|
|
Home | Switchboard | Unix Administration | Red Hat | TCP/IP Networks | Neoliberalism | Toxic Managers |
| (slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and bastardization of classic Unix | |||||||
| Home | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 1999 |
For the list of top articles see Recommended Links section
|
|
Switchboard | ||||
| Latest | |||||
| Past week | |||||
| Past month | |||||
 |
 |
 |
Mitt Romney's Vice Presidential pick, Paul Ryan, as with himself, is an uninformed opportunist who was born into wealth and privilege and whose proposed policies aim to perpetuate that privilege at the expense of the rest of the population with whom he nominally shares a national identity. Barack Obama is a cynical opportunist who serves the interests of wealth and privilege and whose policies more effectively promote those interests than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could ever hope to.
Those circling the wagons to get Mr. Obama re-elected should spend a bit of time getting to know their guy.
... ... ...
In his effort to save particular culpable bankers while leaving the banking system corrupt, fragile, predatory and dysfunctional, Mr. Obama spared the victims of banker malfeasance no inconvenience, misdirection, unnecessary effort or cost. As part of the bank 'bailouts' Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner developed an entire program (HAMP– Home Affordable Modification Program) (link) to intentionally dupe hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure into wasting a year or more of their lives 'negotiating' with banks that had no intention of modifying mortgages. The result was to inflict economic, legal and moral harm onto already distressed citizens solely to benefit the banks. That Mr. Geithner could have accomplished the same goal by fiat without torturing the already victimized citizenry illustrates what utter contempt he and Mr. Obama have for the American people.
... ... ...
After several decades of the Washington political establishment opportunistically trotting out the 'budget deficit' canard in the lull between launching expensive wars for the benefit of their corporate benefactors, creating expensive giveaways to connected industries (Pharma) and enacting exorbitant tax cuts for the ascendant plutocracy, Barack Obama upped the ante by laying Social Security and Medicare on the table to be sacrificed without even the pretense of having been forced to do so. The only likely reason why he didn't beat Paul Ryan to the punch in trying to privatize Social Security, as Bill Clinton had wanted to do, is that the matter polled poorly following George W. Bush's bungling of the matter.
... ... ...
In every dimension as president Barack Obama has proven himself a loyal servant of the global ruling class-bankers, corporate CEOs and oil and gas industry executives, against the rest of humanity. And through his faux-populist rhetoric and crude-materialist presence (black Democrat) he has been able to promote ruling class interests more effectively than conspicuous aristocrats like Mitt Romney could hope to. More to the point, as a trained technocrat, Mr. Obama can avoid the overreach of crude ideologues like Paul Ryan by knowing exactly who his benefactors are. (Mr. Ryan would hit a brick wall thirty seconds into trying to cut the government programs that the ruling class feeds off of. Mr. Obama will stick to de-funding only those who lack social power).
Finally, my condolences to Mr. Obama's supporters on the coming disappointments should he be re-elected. Sure Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would be 'worse.' But should Mr. Romney win there would be less delusion around whose interests any president will serve. The ruling class declared war on the rest of us forty years ago. Mitt Romney clearly represents the ruling class. Mr. Obama does the same with less evident intent.
|
|
|
Counterpunch
... Wall Street strategists view this state and local budget squeeze as a godsend. As Rahm Emanuel has put matters, a crisis is too good an opportunity to waste – and the fiscal crisis gives creditors financial leverage to push through anti-labor policies and privatization grabs. The ground is being prepared for a neoliberal "cure": cutting back pensions and health care, defaulting on pension promises to labor, and selling off the public sector, letting the new proprietors to put up tollbooths on everything from roads to schools. The new term of the moment is "rent extraction."
|
|
|
Sep 7, 2012 | Asia Times
After eight years of cowboy globalism under George W Bush, Americans went for the "smart power" pledged by Barack Obama - resurrecting US prestige overseas, using diplomacy first and violence as a last resort. That was the promise; the reality has been different, with enemies even angrier and friends becoming foes.
Come November, Americans must vote again - an unenviable choice between Obama's "dumb power" and Mitt Romney's alternative.
(Used with permission TomDispatch.)
|
|
|
Aug 27, 2012 | naked capitalism
Yves here. Paul Krugman already pounced on a major, and disturbing, deception on behalf of the Romney economics team: that Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and John Taylor (along with Kevin Hassett) published a white paper which grossly misrepresented the research of multiple economists. In other words, they are willing to flat out lie to create the impression their policies ideas have wide-spread support among
economists .Pavlina Tcherneva makes separate observations about the key advisors in Romney's camp and how well their ideas have fared in our depression-in-the-making.
She also makes sure to include Gary Becker, and with good reason. Becker was among the speakers at a keynote session at the Milken Conference in 2008 which I attended. It was the first time I'd seen toads hop out of someone's mouth when speaking.
By Pavlina Tcherneva, Assistant Professor of Economics at Franklin and Marshall College, Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney boasts support from the scientific community for his supply-side trickle-down economic proposal. It is outlined here, along with the list of economists endorsing the plan.
Several Nobel Prize winners grace the top of the list. Here is a quick look at some of these luminaries and their contributions to some of the most pressing problems of our time.
UNEMPLOYMENT: Robert Lucas
Perhaps no one bears more responsibility for the general apathy among mainstream economists towards the problem of unemployment than Robert Lucas. He is the economist who argued that there was no point in distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary unemployment because agents were 'perfectly rational' and the jobless essentially 'chose' their condition (1978, 242). (Yes, according to Lucas, even during the Great
Depression , 25% of the working population opted for leisure rather than work!) This is not some minor claim, but a signature argument by Lucas and the entire New Classical School of economic thought to which he belongs. This is the school whose second core assumption - that of 'continuous market clearing' - together with the 'rational expectations hypothesis' has been used to render the condition of involuntary unemployment a virtual impossibility.Why spend any effort looking for solutions to a problem which has been assumed away?
THE DOWNTURN: Edward Prescott
Edward Prescott is a prominent member of the Real Business Cycle School (a spin-off of the New Classical School), which also embraces the assumptions of continuous market clearing and rational expectations. Prescott and his colleague Kydland shared the Nobel Prize for "their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics". They are the brainpower behind the most dominant mainstream macroeconomic model-the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model. Yes, this is the same model that failed to predict the latest crisis and prompted the Queen of England to ask "Why didn't anyone see it coming?" This same DSGE model has no money, no default, no financial institutions, no debt… in other words, nothing of interest to those who are interested in the real world. Prescott too subscribes to the idea that the unemployed are simply substituting leisure for work during business cycles and that the government shouldn't do anything about it. Indeed, all that the government safety-nets do is introduce moral hazard (as in, unemployment insurance removes the incentive to look for work). Prescott further maintains that if flood protection were not offered, rational agents would stop living in flood- and hurricane-prone regions.
Surely those troublesome food stamps that go to 47 million Americans disincentivize them from foraging.
THE EUROPEAN MONETARY UNION: Robert Mundell
Robert Mundell is the father of the signature theory (Optimal Currency Areas) that rationalized the design of the European Monetary Union. Under the OCA model, there is no reason for currencies to be connected to nation states. Indeed Mundell claimed that single currency areas would increase economic performance and efficiency. We all know how well this experiment turned out and even the mainstream today recognizes the need for nation states to control their own currencies for the purposes of policy making. The best analysis of the OCA model can be found in Charles Goodhart's seminal article "The two concepts of money: implications for the analysis of optimal currency areas", which is a required reading for anyone interested in MMT or wanting to understand why Europe is in such a mess.
FINANCIAL INSTABILITY: Myron Scholes
Myron Scholes (along with his collaborator Robert Merton) shared the Nobel for "developing a new method for valuing derivatives". This method gave birth to the trading model used by Long Term Capital Management in the 90s. Remember LTCM? The hedge fund that almost brought the financial system to its knees in 1998 were it not for the Fed-orchestrated bailout. 10 years later derivatives trading managed to finish the job and produce a far bigger crisis. Scholes himself was accused by LTCH vs. US of using illegal tax shelters to hide profits from the hedge fund.
No, these are not some obscure economists pushing some obscure ideas. These are the men whose work has defined much of the mainstream economics profession and provided the 'rationale' for supply-side, trickle-down economic policy.
These are men whose ideas have stood the test of time and have failed. What can we expect from the economic plan of a man who has their support?
============
A bonus: Gary Becker
(Though Becker's contributions do not bear direct relevance to the current crisis, it is emblematic of the warped logic used by many mainstream economists.)
Gary Becker is the economist who developed a pricing model for kidneys and other human organs. Since efficient markets solve all problems-economic or social-monetizing organ donation, in this economist's view, makes perfect sense. He is better known for his theory on human capital investment. One extension of this work deals with the question of child-rearing. According to Becker, parents choose to have children because they fear that their retirement portfolios are inadequate to support them in their old age…hence, the kids. Some parents opt to have a few "high-quality kids", while others – many "low quality kids", depending on the family's time preference. I am not joking and these are not my words; they are his. This theory has given birth to the "rotten-kid theorem", which says that because of these financial incentives, parents are "altruistic" even (even?!) towards their spoiled-rotten and selfish kids, because they are essentially trying to maximize their own return. In sum, according to Becker, all social, economic, environmental, health, and other problems can be solved if all human activity is monetized and financial incentives are 'properly aligned'.
(As I suspect every other rational parent has done, I too have been crunching numbers since I had my daughter 2 months ago. Would she yield the return I'm expecting of her or should I increase my contributions to my retirement portfolio? Ah, where is that perfect information when you need it!?)
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/pavlina-tcherneva-economists-for-romney-a-closer-look.html#uswAo5kRl8jpImHA.99
|
|
|
Harvard Business Review
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson ran into an online buzzsaw this week. He says the "liberal blogosphere" was out to do him in, and that was part of it. But there's something bigger at work: a groundswell of resentment for and frustration with the "thought leaders" who craft our conventional wisdom, get paid big speaking fees for it, yet often behave in ways that don't accord with this status. First Jonah Lehrer, then Fareed Zakaria, now this - and surely there will be more such brouhahas to come. It may be that this groundswell is driven entirely by frustrated would-be speechmaking thought leaders. But I think it's more than that (then again, as a would-be speechmaking thought leader, I would).
What got Ferguson - whom I know, although not well, and like - in trouble was his Newsweek cover story "Hit the Road, Barack." The article looks like something a smart, busy guy who really likes Paul Ryan, kind of dislikes the President, and loves to tweak the American liberal establishment - but hasn't had much time to delve into the issues lately - might throw off in a couple of days while vacationing on Martha's Vineyard. It's not good, but it's not exactly an abomination, either.
So why the firestorm of criticism? A lot of it had to do with one little passage about the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare:
The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period.
What Ferguson left out is that the Congressional Budget Office also said that other provisions of the law (reductions in Medicare spending and increases in taxes) will more than make up for that cost, resulting in a net reduction in the deficit. His wording was clearly misleading: Obama's "health-care reform" included both the insurance-coverage provisions and the other provisions. When Princeton economist and frequent Ferguson sparring partner Paul Krugman pointed this out, Ferguson could have easily said something like Oops, I worded that poorly. But the point stands that increasing health coverage is going to cost a lot. Instead, he doubled down and argued that because he'd written "insurance-cost provisions" he'd been entirely correct. Along the way, he again selectively quoted from the CBO in a way that completely misrepresented the meaning of the passage he cited. Which was when the piling on really began.
Some of it was clearly partisan: I have tried and failed to imagine a situation where a sloppy pro-Obama or anti-Romney screed by a Harvard professor would have caused the Atlantic's James Fallows to declare, "As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize." But it was also driven by people like Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal, Politico's Dylan Byers, and Slate's Dave Weigel who had no political axe to grind but were flabbergasted at Ferguson's sheer shamelessness. These are all leading members of a rising digital media elite, closely connected via social media, who are pretty sure their peers and readers would never let them get away with nonsense like that.
