What Aspect Of SCALE & Aggregate Degrees of Freedom Don't We Teach To Enough Kids, In All Schools, Everywhere?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



(Photo: walking towards, instead of away from, an impending tsunami of context changes.)

Why is it that group intelligence always seems to recede just before devastating changes in group context? Ordinary humans are clearly talented enough to devise many practical applications for exploring perceived options. There are countless examples, from sublime to mundane, such as this one.

Most Pet Lovers Don't Perceive Equal, Parallel Need To Help A Handicapped Middle Class

Do we have to practice austerity, or can we achieve everything we can imagine, and more?

Application of our talents is clearly gated by the process of recognizing and orienting to local, regional or systemic context. Perceptions & practice then drive us to optimize an increasingly complex combination of actions, so that we can all sail through that thicket of micro-to-macro contexts. Social species work exactly BECAUSE recombinant member interactions provide compounding group resiliency.

Please ask every talented person you know, to design some Automatic Stabilizer policies, for a struggling and starving Middle Class.

We are what we practice, even at a cultural scale. So what triggers do we need, to get more of ourselves to perceive our own, constrained, self-handicapped electorate?

Too few seem to see a MiddleClass limping down the road to oblivion, right into the path of another set of predatory sociopaths, whether "Brits" in India, or an Upper Looting Class that eventually self organizes everywhere.

To avoid these self-inflicted constraints, we need an electorate that practices simultaneously perceiving the full spectrum individual needs, AND team dynamics, AND social interdependencies. To maintain Adaptive Rate, a working culture has to juggle all available input, and keep all it's increasing options available.

What aspect of SCALE don't we teach enough kids, in all schools, everywhere?

Instead of hoarding static assets as rent, why aren't we seeing the value of employing everyone to explore our full range of cultural options, so that we can practice achieving even more than what any individual can currently imagine?

Join a citizen's army? Be all that, together, "we" can be?

Support cultural intelligence? A group mind is a terrible thing to waste?

Why don't more emerging students grasp the scale of the group options to be explored? What methods do we need, in order to change our re-emerging electorate back towards a more adaptive path?

Methods drive results?

  Milestone goals drive methods?

    And Desired Group Outcomes drive milestone goals?

      And interacting imaginations drive Desired Outcomes - aka, Group Imagination?

We can't get there by having everyone wishing to hoard above average amounts of static assets. The reality of the boring outcome actually achieved from that dream has repeatedly been trivial compared to increasing our dynamic assets, an alternate outcome which is available to any organized aggregate - but only if they first recognize it.

Rebecca Leber — What Climate Change Looks Like on Your Front Porch

A new report, published on Tuesday, represents an attempt to change that. It’s called “Risky Business” and it comes from a year-long research project, convened and financed by Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson, and Tom Steyer. It’s the latest in a series of new reports that sound alarms about climate change: the health effects, glaciers melting, and impact on food nutrition, to name a few. But the researchers and scientists who produced Risky Business are trying to do something a little different. Using new, more sophisticated projections, they have broken down the U.S. into the same regions used in the National Climate Assessment and attempted to show what climate change will mean for each one. They are also trying to put a dollar value on the risk climate change represents in these regions, particularly for businesses.

That last part is important. The primary audience for the report isn’t really Main Street. It’s Wall Street—and corporate boardrooms. The backers include a number of people with credibility in this world—not just Paulson, who used to run Goldman Sachs and served as Treausry Secretary in the Bush Administration, but also George Shultz (Treasury Secretary under George H.W. Bush) and Olympia Snowe (the former Republican senator). Paulson, who has apparently been particularly active in this project, argued in a weekend New York Times op-ed that “risk management is a conservative principle.”

New Republic
What Climate Change Looks Like on Your Front Porch
Rebecca Leber

David Cay Johnston — Thanks to WikiLeaks, public can debate alarming new trade deal

WikiLeaks last week again pierced the veil of official secrecy that surrounds global trade negotiations. The peek it gave us should alarm everyone.

Big Business and national governments wanted to conceal the terms of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) while keeping consumers, unions, environmentalists and the vast majority of businesses in the dark. Thanks to WikiLeaks, they failed.

The draft agreement WikiLeaks released on June 19 is fresh, written in May. It is a model of secret law, blatant in its disregard for transparency, democratic process and history. Its opening page says the terms are to remain secret for five years after negotiations formally end or the proposed new rules take effect. Talks to refine that agreement were to resume Monday in Geneva.

