How Usefully Does This Education Quote Apply To Personnel Systems And Electorates As Well?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



We could add a few things to this, for application to cultural aggregates, and to our MiddleClass - since solutions to all aggregate challenges are recognized in the field, and perfected on the training ground.

"If an aggregate lives with diverse interactions,

it develops the capacity to sense and explore options?"

(Ditto for an aggregate that maintains adequate liquidity - by fiat?)

IF a child lives with criticism,
.......HE leans to condemn. 

IF a child lives with hostility,
.......HE learns to fight. 

IF a child lives with ridicule,
.......HE learns to be shy. 

IF a child lives with shame,
.......HE learns to feel guilty. 

IF a child lives with tolerance,
.......HE learns to be patient. 

IF a child lives with encouragement,
.......HE learns confidence. 

IF a child lives with praise,
.......HE learns to appreciate. 

IF a child lives with fairness,
.......HE learns justice. 

IF a child lives with security,
.......HE learns to have faith. 

IF a child lives with approval,
.......HE learns to like himself. 

IF a child lives with acceptance and friendship,
.......HE leans to find love in the world. 

--Dorothy Law Nolte

ps: Yah gotta wonder why Dorothy didn't apply this to the generic child, instead of only boys?

ps: ps: Were Dick Cheney's parents ogres? How about all NeoCon parents?

The 23rd Annual Minsky Conference Is Coming to D.C. April 9–10, 2014

The National Press Club
Washington, D.C.
April 9–10, 2014

Multiplier Effect
The 23rd Annual Minsky Conference Is Coming to D.C.
Posted by Michael Stephens

Warren Mosler fisks Paul Krugman on Argentina

Paul Krugman just cannot resist that good ol' fashioned monetarism as he clings to ISLM even though his Krugman cross shows that he could know better if he were thinking clearly about his own work.

The Center of the Universe

The unconscious liberal

Warren Mosler

Another very nice comment from a student who attended last week's Forex course

Another student from my course last week just sent me this very nice comment.

"Mike’s course is a must for traders. It is incredibly intuitive and makes the market work for you. We did not experience a single losing trade during my week with Mike. Without much prior forex experience, I feel as though I have been doing it for years. Anyone that wishes to trade profitably must take this course. It has allowed me to systematically identify profitable trading opportunities while harnessing an intellectual and emotional framework to seize upon them. Don’t hesitate and sign up now." –Brett, Chapel Hill Research

It's very gratifying to have people respond to the course this positively.

Another great testimonial from a student who attended my forex course last week!

@mikenorman Best Forex Course ever! Easy to follow and now I know the mental things are more important than the Trading System!!

— Stefan Stredak (@FXStefan) February 2, 2014

Next course: Feb 10 - 14. Sign up here.

Bill Mitchell — Structural fiscal balance is about full employment not ‘normality’

The difference between fiscal balance (revenue minus expenditure) and fiscal stance (whether government policy is expansionary, neutral or contractionary). Conventional economics equates the fiscal balance with the fiscal stance. Bill explains why and how this is wrong, owing to the action of the automatic stabilizers and how neoliberal policy has changed the definition of full employment.

The following provides you with an accurate understanding of what a stuctural fiscal balance is. It has nothing to do with a “normal year” in an economic cycle. In fact, if the fiscal balance is all structural then it would be a very unique year and one that nations rarely attain, mostly because governments will not take responsibility for achieving full employment.

The federal fiscal balance is the difference between total federal revenue and total federal outlays. So if total revenue is greater than outlays, the fiscal balance is in surplus and vice versa. It is a simple matter of accounting with no theory involved. However, the fiscal balance is used by all and sundry to indicate the fiscal stance of the government.

So if the fiscal balance is in surplus we conclude that the fiscal impact of government is contractionary (withdrawing net spending) and if the fiscal balance is in deficit we say the fiscal impact expansionary (adding net spending).

However, the complication is that we cannot then conclude that changes in the fiscal impact reflect discretionary policy changes. The reason for this uncertainty is that there are automatic stabilisers operating. To see this, the most simple model of the fiscal balance we might think of can be written as:

Fiscal Balance = Revenue – Spending.

