Re: Shleifer update
I assume you mean that he will become the chair of Harvard's econ. department. After all, wasn't he close to Summers? Daniel wrote: shit, if that's the dude's defence he'll be lucky if he doesn't get the chair! dd Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Daniel Davies Sent: Sunday, August 15, 2004 3:34 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Shleifer update -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Perelman, Michael Sent: 15 August 2004 05:10 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Shleifer update Harvard and Shleifer say that the reforms they suggested worked well.
Re: KPFA and Sasha Lilley
Generally, it is a bad idea to challenge another member directly in the heading, since it sets off flames, but I cannot think of many people less inclined to intemperate behavior than Doyle and Sasha. If she wants to open a dialogue that could help matters at Pacifica, I would be glad to see the list help. If not, we can just hope that this dispute works out without too much damage. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
RE: [PEN-L] Chávez Loyalists Troll Barrios for Venezuela's Undecided
Yahoo News says that the turnout is heavy. If so, that is great news. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Shleifer update
I picked this up off the Economic Principles site. A conference on damages in the government's suit against Harvard University and one of its star economists, originally slated for July 19, has been rescheduled for September 9. US District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock presumably will ask all parties to file briefs on what they think they ought to be required to pay -- Harvard for breach of its $34 million contract; economics professor Andrei Shleifer and his then-assistant, lawyer Jonathan Hay, up to three times that much for the civil fraud Woodlock concluded they committed. The government has argued that the entire value of Harvard's mission to Moscow was lost when it turned out in the mid-1990s that Shleifer and Hay and their wives had been investing in Russian businesses and securities, in violation of the conflict of interest provisions of their contract. Harvard and Shleifer say that the reforms they suggested worked well. The US State Department fired Harvard when the transgressions came to light in 1996. The Russian government fired the State Department in turn, saying that the Harvard team had done nothing wrong while advising them. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: Economics and law
David interprets the car as a capitalist commodity. I partially agree with him, but for different reasons since I don't like cars. But the question would be how the automobile industry depended heavily on the state -- to build roads, to dislodge street cars Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: Economics and law
David, the problem with the Pinto is that the government does not adequately regulate safety -- not even to the extent of making relevant information available -- so the regulation is left to the lawsuits -- a very inefficient way of doing things. A few bucks for a protective gasket would not have meant that much. In hindsight it was stupid, but very costly for a number of innocent people. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David B. Shemano Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 12:55 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Economics and law Regarding the Pinto, cost/benefit analysis, etc., what exactly is the issue? I mean, we know with certainty that a certain number of people are going to die each year from auto accidents. We also know that if we reduced the speed limit to 5 m.p.h. required all passengers to wear helmets, required safety designs used for race cars, etc., the deaths would all be eliminated. But we don't, because the costs of doing so would be astronomical, and most people seem prepared to assume certain risks in consideration for conveniences and benefits. So is the problem the concept of cost/benefit analysis, the improper implementation of cost/benefit analysis, or disagreement about what are costs and benefits? If you reject cost/benefit analysis, how could you ever decide whether any marginal rule should be accepted or rejected? Why does this issue have anything to do with capitalism/socialism -- would not these issues have to be addressed no matter how the society is organized? David Shemano
Re: Venezuela rightists falter
With respect to this article, again, the polls here are supposed to be close. The Venezuela site says that they opposition polls show Chavez winning. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Re: Loath by the rich: Why Hugo Chavez is heading for a stunning victory
Right wing polls show Chavez loosing. Isn't that correct, Michael L? With the possibility of fraud, can we really expect a victory? Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
New way to escape the draft
NewsScan Daily, 6 August 2004 (Above The Fold) FINLAND DISMISSING 'NET-ADDICTED' CONSCRIPTS A growing number of conscripts have to be dismissed from Finland's armed forces every year due to an Internet addiction that makes them unsuited for service. A Finnish official says: It's an increasing problem. More and more young people are always on the Internet day and night. They get up around noon and have neither friends nor hobbies. When they get into the army, it's a shock to them. There are no specific figures and the military has yet to give the condition a proper dismissal code in its health records. (The Age, 4 Aug 2004) Rec'd from J Lamp http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/04/1091557883381.html Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Re: China's migrant refuseniks
This is a very fascinating article, displaying the contradictions in Chinese development on a far deeper level than the loud discussion that followed the mention of the article by Marty Paul. At first it did not make sense at all. How could China have great unemployment a shortage of workers? Then we see that the public sector has fallen down on the job of educating the workforce. And to give a fair deal to farmers upsets the applecart. Some time ago, Johnathan posted an article about the 10 contradictions in Chinese development. I think that it might be time to look at the sort of contradictions that could have been avoided under socialism and how they might play out under capitalism. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Re: India Turned Kashmir into the Bitter Place It Is Now
David, cut it out if you want to remain on the list. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of sartesian Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 10:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] India Turned Kashmir into the Bitter Place It Is Now You were much further ahead when you said you didn't know. Since then you've deployed the outside agitator explanation, and then this, neither of which address the real issues. - Original Message - From: Chris Doss [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 8:59 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] India Turned Kashmir into the Bitter Place It Is Now --- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: India turned Kashmir into the bitter place it is now Typical Guardian headline: Big country (fill in name of big country here) turned small country (fill in name of small country here) into the bitter place it is now. Small countries are by definition victims of other countries and share no responsibility whatsoever for the situation. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
dean baker vs. the dot com and the tulip bubbles
Notices whom they choose as counterweights to Dean and Shiller, the defenders of the dot.com and tulip bubbles. The Perils of Predicting Financial Bubbles By EDUARDO PORTER New York Times Published: July 25, 2004 HOUSING prices will plunge. Now. This is the conclusion of a growing troupe of economists, who warn that the surge in home prices over the past few years is pumping up a housing bubble that is doomed to implode, prompting a dramatic decline that could cost the economy trillions of dollars in lost wealth. The end result will be a loss of $2 to $3 trillion in housing wealth, and a downturn that is even worse than the fallout from the stock market crash, wrote Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic Policy Research. But maybe not. Even as the housing market has set more warning bells a-clang, some bubble-skeptic economists dismiss the idea that housing prices are due for a pop. Sure, home prices are high, they say. They might decline somewhat to adjust to rising interest rates. But nothing justifies an uncontrolled plunge. The argument is likely to continue - regardless of what actually happens to the price of homes - because the argument doesn't really have much to do with housing prices. It is about fundamentally different views of how markets operate. Housing prices have indeed soared. Stoked by some of the lowest interest rates in history, home prices in Los Angeles rose 18 percent in the last year. In Miami, they jumped 14 percent. But do these amount to bubbles? Robert Shiller, the famed Yale economist and bubble-ologist who predicted the end of the dot-com stock boom in his book Irrational Exuberance, argues that they do. He explains that bubbles are created when the prices of assets are fueled by psychological rather than economic considerations. From apartments in New York to tulips in 17th-century Holland, a bubble is born when people lose sight of the fundamental value of an asset and are willing to pay whatever it takes because they see that prices have risen like crazy and assume they will continue to do so. People get excited about price increases and start behaving differently, Mr. Shiller says. After all, he says, bubbles always pop. Like a Ponzi scheme, a bubble will survive only as long as the herd believes in ever-rising prices. If something pricks this faith, if no next buyer is willing to pay more, the herd will run and the bubble will deflate catastrophically. Take the stock market. From 1996 and to 1999 the price of tech stocks in the Standard Poor's index rose nearly sevenfold, goaded by dot-com enthusiasts who claimed that a new economy with much improved qualities justified prices previously believed to be impossible. Then the herd turned around. By mid-2001, tech stocks had fallen back by 70 percent. But despite these dramatic upheavals, not everybody is convinced that bubbles even exist. Peter Garber, a global strategist at Deutsche Bank, believes that psychological explanations like herd behavior are a deus ex machina invoked by economists who do not properly understand the economic underpinnings of the market. Mr. Garber argues that from the Dutch tulip craze to the stock market boom of a few years ago, soaring prices have been justified by economic fundamentals - be it the earning potential of rare tulips or stocks. Some of the arguments backing the tech boom ultimately proved to be flawed, he acknowledges, but the analysis holding stock prices up - that productivity had reached a new level and companies would be able to capture this in higher profits - was reasonable. When stock prices fell, it was because of changes in this underlying business landscape. Another bubble-skeptic is Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the fabled Dow 36,000, which was published in 1999 when the Dow Jones index was around 11,000. Mr. Hassett says there is an ideological component to the belief in bubbles. Liberals, who tend to believe that government must step in to protect people from market imperfections, will likely see more of them. Conservatives, who like their markets unfettered, will see less. In any case, it's difficult to predict when bubbles may burst. The Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, was three years early when he said stocks were irrationally exuberant in 1996. According to Laurence H. Meyer, a governor at the Fed during the rise and pop of the dot-com bubble, Mr. Greenspan gleaned from the experience an undisputable rule to spot asset price effervescence: if stock prices come crashing down by 40 percent or more, it means there was indeed a bubble, and it just burst. You don't know until its over, Mr. Meyer says. Or at least until it's too late to intervene and avoid it. Mr. Hassett of the conservative American Enterprise Institute thinks housing prices will be pretty much O.K. He acknowledges there might be some bubble dynamics at play in some regions. But he argues
Re: calling for the assassination of the President is against the law
What about Ari Fleischer describing the one bullet option in Iraq? Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Is this a serious problem?
Karmin, Craig. 2004. Slowdown in Buying of Securities Reverses Trend and May Make It Harder to Finance Trade Deficit. Wall Street Journal (26 July): p. C 1. Foreign purchases of securities in the U.S. in May came to $56.4 billion. While that was large enough to finance the current-account deficit, it was down 26% from April and represented the lowest monthly total in seven months. It also marked the fourth consecutive monthly decline of such purchases by foreigners. May was the third consecutive month foreigners have been net sellers. That hadn't happened in nearly a decade. Potentially more troubling was the slowdown in Asian purchases of U.S. debt -- especially in Japan, which holds 16% of all U.S. Treasurys. That country's nascent economic recovery has eased the government's concerns about maintaining a weak currency to boost exports, in turn reducing the Bank of Japan's need to intervene and buy dollars. Japan bought $14.6 billion in U.S. Treasurys in May and $5.5 billion in April, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. That is a significant drop from a monthly average of $25 billion for the seven-month period ending in March. If the Japanese economy continues to rebound, Tokyo's Treasury purchases are unlikely to return to those lofty levels. Japan is to the U.S. financial markets what Saudi Arabia is to the world oil markets -- the primary provider of capital, Joseph Quinlan, chief market strategist for Banc of America Capital Management, wrote in a recent report. Self-sustained growth in Japan could ultimately obviate the need for the Bank of Japan to purchase U.S. securities, leaving a buying void in the U.S. Treasury market, helping to drive yields higher. foreigners now control 40% of U.S. Treasury debt, and their purchases are unlikely to return to peak levels seen at the start of the year, she said. So U.S. interest rates could still go higher, even if the current account is funded, Ms. McCaughrin [Rebecca McCaughrin, an economist for Morgan Stanley] said. China, Asia's second-biggest buyer of U.S. securities, ... bought $13 billion in U.S. assets through May, compared with $33.1 billion a year earlier. China was a net purchaser of $1.7 billion of U.S. Treasurys in the first five months of the year -- down 91% from the $18.4 billion in net purchases a year earlier. Even the United Kingdom, long a reliable buyer of U.S. securities, turned negative in May, with net sales of $4 billion. That was its first monthly net sale since October 1998 during the near collapse of giant U.S. hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management and the aftermath of the Russia financial crisis. Mr. Quinlan [Joseph Quinlan, chief market strategist for Banc of America Capital Management] argued that Japan has become America's de facto banker, helping to keep U.S. interest rates low over the past year. Currency traders say the Bank of Japan hasn't intervened in the currency market since March, and the pace of Japanese Treasury buying of the recent past looks unsustainable: Japan bought $175 billion in U.S. Treasury debt from September to March, a figure that exceeds Japanese purchases of Treasurys in the previous seven years combined. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: Subject: Re: Suicides, Military and Economic
Why are they localized? Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ulhas Joglekar Sent: Saturday, July 24, 2004 10:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Subject: Re: Suicides, Military and Economic Seth Sandronsky wrote: Peasant Suicides in India is a chapter in Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity by Robert Pollin that details the ruinous outcomes of IMF policies on Indian farmers. India doesn't owe any money to the IMF. How IMF policies are ruining Indian farmers? As for farmers' suicides, they are largely in Andhra Pradesh, not elsewhere in India. Ulhas Yahoo! India Careers: Over 65,000 jobs online Go to: http://yahoo.naukri.com/
Re: HDI, GNP and the PPP factor
Yoshie, you are not the only one that has been pestering Paul. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi Sent: Saturday, July 24, 2004 7:33 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] HDI, GNP and the PPP factor Indeed, it has been a little noticed trend that today most of the World Bank's 'public relations' type documents, most human development related documents, and most documents arguing for the success of the neo-liberal project use PPP *and only* PPP. Even where there findings would be utterly reversed by the once standard method. Even the introductory chapter to the World Bank's flagship statistical publication (cited above) uses ONLY the more favorable (and yet artificially constructed) version. Even the Human Development Index we have been discussing presents ONLY one version - and this radically changes many stated conclusions. It is not, as if the actual National Income Accounts are not used in other environments where that method would be more favorable to the Bank or the IMF's policy objectives. Indeed in some cases - such as those involving debt negotiations, foreign investment, or sectoral policies promoting the private sector, it appears (by purely casual observation) that *only* the non-PPP version appears. Paul Paul, why don't you put together your notes on the PPP factor that you've posted here and publish it as an article for the general audience? -- Yoshie * Critical Montages: http://montages.blogspot.com/ * Greens for Nader: http://greensfornader.net/ * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/
Re: Query: Ford/General Motors
I think that this is very important. For me it signifies that the center of gravity of the economy is shifting in the direction of finance capital, except that I would include intellectual property as part of the nonmaterial properties that represent the core of finance capital. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael Hoover Sent: Friday, July 23, 2004 10:33 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L] Query: Ford/General Motors what is progressive economist take on ford and general motors releasng info the other day indicating that each only made profits from credit/lending operations... michael hoover -- Please Note: Due to Florida's very broad public records law, most written communications to or from College employees regarding College business are public records, available to the public and media upon request. Therefore, this e-mail communication may be subject to public disclosure.
