the guy by the door …

On comparative economic systems. Young Dr. Rainer thinks he knows what I think. He is probably wrong.
I will not presume to deny the barbarism that his relatives may have
suffered due to Joseph Stalin. I am in general
unequivocally opposed to denying
holocausts. However, capitalism as currently configured does need more
than a light rinse. The Russian economy, however, is a problem. If
Prof. Cohen is right, that it cannot be considered capitalism by any
reasonable standard, is it an outlier? Millions of peoples lives
reduced to a dot that the “rational mind” should ignore. Weird
“science”. Worse than dismal.

“>

Perhaps something like this will make a cleaner wash.

“>

further, this is being done by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. [I’ll look into the treatment of the Electrical Sisters.] This windmill is in Dorchester at the Freeport Street headquarters of Local 103. [And management says labor is Luddite!
Pishtosh I say! ] So bravo for the Brothers and Sisters. But are the
rest of us moving fast enough to avoid the further ravages of peak
oil?  Dr. Hubbert turned out to be right about U.S. oil production and predicted a similar phenomenon for world oil production. I can prove his theory. It was mentioned in an episode of the West Wing. Qued Erat Demonstrandum. I’m betting with him.

Like everything else in my life, this is a work in progress. I need to
see what fraction of GDP goes into the financial services sector before
deciding if the “free market” is really a costless allocator of
capital. The “empiricists” are loathe to consider this. Also, I need to
consider whether the $0.3 Trillion “incursion” in Iraq can be ignored
as a perturbation or be renormalized away, before I decide if the “free
market” is unconstrained. The answer from upstairs so far, “That was
done by another department.”

 Dr. Hubbert was not an economist, but a geophysicist. But he had an interesting idea about the interaction between physics and economics
or more correctly matter-energy and money.  Matter-energy, of
course, is conserved. Money presumably is tied to real physical wealth,
but the events of late 2001 clearly show how elastic that connection
is. Growth is assumed to be unbounded. [I guess we all agree that the
first derivative is bounded.] I think Dr. Hubbert is onto something,
but should really factor in labor. Marx had to exist, because Smith
understood the power of the division of labor, but not the power of
what was being divided up. This will, of course, get you a job as an
economist, but does it really lead to maximum productivity?

In the U.S. economy over the last three and a half decades wealth has
moved into fewer and fewer hands near the top of the distribution.
[There was a brief uptick in the Gini just before the crash of ’01. The
undergraduate who argued that this was proof of “all boats being
lifted” never came back for re-examination. 🙂 ] This may have
supported the illusion among the movers and shakers that growth is some
kind of magic that is immune to physics. There is something special
about life that it can appear to violate the 2nd Law [entropy]. But,
that is only apparent. And we can no longer afford the illusion.

[Tired. Later.]