Which is where my thought leader idea comes in. Ferguson is a great financial historian - his history of the Rothschild family is brilliant. In recent years he's become more of a generalist, and has focused more on current events. That's not a bad thing - I'm all for experts broadening their reach and sharing their knowledge. But Ferguson has been so good at it, and can express himself so charmingly, and handsomely, and swashbucklingly, that some people are willing to pay him to yammer on about pretty much anything. Tina Brown of Newsweek/The Daily Beast is one of those people, but far more important, as Stephen Marche pointed out on Esquire.com, are the conference organizers who are pay Ferguson $50,000 to $75,000 to entertain and edify a hotel ballroom full of business types about "Chimerica" or "the six killer apps of Western civilization."
That's the link with Lehrer and Zakaria, who are (or probably were, in Lehrer's case) big on the speaking circuit as well. Zakaria is a hugely accomplished thinker and writer (go back and read his breathtakingly good October 2001 Newsweek cover story "Why Do They Hate Us?" for a sample) who seems to have stretched himself too thin. Lehrer is a smart young upstart - his third book, Imagine: The Art and Science of Creativity, had been tearing up the bestseller lists before scandal hit - who seems to have made good storytelling a higher priority than the truth. That progression may tell a lot. The path to lucrative thought-leaderdom blazed over the past couple of decades was to establish yourself with dense, serious work (or a big, important job) and then move on to catch-phrase manufacturing (I spent a few weeks following Tom Friedman around in 2005, and learned that he had made this transition very deliberately). Nowadays ambitious young people looking to break into the circuit often just aim straight for the catch-phrases. Speakers bureaus need pithy sales pitches, not complex erudition - and while speaking fees might be spare change for Mitt Romney, for journalists and academics they often represent their only real shot at a top-tax-bracket income.
The result is an intellectual environment that seems to increasingly reward the superficial, and keeps rewarding those who make it into the magic circle of top-flight speakers even if they don't have anything new or interesting to say. Or at least: a part of the intellectual environment is like that. There's also a lively, seemingly much more meritocratic intellectual scene in the blogosphere and on Twitter. "The growth of online venues," wrote blogger and international relations scholar Daniel W. Drezner in a journal article in 2008 "has stimulated rather than retarded the quality and diversity of public intellectuals."
Where things get combustible is when the two scenes collide - when speaker's-bureau pundits get called out online for misdeeds, errors, or just inanities. (For a bracingly nasty recent example of the latter, check out think tanker Evgeny Morozov's recent New Republic evisceration of the TED ethos.) I don't know if this marks a changing of the guard, an uprising, or just a bunch of Twitter chatter that we should all ignore and get back to work. But it's fair to say that our thought leaders have as a group done a disastrously poor job of leading our thoughts over the past decade, so some kind of shake up is in order. (I should credit futurist Eric Garland, who has been making this argument a lot lately.)
All of which means that if you're a high-profile thought leader like Niall Ferguson, or Fareed Zakaria, or Jonah Lehrer, watch out. What got you there may not keep you there.
Update: Dan Drezner has a great piece, posted about 20 minutes before this one, that explores the same topic.
Justin Fox is editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group and author of The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.
Robert Waldmann
You are very very very much too kind to Drezner. His post is fundamentally different from yours because it contains nothing along the lines of " Along the way, he again selectively quoted from the CBO in a way that completely misrepresented the meaning of the passage he cited. " Drezner not only ignores this fact but asserts that Brad DeLong ignored it too. Drezner claimed that DeLong discussed the possible revocation of Ferguson's tenure for being "tendentious"Justin Fox (his word).Bryan SimpsonIn fact, DeLong only raised the possibility when Ferguson went on to commit gross intellectual fraud. Drezner libeled DeLong by grossly miss-representing what DeLong wrote (he must know what DeLong wrote as he discusses it).
I really don't think you should link to Drezner again. He has demonstrated an inability )really unwillingness( to distinguish the false and the tendentious. He seems to have no idea that historians consider accurate quotation of primary sources important. I don't see how anyone can imagine that Drezner has anything useful to contribute to any discussion. The same, of course, goes for Ferguson.
Justin, I was lead here by someone who referred to your article as a rare mature and thoughtful look at Niall Ferguson's latest internet dust up. It is correct your write up of Ferguson is fair, but you are a wolf in sheep's clothing. You have cut Ferguson like no one I've read. You do everything short of putting thought leader in quotation marks, it's truly a step down for a serious thinker to be considered a thought leader in the context you have drawn out. I too have enjoyed some of Ferguson's histories but I can't say I now recognized the man who wrote them. That Ferguson no longer exists. He has joined the lazy pablum pushers the like of Thomas Friedman. The next famous "thought leader" to screw up better hope you aren't there to explain what happened. Well done.GuestYou state "Ferguson is a great financial historian". Does this go all the way back to 2010? Ferguson on Bloomberg: "Well, that's not really a part of the argument I made in the piece. The point I made in the piece was that the stimulus had a very short-term effect, which is very clear if you look , for example, at the Federal employment numbers there's a huge spike in early 2010 and then it falls back down."Justin FoxKrugman explains the spike is due to census hiring and then writes: "For what it's worth, in this case I don't think we're looking at a blatant attempt to mislead; I suspect that we're just looking at raw ignorance."
Although intentionally misrepresenting source material, as Ferguson seems to have done in the article and definitely did in the subsequent exchange, belongs somewhere on the same scale as plagiarism, doesn't it? show more show less5l5k2laaIn fact what Ferguson did is worse. Plagiarism does not intentionally mislead one's readers, contrary to what Ferguson has done. A clarification. Plagiarism does not intentionally mislead one's readers as to the substantive content of the writing although it does mislead as to the source of the writing. However, to most readers whether the statement is true or false is far more important than whose statement it is. show more show lessAdityaThey're both forms of intellectual fraud.
|
|
|
This systematic distortion of information makes human societies characteristically self-deceptive, with people disposed to believe they are living up to their ideals, particularly when they are not. The existing schematic dissonance is usually subconscious, due to the misleading nature of words, so society stumbles smugly along while at odds with itself, its environment and its equally stupid neighbors. In fact, the only really effective control of development comes not from inside but from physical limitations (what cannot be done) and competition with other groups which are also out of touch with themselves.
In general, internal criticism is of limited value as a control mechanism for growth and development of a social system. There usually tend to be few, if any, effective critics within any organization. When not dismissed out of hand as a crank or an outsider, anyone with valid criticism is made an outsider, as ostracism is a common reward for honesty, accuracy and integrity. Thus, criticism without power is largely wasted, producing little but woe for the bewildered critic himself.
Perhaps there are so few effective critics because anyone with any brains at all quickly finds that most human organizations just are not set up for effective criticism. The basic working assumption is that everything is just fine. Outside criticism is deflected and internal feedback is supposed to be positive reinforcement from "Yes men" promoting their careers by corrupting the mighty. At best, criticism has a place on the fringe, where cranks and comics can be tolerated as amusing diversions.
The resistance of organizations to criticism is inherent in the human condition. Criticism is invariably disruptive, since group spirit, if nothing else, is disrupted when unrecognized problems are made explicit. Such disturbances are unwelcome to those in power. While a critic may think he is performing a service by calling attention to an obvious problem, he is often treated as if he caused it. Actually, critics should be considered society's early warning systems, sensing symptoms of problems before
|
|
|
August 5, 2002 | Donald Cox
Unless you belong to a motorcycle club, you probably don't think they have much to do with your life or with the world at large. I'm going to try to convince you otherwise. The logic of motorcycle clubs (members don't like the word "gangs") applies to many spheres, sublime and nasty, from religion to academic pursuits to terrorism.
"Generically, then, here are two similarities between motorcycle clubs and academic clubs:
- each screens out the less zealous
- and each discourages members from mingling with outsiders"
I don't expect you to be convinced right away, especially in light of some of the clubs' practices. Consider the initiation rites of the Hells' Angels in their mid-60's ascendancy, as reported by Hunter Thompson in his famous biker ethnography, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga:
Every Angel recruit comes to his initiation wearing a new pair of Levi's and a matching jacket with the sleeves cut off and a spotless emblem on the back. The ceremony varies from one chapter to another but the main feature is always the defiling of the initiate's new uniform. A bucket of dung and urine will be collected during the meeting, then poured on the newcomer's head in a solemn baptismal. Or he will take off his clothes and stand naked while the bucket of slop is poured over them and the others stomp it in. These are his 'originals,' to be worn every day until they rot. The Levi's are dipped in oil, then hung out to dry in the sun-or left under the motorcycle at night to absorb the crankcase drippings. When they become too ragged to be functional, they are worn over other, newer Levi's. Many of the jackets are so dirty that the colors are barely visible, but they aren't discarded until they literally fall apart. The condition of the originals is a sign of status. It takes a year or two before they get ripe enough to make a man feel he has really made the grade. [pp. 45-46]Now, where were we? Oh yes, academic pursuits. At the end of the first year of my studies for a Ph.D. my 20 or so classmates and I were given two exams (the "cores") designed not so much to test academic skills but to weed out those lacking the maniacal endurance to study economics past the point of all reason. It worked-by the second year only a half dozen of us remained, and a couple more dropped out before finishing the Ph.D. I wouldn't say the cores were a bucket of slop, exactly, but they did seem to cross the line from pedagogy into hazing.
Maybe you're thinking that a closer analogy might have to do with the sartorial habits of bikers and academic economists. While economists tend to avoid the dung-caked look, they're not exactly snappy dressers, and their uniforms often seem no less rigid than those of bikers. But I think there is a subtler connection. Stinky clothes prevent a biker from consorting with the non-biker world; he can forget about being, for example, a part-time bank teller or Gap salesperson. A seemingly crazy tradition serves a rational purpose, by making it easier for members to concentrate on the world of motorcycles full time.
Likewise, academics are sometimes discouraged from working in the non-academic world. For example, in the upper echelons of academe, "outside" consulting-the term itself belies boundaries-garners little prestige for the free-lancer and, if anything, is often looked down upon by peers. Norms against consulting serve the same purpose as non-standard clothing by making it harder for the club members to stray from the fold.
Generically, then, here are two similarities between motorcycle clubs and academic clubs: each screens out the less zealous and each discourages members from mingling with outsiders.
This line of thinking comes from a theory proposed by economist Laurence Iannaccone, who tried to explain two puzzles connected with religious sects:
- sacrifice, such as the burnt offerings described in the Book of Leviticus,
- and stigma, such as the shaved heads of the Hare Krishnas.
The sacrifices are wasteful, and, to outsiders at least, the stigmas often appear downright weird.
Iannaccone solved these puzzles by turning the logic of the economic theory of clubs on its head. Up to that point, economists focused mainly on how clubs might seek to prevent congestion by limiting membership, as a golf or tennis club might. But for some clubs the problem is not preventing congestion by keeping people out, but achieving critical mass by keeping people in. Small motorcycle clubs risk losing a barfight; tiny choirs are not very uplifting; poorly attended seminars are dull. The last item rationalizes the norms against consulting in academe. The less time my colleagues spend at law firms and corporate offices, the more time they have for lectures and seminars.
But it's not just about numbers; quality matters too: fellow bikers who fight hard, choir members who sing their hearts out, seminar participants who stay awake (and maybe even pay attention). Plus, many clubs-the Hell's Angels included-are beehives of redistribution and mutual insurance. In Thompson's words, "According to the code, there's no such thing as one Angel imposing on another." (p. 173) Iannaccone argues that the sacrifice demanded of prospective members helps screen out potential free-riders-those who might take advantage of the club's benefits without contributing their fair share. Hence the hazing, to weed out those less than fully committed. In the words of one Hell's Angel
"We're the one percenters, man-the one percent that don't fit and don't care....We've punched our way out of a hundred rumbles, stayed alive with our boots and our fists. We're royalty among motorcycle outlaws, baby." (Thompson, p. 4)
Nothing could be more different from a life of riding motorcycles than a life of studying the Talmud. Yet, as Eli Berman's recent study of Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Jews shows, the logic of Iannaccone's model applies with equal force to groups whose behavior it was originally formulated to explain-religious sects. The twin concerns of screening out free riders-who might be tempted to take advantage of redistribution-and attaining a critical mass-in order to make prayer and study more gratifying-each apply.
