith's view that services are unproductive. I would like to see more on this. In addition, some things that are called service look an awful lot like factories to me. Why should one call the production of food in a MacDonalds service labor while the production of food in a Kraft factory or a Pillsbury mill is productive labor. Both equally change matter, so even at a vulgar level both seem equally productive. I don't think Michael Perelman likes discussions of this this, so here's a nutshell version: (1) to both Smith Marx, productive basically refers to producing profits for capitalists. (2) to Smith, services weren't productive, because they didn't produce physical objects. But he was referring to the hiring of personal servants, not people at McDonalds. I think his argument is severely flawed, as did Marx. (3) to Marx, it's the physical nature of the product that's crucial to determining the (un)productive nature of the labor. It's whether or not they contribute to the aggregate surplus-value. So service workers could be productive. However, there are some other jobs (such as stock brokers) which aren't productive, because they involve merely redistributing surplus-value. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: the Saddam Hussein theory
The author of that book was interviewed on one of the networks. She came across as a real lunatic. She coincidentally made the same argument as the Taliban that bin Laden could not be responsible because there are no facilities for training pilots in Afghanastan. Immediately after the interview the news came out about how the pilot training was easily obtained in the U.S. But who knows, maybe she is a lunatic with a valid point. -Original Message- From: Andrew Hagen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 9:01 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:17063] the Saddam Hussein theory Many have linked the 1993 bombing of the WTC with the attack of September 11. Since the 1993 bombing, associates linked to Osama bin Laden have been prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in the United States. One little noticed book makes the strange claim that it was not bin Laden's network, but Iraq that sponsored that terrorism. Former CIA Director James Woolsey is now calling for a short investigation. Files now in possession of Scotland Yard must simply be checked for fingerprints to determine who was the real Ramzi Yousef. Was he the namesake, or an Iraqi plant? http://www.thenewrepublic.com/092401/woolsey092401.html Woolsey bases the suggestion on a book, Study of Revenge, where the author attempts to use the evidence presented at the trial to prove that Saddam Hussein's Iraq is responsible for the attempt to topple the towers. A summary of the book is located at the following site. http://www.aei.org/bs/bs12062.htm If it is true that a government sponsored the 1993 attack, then the current theory that there are semi-autonomous terrorist cells will shown to be flawed, the book says. The cell theory is an important assumption of the current investigation. The investigation of the September 11 attacks is ongoing. The Justice Department has leaked several stories to the media stating they have linked the hijackers to bin Laden's network. No one seems to be considering any other alternative, such as the Saddam Hussein theory. Andrew Hagen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality a nd Healt h
I don't have his work in front of me, but I think it is more in the realm of an ecological regression controlled for by individual variables. Whether he used the state-of-the-art approach like Hierachical Linear Modeling, I don't recall, but he probably did do it right from the technical econometric prespective. -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 11:48 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16479] Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality a nd Healt h right. I think one major point is that it's useful to do regressions (like Mike Reich) of ecological independent variables vs. a ecological dependent variable for SMSAs or some other geographical units, whereas (if I understand it correctly), Deaton's result is ecological independent variables vs. individual dependent variables. At 11:30 AM 8/29/01 -0400, you wrote: Yes, but it would be a lot more compelling to document evidence on the proximal link to health status. The Deaton finding was kind of a big surprise, at least to him. I think some follow-up work on this could be important. -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 10:33 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16475] Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality and Healt h At 09:43 AM 08/29/2001 -0400, you wrote: But figuring out what the specific mechanisms that effect health status is tricky. I can think of a number of candidates the fall under the Reich-type of phenomena. A higher prevalence of dirty industries with low occupational health and safety standards enforcement, ditto for environmental air pollution, more stress and violence in general because of aggravated social conflict, more tobacco and alcohol use for the same reason, etc. the main mechanism of Reich's argument is political (including trade unions and the like). If there are wider gaps between black and white workers, it's harder to unite politically or to form effective trade unions (except narrow, craft-oriented, unions). This means that welfare-state programs and employer-supplied welfare programs (including health care) are weaker because of weaker working-class bargaining power. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality and Health
Yes, this is the first thing that occurred to me. But figuring out what the specific mechanisms that effect health status is tricky. I can think of a number of candidates the fall under the Reich-type of phenomena. A higher prevalence of dirty industries with low occupational health and safety standards enforcement, ditto for environmental air pollution, more stress and violence in general because of aggravated social conflict, more tobacco and alcohol use for the same reason, etc. But as far as I know no one as tried to look as specific factors like this for the high and low health status SMSAs. It would be a major task and I'm not sure how much of the necessary data would be available. The U.S. has pretty good national surveys on some of these variables but they are generally not designed so that the data is avialable at the SMSA level. -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2001 6:05 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16460] Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality and Health At 11:55 AM 08/28/2001 -0400, you wrote: Yes, this is all correct. I have recently completed an extensive review of this subject for cancer that supports this. BUT, what Deaton found was that the average health status of WHITE men as well as Black men is worse in SMSAs with higher percent black population. this reminds me of Michael Reich's finding (in his RACIAL INEQUALITY, for which I was a research assistant) that areas with high gaps between white and black incomes also had high income gaps among white incomes, suggesting that the white working class was weakened by racial differences. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Inequality and Globalisation