Fiscal Balance = (Tax Revenue + Other Revenue) – (Welfare Payments + Other Spending)

We know that Tax Revenue and Welfare Payments move inversely with respect to each other, with the latter rising when GDP growth falls and the former rises with GDP growth. These components of the fiscal balance are the so-called automatic stabilisers

In other words, without any discretionary policy changes, the fiscal balance will vary over the course of the business cycle. When the economy is weak – tax revenue falls and welfare payments rise and so the fiscal balance moves towards deficit (or an increasing deficit).

When the economy is stronger – tax revenue rises and welfare payments fall and the fiscal balance becomes increasingly positive. Automatic stabilisers attenuate the amplitude in the economic cycle by expanding the budget in a recession and contracting it in a boom.

So just because the fiscal balance goes into deficit doesn’t allow us to conclude that the Government has suddenly become of an expansionary mind. In other words, the presence of automatic stabilisers make it hard to discern whether the fiscal policy stance (chosen by the government) is contractionary or expansionary at any particular point in time.

To overcome this uncertainty, economists devised what used to be called the Full Employment or High Employment Fiscal Balance.

In more recent times, this concept is now called the Structural Balance....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Structural fiscal balance is about full employment not ‘normality’
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia

Ruby Russell — Rethinking Economics: From the UK, a Global Student Movement Takes Shape

Neoclassical theory dominates university economics departments the world over. Yet despite the many schools of thought and ideological viewpoints espoused by neoclassical economists – from free market fundamentalists to those who believe the state should play an active role in the economy – none were able to predict the current crisis.

The French student organization Pour un Enseignement Pluraliste dans le Supérieur en Économie (PEPS-Économie), frames the crisis as “not only of the economy, but a crisis of economics itself – and a crisis in its teaching.”

“Not long before the crisis, in the neoclassical macroeconomic model you didn't even have the possibility of a crisis,” says PEPS-Économie’s Louison Cahen-Fourot. “There was no way you could understand what was going on at the time with the model of neoclassical economics. If you go to Marxist economics, or institutional economics, or post-Keynesian economics, some people were warning for quite some time that something was going wrong.

But as these approaches are not taught – or barely taught – students didn't know about that.”

Truthout
Rethinking Economics: From the UK, a Global Student Movement Takes Shape
Ruby Russell, Occupy.com

Sean McElwee — Marx Was Right: Five Surprising Ways Karl Marx Predicted 2014

There's a lot of talk of Karl Marx in the air these days – from Rush Limbaugh accusing Pope Francis of promoting "pure Marxism" to a Washington Times writer claiming that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is an "unrepentant Marxist." But few people actually understand Marx's trenchant critique of capitalism. Most people are vaguely aware of the radical economist's prediction that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by communism, but they often misunderstand why he believed this to be true. And while Marx was wrong about some things, his writings (many of which pre-date the American Civil War) accurately predicted several aspects of contemporary capitalism, from the Great Recession to the iPhone 5S in your pocket.

Here are five facts of life in 2014 that Marx's analysis of capitalism correctly predicted more than a century ago:

Rolling Stone
Marx Was Right: Five Surprising Ways Karl Marx Predicted 2014
Sean McElwee

Maybe a bit simplistic, but the take away is Karl Marx in Rolling Stone.

Howard Schneider — Want to end poverty? Brazil’s answer: Give people money

Brazil confronted a similar political landscape when it began discussing a broad assault on poverty more than a decade ago. The poor were predominantly black, clustered in the north, and uneducated. There were strong arguments that simply giving away money would be a massive rip-off for taxpayers.

Plunged into the usual moral thicket, the response was simple: forget about all that. Though controversial, the government a decade ago decided that any family under the poverty line would be given enough money to put them over it.

The transfers, which now go to 14 million people, has helped decrease income inequality in the country – incomes for the poorest are growing faster than Brazil’s top earners.

The Washington Post — Wonkblog
Want to end poverty? Brazil’s answer: Give people money
Howard Schneider

Ian Welsh — Our Choices

I comment here.

Our Choices
Ian Welsh

Does That Mean That It Is Now Dangerous To Be Right About Democracy In The USA?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Our Fascists have finally defined ActiviStan?