On redistribution: "No sick member is without visitors, and no single member is without an arranged match. Charity is ubiquitous, and interest-free loans abound, both in money and in kind..." (Berman, p. 911). On critical mass: "...praying is much more satisfying the more participants there are, especially when the tenth man arrives to make a prayer quorum (minyan)." (Berman, p. 921).
Berman also addresses a paradox: with worldwide income growth and technical progress, why the rise in religious fundamentalism and increased stringency of fundamentalist groups?
An easy way to resolve the paradox is to return to the example of bikers. If being a bank teller were the only alternative to participating in club activities, requiring members to wear dung-caked jackets effectively closes off that option. But what if technology brings about a new, more accessible alternative, such as, for example, telemarketing? The stigma from the jacket could prove useless for thwarting temptation; a biker might be able to work out of his home. The ante would have to be upped to something more radical (tongue piercing, maybe?).
Berman emphasizes that modern culture is an anathema to many religious sects, such as the Mennonites, the Amish, the radical Islam, in addition to Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Iannaccone's model explains why. TV, professional sports, Britney Spears, Ozzy Osbourne-all these compete for the attention of group members, especially younger ones.
About three weeks into my freshman year at a Catholic high school the "disciplinarian"-a humorless, black-robed cleric-showed up unannounced in the middle of a religion class to give an impromptu lecture on the evils of "Beatle-ism." Beatle-ism, apparently, had mainly to do with clothing: wide belts and pants without cuffs were deemed especially pernicious. (The rule on mandatory cuffs was quietly rescinded when it turned out that the local clothing store lacked the inventory to supply the entire student body.)
The root problem, of course, was that the Beatles were quite effective in competing for our attention. (To add insult to injury, whatever enthusiasm they may have had for saying the rosary or doing trigonometry, they kept well hidden.) But the proximate solution, as I think our disciplinarian reasoned, could well have to do with superficial trappings like clothing and hairstyles. If regulating them could prevent us from consorting with kids who espoused the Beatles' values, maybe we would knuckle down to work and pray harder.
I don't mean to sound churlish, and I don't bear a grudge against Brother Marcel, the disciplinarian. He was just following an economically rational policy. (Further, I'm eternally grateful to him and his prohibitions on long hair, which probably prevented me from joining a rock band and forgetting what little math I knew at the time.)
The clash between Brother Marcel and the Beatles is a microcosm of the perennial and increasingly pressing cat-and-mouse game between the Old Guard and the New Wave. The latter is the machinery-from places like Hollywood, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts-that churns out new gadgets and ideas. I think some are great (new findings in neurobiology are a personal favorite) and some are crap (violent summer blockbuster movies). Accordingly, I feel ambivalent toward the Old Guard. If Brother Marcel were alive today he'd probably be laboring to stanch the flow of gameboys into my high school, something I'd be inclined to support. But I'd also be uncomfortable knowing that, as a member of the Old Guard, he occupies a proverbial slippery slope that can lead to coercive practices of, for example, the Taliban.
The New Wave is becoming cheaper and more accessible all the time. The Old Guard will respond by closing ranks ever so tightly. Where it all leads depends in part on the resolution of these mighty forces. Whether rising fundamentalism will persist in the face of the expanding reach of secular temptation also depends on those old economic mainstays, technology, tastes and incomes. Clearly the New Wave, with its focus groups and market surveys, pays attention to this. But as long as club participation remains voluntary, the Old Guard will have to pay attention as well.
I must confess I'm rooting for the New Wave. In hindsight, I would have preferred spending more time listening to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and less time studying the Baltimore Catechism. But it's a tricky call-all those re-runs of Gilligan's Island burned up a lot of time that would have been better spent on pre-calculus. My three-year-old daughter is starting to like Beatles and that's just fine with me. I do wonder, though, what ol' Marce would have had to say about Barney.
References:Berman, Eli. "Sect, Subsidy and Sacrifice: An Economist's View of Ultra-Orthodox Jews." Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (August 2000): 905-953.
Buchanan, James M. "An Economic Theory of Clubs." Economica 32 (February 1965): 1-14.
Iannaccone, Laurence R. "Sacrifice and Stigma: Reducing Free-riding in Cults, Communes, and Other Collectives." Journal of Political Economy 100 (April 1992): 271-291.
Thompson, Hunter S. Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballentine Books, 1966.
* Donald Cox is Professor of Economics at Boston College. His email address is [email protected].
|
|
|
Economist's View
Bryan Caplan is tired of being sneered at by "high-status academic economists":
The Curious Ethos of the Academic/Appointee, by Bryan Caplan: High-status academic economists often look down on economists who engage in blogging and punditry. Their view: If you can't "definitively prove" your claims, you should remain silent.At the same time, though, high-status academic economists often receive top political appointments. Part of their job is to stand behind the administration's party line. They don't merely make claims they can't definitively prove; to keep their positions, appointees have to make claims they don't even believe! Yet high-status academic economists are proud to accept these jobs - and their colleagues admire them for doing so. ...
Noah Smith has something to say about "definitive proof":
"Science" without falsification is no science, by Noah Smith: Simon Wren-Lewis notes that although plenty of new macroeconomics has been added in response to the recent crisis/depression, nothing has been thrown out...
Four years after a huge deflationary shock with no apparent shock to technology, asset-pricing papers and labor search papers and international finance papers and even some business-cycle papers continue to use models in which business cycles are driven by technology shocks. No theory seems to have been thrown out. And these are young economists writing these papers, so it's not a generational effect. ...
If smart people don't agree, it may because they are waiting for new evidence or because they don't understand each other's math. But if enough time passes and people are still having the same arguments they had a hundred years ago - as is exactly the case in macro today - then we have to conclude that very little is being accomplished in the field. The creation of new theories does not represent scientific progress until it is matched by the rejection of failed alternative theories.
The root problem here is that macroeconomics seems to have no commonly agreed-upon criteria for falsification of hypotheses. Time-series data - in other words, watching history go by and trying to pick out recurring patterns - does not seem to be persuasive enough to kill any existing theory. Nobody seems to believe in cross-country regressions. And there are basically no macro experiments. ...
So as things stand, macro is mostly a "science" without falsification. In other words, it is barely a science at all. Microeconomists know this. The educated public knows this. And that is why the prestige of the macro field is falling. The solution is for macroeconomists to A) admit their ignorance more often (see this Mankiw article and this Cochrane article for good examples of how to do this), and B) search for better ways to falsify macro theories in a convincing way.
|
|
|
October 11, 2010 | www.exiledonline.com
The hero of this story is the $100 bill - or rather, the wad of $100 bills. My first meeting with those lovely $100 bills came at the end of my interview for a job teaching English at the American University of Iraq Sulaimaniya (AUIS). At the end of the interview, the Chancellor, Joshua Mitchell asked me what my travel expenses had been and pulled out a wad of $100 bills. He peeled off 11 of them - the cost of my ticket - and slapped them down on the table, snarling, "There, that's how I do business!"
It certainly wasn't the way most American academics do business. Most Americans are horrified by the sight of large amounts of cash, and American academics, an even more squeamish lot than most, would never have slapped that much money down on a table without asking for a receipt or any other formality. I was impressed; there's something appealing about raw gangsterism popping up when you expected overcautious pedantry - especially when that raw gangsterism is giving you cash.
Any scruples I might have had about joining the occupation vanished with the last of our cash. My wife Katherine and I had been truly poor in the preceding three years - homeless, begging at food banks, the whole deal. I even published some helpful hints in AlterNet for those experiencing real poverty for the first time.
We went to Iraq to make money, not because we believed the neocon talk about training Iraq's future leaders in the great ideals of the West.
And once we got to know our colleagues at AUIS, we found that nearly all the faculty was there for the same reason. Oh, they knew the talking points - democracy, Great Books, transforming an authoritarian culture - but they were in Iraq to make money. Well, to make money and to drink. In fact, when the talk got boozy, as it almost always did at faculty gatherings, the nonsense about bringing democracy disappeared and people started talking openly about SUVs and houses in the country.
AUIS bloomed in the Northern Iraqi desert, a very artificial growth sustained hydroponically with US tax dollars. One night, at a very boozy faculty party, some veteran AUIS teachers told us the secret story of how the place was created. They claimed that AUIS was born when John Agresto, a right-wing academic and vassal of the Cheney clan, drove over the Turkish border with $500,000 cash taped to his body. There was something grotesque about this legend, because Agresto is a notably fat man, and once you'd heard the legend of his cash-strapped trip across the border, you couldn't help imagining him bulging with cash on top of his other bulges, like a wombat infested with botfly larvae.
John Agresto: From disgraced Lynne Cheney lapdog to diabetic cash mule, you've come a long way, baby!
Bizarre as that story sounds, it's probably true. Stranger things, involving much bigger stashes of tax money, have happened throughout the US occupation of Iraq - and Agresto certainly had the political connections to score that kind of cash. In the early stages of the US occupation after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Agresto was in charge of "reforming" the Iraqi education system on good Republican principles. To his credit, he wrote a reasonably honest book about the experience called Mugged by Reality. Unfortunately, the mugging didn't take; Agresto has gone back to his right-wing roots, avoiding that disrespectful thug, Reality, as much as possible.
Agresto has a very typical right-wing biography, steeped in resentment and nourishing long, slow, vengeful designs on the academic profession which had humiliated him. He was a Reagan appointee to the National Endowment for the Humanities in the mid-1980s, joining his patron, Bill Bennett, in the project to de-fund the Left. But when he was nominated as Deputy head, a job that required congressional confirmation, Agresto was bitterly humiliated. He was criticized as a "mediocre political appointment" by the American Studies Association, with a dozen academic organizations joining up to issue a statement deploring his "decidedly partisan reputation." There were also raised evebrows at the fact that a witness who testified for Agresto at his confirmation hearings had recently been given a large grant at Agresto's behest. After these bruising revelations, his nomination was dropped.
Humiliation was the theme of all Agresto's memories of venturing into the wider world, beyond the tiny enclave of neocon academics. Even his ideological allies seemed to hurt him; he once described Lynne Cheney, his boss at the NEH, as "gruff and manly," then repeated with real hatred in his voice, "Gruff…she was gruff."
All that bitterness, and all those wads of taxpayer cash, ended up in the creation of AUIS. It was planned, as we new faculty were told, as a three-campus system, with branches in Baghdad and Southern Iraq. But Reality mugged that plan savagely; any attempt to stroll the groves of academe in any part of Iraq other than the Kurdish far north would have been interrupted with a lesson in practical physics from an IED.
Agresto took that money to Sulaimaniya, in the Kurdish zone of Northern Iraq, and set up AUIS, with himself in charge. He apparently chose Kurdistan for the simple reason that Baghdad, the natural place to put an American university in Iraq, was already too dangerous for Americans.
So AUIS was sited in Sulaimaniya, a quiet Kurdish town near the Iranian border with a long reputation of separatism towards the rest of Iraq, especially Arab Iraq. Saddam recognized Sulaimaniya's tradition of fierce independence, once saying that "the head of the serpent lies in Sulaimaniya."
"Suli," as we expats called it, is a quiet, dusty town. When you fly into the Suli airport, the city seems almost invisible, because the favorite building material is concrete, and the beige and tan blocky houses blend perfectly with the dry brown hills. It's hot in the summer and cold and damp in the winter and there's very little to do. One of my colleagues described living there as "sensory deprivation."