Wisdom from NBER. NBER Digest, September 2001 National Bureau of Economic Research The Digest summarizes 4 to 6 recent NBER Working Papers which are of unusual interest, timeliness, and newsworthiness. If you wish to be removed from the Digest e-mailing list, or if you wish to add others, please send a brief email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In this Issue: (1) How the Fed Responds to Stock Market Moves (2) Does Globalization Make the World More Unequal? (3) Lessons from the U.S./Canada Free Trade Agreement (4) Do Lending Booms Lead to Financial Crises? Other issues are available at http://www.nber.org/digest. (1) HOW THE FED RESPONDS TO STOCK MARKET MOVES An unexpected 5 percent increase in the Standard Poor's 500 index hikes by just over half the probability of a 25 basis point tightening at the next Federal Open Market Committee Meeting. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan famously coined the term irrational exuberance back in December 1996. His warning about the economic risks associated with soaring asset prices set off a widespread debate over whether America's central bank should deliberately prick what appeared to be an emerging stock market bubble. Indeed, price-earnings ratios skyrocketed until the bubble eventually burst in the spring of 2000. Still, there are other broad questions besides whether the central bank should target asset prices that appear to move away from fundamental values. For instance, shifts in the stock market clearly influence the direction of the macroeconomy. Does the Federal Reserve react to stock market movements in setting monetary policy? And if the answer is yes, is the Fed's policy response of the appropriate magnitude? These are the questions that motivate Roberto Rigobon and Brian Sack in Measuring The Reaction of Monetary Policy to the Stock Market (http://papers.nber.org/papers/W8350). The stock market influences the real economy of goods and services through two main channels. The first is the so-called wealth effect. The total financial wealth of American households stood at a staggering $35.7 trillion at the end of 2000, and stocks accounted for $11.6 trillion of that sum. Consumers might open their wallets a bit more when stock prices are rising smartly, but take fewer trips to the mall if falling stock prices are cutting into household wealth. A bull or bear stock market also affects the cost of financing for business. Last year, U.S. non-financial corporations raised some $118 billion in equity offerings and more than $100 billion in venture capital funds. This year, the comparable figures are much lower. Of course, teasing out monetary policy responses to the stock market is difficult, especially since the stock market reacts to changes in monetary policy even as that policy responds to shifts in the stock market. But the authors are able to establish a relationship between monetary policy and stock prices Specifically, they find that an unexpected 5 percent increase in the Standard Poor's 500 index hikes by just over half the probability of a 25 basis point tightening at the next Federal Open Market Committee Meeting. The same calculation works for a monetary easing. In other words, if the probability of a monetary easing were 30 percent under existing economic conditions, an unexpected 5 percent decline in stock prices would increase the probability of a cut in the Fed's benchmark short-term interest rate to 80 percent. This reaction is roughly of the magnitude that would be expected from estimates of the impact of stock market movements on aggregate demand, say the authors. Thus, it appears that the Federal Reserve systematically responds to stock price movements only to the extent warranted by their impact on the macroeconomy. (Chris Farrell) (2) DOES GLOBALIZATION MAKE THE WORLD MORE UNEQUAL? The nations that gained the most from globalization are those poor countries that changed their policies to exploit it, while the ones that gained the least did not, or were too isolated to effectively change economic and political policy... An integrated world economy would be less unequal than today's barrier-filled, partly globalized world economy. The world economy has become more unequal over the last two centuries. That inequality is characterized by widening economic gaps between nations, but not necessarily within nations. During this same period, the world economy has become more integrated globally. This leads some economists to suggest a relationship between global economic integration and economic inequality. In Does Globalization Make the World More Unequal? (http://papers.nber.org/papers/W8228), authors Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson find that increasing globalization has probably mitigated the effects of inequality between nations that participate in global markets. The nations that gained the most from globalization are those poor countries that changed their policies to exploit it, while the ones that
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality and Healt h
Yes, but it would be a lot more compelling to document evidence on the proximal link to health status. The Deaton finding was kind of a big surprise, at least to him. I think some follow-up work on this could be important. -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 10:33 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16475] Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality and Healt h At 09:43 AM 08/29/2001 -0400, you wrote: But figuring out what the specific mechanisms that effect health status is tricky. I can think of a number of candidates the fall under the Reich-type of phenomena. A higher prevalence of dirty industries with low occupational health and safety standards enforcement, ditto for environmental air pollution, more stress and violence in general because of aggravated social conflict, more tobacco and alcohol use for the same reason, etc. the main mechanism of Reich's argument is political (including trade unions and the like). If there are wider gaps between black and white workers, it's harder to unite politically or to form effective trade unions (except narrow, craft-oriented, unions). This means that welfare-state programs and employer-supplied welfare programs (including health care) are weaker because of weaker working-class bargaining power. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
RE: Re: Income Inequality and Health