The anti-fracking activist barred from 312.5 sq miles of Pennsylvania

"Court injunction brought in by oil and gas company makes even supermarkets off-limits for Vera Scroggins."

"It is dangerous to be right in matters about which the established authorities are wrong." ~ Voltaire

Does that mean that in the USA, it is now dangerous to be right about democracy?

The Fallacy of Scale (or Composition) Is All That Prevents Aggregates Of Intelligent People From Coalescing Into A Group Intelligence Greater Than The Sum Of It's Parts.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Why Do Management Consultants - and Electorates - End Up Teaching - and Accepting - The Opposite Of What They Were Forced To Practice?

James Hamilton — Economics of Bitcoin

Hard to know where this is all going to lead. But one thing is clear– we have added a very interesting new chapter in the history of money.

Where it is going is toward a more streamlined payments system that is more efficient by reducing transaction costs. No brainer.

Econobrowser
Economics of Bitcoin
James Hamilton | Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego

Flassbeck vs. Krugman on hot money — Paul Jay interviews Heiner Flassbeck

But what is absolutely clear but is not mentioned by most economists, not even by a person like Paul Krugman, whom I like very much for many of his assertions, but he is not saying, well, flexible exchange rates do not work. But this is the fact and this is the core of the matter.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Flassbeck vs. Krugman on hot money
Paul Jay interviews Heiner Flassbeck

Chris Dillow — Why Inequality Matters

I don't think that lefties are all that concerned with inequality as such. What they are concerned with privilege.  The purpose of liberal government is to eliminate privilege especially when it is not justified by circumstances. Most people have no problem with higher incomes for more competent people if the higher wages are contingent on and commensurable with difference in competency and the different to contribution that this makes.

What people object to is privilege that is incommensurable, for  example, when it is based on the luck of the draw like inherited status and wealth. However, they are more exercised when they perceive privilege to result from cronyism and corruption. I think this is where we are now in the US, the UK, and the EZ. 

This was, by the way, a chief contributing factor to the failure of communism. I have heard this from several friends from Eastern Europe that grew up under communism. They reported being taught socialism from grammar school days and were appalled when they grew up and found that the regime was anything but socialist and instead run by a gang of would-be aristocrats. Having come to the US, they are also appalled at what they see as the moral failure of so-called capitalism. They see the same type of cronyism and corruption, and they are greatly saddened that the statue of liberty wears a mask and has feet of clay.

Stumbling and Mumbling

Why Inequality Matters

Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Data-Wise And Context-Foolish, On A Scale More Epic Than Ever Before. The Task of RIGHT-SIZING AGGREGATE CONTEXT-AWARENESS

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




In case you haven't noticed. THE USA WON.

Yet now we're addicted to the form, and have lost track of the function.

The corollary message that this whole Snowden-NSA affair drives home?

The awesome, overwhelming power of the USA.

I don't see how anyone reading the details could conclude anything else except the fact that the US won, hands down, and now has the capacity to easily know & ward off literally every significant challenge occurring anywhere. We can, will and do know seemingly everything about anything ... but nothing about what any of it is for.

The bigger message here is that we don't seem to know what to do with that capacity, and with our victory.

We are actually misusing our victory so badly that we're actively trying to stuff square success into the round jaws of failure.

The only constant seems to be our systemic ineptitude despite overwhelming brilliance in every narrow discipline.

We're simply back to data-wise and context-foolish, on a scale more epic than ever before.

Even though we've been better than this before. 

We obviously couldn't KEEP our better capabilities. You have to conclude that our grandparents would be disappointed, and downright ashamed of us. We're supposed to be better than this, can be, and will. It's only a question of how, and when. Why is not up to us. If we can't regain our adaptive role, someone else will do that TO us.

The ONLY things that we don't over-teach in our schools?

As a start, how about the fact that, by definition, interdependencies between truly novel discoveries cannot be predicted? Certainly not in real time. And, that failing to acknowledge & explore unpredictable inter-dependencies is a guaranteed way to keep interrupting our systemic success? 