I arrived, with a dozen other new hires, in September 2009. We flew in on the same plane and were taken to our hotels on the same bus. Most of us were pretty flinchyll at first, wincing at every loud noise.But we soon learned there was nothing to fear from terrorists or even street hawkers. The Pesh Merga, the Kurdish militia who run security, are extremely effective, and the Kurds themselves are a polite, phlegmatic people.We soon realized the only danger in Suli was crossing the street. Everybody who's anybody in Suli has an SUV - Kia Sportages for the middle class, Toyota Landcruisers for the rich - and very few locals know how to drive. But there is no violence against foreigners, as far as I know. We learned to go back to sleep after hearing bursts of AK fire, the established manner of celebrating a wedding or an election or just the fact that it's Friday night. The only time I really flinched, once we were settled in, was when a bolt of lightning detonated directly above our hotel in the middle of the night. And even then, though I assumed it was a bomb, I wasn't worried for our safety; my first thought was, "Agh, they'll send us home and I won't get any more of that money."
In fact, I want to say clearly here how much I like and admire the people of Suli, my students in particular. They were a wonderful change from the timid, bland kids I've encountered in my recent North American teaching experiences. Most of the students at AUIS could name relatives tortured or killed by Saddam, or in the vicious Kurdish civil war of the 1990s, and nearly all of them were studying in an alien language they'd had little chance to learn properly. Yet they were smart, funny and without self-pity.
It was my fellow Americans who were the problem. And I was not alone in that opinion. I once asked a colleague at AUIS if she had any trouble getting respect from male Kurdish students. She looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Absolutely not. Are you kidding? The problem around here isn't the students, it's the assholes in the Main Building."
The Main Building dominated the campus. In fact, the campus was divided in two like an ante-bellum plantation: there was the Main Building and the cabins. The cabins were cheap, prefabricated white metal shacks, shimmering in the bright sunlight, laid out like an army camp inside a square of blast walls. All the actual teaching, and all the teachers' offices, were in the cabins. The Main Building, a big stone Soviet-style edifice, was reserved for the administrators' vast offices.
American taxpayer dollars at work: Sure there's no money for Social Security or Medicare or health insurance, but hey, look on the bright side: Tens of millions of American dollars produced this gorgeous scene!
That was the real campus. It wasn't the one we'd seen online. That was the first shock of our arrival: finding out that the huge, luxurious campus on the AUIS website - the one you could fly around on a "virtual tour" that swooped along tiled walkways connecting grand buildings labeled "Presidential Building" and "Student Housing" - didn't exist.
Oh, there's a construction site, sitting on a dry hillside just out of town. And for years, AUIS shamelessly showed a "virtual video" of that site as it's supposed to look, if and when it's ever finished, as if it already were the campus. It may never be finished; already the university hired and finally fired a local construction firm which missed every deadline it was set. A Turkish company has the contract now, adding to the Turks' domination of all business in Iraqi Kurdistan.
When anyone at AUIS dared to suggest that it wasn't very honest to keep up the "virtual tour" fiction, Mitchell and Agresto had a stock response: "We're a startup operation!" It reminded me of a stand-up comic's line: "I try to remain new on the job as long as possible."
One reason we accepted shocks like the nonexistent campus so docilely was that, when our minders met us at the Suli airport, they gave us a nice little packet containing a cellphone and $5000 cash "to help [us] settle in."
Next day, they took us to the real campus and assigned us to one of the white cabins. We soon discovered that these cabins were damn near fictions themselves. They were so shoddily built that the door handles came off nearly every one of them at some point in my year at AUIS. Mine decided to fall off at the worst possible moment, after a morning of grading essays with the help of way too much coffee, just when my aging bladder decided it had had enough. I walked quickly to the door and - clunk. The door handle had become a souvenir, a key chain.
The shoddiness of the cabins came in handy at that point, because all I had to do was bang on the wall we shared with professors in the other half of the cabin, and one of my colleagues obligingly came over and opened the door from the outside. He knew what that banging on the wall meant; the same thing had happened to him a week earlier. It all made for a kind of cheerful roughing-it camaraderie, but it also underlined the strange sense of falseness, that you were living and teaching in a stage set.
All the claims AUIS made had the same stagey, silly feel, a boastful absurdity typical of the US in Iraq. The claims made for our mission were ridiculous; we were supposed to be transforming Iraq's culture, teaching its future leaders a new and democratic way of thinking. But the university had only 200-odd students, and was straining to accommodate that number. It was hard to see how a group this size would transform a country of more than 26 million people.
And when I taught my first classes, I learned that those few students were woefully unprepared for university courses in English. We'd been told - another lie, of course - that the university's ESL program produced fluent speakers and writers of English. That was a joke. Had I graded my students at the same level as in an American university - another one of our official fictions - at least two-thirds of them would have failed. A better man would no doubt have done the principled thing; I wanted those $100 bills and simply handed out a lot of generous C's and B-'s.
Total fabrication; that's what it all seems like now. We were supposed to be bridging the great ethnic divides of Iraq, but in that first semester, I taught a Composition course that consisted of what I thought of as a "Wall of Kurds" and a "Wall of Arabs." The class was almost entirely male, and had the feel of a gang fight in hibernation. On one side of the room was the Wall of Kurds, a half dozen tough-looking, rural Kurdish students who spoke very little English; and on the other, a half-dozen much more urbane but much wimpier Arab students from Baghdad who wore a permanent flinch. The Arabs spoke and wrote much better English, the beneficiaries of Saddam's preferential treatment of Baghdad, and the Kurds resented every sentence their erstwhile tormentors got right.
Both groups regarded me as an ephemeral inconvenience - a real surprise for me, because Agresto had assured me in the job interview that we were the biggest thing in these kids' lives, the transformative yeast in the Iraqi loaf. At AUIS, he had told me (and every other new teacher), we'd see the total dedication to learning that we had longed for, and missed, in American students.
It never appeared. What I saw was several hundred lively, intelligent adolescents who were tremendously excited about living away from home, talking to members of the opposite sex, and trying on new identities. Classic adolescent stuff. There were times, in good weather, when the panorama of fevered social cliques occupying their few square meters of turf on the steps of the Main Building made the place look like a teen movie or a live-action Archie comic - all those family-ridden kids, burdened with having to be somebody's son or daughter, brother or cousin, all their lives, suddenly allowed to be characters out of Heathers or Clueless.
There was an even bigger problem with fulfilling our messianic mission: the faculty. We were not an impressive bunch. There were good teachers at AUIS - I won't name them, because praise from me might get them fired–but they survived by lying low; being bright and a good teacher made you suspect in a place where center stage was firmly occupied by a clique of loud, provincial rightwing nuts. In this sense, AUIS was an excellent microcosm of the American polity that had produced it: the best lacked all conviction, while the worst (with apologies to Yeats) raked in the cash and talked nonsense.
Successful Profs: Red-State Brown-Nosers with No Qualifikashuns
There was a clear, simple formula for success at AUIS: be a Southern white male Republican with a talent for flattery, an undistinguished academic record, and very little experience in university-level teaching.
Some of the faculty were so dismally unqualified and shameless that even our students, mostly reverent toward foreign authority-figures, saw through them.
The man Agresto hired to teach American History makes a perfect Exhibit A in any list of what's wrong with AUIS. The first sign that he was not exactly committed to intellectual integrity was his choice of textbook for the course: an abominable book called America: The Last Best Hope, by William Bennett. Yes, THE William Bennett, Reagan's Secretary of Education, the buffoon who sermonized on virtue until his gambling losses added up so high that they drowned out his pomposities, the man who once scolded a child in public for wearing a Bart Simpson t-shirt.
Bennett's title sums up the thesis of his textbook clearly: America is literally, simply, the last and best hope for the human species. Tough luck, China - or Burma, or Ecuador, or any other nation on the planet - because we R it, the alpha and omega. It's a classic reactionary thesis: "I can't imagine any nation ever being as great as America; therefore no nation ever will be." Argument by lack of imagination - a favorite among opponents of evolution, biological or historical.
My students used to leave this book on their desks between classes, so I had a chance to flip through it. I expected it to be awful, but it was even worse than I could have guessed. Bennett gives sleazy imperial apologists a bad name. If you want to see this thing done well, try Hitchens or Paul Johnston, the British neo-imperialist historian from the Thatcher era. Bennett, who can't write worth a damn and has never done original research in his life, is the worst of that very bad lot.
One student, the son of prominent Kurdish freedom-fighters and a genuine believer in things like intellectual freedom, saw through Bennett and had the courage to complain about the book. The teacher replied, "Well, this is a conservative university and it's my job to give you the conservative perspective." A simpler, more honest answer would have been: "Look, kid, I got this job by sucking up to John Agresto, who happens to be a close friend of William Bennett, so my hugely-inflated salary depends on feeding you this crap." I still remember the disgusted shrug the student gave after telling me the story. He was learning about Western standards of intellectual integrity, all right - but not the way he was supposed to be.
Luckily for the students in American History, they spent most of their time watching war movies rather than reading Bennett's Sunday School tales. Since I taught in the same cabin as our American History instructor, separated from his class by a flimsy metal wall, I got to listen to a whole semester's worth of bad WW II films. Three long months of trying to teach my students to use the simple present, rather than the present progressive, in their essays, shouting to be heard over the corny dialogue coming through the wall: "I'm hit, Sarge! Uh…go on without me!"… usually followed by explosions that rocked the thin metal wall, as Sarge and friends took their revenge for the Gipper.
His one criterion was "bad language." He wouldn't show any movie with swearing in it (thus eliminating every decent war movie ever made). That scruple served him in place of any squeamishness about giving his teaching to the likes of William Bennett and John Wayne.
And for this, he was paid about $15,000 per month. The only reason I know he made that much is that he was a terrible braggart. We'd just been paid our first month's salary, in cash, and as he walked with me among the cabins, he crowed, "Here I am walkin' along with $15,000 cash in my pocket!"
He didn't rate that sort of money because of his qualifications. As in, he didn't got none. Not even a Ph.D. (though he claimed later to have picked one up from an online degree mill). He had no recent teaching experience, and no academic publications. Even by the lax standards of AUIS, the disparity between his rank and his qualifications became the object of speculation.
It was only through his habit of boasting that we found out the truth. As the winter break approached, he started strutting around telling everyone how he was going home to lobby Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, his home state, to send AUIS a big grant. He liked to boast while grooming himself in the stinking men's room of the Cabins, which always stank like a chicken coop in hot weather. Standing at the urinal, he boasted to anyone trying to empty their bladders in his vicinity that his wife was one of the richest women in the state and a close friend of the Senator. He'd have no trouble getting an audience with Chambliss.
So that $15,000/mo. salary was only nominally for teaching; the man was actually a lobbyist with connections to the sleaziest and most lucrative crannies of the Southern rightwing elite. When I heard him boasting about his connections to Chambliss, I looked up the good senator and got another involuntary lesson in the utter falseness of the ideals holding up AUIS and its constituency. Saxby Chambliss was elected to the Senate in 2002 thanks to campaign ads showing the incumbent, Max Cleland, next to photos of Osama bin Laden. Even John McCain called the ads "reprehensible." But that's not the worst of it: Max Cleland, whose patriotism Chambliss impugned, lost three limbs to a grenade while fighting in Viet Nam. Saxby Chambliss never served, supposedly because he had a bad knee from playing high school football. The knee, of course, miraculously recovered once ol' Saxby was past draft age.
Jack | October 12th, 2010 at 9:22 am
American academia is like some kind of sick disease that even though the body it's parasited is in its death throes is spreading across the globe in the form of these Amerikun Biznez schools subsidaries of international educational corporations that are peddling their product all over the globe.