I'll try to make the issues clear as mud... I was asking for opinions about the worth in this particular case, not asserting that they are not worth the effort. The most commonly noted weakness of ecological regressions has to do with measurement error. More example, say we are trying to establish a relationship between health status and income and we have individual data on stage-at-diagnosis for cancer (how early or late the cancer is diagnosed) and census tract level data on average income. There is measurement error in the latter as a proxy for individual income. The most common criticism is that this result in lower power to detect a relationship when one actually exists, but some statistical purists say the bias can actually go in either direction. The discussion starts to get murky in the case of the Wilkinson hypothesis because this is a hypothesis that is inherently ecological, i.e., the relationship between some measure of average health status and some measure on social structure. The problem is that this hypothesized ecological relationship is confounded by the fairly well established relationship between individual health status and individual income (or other measures of individual social status). To deal with this problem Michael Wolfson simulates the expected effect of the individual level relationship on the ecological level and shows that there is still a residual effect at the ecological level that cannot be explained by the individual level relationship (this is for income/health, income distribution/average health for U.S. SMSAs). Deaton, who have been very critical of the Wilkinson hypothesis accepts the Wolfson analysis but then says that percent black performs better in the ecological relationship than measures of income distribution. But I find percent black not to be nearly as conceptually compelling as income distribution as an ecological variable. E.g. what kind of causal mechanism stories go with these measures??? -Original Message- From: Bill Burgess [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, August 27, 2001 3:07 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16413] Re: Income Inequality and Health Martin Brown wrote that ecological regressions (like average health against average income plus income inequality) are not worth the effort. Could you expand a bit on why? I think regession assumptions like linearity, independendence of variables and unidirection of causality are big problems (on top of many issues regarding measuring health), but is this what you have in mind? If so, can you cite a non-econometric-technical summary of these problems, especially as they apply to health? Bill Burgess At 03:12 PM 24/08/01 -0400, you wrote: I'll try to respond to this when I have more time to do it right. But there is something else I wanted to bring up from the International Health Economics Association meeting. There were several plenary and regular sessions focusing on the Wilkinson Hypothesis. That is to say the theory that there is a relationship between macroeconomic measures of income inequality and average health status. This relationship is above and beyond that expected by the Prescott Curve, that says there is a strong relationship between the level of individual income and individual health. To make a long story short, the consensus at the meeting both from those who had been advocates and detractors of the W hypothesis in the past is that current data and/or sophisticated analysis does not support the hypothesis for most situations examined - e.g. OECD countries, within UK, within Canada, within Australia. The remaining, very important case, is within the U.S. Some cross-sectional analyses of SMSA data within the U.S. - notably by Michael Wolfson of Statistics Canada - strongly support the hypothesis. The counter-argument, put forward by Angus Deaton - an econometrician/development economist - is that when one enters percent black population into the regression for the U.S. the coefficients on the inequality measures drop out. This only happens if one looks separately at health status (e.g. mortality) for blacks and whites separately. And, note, white mortality is inversely related to percent black population. There was some discussion to the effect that macro measures of social structure still matter but that things like Gini coefficients of measured income were never very good measures. Some discussion about dysfunction urban structures in the U.S. being the real issue, etcbut apart from this what should we make of this debate?? 1] All attempts a these kinds of ecological regression are not worth the effort. 2] There is rationale for Deaton to substitute percent black for income inequality. 3] Percent black is a proxy measure for something that really is important - but what is it?? I will say this for health economics. 1] Would the questions of inequality ever dominate a meeting of AEA? 2] Would everybody at an AEA
RE: Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality and Health
Yes, this is all correct. I have recently completed an extensive review of this subject for cancer that supports this. BUT, what Deaton found was that the average health status of WHITE men as well as Black men is worse in SMSAs with higher percent black population. -Original Message- From: Gar Lipow [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2001 11:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16442] Re: RE: Re: Income Inequality and Health I can suggest some stories. One is aggressiveness of treatment. With very serious illness, there are often broad choices within acceptable medical practice. A lot of the judgments involved are explicitly social ones. For example, take two people needing a transplant, same age, same basic health, same income, same insurance -- one a member of the socially constructed group black, the other a member of the socially constructed group white. One factor in deciding who gets the priority is the medical judgment as to who will follow post-operation instructions better. Who will take their medicine as scheduled? Who will stick to the diet/rest/excercise regimen prescribed? I don't have them in front of me; but I have seen statistics that the doctors will overwhelmingly make the subjective judgment that the white is more likely to comply. Similarly, when allocating scarce memdical care (like transplants) an important judgement is who is most likely to die anyway. Given equal income, equal objective measures of health, but different races - guess who is judged the more hopeless case. Note that this is in ADDITION to the pre-existing health, and income dimensions. For example in transplants, normal insurance (if it covers transplants at all) will get you on a single waiting list covering some fraction the avaiable organs. If you are rich you can buy your way onto all the lists (at a cost of about 10,000 per list) and thus have a much better shot at receiving the transplant. But the above examples are for people on the SAME list. Umm - this is of course U.S. specific. Most industrialized systems don't have quite as crazy a health care system. Brown, Martin - ARP (NCI) wrote: I'll try to make the issues clear as mud... I was asking for opinions about the worth in this particular case, not asserting that they are not worth the effort. The most commonly noted weakness of ecological regressions has to do with measurement error. More example, say we are trying to establish a relationship between health status and income and we have individual data on stage-at-diagnosis for cancer (how early or late the cancer is diagnosed) and census tract level data on average