Re: Can Tulipmania be explained rationally as the birth of options?
First of all, great pun: spot dog. The person whom Daniel mentions, Garber, is an economist, who began to write about tulip mania right after the `987 stock market melt down in the vain hope of proving that markets were efficient. In the end, he admitted some irrationality, but not a lot. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Daniel Davies Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2004 4:26 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Can Tulipmania be explained rationally as the birth of options? to be honest, not a lot. I'm trying to track down the actual working paper, but my immediate reaction is the same as my reaction to Peter Garber's previous attempt to interpret tulipomania as a rational phenomenon, and rather similar to your own; it is a historical fact that tulipomania diverted massive amounts of the productive output of the Dutch economy and led to a serious recession. If this was produced as the result of the operation of an efficient market, then any point one might reasonably want to make as a critique of efficient markets theory is made, and the Chicago boys have saved their theory by destroying it. In any case, I don't think it makes sense as a piece of finance theory; the option tail does not wag the spot dog. If the reinterpretation of the contracts did take place in this manner, then that would make the futures/options contracts themselves much more valuable to the buyers, but it would make no sense at all for the sellers of tulip bulbs to mark up the spot price of tulips. I suspect that the authors are relying on the assumption that it would be possible for an investor to go short of physical tulips, something which I do not believe was possible. dd -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Pollak Sent: 17 July 2004 20:29 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Can Tulipmania be explained rationally as the birth of options? [Does this argument make any sense? I can't see any upside for the planters in this arrangment. It seems they would be better off doing all their deals on the spot market. And it doesn't seem to provide any explanation for the collapse. It seems they are just in love with the ratio and are bending the facts to fit their chosen conclusion. I was wondering if people who know more about option pricing might see merits that I'm missing.] URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2103985/ moneyboxDaily commentary about business and finance. Bulb Bubble Trouble That Dutch tulip bubble wasn't so crazy after all. By Daniel Gross Posted Friday, July 16, 2004, at 2:05 PM PT During the dot.com bubble and its collapse, economists and historians increased their study of market crazes of the past, particularly the most ludicrous one of all: the 17^th-century Dutch flower bubble. The classic description of Tulipmania appeared in Clarence Mackay's 1841 classic Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, In 1634, the rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade. The normally sane Dutch bourgeoisie got carried away and bid up prices of tulip bulbs spectacularly in winter 1637, only to see them crash in spring. One bulb was reportedly sold in February 1637 for 6,700 guilders, as much as a house on Amsterdam's smartest canal, including coach and garden, and many times the 150-guilder average income. As Earl A. Thompson, an economist at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Jonathan Treussard, a graduate student at Boston University, note in a working paper, the contract price of tulips in early February 1637 reached a level that was about 20 times higher than in both early November 1636 and early May 1637. Sounds like a bubble. But it wasn't, asserts Thompson, who is working on a history of bubbles. Tulip-bulb investors were neither mad nor delusional in 1636 and 1637. Rather, he says, they were rationally responding, in finest efficient-market fashion, to overlooked changes in the rules of tulip investing. As European prices for the dramatic flowers rose in the 1630s, many burgomasters--local mayors--started to invest in the bulbs. But in the fall of 1636, the European tulip market suddenly wilted because of a crisis in Germany. German nobles were big fans of tulips and had taken to planting bulbs. But in October 1636, the Germans lost a battle to the Swedes at Wittstock. Then German peasants began to revolt. The German demand for tulips sagged, and princes began digging up their own bulbs and selling them, say Thompson and Treussard. The sudden glut caused prices to fall, and Dutch burgomasters began
frontiers of intellectual property
Porges, Seth. 2004. We The People...Can't Make Copies? Business Week (12 July): p. 12. How much is the U.S. Constitution worth to you? On Amazon.com, the going rate is $2.99. A copy of the founding document, long in the public domain, can be acquired easily and legally for free on the Internet or at any public library. But e-book publisher NuVision Publications has begun selling it online as an e-book in an encrypted format that can be printed only twice per year. Oddly enough, people seem to be buying the Constitution. The e-book's Amazon sales ranking, as of June 29, was a respectable 1,016 out of the hundreds of thousands of books Amazon sells on its Web site. That's despite the fact that helping someone print the e-book more than twice could violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that forbids tampering with anti-piracy protections, according to Wendy Seltzer, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Re: BW: Timid fat cats
I especially appreciated the reference to the Spring hiring binge. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Poor nations back down on WTO
From the Financial Times from the NYT web sites. Poorer nations to soften trade stance By Guy de Jonquières in London and Frances Williams in Geneva Published: July 14, 2004 A last-minute diplomatic offensive by leading trade powers appeared last night to have beaten back moves by developing countries to adopt a hardline negotiating stance that threatened efforts to revive the Doha world trade round. Top trade officials from the US, the European Union, Brazil and India urged a meeting of ministers from the Group of 90 developing countries in Mauritius to back the drive to agree by the end of this month a negotiating framework for the round. Advertisement Their pleas led G90 ministers to set about re-drafting their planned communiqué, so as to drop or tone down earlier demands that other World Trade Organisation members had told them were unacceptable. The talks have produced greater realism about what is at stake. Key developing countries are looking at the issues much more pragmatically, one participant at the meeting said. Pascal Lamy, the EU trade commissioner, said the talks had produced some common ground and the G90 had indicated greater flexibility on some important issues. Robert Zoellick, the US trade representative, said shortly before leaving Mauritius that he detected points of convergence, though the G90's mood was still fluid. The discussions appeared to have reduced the chances of a potentially explosive confrontation over complaints by African cotton-growing countries that they were being seriously harmed by US subsidies. A senior diplomat from Benin, representing the African cotton producers, told Reuters they might be prepared to negotiate on cotton as part of an overall agriculture package, rather than press for separate negotiations - a demand the US opposes. Mr Lamy sought to defuse controversy over his proposal to exempt G90 members from opening their markets in the round, saying it was only a political concept designed to reassure developing countries that they were not expected to make big concessions. However, Celso Amorim, Brazil's foreign minister, told the ministers there was no free ride and no free round - there is always a price to pay. Nonetheless, he suggested more advanced developing countries might offer special concessions to poorer ones. Trade officials said efforts by Mr Zoellick and Mr Lamy to persuade G90 ministers that negotiations on a WTO agreement to facilitate trade would be in poorer countries' interest also appeared to have won support. The US, EU and Brazilian officials said efforts by WTO members to assemble by the end of this month a package for cutting tariffs and subsidies in agricultural and industrial trade were inching along. But they stressed that important issues remained to be settled. Members will seek to agree a negotiating framework by the end of the month. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Re: Fw: [stop-imf] Africa should not pay its debts - Jeffrey Sachs
I mentioned a couple days ago how much Jeffrey Sachs has moved to the left. Chris's message is further confirmation. As I said before, he has also been very strong on Haiti. Perhaps Paul A. has something to add about the relationship between Sachs and the United Nations. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: Christian Parenti reporting from Falluja
I believe that he was shot at while in Iraq. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: DONKEY. ELEPHANT. CHICKEN?