The unemployment department in the country where I'm living forced me to take a job with them. Some of the kids weren't too bad but most of them were just to poor students to get into a National University but for some reason thought they were destined to be managers and give orders to people. I came to work drunk every day and made them watch American Psycho and learn the lyrics of GG Allin songs; especially I Kill Everything I Fuck.
|
|
|
The crisis has been triggered largely because contemporary economists Keynes had rejected in favor of Chicago School represented by Milton Friedman? Friedman believed that Keynes was wrong when he claimed that every crisis could be resolved by a gradual expansion of the money supply. So he set out the principle that tax policies - and thus government spending to stimulate the economy - were not necessary. For his part, Keynes was inspired by the Great Depression and blamed precisely the policy of contraction in money supply initiated by the Federal Reserve at the time who should have instead adopted a logical expansion. He was so convinced that recessions and depressions that were mainly caused by a fall in consumption.
The remedy advocated by Keynes was logically in a substantial reduction in interest rates allow a recovery in consumption. The cash would be generously provided by the State which would therefore a key role in activating its printing press in spite of deficits that are transient, however, because the stimulus would go to ... According to the Keynesians (as Paul Krugman), the onset of the crisis in 2007 would indeed be a textbook case since the implosion of the housing bubble has devalued the mortgage securities held by banks had immediately sunk the savings into recession draining the credit.
Macroeconomic lessons are certainly valid to study the Great Depression while leaning on the theory of business cycles. However, analyzing the current crisis (started in 2007) against these same criteria - despite their intellectual elegance - would result in dramatic commit the same mistakes. Economists have forgotten that the economy must first serve man and society because the world of contemporary economics is overrun with financial mathematics exercising a tyranny leaving no room for the social sciences! The economist said mischievously that Heilbroner had instilled a rigorous mathematics to economics before killing her! Unless this is the use which has been made which led to the present tendencies since the condemnation of the followers of Keynes in favor of Chicago does not mean progress.
This is the entire profession must now recognize that it was mistaken in its assessment of a highly complex system ... it still does not understand completely! Yet we have learned a lot. That our financial system is even more dangerous as some Bankers delight in pushing their off-balance sheet ratios and the risk that their mechanical explode at any moment. That even the States are obliged to cheat! We also know that this mismanagement is not a coincidence - or accident - but rather the result of a perverse pressure exerted continuously on a profession that is asked time and again the figure ... However, and this is a major lesson of this crisis, these behaviors to limit the criminal is only possible thanks to lax - or complicity? - The regulator and lawmakers believe that what is good for banks is necessarily good for the country.
From his perspective, Krugman is right to defend Keynes because it conforms well to the creed current among elites consisting spend lavishly in order to save a profession and a system without which themselves no longer exist! What Greenspan did after the collapse of technology stocks drastically reducing interest rates in 2001, Bernanke (his successor as head of the Fed) and saving the printing press began in 2007 on a scale more massive, a prelude to all types of risky behavior to come. In other words, the financial system of tomorrow will be even more dangerous than yesterday because this crisis tells first failure of any caste could not economists warn against the formation or against the devastating implosion of bubbles and suspicious behavior. It is true that the debate is mostly limited to crocodiles that frequent the same lake ...
Can "Science" of economic one day share the fate of anthropology or phrenology? In other words, this science of economics does become a science fossil vaguely respected for it has brought but completely outdated? Meanwhile, economists form a sort of caste of Brahmins or omens waving equations hyper sophisticated and always quick to give their opinions on political decisions. Their sole ambition: to be occult advisors to Princes mandarins. They live in fact backed by the powers that be, having their own system of recognition. While waiting for their inevitable fossilization.
|
|
|
June 04, 2012 | Economist's View
Why don't those in power listen to Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman?:Our Most Widely Ignored Public Intellectuals, by Robert Kuttner: ...As the most prestigious economic dissenters of this era, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman form a category of two: astonishingly prescient, widely read, and largely ignored by those in power. ...If these eminent thinkers are at the edge of economic orthodoxy, why are they marginalized within the corridors of power? One reason is that politics, not surprisingly, tends to get personal. Both Stiglitz and Krugman have decided to air their views in public rather than operating as discreet outside members of a kitchen cabinet... Stiglitz, even more than Krugman, has not been shy about criticizing Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner by name, and the disfavor has been richly returned. Though Krugman's column praises the Obama administration when the president gives Krugman half a reason to do so, the White House accurately perceives him and Stiglitz as off-message and part of the opposition.
More fundamental to their marginalization is the relative radicalism of what Krugman and Stiglitz are advocating in our conservative era, one in which even Democratic presidents have done little to reverse unconstrained finance, shrunken government, and deepening inequality. To embrace their wisdom would require something close to a political revolution. So two of our most lauded economists remain prophets with little power to change events. America would be a far healthier country if they broke through.
Jeffrey Stewart:
This is a relatively easy puzzle to solve. It absolutely doesn't matter to politicians and those funding their campaigns that Krugman and Stiglitz are 100% correct. If Krugman and Stiglitz were advocating policies that benefited the wealthy rather than the majority of the population, they would be listened to and have influential positions in any administration. There is a near complete capture of the state by capital. This means that only policies that directly benefit financial, industrial and commercial capitalist and only indirectly the working class, e.g., trickle down economics of tax cuts and deregulation get a hearing and are considered "serious," "responsible" and in the "mainstream" i.e., not "radical" or "extreme.""In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest."
MRJ -> Darryl FKA Ron...
I like your comment about them being like each other.
One example: The right wing today includes a large contingent who actively desire and promote the failure of the US, both economically and politically, so that their side can win the up-coming election, which is strikingly reminiscent of Lenin's tactics prior to the Russian Revolution.
Seth -> Jeffrey Stewart...
Correct. Krugman and Stiglitz are not being ignored by accident or simple misunderstanding. They are being studiously ignored. They are met with deep sighs and 'polite' eyes are averted in the hope that K & S will tire themselves out and simply shut up.
Here was my reaction to Krugman's recent "I'm Not Clubbable" post:
Clubbable is a synonym for Very Serious: it means taking social cues from higher status peers as the basis for evaluating information. Rather than evaluating claims by reference to facts and their logical connections, a VSP understands that demonstrating loyalty to the status hierarchy will better serve their personal interests. Demonstrated failure to conform to social expectations by stubbornly sticking with conclusions drawn from reasoned argument will make clubbable people acutely uncomfortable. They need to disassociate themselves lest they gain a reputation as a 'fellow-traveller' with disloyal types.
This is why economics went seriously wrong -- indeed the discipline quite simply 'sold out' -- when it abandoned attempts to take account of power. Power *constrains* economic outcomes, markets merely optimize within the constraints set by power.
The irony is that this sell-out is what gives economics professors the cache required to have an audience among the powerful in the first place. But when you try to speak the truth, you begin to sound uncomfortably like those scary Marxists the VSP's thought they had managed to purge many years ago.
Policy is made by [the most senior] members of the club. Your role in their world is to justify the policies they derive from their need to reinforce the status quo power structure. I'm glad you refuse to play that sycophantic part in their little morality play, but it isn't at all mysterious why you are treated the way Cassandra was.
Jeffrey Stewart
An excellent example of this pro-capitalist bias is the capitalist, corporate media and VSP fawning over the Ryan budget while the Progressive Caucus' Budget For All received...crickets.
denim:
"It's been really frustrating to watch policymakers listen to the people who got it wrong again and again, not just before the crisis but during it as well, while ignoring the people who largely got things right, and then wonder why the policies weren't more effective. If they'd listened, and it's not too late to start, things could be better today." The policymakers wanted it wrong. The goal is to establish Ayn Rand's vision for America where the sociopath is the most venerated leader of all in business or politics. A well managed pseudo-crisis works wonders for scaring the masses into the slaughterhouses.
Charlie Baker:
Paul Krugman: Things I Didn't Say
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/things-i-didnt-say/
From John Heilemann's article about the falling out between Obama and Wall Street:
After countless rehearsals of the options, Obama wanted to hear a broader range of voices. So in April, a dinner was set up at the White House with the president and a clutch of big-name economists: Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder, Kenneth Rogoff. "That turned out to be a defining moment in the debate," Geithner told me. "Partly because they were all disagreeing with each other, and partly because they knew what they were against but not exactly what they were for and what it entailed-except Krugman. He was the only one willing to say, 'Look, there's a good case for nationalizing, but if you do, you have to understand two things: One, it's incredibly expensive, it'll cost trillions; and two, you have to guarantee everything.' " Once again, Obama cast his lot with Geithner. Uh, no. I never said that it would cost trillions of dollars. On the contrary, I didn't think taking over Citi or B of A, which had near-zero market caps at the time, would cost much at all. I did say that we'd have to guarantee the debts of the seized banks, much as the Swedes did; but I think I said then, and certainly believed, that we were de facto guaranteeing those debts anyway - that we had already socialized the possible losses, and that the point was to give taxpayers a share of the potential gains.
I'm glad to get credit for being more realistic than the other guys - but Geithner seems to be putting a spin on what I actually said.
John Heilmann's article here:
Mark A. Sadowski:
"Given his support for Hillary Clinton, it is hard to take Krugman seriously when he lambaste the Obama administration for centrism and compromising progressive values."
As Krugman has pointed out again and again Obama didn't pose as a Nation-type progressive, then suddenly turn to the right after he won the Democratic nomination. He was always slightly less progressive than Hillary Clinton on domestic issues, and more than slightly on health care.
Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur
Paine:
Oh please the Hill and Barry different in practice
Hill would use the same people and get the same results or less Given her cave factor under pressure
Mark A. Sadowski:
"Given her cave factor under pressure"
Give me a break.
Obama routinely stakes out a postion just to the left of the opposition, not because he's planning any grand Bill Clintonesque triangulation strategies, but because he *really is* the Republican-lite he's always said that he was.
But then he *always* gives into the Republicans and throws a pony into the deal for good measure.
Barry should write a book on "The Art of the Cave-In" when this thing is all over.
Mike -> Sarah...
It is not just Obama. In general, modern day Democrats are to the right of Nixon. They are not liberal or progressive.
I have debated with many on the so-called left about how poor Obama's economic policies have been, and they either typically defend his policies or outright champion them.
It is flat out bizarre, but this is the land of confusion where Democrats are anything but liberal and Republicans are anything but conservative. Neither party takes kindly to criticism since they are too busy looking to blame the other party for their poor performance since it is their best chance to retain power.
Darryl FKA Ron:
Ignoring intellectuals is nothing new or singular in the US. Frederick Perls was out-voted by big pharma in the AMA/APA. Ian Mitroff has met much the same resistance as Peter Drucker. Drucker received much acclaim, but almost no one ever applied his practices. They were managing for different results. Ignored intellectuals are a dime a dozen. I prefer the Stig myself, but neither one should feel like the lone ranger. Now Joe Schumpeter was an intellectual that did not get ignored. So, it just depends upon what you are selling.
John Hulls:
The real irony of this is that the purpose of government should actually be to protect the one percent from themselves and preserve the economy for all. As a retired history professor friend recently told me, the way to understand the current Greek econodrama is to read Arisophanes 'The Acharnians', which I wrote about in a piece entitled 'Hedging the Apocalypse' at http://somewhatlogically.com/?p=598 which is mostly raises the question as to why the financial community fails to learn from others about management of high risk situations, such as nuclear weapons and aircraft safety.
What is so disturbing is that what is going to happen is pretty apparent if you take a look from a perspective outside the current economic debate, and alternate methods of modeling the economy. (I'm interested in analog simulations to illuminate environmental and resource utilization) I can't resist posting a link to a piece that I wrote in 2008, from 'Too Big to Fail to Too Large to Care' at http://somewhatlogically.com/?p=51
Krugman and Stiglitz are sadly right, but tend to put their answers in mostly economic terms, which don't really seem to resonate with the public, as did Roosevelt's specific programs, such as the REA and federal power projects. As Brad Delong's wife said in a recent post on his blog, referring to the REA "Thankee Mr. Roosevelt"
ilsm -> John Hulls...
The foundation of the democratic party goes back to Andrew Jackson or before, Jefferson.