income. There is measurement error in the latter as a proxy for individual income. The most common criticism is that this result in lower power to detect a relationship when one actually exists, but some statistical purists say the bias can actually go in either direction. The discussion starts to get murky in the case of the Wilkinson hypothesis because this is a hypothesis that is inherently ecological, i.e., the relationship between some measure of average health status and some measure on social structure. The problem is that this hypothesized ecological relationship is confounded by the fairly well established relationship between individual health status and individual income (or other measures of individual social status). To deal with this problem Michael Wolfson simulates the expected effect of the individual level relationship on the ecological level and shows that there is still a residual effect at the ecological level that cannot be explained by the individual level relationship (this is for income/health, income distribution/average health for U.S. SMSAs). Deaton, who have been very critical of the Wilkinson hypothesis accepts the Wolfson analysis but then says that percent black performs better in the ecological relationship than measures of income distribution. But I find percent black not to be nearly as conceptually compelling as income distribution as an ecological variable. E.g. what kind of causal mechanism stories go with these measures??? -Original Message- From: Bill Burgess [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, August 27, 2001 3:07 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16413] Re: Income Inequality and Health Martin Brown wrote that ecological regressions (like average health against average income plus income inequality) are not worth the effort. Could you expand a bit on why? I think regession assumptions like linearity, independendence of variables and unidirection of causality are big problems (on top of many issues regarding measuring health), but is this what you have in mind? If so, can you cite a non-econometric-technical summary of these problems, especially as they apply to health? Bill Burgess At 03:12 PM 24/08/01 -0400, you wrote: I'll try to respond to this when I have more time
RE: Re: Income Inequality and Health
I'd say (2). Doesn't racism have effects on health status (through judgments made in health care, and perhaps through other routes - surely I've read of big race-based differences in treatment for acute heart problems in the US)? Racism and race relations in the US do take distinctive forms, and that could well explain US exceptionalism on the [apparent] Wilkinson effect. Yes, but Deaton's regression says that the health status of whites (I think we are talking about males only, BTW) is also worse in SMSA's with high percent black population. He also asserts that the health status differentials cannot be plausibly explained by differences in the provision of health care per se, but I don't think he actually has any compelling evidence on this last point. There is no doubt that medical care had little impact on health differentials in the first half (maybe three-quarters) of the 20th century. I'm not so sure this is true for more recent decades. As for (3), if percent black is knocking out direct measures of income inequality in the regression, then even if it were proxying for something else, that 'something else' is knocking out income inequality, which doesn't suggest support for the Wilkinson effect even in the US case. Fred _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
RE: Re: Re: Income Inequality and Health
Those are usually studies looking at the relationship between individual health and individual measures of race and income. As I said everyone accepts the strong relationship between individual income and health. This is something different - inequality (e.g. Gini or some other summary measure) as a measure of social structure and mean level of individual health. -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 24, 2001 7:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16331] Re: Re: Income Inequality and Health Fred Guy wrote: I'd say (2). Doesn't racism have effects on health status (through judgments made in health care, and perhaps through other routes - surely I've read of big race-based differences in treatment for acute heart problems in the US)? Racism and race relations in the US do take distinctive forms, and that could well explain US exceptionalism on the [apparent] Wilkinson effect. In other studies, inequality is a major factor, even after accounting for race. As for (3), if percent black is knocking out direct measures of income inequality in the regression, then even if it were proxying for something else, that 'something else' is knocking out income inequality, which doesn't suggest support for the Wilkinson effect even in the US case. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Income Inequality and Health
I'll try to respond to this when I have more time to do it right. But there is something else I wanted to bring up from the International Health Economics Association meeting. There were several plenary and regular sessions focusing on the Wilkinson Hypothesis. That is to say the theory that there is a relationship between macroeconomic measures of income inequality and average health status. This relationship is above and beyond that expected by the Prescott Curve, that says there is a strong relationship between the level of individual income and individual health. To make a long story short, the consensus at the meeting both from those who had been advocates and detractors of the W hypothesis in the past is that current data and/or sophisticated analysis does not support the hypothesis for most situations examined - e.g. OECD countries, within UK, within Canada, within Australia. The remaining, very important case, is within the U.S. Some cross-sectional analyses of SMSA data within the U.S. - notably by Michael Wolfson of Statistics Canada - strongly support the hypothesis. The counter-argument, put forward by Angus Deaton - an econometrician/development economist - is that when one enters percent black population into the regression for the U.S. the coefficients on the inequality measures drop out. This only happens if one looks separately at health status (e.g. mortality) for blacks and whites separately. And, note, white mortality is inversely related to percent black population. There was some discussion to the effect that macro measures of social structure still matter but that things like Gini coefficients of measured income were never very good measures. Some discussion about dysfunction urban structures in the U.S. being the real issue, etcbut apart from this what should we make of this debate?? 1] All attempts a these kinds of ecological regression are not worth the effort. 2] There is rationale for Deaton to substitute percent black for income inequality. 3] Percent black is a proxy measure for something that really is important - but what is it?? I will say this for health economics. 