Even the secrecy-shrouded Trans Pacific Partnership that President Barack Obama and his Big Business allies want to ram through Congress without changes and only perfunctory debate does not include a five-year veil of secrecy after adoption. WikiLeaks has released a portion of TPP draft documents to the public.

It is impossible to obey a law or know how it affects you when the law is secret. And that is what this agreement would be, a new rulebook for trade in services — principally banking, insurance and trusts.

The 18-page draft agreement involves 50 nations, which produce more than two-thirds of officially measured global economic activity. That means the consequences of the new rules would be enormous, especially for those living in the more than 140 countries not taking part in the talks. Whether people can get loans or buy insurance and at what prices as well as what jobs may be available will be affected by any new trade rules.

Al Jazeera America
Thanks to WikiLeaks, public can debate alarming new trade deal
David Cay Johnston

Yanis Varoufakis — A European New Deal financed by the EIB, with ECB QE-backing, is the optimal policy: Now recommended also by W. Münchau

Faced with deflationary forces in its core, and a lasting depression in the periphery, the Eurozone requires a major investment drive. One of the Modest Proposal’s policy recommendations is that the European Investment Bank (along with the European Investment Fund) embarks upon a massive investment drive (up to 8% of Gross Eurozone Product) without any national co-funding. These investments could be funded through 100% issues of EIB-EIF bonds, with the European Central Bank purchasing, in secondary markets, sufficient quantities of these bonds to ensure that their yields stay well below 1.5%, thus making a European New Deal not only possible but also self-financing – and off the books of national budgets.

The logic of this scheme was outlined first in a post entitled How should the ECB enact quantitative easing? A proposal. It received considerable support at The Economist May 2014 Bellwether Conference, as well as in the Journal of Central Banking, where Tom Bowker wrote an article entitled QE for infrastructure investment could be ECB’s alternative to ‘pushing on a string’.

Most recently, Wolfgang Münchau, in his regular Financial Times column, astutely noted that Prime Minister Renzi and Chancellor Merkel are on a collision course, courtesy of the former’s determination not to fall prey of Italy’s slow burning depression. Renzi, according to Münchau, is committed to an investment boom that will see off the forces of recession. Merkel, on the other hand, is determined not to allow fiscal deficits to exceed the Fiscal Pact’s austere limits. Can a clash be avoided?
The answer is affirmative…

A European New Deal financed by the EIB, with ECB QE-backing, is the optimal policy: Now recommended also by W. Münchau

Yanis Varoufakis

(h/t Jan in the comments)

Bill Black — Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA

Wikileaks has done the world a great service again by publishing a leak of an April 2014 (partial) draft of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA).

Professor Jane Kelsey of the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland prepared an analysis of the leak that I recommend that everyone read. She, appropriately, emphasizes that any analysis must be tentative because we have only a partial, stale draft through the whistleblower(s).

My analysis is more limited in scope but is consistent with the thrust of her concerns.

New Economic Perspectives
Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Libertarian civil war continues...

Image below from left libertarian (drug/pharma oriented) Alter-Net's website where the most read article is of course about famous cannabis ingesters, while they also have an article in the top 5 which is antagonistic to the right libertarians (metals oriented) about more of their libertarian nemesis' typical out of control hijinks with guns.

We of course are unfortunately caught in the crossfire and second hand smoke of this incestuous libertarian civil war.

Revealing image which illustrates the antagonism and correlating material associations of these two groups of warring libertarian morons pretty well I think.

Chalmers Johnson — Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled

Goldie but goodie that bears repeating. Chalmers Johnson reviews Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.

Alternet
Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled

Chalmers Johnson

Scott Sumner — Unpersuaded [by Piketty]

Humor.

Econlog
Unpersuaded

Scott Sumner, Professor of Economics, Bentley University

Tax Analysts Are Worried About The "Fiscal State" Of The USA?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Here's another eye-opener.

Tax analysts are worried about the "fiscal state" of the USA

They say that the fiat currency issuer is issuing more currency than it takes back as taxes.

Uh, ... isn't that a simple prerequisite for a growing population with growing transaction rates?

The only question is how fast the absolute magnitude of our currency supply has to grow, to allow our growing populace to explore it's growing options?

It gets worse from there, as they go on to discuss the importance of interest free loans to the currency issuer. How do "tax professionals" end up so out of context?