Jackson fought the bank because the US bank threatened to bribe the lower chanber from being the peoples' house.
There was always the feeling that the elites were filled with vice and would corrupt the virtues that the masses would fit to the republic.
TR and FDR were fans of Jackson as was Truman.
A respect for Old Hickory is in order.
Darryl FKA Ron -> John Hulls...
John,
Pretty kool dude. Cross disciplinary science is a must in a modern world, but the econ world has not all got on board with that yet. I just had time to skim the first article, but was smiling the whole time.
Are you familiar with Ian Mitroff?
Here is a list of his books copied from Wiki - just to give you some idea of his range:
- 1974. The Subjective Side of Science: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Psychology of the Apollo Moon Scientists. Elsevier, Amsterdam (reissued in 1984 by Intersystems Publishers, Seaside, California).
- 1978. Methodological Approaches to Social Science: Integrating Divergent Concepts and Theories. With Ralph Kilmann. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
- 1981. Challenging Strategic Planning Assumptions, Theory, Cases, and Techniques. With Richard O. Mason. John Wiley, New York.
- 1982. Creating A Dialectical Social Science: Concepts, Methods, and Models. With Richard O. Mason and D. Reidel. John Wiley, New York.
- 1983 The 1980 Census: Policymaking Amid Turbulence. With Richard O. Mason and V.P. Barabba. Lexington Books, Massachusetts.
- 1983. Stakeholders of the Organizational Mind: Toward A New View of Policy Making. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
- 1984. Corporate Tragedies, Product Tampering, Sabotage, and Other Catastrophes. With Ralph Kilmann. Praeger, New York.
- 1987. Business Not As Usual, Rethinking Our Individual, Corporate, and Industrial Strategies for Global Competition. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
- 1988. Break-Away Thinking, How To Challenge Your Business Assumptions. John Wiley, New York.
- 1989. The Unreality Industry, The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives. With Bennis, Warren. Birch Lane Press, New York.
- 1990. We're So Big And Powerful Nothing Bad Can Happen To Us: An Investigation of America's Crisis-Prone Corporations. With Thierry Pauchant. Birch Lane Press, New York.
- 1992. The Unbounded Mind: Breaking the Chains of Traditional Business Thinking. With Harold A. Linstone. Oxford University Press.
- 1992. Transforming the Crisis-Prone Organization. With Thierry Pauchant. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
- 1993. Crisis Management: A Diagnostic Guide for Improving Your Organization's Crisis-Preparedness. With Christine M. Pearson. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
- 1994. The Challenge of the 21st Century: Managing Technology and Ourselves in a Shrinking World. With Harold A Linstone. State University of New York Press, Albany, New York.
- 1994. Framebreak: The Radical Redesign of American Business. With Richard O. Mason, and Christine M. Pearson. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
- 1996. The Essential Guide to Managing Corporate Crises.
- 1998. Smart Thinking for Crazy Times: The Art of Solving the Right Problems. With Christine M. Pearson, and Katharine L. Harrington. Oxford University Press, New York. The Management of Crises and Paradoxes: Preventing the Destructive Effects of Organizations (in French). H.E.C., Montreal, Canada.
- 1999. A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America: A Hard Look at Spirituality, Religion, and Values in the Workplace. With Elizabeth A. Denton. Jossey-Bass Publishers Inc., San Francisco.
- 2000. Managing Crises Before They Happen: What Every Executive Needs to Know About Crisis Management. With Gus Anagnos. AMACOM, New York.
- 2003. Crisis Leadership: Planning for the Unthinkable. John Wiley, New York.
- 2005. Why Some Companies Emerge Stronger And Better From a Crisis: Seven Essential Lessons For Surviving Disaster. AMACOM, New York. Ian I. Mitroff and Abraham Silvers, Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely, Stanford Business Press (2009), hardcover, 210 pages, ISBN 978-0-8047-5996-0
- 2011. "Swans, Swine, and Swindlers: Coping With The Growing Threat of Mega Crises and Mega Messes". With Can M. Alpaslan. Stanford Business Press.
*****************
Dirty Rotten Strategies is pretty good. I am going to have to get We're So Big And Powerful Nothing Bad Can Happen To Us.
Edward Lambert:
Stiglitz is more of an economic hero than Krugman, because Stiglitz talks more about sustainable economics and living wages...
|
|
|
Stan Collender is driven to shrillness:
Is This The Economic Dark Ages In The U.S?, by Stan Collender: ...a behavior -- bald-face lying --... has become so blatant and commonplace among Republican policymakers on economic issues that any one of them who is even slightly honest and candid now would be both an absolute rarity and a welcome relief.And the fact that the GOP lying about the economy...and especially the budget...is so accepted and expected means that any Republican who wasn't jump-the-shark ridiculous on these issues wouldn't be allowed to stay in the party much longer. ...House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) ... easily qualifies as the weakest and least effective Speaker in my lifetime and has to be included on the list of the all-time worst in U.S. history, demonstrated yet again that he'll say and do anything to stay speaker even when what he's saying about the budget can easily be shown to be nonsense and when he knowingly and without giving it a second thought threatens the well-being of the U.S. economy.I'd say this doesn't bode well for the outcome of this year's federal budget debate, but that's both obvious and an understatement. It actually points to the a period in U.S. history that is very likely to be labeled by historians as its economic dark ages.I think that reporting on economic issues has improved, and that blogs have something to do with that. But when it comes to political reporting on economic (and other) issues, it's just as disappointing as ever. If there's no reputational or other costs associated with this behavior, why stop?
|
|
|
Tim Haab:Study rules out stupidity as a cause of disbelief in climate science*:
And the Yale research published today reveals that if Americans knew more basic science and were more proficient in technical reasoning it would still result in a gap between public and scientific consensus.
Indeed, as members of the public become more science literate and numerate, the study found, individuals belonging to opposing cultural groups become even more divided on the risks that climate change poses.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study was conducted by researchers associated with the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School and involved a nationally representative sample of 1500 U.S. adults.
"The aim of the study was to test two hypotheses," said Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School and a member of the study team. "The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public's limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values. The findings supported the second hypothesis and not the first," he said.
"Cultural cognition" is the term used to describe the process by which individuals' group values shape their perceptions of societal risks. It refers to the unconscious tendency of people to fit evidence of risk to positions that predominate in groups to which they belong.
The results of the study were consistent with previous studies that show that individuals with more egalitarian values disagree sharply with individuals who have more individualistic ones on the risks associated with nuclear power, gun possession, and the HPV vaccine for school girls.
via www.enn.com
*Unless you classify stubbornness as stupidity.
|
|
|
Naked Capitalism
Yesterday I caught a lecture at Columbia given by statistics professor David Madigan, who explained to us the story of Vioxx and Merck. It's fascinating and I was lucky to get permission to retell it here.
Disclosure
Madigan has been a paid consultant to work on litigation against Merck. He doesn't consider Merck to be an evil company by any means, and says it does lots of good by producing medicines for people. According to him, the following Vioxx story is "a line of work where they went astray".
Yet Madigan's own data strongly suggests that Merck was well aware of the fatalities resulting from Vioxx, a blockbuster drug that earned them $2.4b in 2003, the year before it "voluntarily" pulled it from the market in September 2004. What you will read below shows that the company set up standard data protection and analysis plans which they later either revoked or didn't follow through with, they gave the FDA misleading statistics to trick them into thinking the drug was safe, and set up a biased filter on an Alzheimer's patient study to make the results look better. They hoodwinked the FDA and the New England Journal of Medicine and took advantage of the public trust which ultimately caused the deaths of thousands of people.
The data for this talk came from published papers, internal Merck documents that he saw through the litigation process, FDA documents, and SAS files with primary data coming from Merck's clinical trials. So not all of the numbers I will state below can be corroborated, unfortunately, due to the fact that this data is not all publicly available. This is particularly outrageous considering the repercussions that this data represents to the public.
Background
The process for getting a drug approved is lengthy, requires three phases of clinical trials before getting FDA approval, and often takes well over a decade. Before the FDA approved Vioxx, less than 20,000 people tried the drug, versus 20,000,000 people after it was approved. Therefore it's natural that rare side effects are harder to see beforehand. Also, it should be kept in mind that for the sake of clinical trials, they choose only people who are healthy outside of the one disease which is under treatment by the drug, and moreover they only take that one drug, in carefully monitored doses. Compare this to after the drug is on the market, where people could be unhealthy in various ways and could be taking other drugs or too much of this drug.
Vioxx was supposed to be a new "NSAID" drug without the bad side effects. NSAID drugs are pain killers like Aleve and ibuprofen and aspirin, but those had the unfortunate side effects of gastro-intestinal problems (but those are only among a subset of long term users, such as people who take painkillers daily to treat chronic pain, such as people with advanced arthritis). The goal was to find a pain-killer without the GI side effects. The underlying scientific goal was to find a COX-2 inhibitor without the COX-1 inhibition, since scientists had realized in 1991 that COX-2 suppression corresponded to pain relief whereas COX-1 suppression corresponded to GI problems.
Vioxx Introduced and Withdrawn From the Market
The timeline for Vioxx's introduction to the market was accelerated: they started work in 1991 and got approval in 1999. They pulled Vioxx from the market in 2004 in the "best interest of the patient". It turned out that it caused heart attacks and strokes. The stock price of Merck plummeted and $30 billion of its market cap was lost. There was also an avalanche of lawsuits, one of the largest resulting in a $5 billion settlement which was essentially a victory for Merck, considering they made a profit of $10 billion on the drug while it was being sold.
The story Merck will tell you is that they "voluntarily withdrew" the drug on September 30, 2004. In a placebo-controlled study of colon polyps in 2004, it was revealed that over a time period of 1200 days, 4% of the Vioxx users suffered a "cardiac, vascular, or thoracic event" (CVT event), which basically means something like a heart attack or stroke, whereas only 2% of the placebo group suffered such an event. In a group of about 2400 people, this was statistically significant, and Merck had no choice but to pull their drug from the market.
It should be noted that, on the one hand Merck should be applauded for checking for CVT events on a colon polyps study, but on the other hand that in 1997, at the International Consensus Meeting on COX-2 Inhibition, a group of leading scientists issued a warning in their Executive Summary that it was "… important to monitor cardiac side effects with selective COX-2 inhibitors". Moreover, in an internal Merck email as early as 1996, it was stated there was a "… substantial chance that CVT will be observed." In other words, Merck knew to look out for such things. Importantly, however, there was no subsequent insert in the medicine's packaging that warned of possible CVT side-effects.
What the CEO of Merck Said
What did Merck say to the world at that point in 2004? You can look for yourself at the four and half hour Congressional hearing (seen on C-SPAN) which took place on November 18, 2004. Starting at 3:27:10, the then-CEO of Merck, Raymond Gilmartin, testifies that Merck "puts patients first" and "acted quickly" when there was reason to believe that Vioxx was causing CVT events. Gilmartin also went on the Charlie Rose show and repeated these claims, even go so far as stating that the 2004 study was the first time they had a study which showed evidence of such side effects.
How quickly did they really act though? Were there warning signs before September 30, 2004?
Arthritis Studies
Let's go back to the time in 1999 when Vioxx was FDA approved. In spite of the fact that it was approved for a rather narrow use, mainly for arthritis sufferers who needed chronic pain management and were having GI problems on other meds (keeping in mind that Vioxx was way more expensive than ibuprofen or aspirin, so why would you use it unless you needed to), Merck nevertheless launched an ad campaign with Dorothy Hamill and spent $160m (compare that with Budweiser which spent $146m or Pepsi which spent $125m in the same time period).
As I mentioned, Vioxx was approved faster than usual. At the time of its approval, the completed clinical studies had only been 6- or 12-week studies; no longer term studies had been completed. However, there was one underway at the time of approval, namely a study which compared Aleve with Vioxx for people suffering from osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
What did the arthritis studies show? These results, which were available in late 2003, showed that the CVT events were more than twice as likely with Vioxx as with Aleve (CVT event rates of 32/1304 = 0.0245 with Vioxx, 6/692 = 0.0086 with Aleve, with a p-value of 0.01). As we see this is a direct refutation of the fact that CEO Gilmartin stated that they didn't have evidence until 2004 and acted quickly when they did.