1] Would the questions of inequality ever dominate a meeting of AEA? 2] Would everybody at an AEA meeting, even those on the political right end of the debate, concede the importance of the Prescott curve, say that economists have ignored this for far too long and that we need to learn a lot more about the specific mechanisms behind this statistical relationship and intervene with social programs to address it? 3] Acknowledge that the Prescott Curve, alone, tells us that total social welfare would/should be improved by transfering social resources toward lower end of the income distribution (because 99% of health economists have pretty much accepted the proposition that a additional unit of health is/ought to be worth at least as much to a poor person as a rich person). On the down side, this debate has received the least visibility in the one country where the evidence suggests that both the Prescott Curve and (perhaps) the Wilkinson effects are the strongest - the US. -Original Message- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, August 20, 2001 12:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16087] Re: Reducing Risk Martin wrote: When I go to a meeting like the International Health Economics Association, it is only among the U.S. contigent ..., who feel it necessary that social criteria for making health resources allocation decisions must flow directly from neoclassical foundations of welfare economics. There are lots of other creative, and empirically based approaches being advances that try to combine some meaningful mix of objective individual well-being, equity under fixed budget constraints and some measure of social preference that would emerge under a democratic process. No one claims to have the final answer and there is a lot of controversy and debate but the point is; no one except the U.S. NC find any reason that all discussion of social allocation must be bound to the NC paradigm ... could you please give an example of a proposal that involves a meaningful mix of objective individual well-being, equity under fixed budget constraints and some measure of social preference that would emerge under a democratic process? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: Reducing Risk (was Re Re . . . DeLong)
I assume you are speaking strictly about popular sense in the U.S. And I doubt this statement is even true here, rather you are speaking about, excuse the expression, inside the beltway consensus. When I go to a meeting like the International Health Economics Association, it is only among the U.S. contigent (and to a lesser extent U.S. trained technocrats from dependent countries with AID or IMF/World Bank jobs), who feel it necessary that social criteria for making health resources allocation decisions must flow directly from neoclassical foundations of welfare economics. There are lots of other creative, and empirically based approaches being advances that try to combine some meaningful mix of objective individual well-being, equity under fixed budget constraints and some measure of social preference that would emerge under a democratic process. No one claims to have the final answer and there is a lot of controversy and debate but the point is; no one except the U.S. NC find any reason that all discussion of social allocation must be bound to the NC paradigm and, in fact, there have been several keynote addresses at these conference expressing bitter resentment that the U.S. NC types want to impose this orthodoxy on the rest of the world. Also on interest is that much of the work presented by the non-US world at these meetings is actually about ongoing work in making health care sector allocation decisions while most of the U.S. work is about either about high abstract models of health care Industrial Organization, mostly concluding that a minimum of regulation (and even cooperation) is best [from orthodox NCs] or documenting the pathology of the U.S. healthcare market in actual operation [the rest of us]. I served as the unofficial U.S. expert on an OECD panel trying to evaluate how health systems deal with breast cancer across different country systems. Unofficial, because it basically impossible to identify any U.S. government agency that can officially represent the U.S. on planning or policy in regard to national health care allocation. The head of the OECD study expressed great frustration to me about this and I had to explain to him that the idea of official government health care planning in the U.S. was not an acceptable idea. Afterall, if such a concept were acknowledged, what would be the fate of the magic of market place. Most Penner's are aware of the fate of healtcare reform under the Clinton's (I hasten to say - I think the Clinton's proposal, itself, was fatally flawed and unprincipled). But even much milder attempts to provide non-market technical guidance to how health care is organized and delivered have been bitterly opposed and defeated. For example, after some successful experience in restricting the over-dissemination of expensive and redundant capital equipment, most Certificate of Need regulations have been repealed. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ, formerly known as AHCPR) was once suppose to issue objective, science-based clinical guidelines. After it did so on the treatment of lower back pain that indicated that surgical treatment is almost never indicated, the orthopeadic surgeons managed to lobby Congress to abolish the agency. The agency was saved but it's ability to issue meaningful guidelines was essentially eliminated. The slogan of the surgeons was along the lines of don't let government bureaucrats mess around with the free choice of the medical market place. This is a digression, but the point is that when you tell this kind of story to European or Canadians they stare back at you in disbelief. They can't fathom the degree of anarchy that is allowed for something as important as people's health. [Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that these other societies have achieved social-democratic paradise status, but I think we in the U.S. often forget how much social chaos we allow even by comparison to these mildly reformist societies.] Then they hear the top U.S. academic health economists basically apologizing for this state of affairs by saying it resembles a highly simplified model that supposedly replicated so kind of optimality, arbitrarily defined by some crypto-facist theoretician half or century or more ago. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 4:55 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16017] Reducing Risk (was Re Re . . . DeLong) mbs: to Martin, The only special thing is the lack of any popular sense of an alternative answer. to Carrol: properly defined, defending the working class is the common good, though it's not as easy to define primarily black female working people properly in this vein. Not impossible, but not easy. In re: sabotage, my impression is that this modus operandi has become standard for whichever party is not in the White House: do whatever to sabotage the other guys, albeit to no productive end. mbs
RE: Britain/US split?