We are actively lying to ourselves about the unpredictability of systemic failure. Systemic failure is guaranteed by the unpredictability of emerging interdependencies. We only need to ditch the arrogance that leads us to lie to ourselves about our predictive power ... and then go about the easy task of discovering the awesome interdependencies generated as a totally free byproduct of our narrow discoveries. This is NOT rocket science. It's simple, aggregate practice.

To illustrate the easy part, say three people independently invent a hammer, a metal nail, and a saw. Do we arbitrarily focus on war hammers, nail-bombs and CIA-torture methods - and in keeping others from using hammers, nails & saws? Or do we discover carpentry, house-building, architecture and art - and who knows what else? It's all in our outlook, our ability to parse feedback, and our amount of practice at assessing aggregate outcomes.

WHY are we turning something so easy into something so difficult?

If the NSA can presume to predict the proclivity of oppressed, under-educated people to resent our actions, then they sure as hell COULD also acknowledge, track and report the proclivity of our own sociopaths to presume that they know how to constrain our Aggregate Adaptive Path, by Central Planning!

Further, the NSA's same methods could be re-purposed to Adaptive Use by our full aggregate, to track and assess our electorate's balance of listening over-much to our few sociopaths, versus to our entire aggregate's feedback. 

If we want Democracy, we have to invest in methods to extend and then KEEP it's benefits. That's exactly what we are not doing. Instead, we're investing in keeping admirers in other countries from emulating what we've already achieved. That reduces to investing in our own failure. It's self-assisted suicide policy, and we should outlaw it. Our own adaptive rate is our most valuable moving target, and we've taken our aggregate eye off of that target!

Instead of bothering to attack the NSA and our MICC, let's stop them in their tracks, and repurpose the MICC, just like we did with the banks in 1933. We can repurpose the MICC by gifting them a killer technology called a social mirror (full, aggregate, feedback awareness). Given a mirror, repurposing them will be incidental ... but only if they're forced to actually use our social mirror.

There is, actually, a simple, concluding question to draw attention to.

It's not just continuously right-sizing fiat currency supply that matters to a dynamically changing population.

How does any aggregate Right-Size Aggregate Context-Awareness?

And then continuously KEEP it right-sized, despite unpredictable changes?

Gary Engler — Why Capitalism Can’t Fix Our Most Urgent Problems

Real capitalism, not the theoretical version taught in school, is a system of minority rule in which a few people profit at the expense of others.

Real capitalists are always trying to cut their costs and increase their profits, which leads to unemployment, falling wages, rising economic disparity and not paying for the environmental damage they cause.

Private ownership of what are social means of livelihood produces incentives for capitalists to pass along the real costs of industry to communities, workers, future generations and other species.

Private ownership makes growing inequality inevitable. A system can proclaim itself democratic, but if a minority holds most of the economic, and therefore social and political power, that minority will inevitably reward itself, its power will grow and ever-expanding inequality will be the result.

Capitalism is sociopathic. Its ideologues, like the late Margaret Thatcher, reject the social, claiming only individuals exist. Yet capitalism has driven individual producers to the fringes of economies. Most people, ninety per cent in the U.K., depend on wages or salary, working with others in cooperative, coordinated labour — social labour, but directed by wealthy minorities for their own profit.

Capitalism promotes greed. It boasts of this.

Counterpunch
Why Capitalism Can’t Fix Our Most Urgent Problems
Gary Engler

Chuck Spinney — What is the Real Price of Starting Another Cold War?

The chart puts this scam in perspective. Compared to the two lefthand charts, the Pentagon’s deflators (i.e., the righthand graph) make the current defense budgets appear to be less of a departure from past budgets. The right hand chart is the one that the Pentagon briefs to Congress and the press dutifully regurgitates. It implies the current defense budget and future plans are less of a distortionary burden on the economy than is actually the case. (Readers interested in learning more about the inflation scam are referred to this report for a particularly outrageous case study documenting how the Pentagon scammed the Congress and the America people into believing the Reagan spendup was less wasteful than it really was.)