In fact they had evidence even before this, if they bothered to put it together (in fact they stated a plan to do such statistical analyses but it's not clear if they did them- or in any case there's so far no evidence that they actually did these promised analyses).
In a previous study ("Table 13″), available in February of 2002, the could have seen that, comparing Vioxx to placebo, we saw a CVT event rate of 27/1087 = 0.0248 with Vioxx versus 5/633 = 0.0079 with placebo, with a p-value of 0.01. So, three times as likely.
In fact, there was an even earlier study ("1999 plan"), results of which were available in July of 2000, where the Vioxx CVT event rate was 10/427 = 0.0234 versus a placebo event rate of 1/252 = 0.0040, with a p-value of 0.05 (so more than 5 times as likely). This p-value can be taken to be the definition of statistically significant. So actually they knew to be very worried as early as 2000, but maybe they… forgot to do the analysis?
The FDA and Pooled Data
Where was the FDA in all of this?
They showed the FDA some of these numbers. But they did something really tricky. Namely, they kept the "osteoarthritis study" results separate from the "rheumatoid arthritis study" results. Each alone were not quite statistically significant, but together were amply statistically significant. Moreover, they introduced a third category of study, namely the "Alzheimer's study" results, which looked pretty insignificant (more on that below though). When you pooled all three of these study types together, the overall significance was just barely not there.
It should be mentioned that there was no apparent reason to separate the different arthritic studies, and there is evidence that they did pool such study data in other places as a standard method. That they didn't pool those studies for the sake of their FDA report is incredibly suspicious. That the FDA didn't pick up on this is probably due to the fact that they are overworked lawyers, and too trusting on top of that. That's unfortunately not the only mistake the FDA made (more below).
Alzheimer's Study
So the Alzheimer's study kind of "saved the day" here. But let's look into this more. First, note that the average age of the 3,000 patients in the Alzheimer's study was 75, it was a 48-month study, and that the total number of deaths for those on Vioxx was 41 versus 24 on placebo. So actually on the face of it it sounds pretty bad for Vioxx.
There were a few contributing reasons why the numbers got so mild by the time the study's result was pooled with the two arthritis studies. First, when really old people die, there isn't always an autopsy. Second, although there was supposed to be a DSMB as part of the study, and one was part of the original proposal submitted to the FDA, this was dropped surreptitiously in a later FDA update. This meant there was no third party keeping an eye on the data, which is not standard operating procedure for a massive drug study and was a major mistake, possibly the biggest one, by the FDA.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Merck researchers created an added "filter" to the reported CVT events, which meant they needed the doctors who reported the CVT event to send their info to the Merck-paid people ("investigators"), who looked over the documents to decide whether it was a bonafide CVT event or not. The default was to assume it wasn't, even though standard operating procedure would have the default assuming that there was such an event. In all, this filter removed about half the initially reported CVT events, and about twice as often the Vioxx patients had their CVT event status revoked as for the placebo patients. Note that the "investigator" in charge of checking the documents from the reporting doctors is paid $10,000 per patient. So presumably they wanted to continue to work for Merck in the future.
The effect of this "filter" was that, instead of it seeming 1.5 times as likely to have a CVT event if you were taking Voixx, it seemed like it was only 1.03 as likely, with a high p-score.
If you remove the ridiculous filter from the Alzheimer's study, then you see that as of November 2000 there was statistically significant evidence that Vioxx caused CVT events in Alzheimer patients.
By the way, one extra note. Many of the 41 deaths in the Vioxx group were dismissed as "bizarre" and therefore unrelated to Vioxx. Namely, car accidents, falling of ladders, accidentally eating bromide pills. But at this point there's evidence that Vioxx actually accelerates Alzheimer's disease itself, which could explain those so-called bizarre deaths. This is not to say that Merck knew that, but rather that one should not immediately dismiss the concept of statistically significant just because it doesn't make intuitive sense.
VIGOR and the New England Journal of Medicine
One last chapter in this sad story. There was a large-scale study, called the VIGOR study, with 8,000 patients. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on November 23, 2000. See also this NPR timeline for details. They didn't show the graphs which would have emphasized this point, but they admitted, in a deceptively round-about way, that Vioxx has 4 times the number of CVT events than Aleve. They hinted that this is either because Aleve is protective against CVT events or that Vioxx is bad for it, but left it open.
But Bayer, which owns Aleve, issued a press release saying something like, "if Aleve is protective for CVT events then it's news to us." Bayer, it should be noted, has every reason to want people to think that Aleve is protective against CVT events. This problem, and the dubious reasoning explaining it away, was completely missed by the peer review system; if it had been spotted, Vioxx would have been forced off the market then and there. Instead, Merck purchased 900,000 preprints of this article from the NE Journal of Medicine, which is more than the number of practicing doctors in the U.S.. In other words, the Journal was used as a PR vehicle for Merck.
The paper emphasized that Aleve has twice the rate of ulcers and bleeding, at 4%, whereas Vioxx had a rate of only 2% among chronic users. When you compare that to the elevated rate of heart attack and death (0.4% to 1.2%) of Vioxx over Aleve, though, the reduced ulcer rate doesn't seem all that impressive.
A bit more color on this paper. It was written internally by Merck, after which non-Merck authors were found. One of them is Loren Laine. Loren helped Merck develop a sound-byte interview which was 30 seconds long and was sent to the news media and run like a press interview, even though it actually happened in Merck's New Jersey office (with a backdrop to look like a library) with a Merck employee posing as a neutral interviewer. Some smart lawyer got the outtakes of this video made available as part of the litigation against Merck. Check out this youtube video, where Laine and the fake interviewer scheme about spin and Laine admits they were being "cagey" about the renal failure issues that were poorly addressed in the article.
The Damage Done
Also on the Congress testimony I mentioned above is Dr. David Graham, who speaks passionately from minute 41:11 to minute 53:37 about Vioxx and how it is a symptom of a broken regulatory system. Please take 10 minutes to listen if you can.
He claims a conservative estimate is that 100,000 people have had heart attacks as a result of using Vioxx, leading to between 30,000 and 40,000 deaths (again conservatively estimated). He points out that this 100,000 is 5% of Iowa, and in terms people may understand better, this is like 4 aircraft falling out of the sky every week for 5 years.
According to this blog, the noticeable downwards blip in overall death count nationwide in 2004 is probably due to the fact that Vioxx was taken off the market that year.
Conclusion
Let's face it, nobody comes out looking good in this story. The peer review system failed, the FDA failed, Merck scientists failed, and the CEO of Merck misled Congress and the people who had lost their husbands and wives to this damaging drug. The truth is, we've come to expect this kind of behavior from traders and bankers, but here we're talking about issues of death and quality of life on a massive scale, and we have people playing games with statistics, with academic journals, and with the regulators.
Just as the financial system has to be changed to serve the needs of the people before the needs of the bankers, the drug trial system has to be changed to lower the incentives for cheating (and massive death tolls) just for a quick buck. As I mentioned before, it's still not clear that they would have made less money, even including the penalties, if they had come clean in 2000. They made a bet that the fines they'd need to eventually pay would be smaller than the profits they'd make in the meantime. That sounds familiar to anyone who has been following the fallout from the credit crisis.
One thing that should be changed immediately: the clinical trials for drugs should not be run or reported on by the drug companies themselves. There has to be a third party which is in charge of testing the drugs and has the power to take the drugs off the market immediately if adverse effects (like CVT events) are found. Hopefully they will be given more power than risk firms are currently given in finance (which is none)- in other words, it needs to be more than reporting, it needs to be an active regulatory power, with smart people who understand statistics and do their own state-of-the-art analyses – although as we've seen above even just Stats 101 would sometimes do the trick.
|
|
|
Via Chris Dillow, this is Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University:
Mistakes and Ideology in Macroeconomics, by Simon Wren-Lewis: Imagine a Nobel Prize winner in physics, who in public debate makes elementary errors that would embarrass a good undergraduate. Now imagine other academic colleagues, from one of the best faculties in the world, making the same errors. It could not happen. However that is exactly what has happened in macro over the last few years.
Where is my evidence for such an outlandish claim? Well here is Nobel prize winner Robert Lucas
But, if we do build the bridge by taking tax money away from somebody else, and using that to pay the bridge builder -- the guys who work on the bridge -- then it's just a wash. It has no first-starter effect. There's no reason to expect any stimulation. And, in some sense, there's nothing to apply a multiplier to. (Laughs.) You apply a multiplier to the bridge builders, then you've got to apply the same multiplier with a minus sign to the people you taxed to build the bridge.And here is John Cochrane, also a professor at Chicago, and someone who has made important academic contributions to macroeconomic thinking.
Before we spend a trillion dollars or so, it's important to understand how it's supposed to work. Spending supported by taxes pretty obviously won't work: If the government taxes A by $1 and gives the money to B, B can spend $1 more. But A spends $1 less and we are not collectively any better off.Both make the same simple error. If you spend X at time t to build a bridge, aggregate demand increases by X at time t. If you raise taxes by X at time t, consumers will smooth this effect over time, so their spending at time t will fall by much less than X. Put the two together and aggregate demand rises.
But surely very clever people cannot make simple errors of this kind? Perhaps there is some way to re-interpret such statements so that they make sense. ,,. Brad deLong tries very hard along these lines (see here for example), but just throws up inconsistencies.
I prefer to just note that if any undergraduate or graduate student in the UK wrote this in an exam, they would lose marks. The more interesting question for me is why the errors were made. ...
I want to suggest two answers. The first is familiarity with models. I cannot imagine anyone who teaches New Keynesian economics, or who talked to people who teach New Keynesian economics, making this mistake. This is because, in these models, we do have to worry about aggregate demand. We focus on consumption smoothing, and Ricardian Equivalence... I often tell my first year undergraduate students that if they write anything like 'Ricardian Equivalence says fiscal stimulus will never work', they are in danger of failing. ...
Lack of familiarity with New Keynesian economics may be partly explained by the history of macroeconomic thought that I briefly noted in an earlier post. As New Keynesian theory is an 'add-on' to the basic Ramsey/RBC model, it is possible to teach macro without getting round to teaching New Keynesian theory. However, what many people find difficult to understand is how monetary policy (or at least monetary policy as seen by pretty much every central bank) could be regarded as an optional add-on in macroeconomics.
The second difference between physics and macro that could lead to more mistakes in the latter is ideology. When you are arguing out of ideological conviction, there is a danger that rhetoric will trump rigour. In the next paragraph Cochrane writes
These ideas changed because Keynesian economics was a failure in practice, and not just in theory. Keynes left Britain 30 years of miserable growth. Richard Nixon said, "We are all Keynesians now," just as Keynesian policy led to the inflation and economic dislocation of the 1970s--unexpected by Keynesians but dramatically foretold by Milton Friedman's 1968 AEA address. Keynes disdained investment, where we now all realize that saving and investment are vital to long-run growth. Keynes did not think at all about the incentives effects of taxes. He favored planning, and wrote before Hayek reminded us how modern economies cannot function without price signals. Fiscal stimulus advocates are hanging on to a last little timber from a sunken boat of ideas, ideas that everyone including they abandoned, and from hard experience. ...Let's not worry about where the idea that Keynes disdained investment comes from, or any of the other questionable statements here. This is just polemic: Keynes=fiscal expansion=planning=macroeconomic failure. It is guilt by association. What on earth does fiscal expansion have to do with planning? Well, they are both undertaken by the state.