I experienced a little bit of this when I was recently in the UK. As I mentioned earlier, I attended a play called Feel Good in London that is a satire of Blair, written, apparently, by a member of old-labor. More to the point, I needed to take the train from London to York and back. By U.S. standards, anyway, the service was fantastic. But there were some signs of trouble. When I went to the Euro-Rail web site a week prior to the trip to try to find out about schedule and fares, there was no indication that a London-York route existed. This is astonishing given that this particular route is probably the oldest continuous running train line in the world (the British Railway museum is located in York). When I mention this fact at the ticket counter at the Kings Cross station in London, the clerk rolled his eyes and said something like, What will the screw up next. There are also prominent signs in all the rail stations warning customers that any loss of temper or out-burst against a member of the rail staff will be treated as a criminal offense and prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law. This seemed odd to me at the service seemed to be excellent, at least by U.S. standards. Have these signs always been posted, or is this a recent symptom of the rail crisis? -Original Message- From: Michael Keaney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, August 20, 2001 9:22 AM To: PEN-L (E-mail) Subject: [PEN-L:16073] Britain/US split? Penners The following is extracted from a reasonably insightful and interesting article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books, entitled 'Twas a Famous Victory. It gives another perspective on the dilemma facing the British state that Mark Jones highlighted several months back. I'm not so keen on Judt's ruminations on Englishness, since it neatly ignores the class basis of much that is wrong with England and Britain as a whole. Nor are Judt's implied approbations of Blair's leadership re Yugoslavia much use. But his lengthy analysis of the apparent vacuum that is British politics gets to the main point quite succinctly. = For four years Tony Blair held out the promise of a Third Way, a carefully triangulated compromise between Anglo-American private economic initiative and continental-style social compassion. Today we hear little of the Third Way: its prophet, Professor Anthony Giddens, so ubiquitous in Blair's first term, has of late been conspicuous by his silence. Since the national trauma of the railway crisis, New Labour has instead become wholeheartedly devoted to delivering European levels of public service...but apparently at American levels of personal taxation. This is not going to happen. You can do almost anything you want with the past, but the future, like economic reality, is intractable. The British are moving inexorably toward a very hard choice. This choice is conventionally presented as being for or against join-ing the euro, and so in a way it is. But the real issue is not the euro but Europe-or more precisely, the European social model. The English (unlike the Scots) still don't feel very European-which is why William Hague, warning that the pound was in danger, thought he could capitalize on English national sentiment in his election campaign. They probably never will. And a party that could demonstrate how Britain would be better off outside Europe and its currency might yet capitalize on this sentiment in a referendum on the subject. But the electorate has something quite different on its mind. New Labourites rightly claim that Britain is a post-political (actually post-ideological) society. From this they deduce that people aren't interested in doctrinal disputes over the state and the market. They just want whatever works-hence Blair's carefully pragmatic emphasis on mixing public sector and private profit (which is why he pulls his punches even when faced with the mess on the privatized railways, a disaster he could legitimately blame on Tory incompetence and worse). But my own feeling is that England in particular is fast becoming a post-post-political society. By this I mean that Thatcher and Blair have so successfully uprooted the old left-right, State-market distinctions that many people can no longer remember why they need feel inhibited in favoring a return to the state. Why, they ask, should we not have a transport network/health service/school system that works as well as the Swedish or French or German one? What does it have to do with the market or efficiency or freedom? Are the French less free because their trains work? Are the Germans less efficient because they can get a hospital appointment when they need it? Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), has built his political career on the claim that he has made Labour a party of economic responsibility. But a large minority of British voters wasn't even born the last time Britain had an economically irresponsible Labour
RE: The Fall of 'Challenge'?
I came across his anti-trust journal many years ago and thought it was pretty good, though obviously a slight quirky operation. This just shows how the mentality of anti-trust can be profoundly liberal, in the cold-war sense of the word. The guy must be the same age as the queen mother by now - 101. -Original Message- From: Michael Keaney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 8:17 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:15967] The Fall of 'Challenge'? Barkley wrote: Michael, Yes, Mueller threatened to contact my university and inform them of my clearly obnoxious and Marxist behavior. = What a disgusting piece of work. On the AFEE list his downfall was triggered by an event that took place after a few months of his trying to steer conversation his way by more polite means. Purporting to be trying to get a measure of the AFEE line on monopoly, he posed a simple question: what do AFEE members think is better as a matter of abstract principle -- monopoly or competition. When one lister said that this was silly Mueller exploded and launched into a tirade about how he was being belittled, besmirched, etc. It was a rapid decline thereafter, until eventually he moved on to plague other lists, before hitting on the great idea of starting his own lists where he could call the shots and boot out those not playing by his rules (by definition, Marxists). Michael K.
RE: A long way to go still.......
One is tempted to say, A spectre is haunting global capitalism Whatever critique anyone wants to make the ant-globalism, the scope and sustained nature of this protest movement is remarkable. The Washington Post reports this morning that a nine foot high fence will be erected around the perimeter of the Word Bank - IMF meeting. -Original Message- From: Ian Murray [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 2:15 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Lbo-Talk@Lists. Panix. Com Subject: [PEN-L:15964] A long way to go still... [Financial Times] [Contact info at the bottom...] A poor case for globalisation The world's leaders are failing to address legitimate questions raised by protesters about the effects of global capitalism Published: August 16 2001 18:46GMT | Last Updated: August 16 2001 18:53GMT The protesters are winning. They are winning on the streets. Before too long they will be winning the argument. Globalisation is fast becoming a cause without credible champions. This week we saw the Washington consensus make way for Washington's retreat. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are scaling back the annual jamboree at their headquarters in the US capital. It seems that the US has had its fill of angry protests a few blocks from the White House. It's a nice irony. The US can count itself author, architect and principal beneficiary of globalisation. Guided by the US Treasury, the IMF sets the rules of the multilateral game. Now both are bowing before the critics of liberal capitalism. Sure, no great harm will come of the IMF's decision to meet over two days rather than a week. The opulence of the event has always jarred. Happily, a tight timetable should deflate a few egos and shorten the speeches. We shall not miss the save-the-world rhetoric of all those finance ministers. Who cares if the champagne stays corked, the canapes uneaten? It is, though, more serious than that. The organised uproar and violence that the anti-globalisation protests brought to Seattle back in the autumn of 1999 have now become a permanent backdrop. The numbers of protesters have swollen. Italy has still to recover from the - albeit mostly self-inflicted - wounds of the Group of Eight summit in Genoa. Belgium, the current president of the European Union, fears similar chaos at December's Laaken summit of EU leaders. The political kudos that once came with playing host to such gatherings has been replaced by the fear that all they bring now is a bad press. Yet the response to the protests has been largely one of spluttering indignation. Instead of listening, even learning, the politicians have lectured. The knee-jerk response has been to tar all the critics with the brush of thuggery. The tone is hectoring. Liberal markets are good for us, all of us. Anyone who says otherwise is a subversive or a fool. Free trade is an unalloyed blessing, for poor countries as well as rich. The multinational behemoths bring precious investment to developing nations. There are important truths in all these propositions. It is obvious, too, that the counter case is often shot through with confusions and contradictions. These are people, after all, who are waging a global war against globalisation. The anarchists have no need of consistency. But the broader coalition often seems just as inchoate. Non-governmental organisations want the multinationals tamed. Governments must reclaim the sovereignty lost to unaccountable and unscrupulous business executives. The IMF, the World Trade Organisation and the rest are agents of a new imperialism. And yet then we hear the protesters call for new global rules to protect the environment and prevent exploitation of labour. Self-interested trade unions stand with self-proclaimed idealists in demanding that rich nations protect jobs by imposing their own labour standards on poor ones. Somewhere in all this there is a cry for a different set of values. It is often hard to find. But it is there. And it explains why the protesters are winning. Their constituency stretches well beyond the mostly young activists we see on the streets. Many who abhor their tactics share their unease. Globalisation is unsettling, for the comfortable middle classes as much as for the politically disaffected. The threats, real and imagined, to national and local cultures are widely felt. So, too, are the unnerving shifts in the boundaries between governments, business and multilateral institutions. As consumers we are stronger; as citizens, weaker. International economic integration does generate wealth. It also redistributes it. There are losers as well as winners. In good times, unfettered capital markets funnel rich-nation finance to the poor countries that need it. In bad times they carry the curse of contagion. Shareholder value is a fine concept for those who own those giant corporations. But what of those who merely toil for them? As Stanley Fischer, the thoughtful, though
RE: Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long
Would this be in terms of a BMI-adjusted analysis. in the limit, cost-benefit analysis would decide that Lawrence Summers is worth more (in terms of discounted expected future real incomes, of course) than say, Brad deLong, so that it would be beneficial -- if not efficient -- to save the former by offing the latter. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long
I think this discussion would benefit by being related to very relevant concrete political events, i.e., the appointment of John Graham, director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, to deputy director (or some such title) of the Office of Management and Budget for regulatory affairs. By all accounts Graham is a sincere practitioner of CBA and CEA. Yet, at the same time the Harvard Center has received lots of specific corporate money and it is hard to beleive this has not influenced the agenda of the center under Graham. For example, the Center, under corporate sponsorship had what looked to me like a very one-side conference criticizing the precautionary principle. One of Graham's star students also did a review of 500 cost-effectiveness analyses concluding that the mean cost effectiveness was much more favorable for specific, technology laden health care interventions than for broader regulatory measures. Never mentioned in this review is a severe publication bias that haunts this literature. CEA and CBA of regulations are commissioned by the effected industries who do everything they can to under-value the benefits and over-value the costs. The converse is true for CEA and CBA analyses of specific healthcare technologies. -Original Message- From: Max Sawicky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 3:06 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16001] RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long . . . So there is limited or no rationale for an overall budget constraint, whether expressed in dollars or lives. So what's the limit on this? What keeps you from descending to the horrific Summers/Pritchett level, where the logic of dumping toxic waste in Africa is impeccable? Doug Good question. It would seem to defy science. Maybe we should ask what Jesus would do. mbs
RE: RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long
There actually are some interesting counter-analytical frameworks that have been developed by socio-democratic type Euro-health planners. These amount to using surveys to elicit population-based valuation on how different programmes should be traded-off against each-other, including the incorporation of social equity as one of the aspects to be traded-off. For example, the work of Eric Nord -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 3:46 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16007] RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long All well-taken. The political problem, as I see it, is that critics of these people have no counter-science, theory, or evidence. They are reduced to emotionalism. The best they can do is ask people like me to find errors in the other side's arguments. But all I can do is find errors given the operating premises of the other side, which is like spotting them a pair of touchdowns. mbs -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Brown, Martin - ARP (NCI) Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 3:25 PM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: [PEN-L:16004] RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long I think this discussion would benefit by being related to very relevant concrete political events, i.e., the appointment of John Graham, director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, to deputy director (or some such title) of the Office of Management and Budget for regulatory affairs. By all accounts Graham is a sincere practitioner of CBA and CEA. Yet, at the same time the Harvard Center has received lots of specific corporate money and it is hard to beleive this has not influenced the agenda of the center under Graham. For example, the Center, under corporate sponsorship had what looked to me like a very one-side