The charts give you an idea of the golden cornucopia awaiting the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC), if its proponents can start a new Cold War. Anyone who doubts the possibility of the MICC’s capacity to pull this off, need only use these charts to think about (1) the durability of the so-called “peace” dividend accompanying the end of the Cold War in 1990 and (2) how the MICC exploited the horror of 9-11 to power boost the defense budget to levels undreamed of by the threat inflators during the worst days of the Cold War or Vietnam. Just try to think about what a new wave of cold-war hysteria could trigger.

Counterpunch
What is the Real Price of Starting Another Cold War?
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon

Matt Bruenig — Libertarian Julian Sanchez Agrees Non-Aggression Is Circular

You can’t resolve a philosophical debate between a classical liberal and a socialist by appealing to the NAP, because each can claim their view is consistent with that principle given their theories of property: The state is not “aggressing” on an individual “property owner” if in fact The People ultimately own (or have some kind of share right in) all property, given the normatively loaded way “aggression” is used here. The appeal of the NAP lies in its apparent simplicity and intuitive plausibility (tautologies tend to be intuitively plausible), but it’s typically deployed in a way that amounts to a kind of shell game: I argue that socialism must be rejected on the grounds that it violates this one simple moral principle, and hope my interlocutor doesn’t notice that I’ve essentially begged the question by baking a theory of strong property rights incompatible with socialism into my conception of “aggression,” when of course libertarian property rights are ultimately backed by the threat of (individual or state) violence as well.

All along I have emphasized that my point about the NAP being question-begging is stupidly obvious and has been made by others before. It is its stupid obviousness that makes me so shocked that libertarians pretend not to understand it (or maybe they actually don’t understand it, which is even more shocking).

Libertarian Julian Sanchez Agrees Non-Aggression Is Circular
Matt Bruenig

Of course, Libertarians will claim that there is no vicious circle involved because the non-aggression principle is a priori. 

Socialists also claim that their principle of no absolute right to private property is either also a priori or empirical in that originally all property was common and private property is based on primitive accumulation, that is, appropriation of the commons that abrogates the prior right of all to share the commons. They will also point out that much if not most primitive accumulation was through aggression.

Charlton Stanley — Edward Snowden speaks: US blackout of interview

Last Sunday, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden was interviewed for the German television network ARD. The interview was big news in Germany and much of the world in both print and broadcast media. However, the interview appears to have been blocked intentionally by US government authorities. In fact, the media in the US appears to have gone to ‘radio silence’ about it. It has been posted on YouTube several times, but is taken down almost immediately. The video site Vimeo has it embedded, but as I write this, Vimeo is under a DDoS attack. LiveLeak also has it, and that video is embedded in this report by Jay Syrmopoulos for Ben Swann’s news page.

Jonathan Turley
Edward Snowden speaks: US blackout of interview
Charlton Stanley, PhD, ABPP

See also New Video: Guardian Newspaper Destroys Snowden Files While Feds Look On

Bizarre. This is what one would expect of a fascist regime. Oh, wait.

Steve Keen — Modeling Financial Instability

This paper will be published in a forthcoming book on the crisis edited by Malliaris, Shaw and Shefrin. In what follows, I derive a corrected formula for the role of the change in debt in aggregate demand, which is that ex-post aggregate demand equals ex-ante income plus the circulation of new debt, where the latter term is the velocity of money times the ex-post creation of new debt.
The PDF is available here: Keen2014ModelingFinancialInstability. The Minsky models used in this paper are here in a ZIP file. The latest version of Minsky can be downloaded from here.

Debtwatch
Modeling Financial Instability
Steve Keen

The Economics of Basic Social Operations ... Are Deeply Broken

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Have you watched the videotaped interview of Ed Snowden in Moscow? The interview drives home the reality of a very simple fact.

The entire current state of computing is an abuse waiting to happen.

Every aspect of social information assurance has to be rethought, from the IP packet on up.

Yet our US media is censoring the Snowden Interview, while YouTube & websites block it? What don't our own government and corporations want US citizens to hear?

"the video has been taken down almost immediately every time it’s posted on YouTube"

The videotaped interview with Snowdon doesn't reveal anything new at all. It does, however, drive home some of the truly astounding "situational" facts that have already been reviewed at length in print.

Yet the whole context barely makes operational sense, once it's overwhelming implications sink in. Three aspects of our current context emerge, and they are worth stressing.

