BEYOND FED TRANSFERS AND DEBT: 95% Of Americans Are Getting Poorer Every Year

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  • more evidence, or say, emphasis. will it make a difference?
• BEYOND FED TRANSFERS AND DEBT: 95% Of Americans Are Getting Poorer Every Year

Who Rules America: Power in America

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  • If we look at this ensemble of people, we can see that their interests are narrow. They do not include interest in culture, well being of society – no Machiavelli, no de Medici, but we do get Buffet and gates.  The range is too narrow to let this group lead society.

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  The Class-Domination Theory of Power

• , the owners and top executives of the largest corporations, banks, investment firms, and agri-businesses come together as a corporate community. Their enormous economic resources give them the "structural economic power" that is the basis for dominating the federal government through lobbying, campaign finance, appointments to key government positions, and a policy-planning network made up of foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion groups.

Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power

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  • How many economists look on wealth distribution as an outcome of an economy? Do they feel any sense of responsibility, or interest?
• Some of the information may come as a surprise to many people. In fact, I know it will be a surprise and then some, because of a recent study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) showing that most Americans (high income or low income, female or male, young or old, Republican or Democrat) have no idea just how concentrated the wealth distribution actually is. More on that a bit later.

Why Is The World Run By Bean Counters? – Steve Denning – RETHINK – Forbes

• Steve Denning

• Why Is The World Run By Bean

• Counters?

• My take is that for the last 150 years, Western culture has been in the grip of left-brain thinking, and manipulating people like things.

• But then something happened. The gains from running the world this way stopped coming. The bean counters didn’t notice that the economic foundation for the approach had collapsed. The problem was covered up with “financial engineering” and accounting tricks with debt. The result is that we end up with the poignant world described in a Financial Times article on the death of the American dream.

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  • This interesting given that Denning was a serious bean counter a the World Bank. Moving first to narrative in a book a decade ago,  and then to intellectual history smoothly, he has learned a great deal with lots of experience in that old declining world. Now, do we agree on his story here?
• New ways of measurement have emerged that measure what’s truly important to a firm’s future, namely, whether it is delighting its clients as a whole, as well as whether the individual units of the firm are contributing that goal. See my five-part series of articles starting here.

The Clash of Generations – NYTimes.com

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  • The theme is important. Passing on culture and production rom one generation to another. Plato I think suggested that the problem of gneeational inheritance makes a fully conscious society impossible because there is not enough time.  But in this article the tendency is to blame the boomers rather than see the whole movement as a post WW2 affluence bubble in the context of western interpretations of the world, especially its focus on things.

• The Clash of Generations

   
  

  By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

    
  

  Published: July 16, 2011

• That is because there is a deep sense of theft in both countries, a sense that the way capitalism played out in Egypt and Greece in the last decade was in its most crony-esque, rigged and corrupt deformation, letting some people get fantastically rich simply because of their proximity to power

• So there is a hunger not just for freedom, but for justice. Or, as Rothkopf puts it, “not just for accounting, but for accountability.”

Netflix’s Management And Culture Presentation

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  • This belongs to management, but very interesting overview of an open and honest company. 
• REVEALED: The Secrets To Netflix’s Success

What China’s five-year plan means for business – McKinsey Quarterly – Economic Studies – Productivity & Performance

• What China’s five-year plan means for business 

       
  

  McKinsey analyzed the potential impact on 33 industries. Two dimensions stood out: the plan’s effect on profit pools and on the competitive landscape.

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  • this is really important. Will China, with its control economy, be able to make big decisions about big issues more effectively and cleanly than the so-called open economies? The state bureaucracy in China seems more capable of making socially a lot of decisions in the corporate structure of the other major economies.
• China’s recently announced 12th five-year plan aims to transform the world’s second-largest economy from an investment-driven dynamo into a global powerhouse with a steadier and more stable trajectory.

A Roadmap to a Life that Matters – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review

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  • The HBR putting concerns for the quality of life. This should be for all, not just those at the top of Maslow’s (distorting) hierarchy. But the news here is the introduction in another place of the concern for the human more than primarily or even exclusively for profit.
• A Roadmap to a Life that Matters

A Tale Of Two Countries: The Growing Divide Between Silicon Valley And Unemployed America | TechCrunch

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  • This for my SV friends. We face a real problem being at the center of a success that is hurting so many.
• A Tale Of Two Countries: The Growing Divide Between Silicon Valley And Unemployed America

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  • this seems crucial to the whole jobs and income distribution discussion. The old method  which worked for most is no longer doing so. Lots of history and ethics to discuss here.
• In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.

• But could this increase in variation lead to the creation of two almost completely distinct countries in America,

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  • we should have been aware of this, didn’t we all read Vonnegut’s Player Piano?
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  • The comments to the article are a good sampling of people fully misunderstanding each other. The difference is ideology and received opinion deeply held. How did we get to such a state? must have taken years of educational neglect.

What hope is there for us if America is driven to the brink of meltdown? | Will Hutton | Comment is free | The Observer

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  • this is a standard story, but the other is that the crisis is a divergesion from the real issue of who will pay for the costs integrated over the last thirty years. Some argue that Obama has the authority to just deal with the debt limit and let the Bush tax increase expire in a few months.

