Where did you get your figures Keith? The figures on science are considerably off when it comes to government spending on medicine. It's true about the Rockefeller Foundation and medicine but both Robert Desowith's "Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria? and McNeil's "Plagues and People" tell a far different story about who funded the medical research. As for science, the government has far outspent the private sector as well as paid the private sector to exist in such things a micro-chips through groups like Sematec. The biggest government investment in the private sector has been the military and is still. We invest more in the military than the entire world does. Almost all of that is scientific and medical research. I suspect that not even the Space Program comes close the scientific budget in the military. And then there is the secret budget in covert operations which also has a lot of science in space and information technology.
J.P. Morgan was a master of speculation and moving and using funds but when he died he had less than a million dollars personally. That story is courtesy of PBS. As for amounts? I realize that the dollar was vastly different in 1880s but your point about relativity is, I believe, overdone. I don't think Rockefeller or anyone else would have even approached a trillionaire. I'm not sure there were billionaires either but I could be wrong. I wrote this in 2003 for a conference in Washington, D.C. so the figures are out of date but the math is not. It's more true today. I think Keith needs to rethink this, but I don't know where Keith and others got what they did Bob Frank's description of his book either. Status was definitely not the emphasis of the intent. It went much deeper than that and I have gotten that from conversing with him and reading his writings including his columns in the newspapers. There is an article about taxes in today's New York Post that asserts that the wealthy pay more relatively than everyone else on their taxes. They give a whole bunch of figures that doesn't make sense to me but is part and parcel of a whole attitude that gives credence to the wealthy folks myths that they constitute a different culture from everyone else. Personally I think it is an abuse of the word culture and is a symptom of a society that is refusing to renew itself. REH Never have there been more billionaires than today. There are 138 billionaires in America from one billion dollars to 46.6 billion. The huge Rockefeller fortune's richest member has 2.5 billion while the richest Ford has 1.5 billion. It seems that the new status good in America is money and only if you belong to the club are you a member of the elite. What that means for the low person on the totem pole is that they could spend $45,645 a day for 365 days a year for sixty years to spend that one billion that elects them to the club. We could also say, if they stayed awake during that time - never sleeping - it would come to $31.71 per minute for sixty years. One Billionaire's day is more than the yearly per capita income of a citizen of the highest per capita income country in the world: The tiny country of Luxemburg. How much will Bill Gates have to spend a minute if he decided to spend it all in sixty years? Well you figure it out; he's worth 46.6 billion. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 10:56 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; Ed Weick Subject: Re: [Futurework] Professional Ethics (of economists) Ed, But the relative gap between the rich and the poor (in the advanced countries) is nowhere near the relative gap between the rich and the poor a century ago. J.P. Morgan was as rich as Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and several more combined. So was Carnegie, so was Rockefeller. In modern day terms each of them was probably a trillionaire. Going back further, Morgan and Co were not as rich in relative terms to the poor as the great landowners of the Middle Ages. Henry VIII (with 49 palaces) and about a dozen more owned half of England. It's true that there has been a recent surge in the gap, but come the double dip the rich are more than likely going to take a relatively larger bashing, too. The gap has only become really outrageous since the credit surge of the last 30 years. It's more than likely that the present gap will be greatly reduced to the long-term historical trend once the present currency catastrophe finally sorts itself out. All in all, the main difference today is a perceptual one. We know a great deal more about the rich than ever before, nor do we have scruples about being envious these days. Previously it was considered a sin to be envious in order to keep us in our place. Today, probably proportionately more money is being left by the rich to foundations and charities -- hundreds of them in recent decades -- than to families. Most of the medical innovations of the last 50 years have been due to research paid for by private foundations, not government-backed science. Just the Rockefeller Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute alone have probably produced as many new therapies than all US government research spending. Think of the Gate's and Buffet's present and future contributions to medical research and future eradication of some diseases such as malaria all round the world. Meanwhile we in the advanced countries devote less than 1% of our GDPs to the Third World. Keith At 14:11 21/09/2011, you wrote: Economics could still be considered a "moral science", given the prominance of concepts like "growth" in economic analysis. Where it fails as a moral science is in not having much to say on the morality of things like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, leaving that to politicians and other social sciences. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Sandwichman <mailto:[email protected]> To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 10:05 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Professional Ethics (of economists) Either that or you're both obsessed with bedbugs... But, hey, to bring this discussion back to where it started, I just want to mention that "economics" sprung from "moral sciences": "The emergence of economics as a separate subject (or Tripos, in Cambridge terminology) created intense debate over its relationship with the existing organization of teaching through the 'Moral Sciences' Tripos. John Neville Keynes, the father of John Maynard Keynes, faced considerable mental and emotional anxiety in his attempt to reconcile economic science with ethics and religion." (Martin Daunton, "Welfare, Taxation and Social Justice") On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Ray Harrell <[email protected]> wrote: I should start reading from the top. I come in after teaching a class until nine and find that Ed commented on bedbugs first. Either he's an artist or I'm an economist. REH From: [email protected] [ mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> ] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 3:18 PM To: [email protected]; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Professional Ethics (of economists) Rat farming? How about bedbugs? They're making a comeback. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Spencer" <[email protected] > To: < [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 2:30 PM Subject: [Futurework] Re: Professional Ethics (of economists) > > Last night, I commented on Tom's reference: > >>> http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2011/09/professional-ethics.html >> >> Over the past 30 years, the economics discipline has been >> systematically subverted....Many of the most prominent economists >> in America are now paid to testify in Congress, to serve on boards >> of directors, testify in antitrust cases and regulatory >> proceedings, and to give speeches to the companies and industries >> they study and write about with supposed objectivity. This is not >> a marginal activity; it is now an industry, run by a half dozen >> large companies. >> >> I didn't know that. Why does that remind me somehow of the privatized >> prison industry? > > Saw this on Slash/dot: > > How Bug Bounties Are Like Rat Farming 104 > > Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 20, @11:00AM > from the first-we-hypothesize-a-problem dept. > > Gunkerty Jeb writes "In a keynote speech at the United Security > Summit, Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, drew parallels > between the increasingly popular (and successful) practice of > software vendors offering bug bounties and a new industry > springing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the population > has recently found itself beset with a growing rat problem. In > order to help mitigate their rodent problem, officials in > Johannesburg began offering a small monetary rewards for each dead > rat turned in. It was wildly successful, and it didn't take long > for fresh batch of entrepreneurs to pop up and exploit the > situation. Of course, I'm talking about rat farming. Evidently, > business minded individuals have taken to breeding rats, only to > kill them and turn them in for rewards. Obviously, rat farming is > somewhat unscrupulous, but security researchers are doing the same > thing: breeding bugs in the lab, then leading them to the > slaughter for a nice payday. And it's a good thing." > > Which probably isn't a totally new thing [1] but a reminder about how > that works with prisons, weapon systems and (allegedly) economists. > > The way it works out for (software-) bug hunting -- the relevance for > Slash-dotters -- seems to be free of the malignancy/fraudulence of rat > farming: > > http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/how-bug-bounties-are-rat-farming-092011 > > as one commenter there (somewhat intemperately) observes. > > So the question is: how do you structure privatization of prisons, > corporatized for-fee economics consulting or any such activity so that > it works like bug-hunting and not like rat-farming? Do we need to > somehow extract or sequester such activities completely from > capitalist incentives? > > > - Mike > > > [1] The Paris rat-catcher of circa 1689 in Stephenson's _Quicksilver_ > was already (and quite entertainingly) into rat farming. > > -- > Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. > /V\ > [email protected] /( )\ > http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ <http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A 0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0> ^^-^^ > > _______________________________________________ > Futurework mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework > _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework -- Sandwichman _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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