should also be noted that accusing a reporter of lying is a very serious
matter, almost certainly libellous in itself if not true, and that if Mr
Hersh is interested he will find that the British libel courts, like the
Ritz Hotel, are open to all.
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list
Chris, you make a number of good points, but I don't think you're taking
your opponents' position seriously enough. It's always been a pet theory of
mine that almost all difficult questions relating to imperialism can be
enlightened by considering the degree to which they are analogous to the
Shurely market prices have to react to buying and selling, or they wouldn't
be market prices. The question is whether the buying and selling matches up
to anything in what Paul Davidson calls The Real World (a place which I
visited once, and didn't really like it).
For what it's worth, I'm
Peter has it right. Fama's 3 kinds of market efficiency are basically
statistical definitions; they're different strengths of assertions about
unpredictability. This is a necessary condition for efficiency (viz the
title of Samuelson's paper on the subject Properly Anticipated Prices
Fluctuate
: Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice
Daniel Davies wrote:
The more hazy idea behind
efficient markets theory is that stock market prices are in some way the
best forecast of discounted value of future cash flows.
Yup. It's been ages since I read this stuff, but some of the more
honest economists
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Doug
Henwood
Sent: 24 June 2004 03:20
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice
Daniel Davies wrote:
That point (which is, incredibly, very well established and true) is that
40% of the entire
The transformation problem is at best of limited relevance.
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Charles
Brown
Sent: 24 June 2004 17:21
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: EMH
by Chris Doss
no, that won't do.
Hubbert hated Native Americans!
jd
---
Lenin
s. artesian wrote:
Then comes the advice about doing the right thing in the international debt
markets and
taking positions (long? short?) in Venezuelan debt. That's a real thing
of beauty by the
way.
That was me (btw, I don't believe I've ever claimed to be a Marxist, though
I reserve the
Suffice to say that, no joke, in (I think) 2002 when the 10bn lira note was introduced
(quote from the Central Bank Governor at the time It's not exactly a proud moment
having your name on a note with ten zeros on it, but needs must), there was a small
but serious atempt by some members of the
David, I cannot help noticing that you have written close to 1000 words
about what a fantastic chap Thomas Sowell is, and not a single word about
the actual (IMO lousy) boilerplate free trade hackwork that was forwarded to
the list. This also, is a form of argumentum ad hominem.
dd
I seem to remember from university days that the power of Congress to decide
whether or not the USA is at war or not, is one that has repeatedly been
ignored by successive US Presidents to the point where it is more or less
universally regarded as part of the dignified apparatus of the US
Gerry Cohen wrote a lot about this. I can't remember which side he came
down on, but he certainly agreed with David that you have to be very careful
in using the language of theft when talking about capitalist surplus-value
or you end up basically legitimating a whole lot of property rights-talk
it's previewing in London this evening, and you can't get tickets for love
or money (I believe; to be honest I've only really tried offering money)
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Doug
Henwood
Sent: 04 July 2004 17:30
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sachs has always been basically a man of the left, and has been saying
sensible things about sovereign default fo longer than anyone else I can
remember (including me and Richard Portes). Perhaps the whole Harvard
Institute thing should be viewed by revisionist historians as a brief
aberration in
I have not followed Sachs closely in most recent times but I think he would
strongly object to being called a 'man of the left'.
maybe I was being too charitable on this point ... I'd say he's a man of
the left in the same sense in which Brad DeLong is; ie, the plain man would
identify him as
One of the interesting things about the whole imbroglio is that very, very
few African states have material debts to privately owned capital. It's
almost all government-to-government debt or IMF debt apart from SA, Botswana
and a bit of trade finance (which IMO shouldn't really be analysed as
It's a useful corollorary (?) of social network theory that almost all bad
lads are joined up together, via a smallish number of connected node
individuals. The North Korean government's forged $100 bills ended up
financing the ecstasy trade in Birmingham, via the Libyans, the mafiya and
the
Michael was just asking how the Russian
oligarchs would go about making use of Chechen freedom fighters; my point was
only that, in general, there is a surprisingly efficient global community of
violent men and no particular instance of thugs of two kinds working together
ought to
JK Galbraith referred to it as "the bezzle"
-- the increment to national wealth during that period when the conman knows he
has got the mark's money, but the mark is as yet not aware that he has been
dispossessed of it ...