1) One agency's runaway capabilities have clearly compromised the entire workings of the US Congress, POTUS AND SCOTUS - not to mention the rest of the electorate. We HAVE no civil protections. They are ALL compromised! Completely.

2) How and why? Entirely due to a broken policy & personnel system, all eventually reliant upon political campaign funding from the very corporations angling for contracts to staff said agency!

3) All this has occurred WHILE that agency & those corporations employ truly juvenile IT/IS operations & controls which leave THEMSELVES totally compromised!

It's like one, huge, Heath Robinson STUPID machine!

We're extremely lucky that this hasn't ALREADY blown up into unimaginably bad outcomes. At the heart of it are completely archaic information-assurance methods, layered on top of a TOTALLY compromised personnel system. Even worse, both of those are layered on top of a near hopelessly ill-informed electorate. What COULDN'T go wrong?

Here's a good synopsis of the print & video details previously disclosed:

(Same video, on YouTube and at CCC-TC, Germany)

NSA "TURMOIL" is deep packet inspection 

(of any computer whatsoever, anywhere),

NSA "TURBINE" is deep packet injection 

(of info into any computer, including your account, at your bank!)

NSA "QFIRE" is their integration.

@#$%^&! When is enough more than enough?

It's like we've all caught the Clapper. Yet this is far worse than other social diseases.

"the NSA has in a literal sense retarded the process by which we would secure the internet"

That really hits home.

If we retard internet security, we're retarding our culture (and everyone else's too).

Forget endemic dash cams in Russian cars, this immediately puts pressure on all people everywhere in the entire world ... to store, verify and DOCUMENT every single IT packet that ever goes in to or out of their IT devices AND their home routers or cable modems ... purely for defensive purposes. Otherwise, anyone can be framed.

Does anyone smell a protection racket coming?

The entire current state of computing actually is an abuse waiting to happen.

As is the state of Democracy in the USA. We have democracy compromised.

Felix Salmon — Who’s to blame for the emerging-market crisis?

Paul Krugman and Dani Rodrik are out with dueling op-eds on the subject of the latest bout of financial-market craziness in places like Argentina and Turkey. Both men have been following emerging-market crises for decades; both indeed, are world-class experts on such episodes. What’s more, both economists have a broadly left-liberal worldview: there’s no deep ideological or philosophical rift here. And yet the two seem diametrically opposed.

Reuters — Econoblog
Who’s to blame for the emerging-market crisis?
Felix Salmon

Who's to blame. First, the institutional structure imposed under neoliberalism that rests on the myth assumption of "free markets, free trade, and free capital flows." Secondly, the requirement that the economy and therefore, the financial system as well, be run  by capital for capital preservation and accumulation, the myth assumption being that capital formation is the sine qua non of growth, which includes the myth assumption that "growth" is identical with greater prosperity. 

Of course, this is only part of the mythology which is ultimately to blame for recurrent social, political and economic problems. But it is an important part of it. There is no fix in an ill-designed or broken system without overhauling the system, or at least reforming it in a major way.

Neoliberalism is not only antithetical to democracy but also incompatible with distributed prosperity.

 

Miya Tokumitsu — In the Name of Love

Do what you love. Love what you do.”

The command is framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog and has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times. Though it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living room is the place all those pinners and likers long to be.

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

Slate
In the Name of Love
Miya Tokumitsu
(h/t Clonal)

Joe Weisenthal — Dogecoin Is On A Gigantic Tear, And It's Not Hard To See Why

When I've written about cryptocurrencies in the past, I've argued that an important facet of them is as a social network. A social network as you think about it (like Twitter or Facebook) only has value because lots of other people you know are using them. The technology itself can easily be copied. It's the same with digital currencies. It's the social aspect and network affects that creates the value, since the actual code is easily replicated.

The Doge community isn't likely to become a "mass" thing, but it seems to attract fun people that are into doing cool things. It's not that weird to see why it's taken off so much.

Business Insider — Clusterstock
Dogecoin Is On A Gigantic Tear, And It's Not Hard To See Why
Joe Weisenthal

Cryptocurrencies being used to power social networks? Now that's an idea that has legs.