I have argued elsewhere that the problem too many macroeconomists have with fiscal stimulus lies not in opposing schools of thought, or the validity of particular theories, or the size of particular parameters, but instead with the fact that it represents intervention by the state designed to improve the working of the market economy. They have an ideological problem with countercyclical fiscal policy. But the central bank is part of the state, and it intervenes to improve how the economy works, so this ideological view would also mean that you played down the role of monetary policy in macroeconomics. So ideology may also help explain a lack of familiarity with the models central banks use to think about monetary policy. In short, an ideological view that distorts economic thinking can lead to mistakes.
|
|
|
I need to think about this more before signing onto or rejecting this argument, but here is Chris Dillow's response to the post above this one (and it provides a nice complement to the post that follows by Dan Little):
Mechanisms vs models, by Chris Dillow: Simon Wren-Lewis asks a good question about Robert Lucas's and John Cochrane's apparent misunderstanding of the balanced budget multiplier: how can very clever people make silly errors?
He suggests two good answers. I'd like to suggest a third. There are two different ways of thinking about economics - the model paradigm and the mechanism paradigm, and the former has crowded out the latter.
Simon says:
If you spend X at time t to build a bridge, aggregate demand increases by X at time t. If you raise taxes by X at time t, consumers will smooth this effect over time, so their spending at time t will fall by much less than X. Put the two together and aggregate demand rises.
This is clear and true. And it would be obvious to anyone using the mechanism paradigm. If you ask "What is the mechanism whereby higher taxes reduce consumer spending?" you pretty much walk into the notion of consumption smoothing. ...
But lots of brilliant economists don't think merely in terms of mechanisms but rather build impressive models. And like photographers, they tend to fall in love with their models which distracts them both from others' models and from mechanisms.
This matters, because the importance of particular mechanisms varies from time to time. The social sciences, wrote Jon Elster:
can isolate tendencies, propensities and mechanisms and show that they have implications for behaviour that are often surprising and counter-intuitive. What they are more rarely able to do is state necessary and sufficient conditions under which the various mechanisms are switched on. This is [a] reason for emphasizing mechanisms rather than laws. Laws by their nature are general…Mechanisms by contrast make no claim to generality. (Nuts and bolts for the social sciences, p 9-10)
A good example of this lies in the idea of expansionary fiscal contraction. The virtue of this idea is that it draws our attention to mechanisms (a falling exchange rate, better corporate animal spirits, whatever) whereby fiscal contraction might boost the economy. The drawback is that these mechanisms are just unlikely to operate here and now. Yes, there's a model that tells us that expansionary fiscal contraction can work. And there are models that say it can't. But arguing about competing models misses the practical point.
Now, there is an obvious reply to all this. Models have the virtue of ensuring internal consistency, and thus avoiding potentially misleading partial analysis. However, I'm not sure whether this is an argument against mechanisms so much as against poor thinking about them.
When I was a student (back in the 80s!) I learned lots of models (OK, a few), but when I became a practising economist, I found them to be less useful in thinking about the economy than Elsterian thinking about mechanisms.
This is not to dismiss models entirely. I'm just saying that, insofar as they have uses other than as mental gymnastics for torturing students, it is because of the mechanisms contained within them. The parts might be more useful than the sum.
Posted by Mark Thoma on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 10:02 AM in Economics, Macroeconomics, Methodology
|
|
|
Dan Little discusses how the definition of a scientific explanation has changed over time:
Recent thinking about scientific explanation, by Dan Little: What do we want from a scientific explanation? Is there a single answer to this question, or is the field of explanation fundamentally heterogeneous, perhaps by discipline or by research community? Do biologists explain outcomes differently from physicists or sociologists? Is a good explanation within the Anglo-American traditions of science also a good explanation in the German or Chinese research communities? Is the idea of a scientific explanation paradigm-dependent?
For several decades in the twentieth century there was a dominant answer to this question, that was an outgrowth of the tradition of logical positivism and examples from the natural sciences. This theory of explanation focused on the idea of subsumption of an event or regularity under a higher-level set of laws. The deductive-nomological theory of explanation specified that an outcome is explained when we have produced a deductively valid argument with premises that include at least one general law and that lead to a description of the event as conclusion. Carl Hempel was the most prominent advocate for this theory (Aspects of Scientific Explanation
), but it was widely accepted throughout the philosophy of science in the 1950s and 1960s. The "covering law" model was a core dogma for the philosophy of science for several decades.
The D-N theory was subject to many kinds of criticisms, including the obvious point that much explanation involves phenomena that are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Hempel introduced the inductive version of the D-N model to cover probabilistic-statistical explanation, along these lines. An argument provides a scientific explanation of E if it provides at least one probabilistic law and a set of background conditions such that, given the law and conditions, E is highly probable. This model was described as the "Inductive-Statistical" model (I-S model). Wesley Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World
falls within this tradition but offers important refinements, including his formal definition of causal relevance.
In each case the motivation for the theory of explanation is a plausible one: we explain an event when we show how it was necessary [or highly probable] in the circumstances, given existing conditions and relevant laws of nature. On the logical positivist approach, an explanation is an answer to a "why necessary" question: why did this event occur? In this conception of explanation the idea of necessity or probability is replaced with the idea of deductive or inductive derivability -- a syntactic relationship among sets of sentences.
A different approach to explanation turns to the idea of causation. We provide an explanation of an event or pattern when we succeed in identifying the causal conditions and events that brought it about. This approach can be tied to the D-N approach, if we believe that all causal relations are the manifestation of strict or probabilistic causal regularities. But not all D-N explanations are causal, and not all causal explanations invoke regularities. Derivability is no longer the criterion of explanatory success, and explanation is no longer primarily a syntactic relation between sets of sentences. Instead, substantive theories of causal powers and properties are the foundation of scientific explanation. A leading exponent of this view is Rom Harré in Harré and Madden, Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity
. Nancy Cartwright's Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements
is also an important contribution to this view. And J. L. Mackie's The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation
is an important contribution as well. The causal approach retains the idea that explanation involves showing why an event is necessary or probable, but it turns from derivability from statements of laws of nature, to theories of causal powers and properties.
The causal mechanisms approach to explanation continues the insight that explanations involve demonstrating why an event occurred; but this approach moves even farther away from the idea of a causal law, replacing it with the idea of a discrete causal mechanism. On this approach, we explain an event when we identify a series of causal interactions that lead from some antecedent condition to the outcome of interest. Hedstrom and Swedborg's Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory
presents aspects of this theory of explanation in application to the social sciences. One benefit of the social mechanisms approach is that it also provides a basis for answering "how possible" questions: if our puzzlement is that an outcome has occurred that seems inherently unlikely, we can provide an account of a set of causal mechanisms that transpired to bring it about.
The chief line of dispute in the traditions mentioned so far is between the "general laws" camp and the "causal powers" camp. Both are committed to the idea that explanation involves showing how an outcome fits into the ways the world works; but the general laws approach presumes that law-like regularities are fundamental, whereas the causal approach presumes that causal powers and mechanisms are fundamental.
So what has developed in the theory of explanation in the past twenty years? Quite a bit. A recent collection of essays coming largely from the Scandinavian tradition of the philosophy of science is quite helpful in orienting readers to recent developments. This is Johannes Persson and Petri Ylikoski's 2007 Rethinking Explanation
. Quite a number of the contributions are worth reading carefully. But Jan Faye's "Pragmatic-Rhetorical Theory of Explanation" is a good place to start. Faye distinguishes among three basic approaches to the theory of explanation: formal-logical, ontological, and pragmatic. The formal-logical approach is essentially the H-D and I-S approaches described above. The ontological approach is the causal-powers approach described above. The pragmatic approach is in a sense the most important recent contribution to the theory of explanation, and represents a significant re-focusing of the debates in post-empiricist philosophy of science. Here is how Faye describes the pragmatic approach to explanation-theory:
The pragmatic view sees scientific explanations to be basically similar to explanations in everyday life. It regards every explanation as an appropriate answer to an explanation-seeking question, emphasising that the context of the discourse, including the explainer's interest and background knowledge, determines the appropriate answer.And why should we consider a pragmatic approach? Faye offers eight reasons:
First, we have to recognise that even within the natural sciences there exist many different types of accounts, which scientists regard as explanatory.Second, if one is looking for a prescriptive treatment of explanation, I see no reason why the social sciences and the humanities should be excluded from such a prescription. If they are included, the prescriptive account must include intentional and interpretive explanations, i.e., accounts providing information about either motives or meanings.
Third, the meaning of a why-question alone does not determine whether the answer is relevant or not.
Fourth, John Searle has correctly argued that the meaning of every indicative sentence is context-dependent. He does not deny that many sentences have literal meaning, which is traditionally seen as the semantic content a sentence has independently of any context.
Fifth, many explanations take the form of stories. Arthur Danto has argued that what we want to explain is always a change of some sort. When a change occurs, we have one situation before and another situation after, and the explanation is what connects these two situations. This is the story.
Sixth, a change always takes place in a complex causal field of circumstances each of which is necessary for its occurrence. Writers like P.W. Bridgman, Norwood Russell Hanson, John Mackie, and Bas van Fraassen have all correctly argued that events are enmeshed in a causal network and that it is the salient factors mentioned in an explanation that constitute the causes of that events.Seventh, the level of explanation depends also on our interest of communication. In science an appropriate nomic or causal account can be given on the basis of different explanatory levels, and which of these levels one selects as informative depends very much on the rhetorical purposes.
Eight, scientific theories are empirically underdetermined by data. It is always possible to develop competing theories that explain things differently and, therefore, it is impossible to set up a crucial experiment that shows which of these theories that yields the correct account of the data available.
Faye then goes on to analyze scientific explanation as a speech act. We need to understand the presuppositions and purposes that the explainer and the listener have, before we can say much about how the explanation works.
Petri Ylikoski's contribution to the volume, "The Idea of Contrastive Explanandum," picks up on one particular but pervasively important feature of the rhetorical situation of explanation, the idea of contrast. When we ask for an explanation of an outcome, often we are not asking simply why it occurred, but rather why it occurred instead of something else. And the contrastive condition is crucial. If we ask "why did the Prussian army win the Franco-Prussian War?", the answer we give will be very different depending on whether we understand the question as:
"Why did the Prussian army [rather than the French army] win the Franco-Prussian War?"or:
"Why did the Prussian army win [rather than fighting to stalemate] the Franco-Prussian War?"So scientific explanation is context-dependent in at least this important respect: we need to understand what the question-asker has in mind before we can provide an adequate explanation from his/her point of view. As Henrik Hallsten puts it in his contribution, "What to Ask of an Explanation-Theory",
To summarize: Any explanation-theory must [do] justice to the distinction between objective explanatory relevance and context dependent explanatory relevance or provide good arguments as to why this distinction should not be upheld. (16)So perhaps the most important recent developments in the theory of scientific explanation fall in a few categories. First, there has been substantial work on refining the idea of causal explanation (link). Second, philosophers have reinforced the idea that explanation has pragmatic and rhetorical aspects that cannot be put aside in favor of syntactic and substantive features of explanation. And third, there is more recognition and acceptance of the idea that explanatory models and standards may reasonably differ across disciplines and research areas. In particular, the social and historical sciences are entitled to offer explanatory frameworks that are well adapted to the particular kinds of why and how questions that are posed in these fields. In each case the philosophy of science has made a very great deal of progress since the state of the debates about explanation that transpired in the 1960s.
Google matched content |
Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
Quotes
War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
Copyright © 1996-2021 by Softpanorama Society. www.softpanorama.org was initially created as a service to the (now defunct) UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) without any remuneration. This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is distributed under the Softpanorama Content License. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
FAIR USE NOTICE This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to advance understanding of computer science, IT technology, economic, scientific, and social issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided by section 107 of the US Copyright Law according to which such material can be distributed without profit exclusively for research and educational purposes.
This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Grammar and spelling errors should be expected. The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree...
|
|
You can use PayPal to to buy a cup of coffee for authors of this site |
Disclaimer:
The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.
Last modified: August, 01, 2020