-Original Message-From: PEN-L list
[mailto:[EMAIL
as opposed to cyclical. It's a statistical concept at base; the idea is
that if you were able to perfectly control for the business cycle then what
you'd be left with is the secular trend.
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Charles
Brown
Sent: 12
OTOH, although this is an interesting scientific question, it has
surprisingly few political implications. Although there are differences of
opinion on how they work, the brute fact of the matter is that
antiretroviral drugs do in fact work for AIDS patients, and nothing else
does. So for the
this is such crap. Note that the closer than the official forecast 75% of
the time number shows up twice in different contexts. Note also that you
would do better than the official forecast 50% of the time by simply
flipping a coin, so 75% seems a pretty low bar (if your playing a coin
flipping
I'm not an oil analyst, but a good broker knows a little bit of everything
...
barrels per day, when used in that context, is usually barrel of oil
equivalent (boe). BOE is a unit of energy, like BTUs. It's equal to about
6 billion joules, which is the energy you would release by burning a
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
First of all, great pun: spot dog.
I'm so glad you spotted it. In which spirit I would like to share with an
unwilling internet my son's first contribution to world literature, in the
form of a story he told me yesterday.
Once upon a time there was a little boy called Spot the Dog. Now go to
Hazlitt's essay on Robert Owen is quite fun:
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/Political/Owen.htm
there's also a rather good museum in New Lanark these days which makes an
attractive daytrip if you're ever stuck in Glasgow.
I occasionally find myself thinking that Owen and the
they wouldn't, necessarily. The statistics people try to get a fix on the
genuine average price of things, but it's a hell of a job to be sure you're
comparing like with like, and the bias is likely to be entirely one way; as
Michael noted earlier, how often do they make a mistake in your favour,
2004 19:56
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: oops, again
Daniel Davies wrote:
they wouldn't, necessarily.
Fees most certainly should be included. Usurious interest rates
would be difficult to define in a world of 18-21% credit card rates.
And if they're not changing, but just constantly high
On the other hand, note that this
would mean that the CPI would systematically overstate the cost of living
the life of a rich person but underestimate the cost of being poor, which
is
a known problem of RPI and related statistics.
I forgot to mention that this is the main reason why it is always
I'd be *very* careful how one went about this. It feels like entryism, and
the experience of the (UK) Labour Party in the 1980s suggests that the
'mainstream' Dems would react to it very badly indeed (by which I mean that
this, if it didn't work, would be the *end* of friendly relationships
In fairness, Kerry has never denied having blood on his hands and has done
more than most (indeed, has built his political career on it) to bring the
facts about what US soldiers did in Vietnam into the public eye.
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf
Sasha Baron-Cohen isn't really that left-wing; my other half was a
contemporary of his at Cambridge and remembers him as being pretty
apolitical. The sexual politics of some of the things he's done on British
TV were really quite appalling, in that rather annoying ironic laddish
sexism way that
The point I think Ulhas is driving at is the really interesting thing in
those HDI statistics; Cuba has managed to achieve first world life
expectancy and literacy on a GDP of just over $5k per head. I think that
the next lowet on the list is close to $8k. That's the really interesting
thing
it's only happened once in the UK since the war.
