20-Episode, High Profile Short Films On Economics, Touted By Newsweek ... Falls Short of Reality. Hurts More Than It Helps.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

I shudder to imagine it's plot ... but haven't seen them all yet. So we can hope for the best.

Maybe an animated film on Control Fraud will follow? :)

And then one on Boyd, Deming, Shewhart ... and even Wallace & Darwin ...?

And then? Planck, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Kepler ... and Imhotep? :)

These topics are all inter-related ... by much more than comedy. It's just that nearly every single specialist doesn't "believe" that they are, or that THEY could use even more perspective.

Every single "discipline" is, by definition, an application of Neo-Liberal thinking that in fact degrades systemic coordination. Ya gotta wonder what a Cross-Fit CULTURE would briefly look like (another Renaissance?). One featuring Liberal Education? One that is NOT just a mob of Neo-Liberally educated specialists in distributed silos, each the supposed center of it's own, parallel universe?

Film Series Explaining Economy Makes Cotton Candy Out of Spinach

(Stav Ziv, Newsweek)

Morgan Spurlock, who produced the McDonald's documentary Super Size Me is undertaking a daunting task: making a series of short documentaries about economics and the related issues that are effecting our lives. He has a host of big-name entertainment people participating. GEI hopes to be able to make the films available on-site in the not-too-distant future. 

(hat tip John Lounsbury, www.econintersect.com)

Why is there little or no teaching of distributed control & Democracy as fused subjects?

As soon as you say "distributed control" of aggregate navigation ... you're already stating the task of a tribe, or an aggregate or an electorate navigating overall context.

It's amazing how much is separately known in policy-politics fields, & in engineering-biomechanics-biology fields .... that is NOT allowed to interact!

What a waste. We could easily make all students aware of this by age 10.

"How Franklin D. Roosevelt Botched Social Security"

(Commentary by Roger Erickson)

The Paradigmatic Liberal as Fiscal Conservative

Fascinating read.

Will have to read this several times over to let it all soak in.

First comment, it's surprising that there's no mention of Luther Gulick's famous memo, admitting that FICA taxes were never a necessity, only enough politics to get the act passed against party-specific opposition.

Why progressives lose the debt argument every, single, time

There's no one in the progressive movement (other than some MMT folks) that have a serious rebuttal (no...a refutation) to the conservative, deficit hawk, argument. Even Paul Krugman, who is quite prolific when it comes to challenging the conservative arguments on deficits, government spending, entitlements and such, will set himself up for destruction each and every time when says things like, "The debt is not a problem in the short term, but we need to get long-term structural deficits under control."

It is that "long-term" stuff that undermines his efforts.

Once progressives agree with conservatives that there IS a problem, never mind if it has to be addressed now or later, then conservatives just easily come back and say, well, if you agree there is a problem, then why don't we just fix it now and be done with it?

Until we get a progressive that understands our monetary system; that understands the FACT that we can't go broke and that deficits add to the financial balances of the public, and go on to become part of the inheritance (and wealth) of current and future generations, as opposed to being a burden...until that happens, we will lose every, single, time.

Economic illiterate and degenerate, Bill O'Reilly, rips another meek Progressive

Economic illiterate and degenerate blowhard Bill O’Reilly went ballistic on his show the other night, screaming at liberal Fox News whipping boy Alan Colmes and shouting “bull-blank.” (Utterly ridiculous, bull-blank? Seriously?)

O’Reilly called Colmes a “liar” because he said that Colmes couldn’t name one program that has seen a reduction in spending even though Colmes repeatedly stated, Medicare, which saw a $10 billion dollar reduction in FY 2012 vs FY 2011. In addition, Medicaid was down by $23.7 billion, NASA down by $1 billion, Federal salaries (not a program, but still a target of fiscal conservative ire) down by almost $3 billion and there’s more. The numbers are there.

While O’Reilly did the typical bully job on meek Colmes, Colmes deserved it for doing the usual liberal/progressive thing of not having any facts to back up his arguments. The progressive leadership (of which Colmes is a part due to his media presence) is a BIG part of the reason why the movement is not going anywhere. It is easily countered or destroyed by the "bull-blank" conservative dogma.

Here's the video.