For the most part, we have been spared the agonies of the choice between Kerry and Nader on this list, with the threat of another ghoulish four years of Bush. No attractive choice lies ahead of us. I once spent a couple hours alone with Nader. I don't think he had the slightest interest in me as a person, but when I gave him information he would find useful you could see him intently processing it. When what I said was less interesting, he was somewhere else. His knowledge, his information, the networks he has established, and the influence he has exerted have all been very positive. Kerry, in contrast, with all the advantages he has had in life really has done very little, even though Massachusetts should have given him a safe base for activism. His zombie-like campaign, his support of Israel, and his lack of any real plan are disheartening. In California, my vote cannot harm Bush. I cannot imagine the Republicans taking control of this state, so I can safely vote for Nader without worrying about the effect of my vote. But then, I've never voted for a Democratic candidate for president. I understand the divisions in the Green Party, I cannot understand getting angry about what they do one way or the other. The Greens have not proven to be reliable leftists, even United States were in Europe. They have not developed an effective electoral strategy, but neither has anybody else on the left. The right wing did. Everybody knows it did. Many leftists talk about replicating that strategy. The Green local elections are about as far as anybody has taken this idea. We on the left has never been particularly good about critical support of those who are not with this 100%. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Re: The Age of Anxiety
Right. Done remarkable work. The technology is wonderful when the user is not careless. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Doug Henwood Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2004 1:53 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The Age of Anxiety Michael Perelman wrote: I recently attended a history of economic thought conference in Toronto. Judy Klein, who has unremarkable work I assume that sound recognition software's way of rendering done remarkable work. about the overwhelming influence of military thought on both economics and mathematics, has used the crude computers that military could in its fighter craft during World War II as a way of demonstrating that relationship. For example, rational expectations comes directly out of the server mechanisms that the gunners used. Some of the early work in portfolio theory was funded by the navy. Doug
Hidden costs of living
Here are some snippits from a Wall Street Journal about bank credit card fees. Does anybody attempt to take account of such things in measuring the CPI or income distribution? Pacelle, Mitchell. 2004. Late Payers and Big Borrowers Are Becoming Cash Cows. Wall Street Journal (6 July): p. A 1. For consumers who pay off their credit-card balances each month, shop aggressively for interest rates as low as 0%, and take advantage of generous credit-card rewards programs, consumer credit has never been cheaper. But for others like Ms. Reid, who went into debt so she could move to a better job in Florida from South Carolina, the trend is in the other direction. Card users, consumer advocates and some industry experts complain that banks are attempting to squeeze more and more revenue from consumers struggling to make ends meet. Instead of cutting these people off as bad credit risks, banks are letting them spend -- and then hitting them with larger and larger penalties for running up their credit, going over their credit limits, paying late and getting cash advances from their credit cards. The fees are also piling up for bounced checks and overdrawn accounts. People think they are being swindled, says industry consultant Duncan MacDonald, formerly a lawyer for the credit-card division of Citigroup Inc. Penalty fees aren't new, but they are becoming more important to the industry's bottom line and are being borne by the people who can least afford to pay them, he contends. Cardweb.com, a consulting group that tracks the card industry, says credit-card fees, including those from retailers, rose to 33.4% of total credit-card revenue in 2003. That was up from 27.9% in 2000 and just 16.1% in 1996. The average monthly late fee hit $32.01 in May, up from $30.29 a year earlier and $13.30 in May 1996, the company said. In 2003, the credit-card industry reaped $11.7 billion from penalty fees, up 9% from $10.7 billion a year earlier, according to Robert Hammer, an industry consultant. As competitive pressure builds on the front-end pricing, it has pushed a lot of the profit streams to the back end of the card -- to these fees, says Robert McKinley, chief executive of CardWeb .com. Over the past two years, he said, it's become much more aggressive. At industry conferences, he notes, talk often turns to what the market will bear. Banks say that penalties and fees are a necessary component of new models for pricing financial services. Gone are the days when banks collected hefty annual fees on all credit cards and charged fat interest rates to all customers. Now, the banks say, they must rely on risk-based pricing models under which customers with the shakiest finances pay higher rates and more fees. Until the early 1990s, most banks offered one main credit-card product. It typically carried an annual interest rate of about 18% and an annual fee of $25. Cardholders who paid late or strayed over their credit limit were charged modest fees. Profits from good customers covered losses from those who defaulted. By the late 1990s, banks were attracting consumers with low introductory rates, then subjecting some of them to a myriad of risk-related fees, such as late fees and over-limit fees. A 2001 survey by the Federal Reserve showed that 30% of general-purpose credit-card holders had paid a late fee in the prior year. In a survey of 140 credit cards this year, the advocacy group Consumer Action said 85% of the banks make it a practice to raise interest rates for customers who pay late -- often after a single late payment. Nearly half raise rates if they find out that a customer is in arrears with another creditor. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: Sowell
David wrote: The relevant factor wasn't that minimum wage laws (not raising wages) reduce employment. It was the reaction of the government bureaucrats to his suggestion of an empirical test to determine why employment was falling, which led him to philosophically shift from the importance of goals to incentives David may not know about the economics literature about the minimum wage. David Card and Alan Krueger showed that the minimum wage did not reduce employment. They compared employment into adjacent states where one increased the minimum wage. Soon thereafter, the fast food industry hired two economists to refute the study. They were not very successful. The refutation did not stand up to scrutiny. The other study did. I have to leave now even though this explanation is inadequate. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Bush endorses solar energy.
Well, sort of. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,64021,00.html Solar to Keep Army on the Go By John Gartner 02:00 AM Jun. 29, 2004 PT During a battle, the ability to move troops swiftly and without detection can mean the difference between victory and defeat. The U.S. Army is developing tents and uniforms made from flexible solar panels to make it more difficult to track soldiers. Jean Hampel, project engineer in the Fabric Structures Group at the Army's Natick Soldier Systems Center, said the need to reduce the Army's logistics footprint spurred interest in developing lightweight solar panels. We want to cut back on the things that soldiers have to bring with them, including generators and personal battery packs, Hampel said. In modern warfare, portable power for communications technology is every bit as important as firepower and manpower. The Army is testing flexible solar panels developed by Iowa Thin Film Technologies that can be layered on top of a tent, or rolled up into a backpack to provide a portable power source. Tents using solar panels made from amorphous silicon thin film on plastic can provide up to 1 kilowatt of energy, which is sufficient to power fans, lights, radios or laptops, according to Hampel. Hampel said using solar tents would reduce the need for diesel powered generators and diminish the thermal signature that enemy sensors use to track troop location. She said soldiers could carry smaller flexible solar panels and unfold them during the day to collect energy to recharge their personal communications equipment. This would enable soldiers to lighten their loads of extra battery packs, which are sometimes left behind and reveal the soldiers' presence, according to Hampel. While Iowa Thin Film's PowerFilm products are ready for field use, the Army's type classification process, which enables them to be purchased in bulk, will require one to two years of additional testing. Iowa Thin Film's plastic-based products are an improvement over previous generations of solar panels that layer the panels onto less-flexible metal, company spokesman Mike Coon said. He said the amorphous silicon products are also cheaper to produce because the panel connectors that centralize the collected energy are laser-welded during the production process; standard photovoltaic panels must be individually connected. Coon said standard PV panels are uniform in size, but his company's products can be cut into modules of different sizes, which maximizes the efficiency of power collection. Coon said Iowa Thin Film custom-made the solar panel fabric that is layered onto tents for the Army and the smaller foldable panels became commercially available in late 2003. The PowerFilm products are currently more expensive than traditional solar panels, but Coon said improvements in the manufacturing process will enable them to be cost-competitive within two to five years. The Army's long-term vision is to have solar panels that can be camouflaged into tents or even uniforms, Hampel said. Her group is working with Konarka Technologies to develop nanotechnology-based solar panels that can be woven directly into fabric. Konarka's technology replaces silicon with dye polymer plastics that transform any kind of light into electrical energy. Using plastics as the basis for solar panels will result in a faster manufacturing process than silicon fabrication plants, said Russell Gaudiana, vice president of research and development at Konarka. Gaudiana likened the process to producing photographic film (he previously worked at Polaroid), and said the solar panels can be printed in any color. Our solar panels can be woven into any fabric, including tents, clothing or roofing material, he said. The technology would reduce the cost of installing solar panels on new buildings because they could be applied as part of the roof itself instead of as an additional step, according to Gaudiana. And instead of having a small solar panel on a handheld or notebook, the entire surface area could be used to recharge the batteries. Gaudiana said the technology is still in the research phase, and declined to give a timetable of its availability. It would likely be cost-competitive with other technologies initially and would be cheaper when it is mass-produced. Solar energy consultant Paul Maycock of PV Energy Systems said the Army has been interested in flexible solar cells for about 10 years. It's very important that we have reliable portable electricity for telecommunication-based military, Maycock said. Companies have been producing solar panels using amorphous silicon on steel for several years, but several failed because they could not advance the technology quickly enough to keep up with rigid photovoltaic systems, Maycock said. He said the Army has continued to fund development of the technology because the materials to date have been too heavy and not cost-efficient. The technology has thousands of applications
Re: Enron
We used to get conservatives here who came to convert us. All they did was to create irritation. David never has done that. Sometimes he tweaks us -- always in good humor. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 As a I said when I first participated on this list so many years ago, I am here to learn, and believe learning results from dialectic argument. The argument that capitalism is legalized fraud and theft is a very interesting thesis which I would love to explore. (For instance, doesn't that statement, as a normative statement, assume the justness of private property, because if not, what is wrong with theft?). However, as Prof. Craven does not appear to suffer from any doubt, I doubt he would enjoy such an exchange with me. You can't please everybody. David Shemano
Re: Chechnya and capitalism
Lou, demanding does not work or belong here. I think that Chris is going to unsub because of this mode of communication. You can disagree. You can supply other facts. The non-personal part of the dialogue is useful; the personal part is not. -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Louis Proyect Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 6:29 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Chechnya and capitalism Michael Perelman wrote: It is a shame that so much information is mixed with the personal stuff. What is so personal about demanding that he back up his slander about raiding? The main excuse of the Kremlin for its criminal war is that it is rooting out bandits. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Bush's rapid shifting of position
I cannot remember a time with so many left documentaries getting screen time -- even ignoring Michael Moore. Supersize this, control room, the corporation Maybe our time is coming. And then, maybe not. Michael
Re: Bush's rapid shifting of position
I am sorry. I thought it was because of our revolutionary work on pen-l. -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Dorman Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2004 2:14 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Bush's rapid shifting of position A significant constituency on the left has materialized in recent years, propelled by anti- (alter-) globalization actions, mobilizations against the Iraq war, etc. This demographic has been discovered by the entertainment industry, which is ready to sell to them. To say this is not to denigrate the work of Moore et al., but to explain why it is being promoted in the mainstream. Still recommended after all these years: The Consciousness Industry by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Peter Perelman, Michael wrote: I cannot remember a time with so many left documentaries getting screen time -- even ignoring Michael Moore. Supersize this, control room, the corporation Maybe our time is coming. And then, maybe not. Michael
Re: Sacred outsourcing
When Jim D. sends articles from the Onion he has to attach a warning because I find it difficult to distinguish between satire and the news. Michael P.
Re: odd bodkins on Reagan
Thanks. Tell your friend that I was a fan back then. -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dan Scanlan Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 1:45 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] odd bodkins on Reagan Importance: High Dan and the rest of the list, please do not send graphics to the list. It takes up enormous bandwidth. It fills up mailboxes and puts an inordinate cost on some people outside the United States. Just send a URL. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Sorry Michael. The artwork's not yet on the web. Dan -- --- IMPEACHMENT: BRING IT ON NOW! NOVEMBER COULD BE TOO LATE. -- END OF THE TRAIL SALOON Alternate Sundays 6-8am GMT (10pm-midnight PDT) http://www.kvmr.org I uke, therefore I am. -- Cool Hand Uke I log on, therefore I seem to be. -- Rodd Gnawkin I claim, therefore you believe. -- Dan Ratherthan Visit Cool Hand Uke's Lava Tube: http://www.coolhanduke.com
Re: Reagan dead
It was Ford, not Carter that ok's the slaughter in E. Timor. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Carrol Cox Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2004 2:33 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Reagan dead Mark Laffey wrote: Did anyone else see the CNN hagiography? He was 93 - how many people died as a result of his policies? Mark Most or all of the Reagan policies that led to so many deaths were policies initiated during the Carter administration. I think it especially important to recall this in the midst of the current ABB hysteria. It was Carter above all who sponsored the slaughter in East Timor. It was Carter who in effect approved in advance of the murder of Bishop Romero and of the ongoing massacres in Central America. It was Carter who began the war in Afghanistan that led directly to the present horrors. It was Carter who began the military build-up that Reagan merely continued. It was Carter who began the deregulation process that Reagan merely continued. Carrol
Re: new megafraud controversy raging in Venezuela: imperialism or Chavez
What a wonderful example of American imperialism! On a more serious note, Michael, what are the prospects for a recall? Also, I suspect that everybody here is grateful for the serious information we have been getting about Venezuela. Thanks. By the way, Michael L. was one of the 2 original members of this list. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of michael a. lebowitz Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 2:22 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L] new megafraud controversy raging in Venezuela: imperialism or Chavez Published: Friday, June 04, 2004 Bylined to: Patrick J. O'Donoghue Chavez Frias blamed for Miss Venezuela's poor showing in Miss Universe Analyzing the failure of Venezuela to figure in the final 5 candidates of the Miss Universe contest held in Quito, Ecuador, some Venezuelan luminaries are throwing the blame on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias. Beauty contest expert, Julio Rodriguez says political reasons dominated the exclusion of clear favorite, Ana Karina Anez ... it's due to the tense situation between Venezuelan and the USA ... we must remember that it's a US-based event ... she should have been the last 5 ... I cannot see any other motive. Nidal Nouahied, who designed Miss Venezuela's national dress agrees that politics did enter the contest this year ... we are talking about a US company that disagrees with the process developing in Venezuela ... Lebanon and Israel are always excluded for the same reason. Star Models Agency director, Elizabeth Linares complains that Ana Karina had everything it takes to win and showed plenty of security ... tense and stringent relations between Venezuela and the USA will hinder everything we do in international contests ... beauty has nothing to do with politics ... but! The exclusion of Miss Venezuela broke Venezuela's record of 21 finals ... three times as runner up: Marena Bencomo (1996), Veruska Ramirez (1997) y Mariangel Ruiz (2003). Ruiz says she's as shocked as the rest of the Nation because people were certain the Venezuelan girl would win ... money was no object in the preparing Anez for the event but she rules out the political factor, pointing to the non-political character of the contest. Linares revives the theory that Miss Universe tycoon, Donald Trump is getting his own back after the (Miss Universe Alicia Machado rumpus several years ago but other experts reject the theory outright. * Some people suggest that it is time to change the Venezuelan prototype, insisting that future Miss Venezuelas beef up on the question part and learn to speak English. Miss Venezuela organizer, Osmel Sousa admits he wasn't too happy with Ana Karina's performance ... she was a bit nervous, a bit passive before the preliminary jury.