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael
Pollak
Sent: 23 July 2004 03:12
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Housing prices
I recently read that nominal housing prices have never declined in the US
a Member of Parliament is the Honourable Member for Bogarse South. A
Privy Councillor is The Right Honourable. Debrett's would encourage you
to refer to a younger child of a hereditary peer as the Honourable as a
courtesy title in the absence of any other title, but this practice is on
the way
nor is Malaysia
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chris Doss
Sent: 23 July 2004 14:40
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Human Development Index 2004
--- Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Is there any common
cause
with any of today's 3rd world
Also worth noting (although to be honest I'm not anything like informed
enough to be a booster or otherwise of the Cuban economy) that unlike
Jamaica and Dom. Rep., Cuba's economy is not a material exporter of cannabis
or cocaine, although it is perfectly well set up to be. This has to be
accounting for the profits of lending is the second blackest of the black
arts (accounting for the profits of life assurers is the blackest). There
are often very substantial gaps indeed between even the best accruals
accounts and cash. If the debt ends up not being repaid, this earnings
stream
As far as I can tell, no; Cuba is still hanging round $15 per head per day.
It looks like they're just doing more with less development-wise.
dd
-Original Message-
Does that mean that Cuba's economy is more marketized and monetized
than before -- hence a higher GDP per capita and a
didn't straight-to-video fave Rutger Hauer star in a film about a blind
swordsman once?
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Louis
Proyect
Sent: 28 July 2004 16:43
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The Blind Swordsman Zatoichi
In Hollywood, the blind
I am
sure I would not be the only one who would be horribly disappointed if this was
the last of your posts in this series.
dd
-Original Message-From: PEN-L list
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of PaulSent: 29
July 2004 01:49To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject:
HDI\PPP
same as the anti-imperialist content of blowing up pubs in Guildford and
Birmingham. Those who don't understand Ireland are doomed to repeat its
history ...
on the other hand, I suppose I should cheer up. Ireland is now a thriving
and dynamic nation, and racial prejudice against the Irish would
I don't want to sound patronising, nor like a single-issue obsessive, but
all of these conversational gambits were tried on the British left during
the Troubles and it's not obvious that they did a lot of good.
dd
-Original Message-
You have no moral right to be acting superior to
the reason why the income number is easier than the wealth number, of
course, is that if you had all the world's wealth, what would you buy with
it? In a very real sense ( this phrase [c] Alan Bennett), the world's
wealth can probably only be measured in hours of equivalent socially
necessary
Julio H wrote:
I cannot make an educated guess about net global income, so I'll just say
it's 30 trillion USD. Global capital can be now treated as an annuity,
which is very convenient because its present value formula is net income
flow/r. To calculate the present value, we discount net income
it is surprising what a man can understand when his pocketbook depends on
him not understanding it, or some such.
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael
Perelman
Sent: 04 August 2004 17:38
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: What is the total
I'm well out of my depth on this one but it doesn't strike me that there is
any great mystery here on the investment numbers. The investment budget of
PDVSA is $5.3bn. Minus $1.7bn which has been diverted into the social
housing budget gives $3.6bn. The capital expenditure needed to cover
for what it's worth, my copy of the FT this morning has an article in it
saying convincing Chavez victory would be good for international oil
companies. Someone in it is quoted as saying Mr Chavez is now seen as
someone we can do business with. Which usually means he is seen as
someone we're
my
understanding of the whole thing is that the popular revulsion to Ford in the
Pinto case was basically Kantian; they didn't consider the people's deaths as a
"cost" in themselves, but only in as much as some proportion of the deaths would
probably give rise to lawsuits which would affect
just to note that a lot of the hidden assumptions that Paul has been talking
about in the context of PPP figures are actually there when you're comparing
figures for the same country over time. I wrote a piece for my weblog this
morning (http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002321.html) about
from what I hear, the problem was not so much the affair, as the revelation
that he's a friend of Dorothy.
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael
Perelman
Sent: 12 August 2004 21:49
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: NJ gov.
Why would an affair
I drove a Lada for five years. It was fourteen years old when I got it and
was still going just fine when I gave it away last month. They were built
off the plans of old Fiats.
dd
-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chris Doss
Sent: 13 August 2004
shit, if that's the dude's defence he'll be lucky if he doesn't get the
chair!
dd
-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
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