• What hope is there for us if America is driven to the brink of meltdown?

     

  If the US cannot service its public debts and defaults, the outcome will have catastrophic consequences

@LISwires \\ » World economy: a perfect storm in August?

• World economy: a perfect storm in August?

• gust?

• Chinese “Tiger” inflation at 6.4%

• After a growth of 5.1% last year, the world will grow less this year and next, 4.3% and 4.5% respectively, according to figures released in June update by the IMF World Economic Outlook. But more troubling is the slowdown in international trade – from an increase of 12% in 2010 to 8.2% this year and 6.7% next year.

• The big risk of this summer is that the convergence of these negative trends causes the appearance of some “black swan”, still unpredictable.

Americans’ Wealth Is Stolen

• Americans’ Wealth Is Stolen

   

  By Rep. Dennis Kucinich,

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  • Here is another strong critique. Our question is, where, if at all, is it wrong or misleading?
• that our entire government has been turned into a machine which takes the wealth of a mass of Americans and accelerates it into the hands of the few.

The Capitalist Threat – George Soros – Project Syndicate

• The Capitalist Threat

   
  

  George Soros

• In The Philosophy of History, Hegel discerned a disturbing historical pattern — the crack and fall of civilizations owing to a morbid intensification of their own first principles.

• The main enemy of the open society is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.

• why no one has access to the ultimate truth. The answer became clear: We live in the same universe that we are trying to understand, and our perceptions influence the events in which we participate. If our thoughts belonged to one universe and their subject matter to another, truth might be within our grasp.

• Operating under Communist regimes, I never felt the need to explain what the meaning of "open society" was. Those who supported the objectives of the foundations I established in the region understood it better than I did, even if they were not familiar with the expression.

• The end of the Cold War brought a response very different from that at the end of the Second World War. The idea of a new Marshall Plan could not even be mooted. When I proposed such an idea at a conference in Potsdam (in what was then still East Germany), in the spring of 1989, I was literally laughed at.

• Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is a belief in the magic of the marketplace. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. But unless this view is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that takes precedence over individual interests, our present system–which, however imperfect, qualifies as an open society–is liable to break down.

• I contend that an open society may also be threatened from the opposite direction; from excessive individualism, from too much competition and too little cooperation.

• Friedrich Hayek, one of the apostles of laissez-faire, was also a passionate proponent of the open society. But because communism–and even socialism–have been thoroughly discredited, I consider the threat from the laissez-faire side more potent today than the threat from totalitarian ideologies.

• In the case of the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism, the claim is more difficult to dispute because it is based on economic theory, and economics is the most reputable of the social sciences. While one cannot simply equate market economics with Marxist economics, laissez-faire ideology is just as much a perversion of supposedly scientific verities as is Marxism.

• The main scientific underpinning of the laissez-faire doctrine is the theory that free and competitive markets bring supply and demand into equilibrium and thereby ensure the best allocation of resources. This is widely accepted as an eternal verity, and in a sense it is one. Economic theory is an axiomatic system. As long as the basic assumptions hold, the conclusions follow. But when we examine the relevant assumptions closely, we find that they do not apply to the real world. As originally formulated, the theory of perfect competition–of the natural equilibrium of supply and demand–assumed perfect knowledge, homogeneous and easily divisible products, and a large enough number of market participants to ensure that no single participant could influence the market price.

• Still, I believe the radical change of attitude required for the success of the open society is possible and will allow us to develop our potential better than a social system that claims to be in possession of ultimate truth. There is historical precedent for a change of similar magnitude. The Enlightenment was a celebration of the power of reason, and provided inspiration for the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The belief in reason was carried to excess in the French Revolution; nevertheless, it was the beginning of a new way of life. We have now had 200 years of experience with the Age of Reason, and as reasonable people we ought to recognize that reason has its limitations. The time is ripe for developing a conceptual framework based on our fallibility. Where reason has failed, fallibility may yet succeed.

Can global economic policy be freed from its paralysis? – The Washington Post

• By the BIS report, you’d hardly know that there are almost 45 million unemployed in the advanced countries, up 50 percent from 2007. But can governments do anything about it? The BIS has no answer. Economic policy seems paralyzed. There’s an almost palpable sense of helplessness, whether reading the BIS report or listening to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at his recent news conference. Economics seems to have emptied its toolbox. Patience and prayer are what’s left: Last week’s release of oil stocks, for example, was a desperate prayer for lower gasoline prices.

The Oil Drum | Discussions about Energy and Our Future

• Russia has announced it will send two army brigades, including special forces soldiers, to the Arctic to protect its interests in the disputed, oil-rich zone. 

   Russia, the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway have all made claims over parts of the Arctic circle which is believed to hold up to a quarter of the Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas.

The Oil Drum: Campfire | Joseph Tainter’s 2009 Speech – Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability

• Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability

   

  by Joseph Tainter

   

  Few questions of history have been more enduring than how today’s complex societies evolved from the foraging bands of our ancestors. While this might seem of academic interest, it has important implications for anticipating our future. Our understanding of sustainability depends to a surprising degree on our understanding of the human past. My purposes today are to show that the conventional understandings of cultural evolution are untenable, as are assumptions about sustainability that follow from them, and to present a different approach to assessing our future.