money, sex, happiness
David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald. Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study. NBER Working Paper No. w10499 Issued in May 2004 Another version can be found at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~blnchflr/papers/sentScanJEsexmoneyhappinessj une2003.pdf This paper studies the links between income, sexual behavior and reported happiness. It uses recent data on a random sample of 16,000 adult Americans. The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations. Greater income does not buy more sex, nor more sexual partners. The typical American has sexual intercourse 2-3 times a month. Married people have more sex than those who are single, divorced, widowed or separated. Sexual activity appears to have greater effects on the happiness of highly educated people than those with low levels of education. The happiness-maximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is calculated to be 1. Highly educated females tend to have fewer sexual partners. Homosexuality has no statistically significant effect on happiness. Our conclusions are based on pooled cross-section equations in which it is not possible to correct for the endogeneity of sexual activity. The statistical results should be treated cautiously Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
frontiers of fictitious capital
PAGE ONE How Cuts in Retiree Benefits Fatten Companies' Bottom Lines Trimming a Health-Care Plan Creates Accounting Gains, Under Some Arcane Rules A Shield Against Rising Costs By ELLEN E. SCHULTZ and THEO FRANCIS Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL March 16, 2004; Page A1 The loud message comes from one company after another: Surging health-care costs for retired workers are creating a giant burden. So companies have been cutting health benefits for their retirees or requiring them to contribute more of the cost. Time for a reality check: In fact, no matter how high health-care costs go, well over half of large American corporations face only limited impact from the increases when it comes to their retirees. They have established ceilings on how much they will ever spend per retiree for health care. If health costs go above the caps, it's the retiree, not the company, who's responsible. Yet numerous companies are cutting retirees' health benefits anyway. One possible factor: When companies cut these benefits, they create instant income. This isn't just the savings that come from not spending as much. Rather, thanks to complex accounting rules, the very act of cutting retirees' future health-care benefits lets companies reduce a liability and generate an immediate accounting gain. In some cases it flows straight to the bottom line. More often it sits on the books like a cookie jar, from which a company takes a piece each year that helps it meet its earnings targets. The art of minimizing retiree-benefit costs while creating income is arcane and poorly understood by the public -- and by the retirees. Here's a field guide to seven techniques. Hitting the Ceiling Big companies began in the early 1990s to set ceilings on how much they would ever spend for retiree health care, regardless of what happened to medical costs in general. ConocoPhillips, Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. are among the many that did so. A cap can be a fixed annual amount per retiree, a per-retiree average or, less commonly, a fixed sum for a group. In any case, once it's reached, a company is largely insulated from future medical-cost increases for those retirees. The fate of retirees can be very different. When Robert Eggleston retired from International Business Machines Corp. 12 years ago, he was paying $40 a month toward health-care premiums for himself and his wife, LaRue, with IBM paying the rest. In 1993, IBM set ceilings on its own health-care spending for retirees. For those on Medicare, which provides basic hospital and doctor-visit coverage, the cap was $3,000 or $3,500, depending on when they retired. For those younger than 65, the cap was $7,000 or $7,500. Spending hit the caps for the older retirees in 2001, the company says, pushing future health-cost increases onto retirees' shoulders. Mr. Eggleston, 66 years old, has seen his premiums jump more to $365 a month for the couple. Deductibles and copayments for drugs and doctor visits added $663 a month last year. It just eats up all the pension, which is $850 a month, Mrs. Eggleston says. Her husband has brain cancer. Though he gets free supplies of a tumor-fighting drug through a program for low-income families, he has cashed in his 401(k) account, and he and LaRue have taken out a second mortgage on their Lake Dallas, Texas, home. IBM retirees as a group saw their health-care premiums rise nearly 29% in 2003, on the heels of a 67%-plus increase in 2002. For IBM, with its caps in place, spending on retiree health care declined nearly 5%, after a drop of 18% the year before. IBM confirms that retirees' spending has risen as its own has fallen. It describes the retirees' increased cost in 2003 as not very dramatic, averaging $158 a year, or $13.15 a month, for each of the 190,000 retirees and dependents who participate in the plan. IBM says its costs are down because more retirees are older and eligible for Medicare, so the company's contribution is lower. It says that this year it established a zero premium plan for retirees, although this plan carries deductibles double those of other plans. Caps Plus Cuts Just because companies have shelter from retiree health-cost inflation doesn't mean they can't also cut their retirees' health benefits. In January last year, Aetna Inc. said it would phase out health-care benefits for workers who retire starting this year. Health-care costs have increased, says a spokesman for the company. Yet federal filings show Aetna's spending on its retirees' health benefits had not been rising substantially, thanks to ceilings Aetna imposed a decade ago. From 1998 through 2002, its annual spending for retiree health benefits ranged between $35 million and $39 million. Aetna says it made the January 2002 benefit cut to strengthen its business. Wherever it makes sense, we've been trying to reduce expenses in order to be competitive, says its spokesman, adding
Bush and the loonies
Bush is in Roswell, NM supposedly to talk about jobs. For those of you outside of the US, Roswell is supposed to be where the Air Force has the captured flying saucers. So he can connect the war on terror, jobs, and the Mars program. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Re: the $
This article seems quite good for the conventional corporate media. I mentioned a couple days ago that I thought that the biggest risk for the Bush economy comes from the international sector. A couple of days ago, Jeff Madrick had a nice piece in the New York Times emphasizing the importance of cooperation in maintaining international economic health. He probably goes too far in making the pre-Bush era seem like a time of great international cooperation. Surely the US through its way around quite a bit before Bush, but the gung ho cowboy politics of today certainly represent a threat to any hope of international cooperation. Maybe the US can successfully act as a coercive hegemon, but I doubt it. The dollar dilemma seems crucial in reminding us that the capitalist system is full of contradictions. If you push too hard in one direction, you can bite you in the butt from the other side. Cheap dollar help manufacturing, but rapidly cheapening dollars threaten US finance. Michael Perelman
call to arms
[NOTE: Vijay Prashad's e-mail address is below. Reply to HIM if you want to get involved in this.] Confronting the Evangelical Imperialists Mr. Kurtz: the Horror, the Horror By VIJAY PRASHAD [EMAIL PROTECTED] In mid-October, my email in-box began to receive forwards from Michael Bednar, a graduate student in the department of history at the University of Texas, Austin. The subject line suggested that it was an email joke: Congress moves to regulate postcolonial studies. Thanks to the vigilance of Michael Bednar many of us now know that the US Congress is poised to transform the relationship between university and college level international or area studies and the US government. The study of the world has been cultivated by federal funds via Title VI legislation, but the government has, by and large, not been involved in the career choices of those who take the money, study and then go forward into their lives. The government, when the President signs HR 3077 into law, will now create an International Education Advisory Board made up of members of the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and Homeland Security to increase accountability by providing advice, counsel, and recommendations to Congress on international education issues for higher education. In other words, the government wants our students to enter a War Corps, to provide the translators, the intelligence analysts and others who will do the bidding of this era's Evangelical Imperialism. I had barely begun to get over the death of Edward Said, whom the Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe rightly called the lighthouse that navigates us. The assault on Area Studies it turns out is part of an assault on the legacy of those such as Edward Said, a long-time obsession of Martin Kramer's Middle East Forum (and Daniel Pipe's year old Campus Watch website). On 19 June 2003, when the Iraq war had already turned into this disastrous occupation, the US House of Representative's Subcommittee on Select Education held a hearing on International Programs in Higher Education and Questions About Bias. The lead plaintiff at the hearing was Stanley Kurtz, a rather well known partisan from the Hoover Institute and National Review, who makes Bernard Lewis seem a liberal. Kurtz testimony invoked Said in his claim that most area studies centers are currently teaching anti-Americanism. Said equated professors who support American foreign policy with the 19th century European intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and culture at the service of American power. Actually this is not a bad summary of Said's argument on culture and imperialism. Kurtz recommends a reversal of the Said claim. Indeed he wants the government to oversee the Title VI funds given over to universities for the study of the rest of the world. The House accepted the critique and the recommendations. They have now written H. R. 3077 that adopts all this language, they passed it and have sent it along to the Senate (who is expected to start deliberations on it come the new year). H. R. 3077 is not a break from US government policy. It is a reaction to the break made by many scholars within Area Studies from the goals of US imperialism. The establishment wants to take back Area Studies programs to the goal of their origination. Area Studies emerges in the early part of this century mostly as part of US evangelism: K. S. Latourette at Yale helped kick-start East Asian studies (his 1929 book is History of the Christian Missions in China); H. E. Bolton at Berkeley pioneered Latin American Studies (his 1936 book is The Rim of Christendom: A biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer); A. C. Coolidge at Harvard worked out the contours of Slavic Studies (his big book of 1908 is entitled The United States as a World Power). In its infancy, the Church and Washington held sway over Area Studies. Our evangelical imperials of today want to return to this period. Toward the end of Orientalism, Said noted that the US academy had taken over the Orientalist mantle from the Europeans after World War II and the area specialist, he noted, lays claims to regional expertise, which is put at the service of government or business or both. Area Studies, or the study of the world within the US academy, indeed has a complex history, much of it mired in an eagerness to please the powers. University of Chicago's sociologist Edward Shils said of his secondment to the War Department in the 1940s, that he was glad of the vacation from teaching [and] enjoyed the excitement of proximity to great events and to great authority as well as to the occasional exercise of power on [our] own. Such is perhaps a good summary of the intentions of those academics who want to will themselves to power--venality mixed with a dose
Re: Vegatative states and neuroscience: From Hari Kumar
Doug wrote: One of the key areas for the disabled rights movement is cognitive issues. To be clear when I use this term, cognitive, many disabled people do not use it in broad context, but to mean a specific area of disability. Cognitive for me is involvement of the brain in a disability. Schizophrenia, developmental disability, blindness, dyslexia and so forth have cognitive issues. This article in the NY Times goes to the heart of the physician assisted suicide movement. The disability rights movement takes a strong stand on the rights of disabled people, and contra to philosophers like Peter Singer of Princeton advocate euthanasia for a variety of disabled people. I do not think the medical profession is the place for these issues to be fought out, i.e. this is a social issue, and a class issue. However, in some cases in a practical sense this is where the debate is currently waged as well as by election for the right to suicide. Question: Hi Doug: I would not disagree with most of your premises. But please explain the class issue here. Hari Kumar - Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
new energy book
Rakesh suggested that we might be interested in this book. Power Play The Twentieth-Century Struggle Over Electricity Sharon Beder Hardcover, $25.95, 1-56584-808-X 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 336 pages Current Affairs Territorial Sales Rights: Y Synopsis As electrification spread across America in the early twentieth century, private corporations moved quickly to reap unprecedented profits from millions of new paying customers. Blocking their path was the widespread view that electricity was a basic need and that its production should be regulated-if not owned outright-by the public. The electricity companies fought back, buying up newspapers, radio stations, and politicians, and flooding the schools with free, pro-industry schoolbooks. Their actions heralded the advent of corporate public relations, and form a major chapter in the history of the industry. In an eye-opening investigation, Sharon Beder's Power Play reveals the decades-long struggle to wrest control of electricity from public hands. Her analysis ranges from the machinations of American political power to grassroots struggles in South Asia aimed at stemming the environmental degradation caused by multinational energy providers. In so doing, she sets the stage for understanding the damage done by deregulation, the roots of the Enron scandal, and the contemporary debacle of electricity supply. Sharon Beder is the author of numerous books, including Global Spin, Selling the Work Ethic, and The Nature of Sustainable Development. She is currently associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Praise for Sharon Beder's previous work: Sharon Beder has taken the taboo subjects of propaganda and censorship in free societies and exposed their insidious threat. This is such an important book that I would put it on every school curriculum. -John Pilger -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
virtual economics