conference criticizing the precautionary principle. One of Graham's star students also did a review of 500 cost-effectiveness analyses concluding that the mean cost effectiveness was much more favorable for specific, technology laden health care interventions than for broader regulatory measures. Never mentioned in this review is a severe publication bias that haunts this literature. CEA and CBA of regulations are commissioned by the effected industries who do everything they can to under-value the benefits and over-value the costs. The converse is true for CEA and CBA analyses of specific healthcare technologies. -Original Message- From: Max Sawicky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 3:06 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16001] RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long . . . So there is limited or no rationale for an overall budget constraint, whether expressed in dollars or lives. So what's the limit on this? What keeps you from descending to the horrific Summers/Pritchett level, where the logic of dumping toxic waste in Africa is impeccable? Doug Good question. It would seem to defy science. Maybe we should ask what Jesus would do. mbs
RE: Bounced from Michael McIntyre
King Leopold and the Congo? -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 4:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16013] Bounced from Michael McIntyre Well, how about the East India Company's incompetence during the Bengal famine of 1770? Ten million dead out of a population of thirty million, if memory serves? Pissed the hell out of Adam Smith, too. Michael McIntyre -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Re: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long
Ditto, But what is so special and correct about any given neoclassical solution to this question? -Original Message- From: Carrol Cox [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 4:26 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16014] Re: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: From Brad De Long Max Sawicky wrote: That's interesting as far as matching policies to popular preferences, but does it tell me how to vote if I'm dedicated to the common good? If I weren't tired and didn't have errands to run, I'd try to give a substantive commentary here, but I am tired and must run, so I'll state a dogma that I think could be defended undogmatically. Progressive politicians ought not to honor the common good; they ought (by fair means or foul) defend the interests of working people, primarily black female working people. They ought also (though this is actually redundant) do all in their power to sabotage the work of the Defense Dept., the State Dept. and the Attorney General. Carrol
RE: New Labour and the triumph of Cold War liberalism
When I was in London recently I saw a play called Feel Good, a ruthless satire of Blair's Labor Party. Have you seen it?. Any thoughts. If a similar play about the Clinton Administration had appeared on Broadway it would not have been obvious if it had been written by an lefty-ADA democrat or a member of Hillary's right wing conspiracy. -Original Message- From: Michael Keaney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 9:16 AM To: PEN-L (E-mail) Subject: [PEN-L:15927] New Labour and the triumph of Cold War liberalism Penners A few weeks ago Tony Blair presidentially appointed the chairman of the Labour Party without acknowledging that the post already existed, and has done for decades. The chair of the party an elected post. But such is Mr Tony's adherence to the norms of democracy that he saw fit to override legal protocol and impose his own appointee. The person he chose, Charles Clarke, was, only a while ago, being written off by such insightful commentators as Andrew Roth as too associated with the failed regime of Neil Kinnock, whose close adviser he was. In an earlier post Clarke was identified as having been a key figure in the Labour leadership's efforts to discredit the miners' strike of 1984/5 and having had earlier experience in CIA-backed ICFTU trade unionism. That his association with the electorally failed regime of Kinnock would have put an end to his political career is a measure of the inanity that passes for political journalism in Britain, where there is barely any acknowledgement of the largely obvious: the vast majority of the Blair entourage are the beneficiaries of the Kinnock ascendancy. Kinnock himself is now ensconced as the vice president of the European Commission, succeeding Leon Brittan in the mission to tailor that august institution to suit British sensibilities, in line with the British state's overall determination to integrate further in the European Union (see earlier posts by Mark Jones). The role of Kinnock and Brittan in this requires a separate post that may, or may not, materialise. Whatever, Kinnock has hardly failed and has been well-rewarded by his backers in the permanent government with his current appointment. Meanwhile Kinnock's erstwhile deputy, Roy Hattersley, continues to display a quality that is both endearing and infuriating: political naivete. In the article below, in which he complains of Clarke's appointment (whilst making sure not to bad-mouth Clarke himself), he says: When I was a member of Labour's national executive, Tony Benn would make long speeches about the plot to transfer all power from party members to the parliamentary leadership. Neil Kinnock and I shook our heads in bewilderment and mumbled about the need for Tony to lie down in a darkened room. I now realise that, far from being demented, he was prescient. Nice one, Roy. Now, prescience would imply there being some element of continuity in the Kinnock reforms and the present Blair autocracy. But that is not a road Roy is either willing or able to travel down, at least yet. The truth of the matter is that New Labour is the ultimate triumph of the liberal wing of the CIA and US National Security State. Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Michael Foot represented an interregnum which allowed the dangerous emergence of the New Left within the Labour Party, and which had to be beaten down and out with the full force of the British secret state, itself assisted by its US allies (hence the disowning of the miners' strike, support for repressive Thatcherite employment legislation, the surrender of the BBC and the assiduous courting of business interests). While the out-and-out reactionaries like James Angleton believed any kind of socialism equated to Soviet communism, the liberals used the language of social democracy (via the Socialist International, the ICFTU, etc.) and nurtured relationships with certain amenable social democrats (Hugh Gaitskell, Michael Stewart, Denis Healey, David Owen, Shirley Williams, George Robertson, Peter Mandelson, to name but a few) via such tailor made outfits as the British American Project for a Successor Generation in order to accomplish exactly what Blair is achieving now. There is a lot of detail behind all this that requires deeper explanation, but the essence is just that. As for Mark's points re the split between the US and the UK, it is quite possible that slavish adherence to US dictates appeals less than a leadership role (there could be no other for Great Britain, after all) in a European counterweight to US hegemony. Fanciful it might be, a long term ambition it would certainly have to be. Nevertheless, it would be a strategically logical maneuver for a third-rate imperialist power desperately punching above its weight. The Conservatives' attachment to empire (preserved by the punk Thatcherite tendency) is wholly anachronistic, as it was in 1945. But it was why the liberal wing of the US national security state