Adam J. Levitin — Postal Banking: Maybe Not So Crazy After All

A recent white paper by the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General floated the idea of introducing postal banking services as a means of expanding financial inclusion. Not surprisingly, the banking industry has rushed to condemn the idea—which would create new competition for financial services—as sort of creeping socialism. But when one considers postal banking more carefully, the idea isn’t so crazy, although it raises a number of real questions and challenges.

American Banker
Postal Banking: Maybe Not So Crazy After All
Adam J. Levitin | Professor of Law at Georgetown University

Brad DeLong — John Maynard Keynes's Definition Of What Economics Should Be

John Maynard Keynes: Letter to Roy Harrod, July 4, 1938

Grasping Reality...
John Maynard Keynes's Definition Of What Economics Should Be
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

Alex Hoffman — Introducing Modern Money Monopoly (MMM)

Reconfiguring the rules of Monopoly® to teach MMT to children, as suggested by J. D. Alt. Brilliant. Bravo.

New Economic Perspectives
Introducing Modern Money Monopoly (MMM)
Alex Hoffman*

*) I am indebted to Dr. Dirk Ehnts, my German partner in all matters MMT, who played an earlier version of the game with his students at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. Dirk has made helpful suggestions of how the game could be more fully developed for grown-ups. My sister-in-law Alexandra von Rotberg and my children, above all Jakob Hofmann, deserve to be mentioned for giving up valuable holiday time to test-run MMM.

For Those Who Can't Grasp Democracy - Consider the 2nd Derivative of Disruption

   (Commentary by Roger Erickson)

No Central Planning, No Central Control

There is plenty of evidence that large human "democracies" of this sort existed in multiple sites worldwide, in between cultural "development" cycles.

Evidence: large population or temple sites showing outcome of large-population labor, absence significant, long-term evidence for present-day combinations of agriculture, weaponry and/or warfare - e.g., Stonehenge, Catal Hyuk, Harappa, and many paleolithic & neolithic sites in South/North America, Asia, Africa & Europe.

One simple, unproven hypothesis is that it is our rate tool invention itself that stresses us.

When a subgroup of humans invent a new tool, practice or process ... they invariably misuse it (typically against their neighbors) for a long time, before settling into an optimal pattern of adaptive, distributed use (i.e., common sense slowly becoming common & obvious, through reverberating feedback).

Then another game-altering tool/practice/process is invented, which allows some parasites to bully the system again ... just 'cuz they can ... until we all wise up again.

You'll even hear this from experienced businesspeople: "I finally learned that just because you can ... doesn't mean that you should."

A core question for ORGANIZED systems is how to invent new tools, and AVOID misusing them before adaptively using them. This boils down to be the 2nd derivative of disruption. Just because some entire system has to be rebuilt per an altered design, doesn't mean that burning it down and starting from scratch is ALWAYS the most adaptive procedure. 

Rather than eradicating prior clans and clones before repopulating a new niche, a key advance invented by social species is to RAPIDLY scavenge, rescue and reuse existing populations, for immediate application to new tasks while accelerating exploration of new options in new niches. Whether you call it re-deployment or reorganization doesn't matter.

There are ways to titrate that path which produces the most new options, soonest. That titration method requires FULL-GROUP FEEDBACK, and we call it Democracy. Following that path requires continuous, real-time, statistical evaluation of the complex moment of adaptive power in a distribution of lost-vs-gained, net+local option-exploration.

Such titrated evaluation requires a statistical evaluation of a 2-stage optimization process. Keep the components well fed PLUS grow the net systemic options. Neglecting either stage feeds disparity, but not net adaptation.

Is This How The NeoLib "Memirus" Swamps Our Democracy's Adaptive Responses?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Ignorance is our Greatest Public Health threat, social as well as physiological.

Just as HIV hides out in the immune cells concentrating in the gut, a reservoir of the NeoLib "memirus"* hides out among all the IGNORANCE CONCENTRATED IN POLITICS.




* A virus is a stripped down packet of nucleic acid packaged in a protective protein capsule.

  A memirus is a stripped down package of toxic sophism, hidden within a confusing, semantic capsule.