Today, NPR had a feature about this paper, probably stealing the idea from Slate. It is surprising how few original ideas they come up with. I found the discussion interesting in that it added another dimention to the concept of ficticious value. I still cannot receive mail, including pen-l, at my usual address. Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier EDWARD CASTRONOVA California State University, Fullerton - Department of Economics; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research) December 2001 CESifo Working Paper Series No. 618 Abstract: In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called Norrath, populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath's currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money -- with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 -- and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity. Keywords: Information and Internet Services, Computer Software JEL Classifications: L86 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID294828_code020114590.pdf?abstractid=294828 - Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
mail problems
I am unable to receive mail at my normal account for some reason. If you need to contact me, please use this account for the next couple of days. With respect to my post regarding Brad, I put the ism on centrist to specify the dogmatism that Bill Lear identified in his post. I think that his attitude is sad because I think that he could be a positive force. Unfortunately, the mere mention of the name of any socialist leader drives him up the wall. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
xx
del pen-l [EMAIL PROTECTED] add pen-l [EMAIL PROTECTED] SET pen-l nomail FOR [EMAIL PROTECTED] Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
exciting research opportunity for pen-l
Title: Market Mechanisms and Incentives for Environmental Management (MMI) URL: http://es.epa.gov/ncer/rfa/current/2003_market_mech.html Open Date: 06/27/2003 - Close Date: 10/22/2003 Summary: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program, is seeking applications for research leading to improved theoretically-sound empirical analyses of the feasibility and effectiveness of market mechanisms and economic incentives (MMI) as substitutes for, or complements to, traditional environmental management programs. The terms market mechanisms and incentives refer to approaches that rely on economic incentives, market forces, or financial mechanisms to encourage regulated entities to reduce emissions, discharges and waste generation, or generally improve environmental performance. EPA is interested in supporting research on practical applications of MMI approaches related to its mission, i.e., protecting environmental quality and human health. Applicable Category(s): Grant/Fellowship Announcements Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
deflation everywhere
Deflationary Virus Spreading Worldwide Abstract: Toshihiko FUKUI (Chairman, Fujitsu Research Institute) argues that deflation is no longer a problem peculiar to Japan and the whole world is starting to see the phenomenon as it spreads across an increasingly integrated global economy. China, which has recently seen consumer prices declining, seems to be affecting other countries like Japan, and the government needs to work harder to deal with deflation, even if the role of monetary policy is of great importance, according to Mr. Fukui. Full article at: http://www.glocom.org/opinions/essays/200303_fukui_deflationary/index.html - Michael Perelman Economics Department CSU Chico, CA 95929
forwarded from Michael Yates
Organized labor in the United States - with some heroic exceptions - has traditionally been pro-war and pro-imperialist. In World War II the AFL made a no-strike pledge even though it failed to get a no-war profiteering pledge in exchange. All through the Cold War the AFL-CIO willingly acted as an arm of the U.S. State Department sabotaging progressive unions around the world. George Meany and labor's other top leaders supported the American war on Vietnam and aggressively smashed dissent in the ranks Things are different this time around. Increasing numbers of unionists are coming to see an integral connection between the war abroad and the war at home. The United Electrical Workers (UE) is the first - and, so far, the only - national union to take a stand against the war. But dozens of local unions are taking similar positions. As of this writing (early Dec. 2002) unions representing over 1.5 million workers have publicly declared their opposition to war on Iraq. These unions stretch from New York to New Mexico, from Washington state to Washington, DC. Some have a few hundred members, while others are giants - like New York Local 1199/SEIU, which represents 236,000 workers. Both the Washington State Labor Council (representing that state's 450,000 AFL-CIO members) and the San Francisco Labor Council passed resolutions against the war in August. Upstate New York central labor councils in Albany, Rochester, and Troy have also gone on record against the war. Critic Marc Cooper writes in The Nation (12/9/02) that the bulk of these anti-war activists are white-collar, mostly intellectual workers. That's highly questionable. Most of the UE's members are blue-collar workers. The same is true of 1199's quarter million members. And one has to assume that a number of union members in Washington state, San Francisco, and upstate New York are blue-collar as well. Unions representing postal workers, typographers, taxi drivers, longshoremen, carpenters, and painters have all come out against the war. When the Boston group Labor for Justice and Peace recently discussed printing anti-war/pro-union bumper stickers, local construction workers asked that they make stickers for their hard hats as well. Thousands of workers are mobilizing against the war regardless of their unions' positions. They come from anti-war unions, pro-war unions like the AFT, and unions that have no position at all. Labor anti-war groups are active in New York City, San Francisco, Albany, Detroit, Boston, Seattle, Washington DC, and Portland OR. Workers are also forming anti-war groups within specific unions. These groups often have a dual purpose - mobilizing rank-and-file workers and getting the unions themselves to formally oppose the war. These days there is less money around to buy labor's support for empire. And with union density dropping, there is less need to do so. Both globalization and neoliberalism make attacks on labor an essential part of the war at home. Bush has repeatedly invoked national security to break strikes. Under the Homeland Security Act, thousands of federal workers are losing their union rights. Thousands of Immigrant workers, traditionally a pro-union bloc, are being detained and deported by the government. Thousands more have been fired from their unionized jobs in airports and replaced by American-born non-union workers. And it's clear that Bush wants to crush the ILWU, the West Coast dockworkers' union, just as Reagan crushed PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union. Most unions' anti-war resolutions recognize the connection between the war abroad and attacks on American workers at home. Organized labor has much to recommend it as an important part of the antiwar movement. It's large - the AFL-CIO has about 13 million members. It's nationwide. It's organized. A relatively high percentage of union members are women. And labor is multinational in a way that is unique in our society. Further, labor is in a position to see the unity of the war at home and the war abroad. Its participation in the anti-war struggle brings the question of class to the fore. This is vitally important . Until we address class, our analysis will be limited to treating imperialism as a policy rather than an economic system. Without this class analysis the anti-war movement will not develop into a genuinely anti-imperialist force, but will remain essentially reactive. SIDEBAR #1* INTERNET RESOURCES ON LABOR AND THE WAR: * The Labor Educator (has a Labor and the War section): http://www.laboreducator.org/notewar.htm * Labornet (has a Labor on the War section): http://www.labornet.org/ * New York City Labor Against the War: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/files/ * ZNET Labor Watch: http://www.zmag.org/LaborWatch.htm * Media Workers Against War (UK Labor Group): http://www.mwaw.org/
deflation watch
Falling Prices Put Fed on Guard Policymakers Talk About Dangerous Dynamic for Economy Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, right, talks with Rep. Jim Saxton (R-N.J.), center, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) (L) before a recent meeting of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, at which Greenspan said the central bank is watching for signs of deflation. (Frank Johnston -- The Washington Post) By Steven Pearlstein Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, November 29, 2002; Page A01 After half a century of trying to prevent prices from rising too fast, economic policymakers have a new concern: Prices aren't rising fast enough. Government statistics show that average prices for products have declined in the past year, including those of cars, clothing, computers, furniture, gasoline and heating oil. So, too, have the prices for services such as telephones, hotel rooms and airplane tickets, even as costs for other services such as health care, housing, education and cable television continued to rise. The broadest measure of prices in the economy shows they rose less than 1 percent during the 12 months that ended in September, the smallest increase in 50 years. Until now, the slowdown in overall inflation has been a boon to the American economy, giving consumers more for their money and allowing living standards to continue to rise even during a period of slow economic growth. But economists warn that if disinflation turns into deflation -- a broad and sustained decline in prices -- it would create a dangerous dynamic that could drag the economy into a nasty recession from which it could be difficult to escape. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said it was ridiculous to worry about deflation, said Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton University economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. But the prospect of deflation is now sufficiently probable -- I'd say 15 to 20 percent -- that it's now worth talking about. There has been quite a bit of talk about deflation lately. In recent testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that while the economy is not yet close to a deflationary cliff, he and his central bank colleagues are watching it closely and taking it very seriously. Last week his fellow Fed governor, Ben S. Bernanke, followed up with a deflation speech titled, Making Sure It Doesn't Happen Here. Corporate executives complain that price competition is so fierce, they are forced to cut prices even as wages and other costs continue to rise. And on Wall Street, declining long-term interest rates in the bond market signal that investors are not much concerned about renewed inflation. Deflation, like cholesterol, comes in good and bad varieties. The good kind, such as many of the price declines over the past few years, happens when companies find ways to produce goods and services more cheaply, usually by making use of new technology or new ways of doing business. In varying degrees, these productivity gains are passed on to consumers as lower prices, to workers as higher wages and to shareholders as higher profits. That makes almost everyone better off. By contrast, the bad kind of deflation occurs because there are too few customers chasing too many goods and services, resulting in repeated rounds of competitive price cutting that leads to layoffs, falling wages, and a decline in business investment and consumer spending. During bad deflation, consumers and businesses -- knowing that prices are likely to be lower tomorrow than they are today -- hoard cash and put off buying things, making the recession worse and driving prices and wages down further. Households and companies with lots of debt suddenly find that they have to make fixed monthly payments out of deflated wages and revenue. Some file for bankruptcy; some are forced to cut other spending to meet their debt service. That was what happened in the early 1930s, triggering the Great Depression. Something similar has taken hold in Japan, where prices are falling about 1 percent a year. What worries some economists is that in both of those bad episodes, the deflationary spiral occurred after a huge investment bubble burst, leaving the economy with too much debt and too much capacity across a broad range of industries. Stephen S. Roach of Morgan Stanley argues that some of those dynamics are now at play in the U.S. economy after the worst stock market losses since 1929. The risk of deflation is higher than at any time in the past half century, Roach said. Americans can already see a few early signs of bad deflation taking hold in a number of industries -- Wall Street, commercial real estate, much of the technology and telecommunications sectors. Perhaps no industry shows it more clearly than the airlines. Take the example of United Airlines, which is cutting expenses in hopes of getting federal loan
x
delete pen-l perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Michael Perelman Economics Department CSU Chico, CA 95929
More Bubble Watch
Title: More Bubble Watch Sabri forwarded this: Top Financial News 11/01 16:26 U.S. Economy: Payrolls Fall, Manufacturing Shrinks (Update2) By Siobhan Hughes and Carlos Torres Washington, Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent in October from 5.6 percent a month earlier. Companies cut jobs for a second straight month and manufacturing weakened, leading many economists to predict the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates next week to spur growth. ``We should be doing a lot better at this stage of the recovery,'' said Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economics professor and former Fed vice chairman, in an interview. ``It certainly looks likely'' that central bankers will reduce their benchmark interest rate on Wednesday. Payrolls fell by 5,000 after dropping 13,000 in September, while hours worked and weekly earnings declined, the Labor Department said. The Institute for Supply Management's factory index dropped last month to 48.5. That was the second monthly reading below 50, which signals contraction. More than 1.5 million jobs have been lost since March 2001, when the economy slipped into a recession that probably ended at the start of this year. Job growth is key for sustained consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of gross domestic product, economists said. Expectations of a rate cut next week have risen with reports of statistics suggesting the recovery is lethargic. Of 127 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News as of 4 p.m. Friday, 60 were predicting a quarter-percentage-point reduction in the overnight bank lending rate and 17 forecast a half-point cut. Dissenting Views Not all economists agree. ``Growth seems to be slowing, but perhaps not as much as one might think and not enough to force the Fed to move this close to an election or, for that matter, at all in the absence of a war in the Middle East,'' said Vincent Boberski, senior economist at RBC Dain Rauscher Inc. in Chicago. Boberski also noted that the economy lost fewer jobs in September than the previously reported 43,000, and gained 123,000 in August, more than the previously estimated 107,000. The revisions ``take much of the sting'' out of the October losses, he said. Economists had expected no change in payrolls and an increase in the unemployment rate to 5.8 percent from September's 5.6 percent, based on the median of 62 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. Treasury securities fell after the jobless rate rose less than forecast and stocks rose on expectations of a rate cut. Today's jobs and manufacturing reports are the latest to suggest weakness in the economy. Consumer confidence dropped in October to a nine-year low, the Conference Board said on Tuesday. Durable goods orders plunged 5.9 percent in September, the biggest drop in 10 months, Commerce Department figures showed. Retail sales fell 1.2 percent in September, the largest decrease since November, and may stay weak in October because of waning demand for automobiles. Auto Shutdowns ``Certainly the market is slower than it was two months ago,'' said Dieter Zetsche, chief executive of DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler unit, in an interview last week. The world's fifth largest automaker temporarily shut a plant in St. Louis this week because of reduced demand for the company's vehicles. Fed policy makers have left the overnight bank lending rate at a 41-year low of 1.75 percent since December. Judging by trading in fed funds futures, investors are betting the central bank will lower the overnight rate to 1.5 percent at its Nov. 6 meeting. The implied yield on the November fed funds contract is 1.54 percent. The 4 3/8 percent Treasury note maturing in August 2012 fell 3/4 point, pushing up its yield 10 basis points to 3.99 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 121 points, or 1.4 percent, to close at 8517.64. The Standard Poor's index of 500 stocks increased 15 points, or 1.7 percent, to close at 900.96. Uneven Recovery The recovery has been uneven. The economy grew at a 3.1 percent annual rate in the third quarter after growing at a 1.3 percent pace from April-June and a 5 percent rate during the first three months of the year. Growth may slow to a 2.2 percent rate in the fourth quarter, based on the October Blue Chip Economic Indicators survey. Companies reduced the number of hours worked to an average 34.1 in October from 34.2 hours in September, another sign of slow growth. More than half of all industries shed jobs. The number of people who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer was 1.66 million, up from 906,000 in October 2001. ``Nobody wants to just hire,'' said Carrie Tuttle, a 31-year old management consultant in Alexandria, Virginia, who lost her job at the end of last year and has had five interviews so far. ``I've been looking since the beginning of 2002, so you can see how bad the job market is.'' Workers' Earnings The weak demand for labor is also showing up in
I am off line
I cannot get to my pen-l account until Sunday night. I can only look at messeages from time to time on the web. If you need to contact me, I will look at this account from time to time. I was just reading an article Dasgupta, Partha. 2001. Valuing Objects and Evaluating Policies in Imperfect Economies. Economic Journal, 111: 471 (May): pp. 1-29. He uses estimates of natural capital to suggest that the people of the Indian sub-continent as well as sub-Sahara Africa are getting poorer. On LBO Brad De Long, who left us after Sept 11, has been insisting that India is doing better. Dasgupta is using averages rather than medians or counting the absolute number of people becoming poor. - Michael Perelman Economics Department CSU Chico, CA 95929
The FBI at Berkeley
Today's San Francisoco Chronicle has an excellent report on the FBI and the University of California. http://www.sfgate.com/campus/ - Michael Perelman Economics Department CSU Chico, CA 95929
Interesting Develeopment
The Pacific News Service, a nonprofit radio broadcasting company, has created a new bimonthly print magazine for Silicon Valley's temporary workers. Given out free at bus stops and other places where young workers can be found, it's called Silicon Valley De-Bug. The magazine's 27-year-old editor Raj Jayadev has an activist social message and says the publication is doing something which Silicon Valley doesn't allow a voice for everyday people. There's this other demographic that researchers and the media have passed over young workers who aren't on the high-tech fast track or four-year university track. No one's paying attention to them. Jaydev says traditional labor-organizing hasn't worked for temp workers and considers the magazine an alternate form of organizing. The point is to start a dialogue among young and working people. What we want is for people to critically examine Silicon Valley, so they have a voice at the table at their workplace and in their communities. We want them to come up with the agenda. (San Jose Mercury News 26 Mar 2002) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/2941314.htm - Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Re: Method of pol. Econ.
Sorry for the poor formatting. My main server is down. miyachi wrote: What is the meaning of static I can't understand, What do you want to say to define that simple value analysis as static? By static, I mean that it does not take into account that the economy is dynamic. We don't disagree about what you say below. The labor to maintain the machine counts as part of the living labor that goes into the production process. The fact that the value does not exist without use is central to what I wrote. You insist that value is determined by labor time necessary to reproduce machine, but to maintain machine's value is due to use this machine by worker's labor. Why is it possible that value is reproduced by machine itself without using? Machine is no value without use it. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Nastiness at pen-l
I don't know if my previous message got through, but I want the nastiness to stop immediately. - Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
e-mail troubles
My usual e-mail address is down. You can contact me temporarly for any pen-l business at this address. - Michael Perelman Economics Department CSU Chico, CA 95929
Forwarded from Gernot Kohler
Thanks, Professors(?) Activists(?) Citizens Burford and Hagen, for your interest in my posting. It is nice to get some support from highly esteemed comrades. The brand name issue - I agree that global Keynesianism is as little satisfactory as a brand name as most other names for this kind of thing. There is a major naming problem. The French/multinational NGO which is promoting a Tobin tax and other good things has a better brand name - ATTAC (derived from some clever French phrase). PR - it would be nice if a working group/committee could be put together, as you propose. Please put me on your list - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gernot Kohler Oakville, Canada - Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
FW: statement to support increasing CA UI benefits
From: Michael Reich [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2001 1:58 PMTo: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: statement to support increasing CA UI benefitsAugust 14, 2001Dear Colleague:I am attaching and also providing below a statement of support for SB 40 (Alarcon), a bill to increase unemployment insurance benefits in California. Our state ranks last in the nation in unemployment benefits as a percentage of average weekly wages. A similar bill passed the legislature last year and was vetoed by Governor Davis. I believe that SB40 is both fiscally and economically prudent as well as equitable and I am circulating the statement to economists in California in order to gain support for the bill.If you agree with the attached statement and can sign onto this document, please respond by e-mail directly to me or by e-mail to Angie Wei, Public Policy Director, CA Labor Federation AFL-CIO at [EMAIL PROTECTED], no later than August 20, 2001. This document will be submitted to Governor Davis and/or may be used for media work. As usual, your institutional connection will be listed for identification purposes. A fuller statement of the bill can be found at www.leginfo.ca.gov. or www.calaborfed.org. Please feel free to contact me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or 510-643-7079 if you have any questions. You may contact Angie Wei at 510.663.4030.Sincerely, Michael ReichProfessor of Economics, UC Berkeleyand Research Chair, Institute for Labor and Employment Economists in Support of SB 40 (Alarcon)INCREASE IN UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE BENEFITSWe are writing as California economists in support of SB 40 (Alarcon), a bill to increase unemployment benefits in California. SB 40 would provide a much-needed increase in the maximum weekly unemployment insurance benefit from $230.00 to $380.00/week over a three-year period and increase the replacement rate for all unemployed workers. California's Unemployment Insurance benefits were last increased on January 1, 1992. Yet our benefits levels are among the lowest in the nation: forty-five (45) states and the District of Columbia pay higher maximum weekly benefits. The average weekly UI benefit $161 per week replaced only 22% of the average weekly wage in 2000. This ratio was the lowest in the nation. Our state's failure to index benefits is also out of step with most states; at least thirty-one states and the District of Columbia index their benefits to insure that they keep up with inflation. A 1995 report to the President by the Advisory Council on Unemployment Compensation recommended that states adopt a policy of replacing 50% of wages earned by the unemployed. To achieve this standard, the state maximum benefit would need to be equal to two-thirds of the state average weekly wage. In California, this would mean a benefit level of almost $500/month.Employer contributions to the UI system have been declining as a share of total wages, from .98% in 1994 to .62% in 1999. Put another way, employer tax contributions would have been $1.5 billion higher in 1999 had the contribution rate continued at 1994 levels. The state's Employment Development Department forecasts that, if SB 40 were signed and unemployment benefits were raised as of January 1, 2002, tax rates would not increase until 2004, at the earliest. Increasing unemployment insurance benefits will immediately increase the buying power of unemployed workers as well as pump more resources into local economies. We believe that SB 40 is a fiscally prudent measure that improves fairness for California's unemployed workers while maintaining the competitive position of the state's economy. aw/tng39521cwa.afl-cio -- Attachments are virus free! This message has been scanned for viruses at the originating end by Nemx Anti-Virus for MS Exchange Server/IMC http://www.nemx.com/products/antivirus reich final.doc
Cut off from access.
The Chico State system seems to be having problems and the server that handles pen-l is down. I have only looked at a few messages in the archive since I don't think many messages have gone through. I thought that the discussion regarding the paper by Alex and Wynne was excellent. I am saddened to see Rakesh personalizing his disagreements with Max. I have to be back on line soon. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
No Subject
I am still cut off from my normal access to e-mail. I was thinking this morning about what would happen in the power of the US relative to the IMF and World Bank were reduced by 99%. What would a structural adjustment plan for the US look like? Also, I thought that one good thing about the US abrogating treaties was that it would make retreat from WTO, NAFTA, etc. easier. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
I am off-list
Our server has been down since last night, so I am unable to follow what is happening. - Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
chihuahua economics
Max, the UE is a lagging indicator, isn't it? Max wrote and a UE rate of 3.9 percent. Ai chihuahua. (yiddish for 'oy vey.') -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, Ca. 95929 [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Rostow
Remember the subtitle of Rostow's book : a non-communist manifesto Regarding Vietnam, his idea and the prevailing idea at the time was that China was Japan's natural trading partner, but Vietnam was supposed to be an alternative. I am sorry but I am only imperfectly connected. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, Ca. 95929 [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
strange stiglitz sighting
GOVERNMENT ACTIONS STIFLING E-COMMERCE A report just released by the Computer Communications Industry Association says that U.S. government efforts to move operations onto the Internet are in some cases competing unfairly with the private e-commerce sector. Ed Black, president and CEO of the CCIA says that some e-commerce initiatives have ventured beyond boosting efficiency and improving service quality. "Instead, they are engaging in private-sector businesses. Some agencies seem to have discovered a back door to rebuilding Big Government -- and that back door is the Internet." The report, titled "The Role of Government in a Digital Age," was authored by three prominent economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, an economics professor at Stanford University who previously served as the World Bank's Chief Economist. Among the conclusions reached were that the U.S. Postal Service is competing directly with private industry through its eBillPay service, and threatening to swamp fledgling online bill-paying business, which do not have the resources or the brand recognition of the USPS. The report also warned that the possible entry of the IRS into online tax preparation would be in direct conflict with private online tax preparation services. (E-Commerce Times 13 Oct 2000) http://www.ecommercetimes.com/news/articles2000/001013-1.shtml -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, Ca. 95929 [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
debating yugoslavia
The subject of Yugoslavia is so contentious, that I suspect that we will not get very far here. Whatever Milosovic's economic achievements might be, I abhor the nationalism that he represented. The US has succeeded in demonizing M., even though his nationalism was no different from that of our allies in the region. Whatever M's deficiencies, he seems no worse than our "leaders" in Washington. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
anti-union action in cyberspace
LPA (http://www.lpa.org) is a group of corporate managers that lobby the US Congress and the US government, on behalf of management, on issues such as labor union organizing or civil rights for workers. Among the projects of the LPA is NLRB Watch (http://www.nlrbwatch.com/), a web site and newsletter that alerts employers to activities of the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and promotes various anti-union views. On July 8, 2000, the LPA wrote a six page letter to ICANN that provided a full scale attack on the proposal to create a .union top level internet domain, to be controlled by labor unions. For background on the .union proposal, see: http://www.cptech.org/ecom/icann/toplevel/ Many of the LPA's attacks on the .union proposal echo the similar naive critics of new proposals for civil society Top Level Domains. For example, much is made of potential disputes among competing unions to get a domain such as boeing.union, where multiple unions represent workers or are seeking to represent workers. Mentioned only in passing is the fact that in such cases the domain would be a gateway or portal to various unions with interests in providing information about union activate with of a particular firm or employer. While it is true that the management of something like a .union TLD will involve choices and decisions, the global labor union community is apparently willing to take this task on. A group of international labor organizations, lead to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), has been holding discussions on this issue, and is expected to come forward with a formal ICANN proposal at some time. The ICANN board meets in Yokohama on July 14, 2000, and will discuss rules for TLDs like .union. Manon Ress of the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute (http://www.djdinstitute.org) has proposed a resolution to the ICANN non-commercial constituency that reads: The .union TLD should be controlled and managed by labor unions. With the exception of limited technical issues that affect Internet navigation and stability, and the selection of a bona fide global labor union body that will control the registry, ICANN should not interfere with the management of the .union TLD. The July 8, 2000 letter from LPA opposing the .union TLD is evidence that corporate management now sees the .union TLD proposal as potentially a powerful labor union organizing tool, and a significant threat to corporate management interests. The LPA letter follows: Jamie love LPA Letter to ICANN --- July 8, 2000 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330 Marina Del Rey, CA 90292 Re: July 2000 ICANN Yokohama Meeting Topic: Introduction of New Top-Level Domains To Whom It May Concern: LPA is pleased to submit comments regarding the likely addition of new top level domain names by the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In particular, LPA registers its strong opposition to the adoption of a .union chartered top- level domain (TLD), which was mentioned as an example of a new domain name in ICANN's June 13, 2000 background document. The addition of a .union TLD would cause undue confusion among Internet users, particularly among employees who are not represented by a union. Moreover, a .union TLD would violate many of the principles announced by Working Group C in its supplemental white paper. At a minimum, LPA recommends that ICANN refrain from accepting a .union TLD in the initial round of expansion and instead draw on the lessons learned from the implementation of other chartered top level domains that are added before evaluating the viability of .union TLD. LPA is an association of the senior human resource executives of more than 200 leading corporations in the United States. LPA's purpose is to ensure that U.S. employment policy supports the competitive goals of its member companies and their employees. LPA member companies employ more than 12 million employees, or 12 percent of the private sector U.S. workforce. LPA members have a substantial interest in making sure that employees receive accurate information about whether they are represented by a union or not. The addition of a .union top-level domain could prematurely undermine employee confidence in the use of the Internet as a tool for communicating with employees. I. The Creation of a .union TLD Would Create Confusion and Administrative Problems LPA believes that a .union TLD would create more problems than benefits and should be dropped from consideration, particularly at this stage of domain name expansion. The creation of a .union TLD could confuse employees, especially those who are not familiar with union organizing procedures. The .union domain name would also likely require the chartering entity to put in place sophisticated application and management procedures to reduce the inevitable disputes that would arise among competing unions. Moreover,
Re: Anthropology Question: Bounced from C. Moore
Here's a quote from Will Durant's _The Story of Civilization_ Vol I, "Our Oriental Heritage": p.105. (chapter VI The beginnings of civilization. 2. writing.) ... The linear script of Sumeria, on its first appearance (ca. 3600 B.C.) is apparently an abbreviated form of the signs and pictures painted or impressed upon the primitive pottery of lower Mesopotamia and Elam.6oa (Cambridge Ancient History i,376.) ... From such a beginning to the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia would be an intelligible and logical development. The oldest graphic symbols known to us are those found by Flinders Petrie on shards, vases and stones discovered in the prehistoric tombs of Egypt, Spain and the Near East, to which, with his usual generosity, he attributes an age of seven thousand years. This "Mediterranean Signary" numbered some three hundred signs; most of them were the same in all localities, indicating commercial bonds from one end of the Mediterranean to the other as far back as 5000 B.C. They were not pictures but chiefly mercantile symbols -- marks of property, quantity, or other business memoranda; the berated bourgeoisie may take consolation in the thought that literature originated in bills of lading. The signs were not letters, since they represented entire words or ideas; but many of them were astonishingly like letters of the "Phoenician" alphabet. Petrie concludes that "a wide body of signs had been gradually brought into use in primitive times for various purposes. These were interchanged by trade, and spread from land to land, ... until a couple of dozen signs triumphed and became common property to a group of trading communities, while the local survivals of other forms were gradually extinguished in isolated seclusion." 61 That this signary was the source of the alphabet is an interesting theory, which Professor Petrie has the distinction of holding alone.62 (On page 228 Durant describes the commercial transactions of the ancient commercial civilization par excellence: Babylonia, ... beginning even before the time of Hammurabi, ca 2100 B.C.) Returning to page 105 of Durant: Whatever may have been the development of these early commercial symbols, there grew up alongside them a form of writing which was a branch of drawing and painting, and conveyed connnected thought by pictures. ... Certainly by 3600 B.C., and probably long before that, Elam, Sumeria and Egypt had developed a system of thought-pictures called _hieroglyphics_ because practiced chiefly by the priests.64 If the above is true, then that 800 year gap quoted by your authority gets called into question, at least requires further amplification. (This Durant reference that I am quoting from was written in 1935 ... soo take it with the proverbial grain of salt. It's the book I've got.) Curtis Moore At 03:04 PM 5/26/00 -0700, you wrote: I have a question for anyone with a passing knowledge of anthropology. The speaker on our campus made these two statements that some very interesting. Are they true? cuneiform was only used for business transactions 800 years before people realized that it could be used for other purposes. Early humans only sharpened one side of a stone by chipping it for 800,000 years before they began to chip the other side. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:5327] FW: important message
Action Alert to Save Producer Responsibility from Attack by the US Trade Rep. Don't Trade Away our Health and the Environment! Your immediate assistance is needed to defend an important new initiative that will help protect environmental health and safety by phasing out persistent, bio-accumulative toxics and by cleaning up the life cycle of computer manufacturing and other electronic and electrical products. This new "take-back" Directive, developed by the European Commission, focuses on Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and is designed to address the growing piles of electronic junk. Besides phasing out toxic chemicals, the directive will require producers of electronic and electrical equipment to assume financial and legal responsibility for their products throughout their entire life cycle; it also establishes a framework for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). However, the US Trade Representative (USTR) -- at the request of the American Electronics Association (AEA), the largest trade association of the electronics industry with more than 3000 members -- is launching a new lobbying attack on the WEEE Directive. The AEA is using international trade law as a weapon to dictate global health and environmental policy to protect the economic interests of its members (Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Motorola, etc.). In a 15 page legal position paper, the AEA asserts the proposed phase-out of the listed persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic materials -- lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium and halogenated flame retardants -- and the provision requiring at least 5% recycled plastics in electronic and electrical products are "illegal" and violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. Rather than working to defend and protect our health and environment, the USTR staff is supporting the AEA's position in discussions with other US and international agencies. European NGOs such as the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), ANPED (the Northern Alliance for Sustainability) and other environmental health and consumer organizations in Europe have asked us to help protect the WEEE Directive. By supporting their initiative, we are fighting for improved global standards for everyone. If adopted in Europe, this Directive will help our efforts for similar legislation in the US to reduce toxics and promote clean production. It is crucial that US activists involved in toxics, waste, recycling, incineration, corporate accountability, consumer advocacy, international trade, human rights and/or democracy issues make our voices heard before the US government adopts the myopic views of the U.S. computer industry on these important environmental issues. TAKE ACTION. Time is of the essence. With the intensive lobbying efforts of the electronics industry, the US is formulating its position to oppose this directive. Please take a few moments to fax or send a letter on your own letterhead to Vice-President Gore and tell him to bring an immediate halt to the USTR's lobbying activities. You can use the enclosed text as a model. Please also send (or e-mail) a copy to Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition ([EMAIL PROTECTED] or fax 408-287-6771). We will add your name to the action alert on our website. We may also publish ads in national media. Thanks very much for your support. For additional background on this issue: **find a copy of the letter to Pres. Clinton and signatories at http://www.svtc.org/cleancc.weeeustr.htm **find a copy of the letter to the European Commission at http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/weeeletr.htm **find a copy of the draft directive on our website at http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/weeedir.htm. **view the position of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) at http://www.greenchannel.org/eeb **view the position of the AEA at http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/weeeaea.htm White House Fax Line - 202-456-2461 Vice President Gore's e-mail - [EMAIL PROTECTED] USTR - Ms. Charlene Barshefsky, US Trade Representative - fax 202-395-3911; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] US EPA - Ms. Carol Browner, Administrator - fax: 2002-260-0279; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact your senators - http://www.senate.gov/senator/index.html To contact your representative - http://www.house.gov/writerep/ Dear Vice-President Gore: We are writing to request your immediate assistance to help defend an important environmental initiative, the draft European Commission Directive on Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). This draft directive -- which is designed to address the growing problem of obsolete electronic equipment -- will help protect environmental health and safety on both sides of the Atlantic by phasing out some of the worst toxic chemicals, cleaning up the life-cycle
[PEN-L:4145] labor victory
Labor Wins Shareholder Votes Decisions at Oregon Steel Reflect Union Pressure on Wall Street By Frank Swoboda Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, March 4, 1999; Page E03 Organized labor scored a victory yesterday in its new campaign to use its financial muscle on Wall Street to bring shareholder pressure against corporations with protracted labor disputes. Shareholders at Oregon Steel Mills Inc. voted overwhelmingly in favor of laborbacked, though nonbinding, resolutions to make it easier to oust the board of directors and wrest control from the company, force shareholder approval of any "poison pill" antitakeover proposals, and keep shareholder votes secret from the company until the final vote has been tabulated. The company indicated yesterday that it will try to meet the unions halfway on some of the issues. The vote results, certified yesterday by CT Corporation Systems, showed the three labor resolutions winning the support of a minimum of 10.7 million shares of the 14.3 million votes cast. There are 25.7 million common shares outstanding. "This is a 9.5" on a scale of 1 to 10, said Bill Patterson, director of the AFLCIO's Office of Investment, who helped organize labor's effort at Oregon Steel. Oregon Steel is involved with the United Steelworkers of America in a bitter strike at its Rocky Mountain Steel Mills plant in Pueblo, Colo., that began in October 1997. The strikers have since been permanently replaced. Oregon Steel's other mills in Oregon and California are nonunion. Last month, the AFLCIO announced it was keeping a public scorecard on how investment managers voted on laborbacked proxy motions, just as unions keep a scorecard on votes by members of Congress. A low grade on the annual list could cost money managers some of the business that labor pension funds send to Wall Street. A survey by Georgeson and Co., a New Yorkbased proxysolicitation firm, showed that 43 percent of all shareholder resolutions dealing with corporate governance last year were introduced by labor unions. American workers have approximately $6 trillion in retirement assets such as pensions, stock plans and 401(k) savings plans. Assets from union members total $350 billion, according to the AFLCIO. The company, which had opposed the labor resolutions, saw the result quite differently. Company spokeswoman Vicky Tagliafico said the vote was actually a victory because, by the company's accounting, a majority of the shareholders either voted against the resolutions or didn't bother to vote at all. She said failure to cast a ballot was the same as a vote to withhold support for the resolutions. Patterson responded: "Any time you get 80 percent of the shareholders that vote in a contest, I consider that a win." Tagliafico said she expected the company board to make some changes in the governance rules, but not the ones the unions wanted. Failure to adopt the terms of the shareholder proposals even though they are nonbinding is expected to set up a further confrontation with the unions, labor officials said. But Patterson said he was glad the company was going partway on the governance issues. "We're going to push them forward," he said. Patterson said the unions would continue their shareholder efforts at the company, with possible efforts including a push for binding shareholder resolutions, votes against current board members and even running director candidates of their own. © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
[PEN-L:2898] Bounced from Anwar Shaikh
From: "Anwar Shaikh" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: S.O.A.S. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 10:47:47 GMT Subject: long wave recovery Jeff My analysis of the US economy's recovery is not published. I am working on a book now, but am a long way from that particular section. Part of my work has involved showing that a secular fall in the rate of profit provides a theoretical foundation for long waves. The basic arguments and empirical evidence are in the papers listed below. One of the implications of this is that the recovery of profit growth (growth in the level of profits) is the foundation for a recovery. I also was able to show that we could link the changes in the amount of profit directly to movements in the stock market. The key in both cases is the rate of return on new investment, which can be related to the incremental profit rate r = D(P)/I(-1), where D(P) is the change in real gross profits, and I(-1) is the previous period's real gross investment. Such a link works very well empirically for a variety of issues, as I and various others working with me have been able to show. In the US, the mass of profit began a strong persistent upward trend in the early 1980's, and has been trending upward steadily since. For this reason, I trace the turnaround point in the US to the mid-1980's. There another also other quite remarkably consistent measure of long waves which I have been able to extend back about 200 years in the US and the UK, and it too pointed in much the same direction. Mary Malloy, at Iona College, is another person who has worked on linking long waves to profits, and has taken her data back almost 150 years. All such measures work best when smoothed somewhat to bring out trends. I tend to use simple centered moving averages, which does not distort major turning points too much, but the cost of that is of course that timing of a turnaround becomes clearest only a few years after the fact. Nonetheless, this was clear by the late 1980's. Previous long waves show that recoveries can be interrupted by a sharp but relatively brief downturn. For instance, in the Great Depression (previous to this one) we found that a sharp recovery in profits took place by around 1933, long before the war and its further boost. But there was a sharp downturn in 1937, followed by an equally sharp recovery by 1938-9. A profit recovery in the US does not, of course, automatically raise the whole capitalist world. While Britain has also had a profit recovery (for much the same reasons), many other advanced countries have not (Japan), or at least not to the same degree. And of course, in certain major developing countries which have made successful forays into the world market, the takeoff has been grounded for the time being (S. Korea) or possibly aborted (Indonesia, Malaysia). Even there, I do not place much credence in the claim that the volatility of financial flows are to blame, since that kind of argument seldom confronts the huge internal problems of profitability and credit overhang in many of these countries. The greatly enhanced role of credit is one critical difference in the modern era -- both as a means of covering up a crisis, and as a threat to a recovery through a financial meltdown. The two aspects are obviously linked, not the least by the fact that states and international organizations plays a role on both sides, so to speak. But in the end the power of these capitalist institutions floats on a sea of profits. This power is the greatest when the tide is in, even though the need for intervention is generally greatest when the tide is out. A long wave recovery of course requires a settlement of class struggle in favor of the (surviving) big capitals. A sharp recovery of profits is only a (lagging) indicator of this. And here, in the advanced countries at least, the outcome seems clear to me. The decisive balance has been long in favor of capital, and even any resurgence of labor militancy does not seem probable until well into a recovery. So, are we ultimately on a long wave upturn? On balance, I think so. Other advanced countries are beginning to move in the US and UK direction, and lamenting it does not change the facts. Even Japan, stuck as it is, is not likely to collapse and bring the whole system crashing down. And I never thought that the Asian Crisis would do so. As I began by saying, none of this precludes a sharp interruption in the process, triggered most likely by a financial crisis. Anwar "The Stock Market and the Corporate Sector: A Profit-Based Approach", in a Festschrift for Geoffrey Harcourt, Malcolm Sawyer, Philip Arestis, and Gabriel Palma (eds.), Routledge Kegan Paul, 1998. "The Falling Rate of Profit and Long Waves in Accumulation: Theory and Evidence", in Alfred Kleinknecht, Ernest Mandel, Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), New Findings in Long Wave Research, London:
[PEN-L:2285] Bennett Harrison
January 19, 1999 Bennett Harrison, 56, Urban Economist, Dies By SYLVIA NASAR Bennett Harrison, a leading radical economist, vocal critic of United States economic policy and the co-author of the 1983 book "The De-Industrialization of America," died at home on Sunday of complications from cancer of the esophagus. He was 56 years old and lived in Brooklyn Heights. Professor Harrison was professor of urban political economy at the New School for Social Research and had just completed the latest of a dozen books that shared one common message: the need, in his view, for Washington to play a bigger role to counter what he saw as the dark side of the Wall Street economy. A native of Jersey City, Professor Harrison grew up in an atmosphere of ethnic tensions; his father changed the family name from Horowitz to Harrison to get a job at a radio station. An ambitious student, he relied on scholarships -- first at Brandeis University, then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Ph.D. in economics in 1970. In his heart, though, he never entirely left Jersey City. His academic career reflected an interest in the fate of cities and their inhabitants, especially blacks. His first book was about economic development in Harlem, and his latest academic research, mostly financed by the Ford Foundation, concerned community development and job training. He helped found the Union of Radical Political Economists in the late 1960's but revered the progressives of the 1930's rather than Marx. A lively teacher and a popular thesis adviser, he spent most of his career as a member of the urban studies and planning department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He only gave up his full professorship there to follow his then-wife to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh in 1991. Professor Harrison was very much a public intellectual. For upward of 30 years, he played this role mostly in a duet with his best friend and frequent collaborator, Barry Bluestone, an economist at Northeastern University in Boston. Harrison devised economic development plans for a series of left-leaning Democratic Presidential contenders, starting in 1972 with Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma. The plans addressed segments of the economy where in his view Government could play a greater role -- public works, environmental clean up and mass transit. His prescription scarcely changed in subsequent campaigns and with subsequent candidates. While he believed that markets could produce wealth efficiently, he doubted that they could share it equitably, and he believed that government somehow could. A writer with a breezy style and an eye for big ideas, more popular with readers of editorials than with members of the economics fraternity, Professor Harrison was one of the first to articulate the middle-class malaise, a recurring theme of the 1980's. In "The De-Industrialization of America," written with Professor Bluestone during the deep recession of 1981-82,, he argued that plant closings and layoffs, not the strong dollar, were weakening American manufacturing and the blue-collar communities that depended on factories. By urging Washington to follow Tokyo's lead and adopt a policy of subsidizing favorite industries like autos and aircraft, he helped stimulate a national debate. The New York Times reviewer, an economic adviser to the Carter Administration, called the book intensely irritating but important. Five years later, in 1988, Professor Harrison, again in tandem with his best friend, turned his attention to inequality, a topic that was to become hot during the 1992 Clinton-Bush contest. In "The Great U-Turn," Professor Harrison argued that the gap between high- and low-wage workers was exploding largely because of shrinking factory employment and the collapse of the power of the unions. While Professor Harrison's analysis was not widely accepted -- economists pretty well agree that inequality reflects the growing demand for educated workers by an economy increasingly dominated by services -- he had once again succeeded in striking a nerve. Known for his willingness to engage people of varying views in friendly debate -- from the competitiveness guru Michael Porter to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo -- Professor Harrison was not afraid to change his mind. While he and Processor Bluestone were routinely introduced as Drs. Doom and Gloom in the 1980's, his penultimate book, "Lean and Mean," celebrated the vitality of large corporations like I.B.M. and Intel. And his last book, which Professor Bluestone was promoting in Europe last
[PEN-L:2211] Fw: Rachel #633: Carcinogens Everywhere
Interesting material on environmental reacism as well as pollutants in general. [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message 77pchj$qa0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]... . . . RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT HEALTH WEEKLY #633 . .---January 14, 1999--- . . HEADLINES: . .CARCINOGENS EVERYWHERE . . .LEAD IN CHILDREN: OLD STORY, NEW DATA . . . Environmental Research Foundation . . P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403 . . Fax (410) 263-8944; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] . . . Back issues available by E-mail; to get instructions, send . . E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the single word HELP . .in the message; back issues also available from. . http://www.rachel.org . To start your free subscriprion, . . send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words . . SUBSCRIBE RACHEL-WEEKLY YOUR NAME in the message. . CARCINOGENS EVERYWHERE U.S. EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] published a report in 1998 saying that 100% of the outdoor air in the continental U.S. is contaminated with eight cancer-causing industrial chemicals at levels that exceed EPA's "benchmark" safety standards.[1] Alaska and Hawaii were excluded from the analysis for lack of available data.~ Using 1990 data on toxic industrial emissions, EPA applied well-known mathematical models to estimate year-round average outdoor air concentrations for 148 industrial poisons in each of the nation's 60,803 census tracts. For each of the 148 toxicants, EPA established a "benchmark" level that the agency considers safe. Eight of the 148 industrial poisons exceed EPA's benchmark safety levels all of the time in all 60,803 census tracts. All eight are carcinogens, that is, they are known to cause cancer: bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate; benzene; carbon tetrachloride; chloroform; ethylene dibromide; ethylene dichloride; formaldehyde; and methyl chloride. In its report, EPA said that outdoor air concentrations provide a reasonable estimate of toxic concentrations "that occur both outdoors and indoors, given the high rates of penetration into indoor environments for various HAPs [hazardous air pollutants]." In other words, EPA believes that being inside your home or workplace does not protect you from constant exposure to these eight carcinogens. EPA said its mathematical models probably underestimate the true levels to which the population is exposed. Where actual measurements of toxic contaminants were available, EPA found that the measured levels exceeded the levels estimated by their mathematical models. In its report, EPA also acknowledged that it may have underestimated the health effects because the eight chemicals, combined, may have additive or multiplier effects since people experience all of them simultaneously. However, the agency also acknowledged that it has no way to take such combined effects into account. The agency also acknowledged that many of the chemicals may have health effects for which the agency has established no "benchmark" standards. For example, benzene and 1,3-butadiene have both been associated with reproductive and developmental effects, but EPA currently has set no benchmark safety levels for such effects, and so those effects were ignored in this study. And finally, most (if not all) individuals are exposed to far more than just eight industrial poisons. These eight merely provide a toxic background to which other toxicants are added, depending upon a person's (or a community's) individual situation: automobile and truck exhaust, second-hand cigarette smoke, prescription drugs, emissions from power plants, smelters, incinerators, and so on. Several of the eight chemicals exceed EPA "benchmark" safety levels by a wide margin. For example, the average day-in-and-day-out concentration of carbon tetrachloride exceeds EPA's benchmark level by a factor of 13, and bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate exceeds EPA's benchmark by a factor of 6.4. LEAD IN CHILDREN: OLD STORY, NEW DATA In 1998, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) in Atlanta issued a report saying that only 4.4% of American children between the ages of 1 and 5 have the toxic metal lead in their blood at "levels of health concern," which CDCP defines as concentrations of 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood (10 ug/dL) or higher.[2] A microgram is a millionth of a gram and there are 28 grams in an ounce; a deciliter is a tenth of a liter and a liter is about a quart. The reporting period was 1991-1994. Although 4.4% sounds like a small
[PEN-L:1928] Nixon as Keynesian
I have never been able to locate an exact quote. It is not quite an urban legend. Here is what I did find. Lynn Turgeon pointed out the second reference to me. Buckley, William F., jr. 1971. "Are You a Keynesian?" National Review, Vol. 23 (9 February): pp. 162-3. A couple of weeks ago, President Nixon reportedly told Howard K. Smith after a t.v. interview, "I am now a Keynesian in economics." Also see New York Times January 7, 1971. ## Anon. 1971. "Nixon Reportedly Says He is Now a Keynesian." New York Times (7 January): p. 19. Howard K Smith, one of four journalists who questioned Nixon on TV on January 5th, asked Nixon after the TV debate whether he was a Keynesian. Nixon answered affirmatively. P.S. my mail system at Chico is down. I do not know when they will have it fixed. I am on my way to New York. I can still read mail at this address.
[PEN-L:1874] reply to Tom Walker
Tom Walker wrote: Perhaps someone could explain to me what the following passage means from the perspective of marginal utility: "In short the argument that wages can be raised permanently by stinting labour rest on the assumption that there is a permanent fixed work-fund, i.e. a certain amount of work which has to be done, whatever the price of labour. ME: Withholding of labor will not raise wages. THE PARAGRAPH CONTINUES And for this assumption there is no foundation. On the contrary, the demand for work comes from the national dividend; that is, it comes from work. The less work there is of one kind, the less demand there is for work of other kinds; and if labour were scarce, fewer enterprises would be undertaken." ME AGAIN: This is merely a Keynesian multiplier like argument, that jobs create the demand for more labor. TOM ASKS; What is the relationship between "labour" and "work" in the above paragraph? Does the term "work" have a consistent referent throughout the paragraph? ME AGAIN: The paragraph seems to use work to mean the demand for jobs and labor to means the sale of "labor power," although the usage is not entirely consistent.