Our bigger problem is our school system?

That's what is producing professionals in multiple disciplines who don't know the context in which their discipline operates. That's important, since, per Walter Shewhart, "without context, data is meaningless."

Marshall Auerback — The Roots Of The Ukraine Problem

Repeating history?

Macrobits by Marshall Auerback

The Roots Of The Ukraine Problem
Marshall Auerback

Peter Dorman — Mankiw: Let’s Really Piss Off Those Liberals

Putting all of this together, it doesn't sound like the sweeping conclusion at the end of Mankiw's column is justified, does it? 

But Greg’s a smart guy! He doesn't really think that his op-ed is summing up the state of scientific knowledge. He knows everything I've written above. Some of it is even in his textbook. Clearly his goal is not to make a defensible economic argument. 

To take him seriously is to miss the point. When he wrote this column Greg had a twinkle in his eye. He’s thinking to himself, “This is really going to annoy the liberals!” That’s what the central message of microeconomics is about, after all, once you put aside all the caveats and unlikely assumptions: self-interest is good for everyone, a free market is the optimal form of economic organization, and there is no conflict of interest between the rich and the rest. In real economics these propositions are hypotheses to be examined and quite often rejected, but in ideological economics they are ammunition to attack the left.

This is why teaching neoclassical economics is ideological BS. Of course, it's just propaganda that has little if anything to do with either present reality or a feasible economics in modern society.

EconoSpeak
Mankiw: Let’s Really Piss Off Those Liberals
Peter Dorman

Matias Vernengo — ISLM, ISMP, DSGE and other models

Matias Vernengo begs to differ, holding that ISLM (and its variants) is one of the most useful economic models with respect to explaining policy and that Keynes endorsed it. For example, ISLM can be modified to ISMP to take into account a policy rate.

Naked Keynesianism
ISLM, ISMP, DSGE and other models
Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, University of Utah

Thomas Frank — Hillary Clinton forgets the ’90s: Our latest gilded age and our latest phony populists

The original Gilded Age ended when Democrats and Republicans came together around the old populist program of financial regulation, antitrust enforcement, income tax, and legitimacy for organized labor. This time around there is no end in sight, because Republicans and Democrats have come together on a program that is almost the opposite—dismantling the regulatory state at the behest of the One Percent while assuring an ever angrier public that they feel our pain, that they’re Putting People First, that they’d be great to have a beer with, that Yes We Can. The heart sickens at the thought of these many long years of fake populism, and the stomach turns to imagine how little time there is before we are swept up in it all over again.

Salon
Hillary Clinton forgets the ’90s: Our latest gilded age and our latest phony populists
Thomas Frank

Crying for Argentina

Last week, the US Supreme Court made a decision that could force Argentina to pay American billionaire hedge fund managers the full value of its decade-old debts. Argentina’s dollar denominated/pegged debt is one of many cruel legacies of the criminal Washington consensus government under Carlos Menem. Menem was known for being buddy-buddy with Bill Clinton, and excluded the same sort of chill machismo as Clinton, while turning his country into an internationally financed Ponzi scheme. In the 90’s, he was lauded as a hero of fiscal discipline and inflation control, but his real achievement was severely eroding Argentina’s sovereignty and allowing it to become a petri dish for reckless neoliberalism. As poorly managed as Argentina had been before the neoliberal experiment, it should now be clear that establishing a currency board and pegging the peso to the US dollar was a disastrous “solution.”

The current Kirchner government is also deeply flawed, and I have trouble finding anything positive to say about the leadership of my second home country. This government has continually lied about inflation statistics and violated freedom of the press. That being said, Argentina has been struggling for years to build up its dollar reserves by exporting an enormous amount of its agricultural production, at the cost of increased food prices for the poor. Argentina has also seen millions of acres of its land transformed into soybean farms, with all the environmental consequences from the herbicides and fertilizers that go along with it. Meanwhile, the US refuses to allow imports of Argentina’s higher valued agricultural goods, such as meat and citrus, due to grossly outdated health and safety measures that masquerade as protectionism for America’s welfare farmers. So on the one hand, US policy is forcing Argentina to pay back debts in dollars, and on the other hand, US policy is making it difficult for Argentina to actually acquire those dollars! Along with the current disaster in Iraq, it’s hard to see how our current leadership could do a better job of turning the entire world against the US.

This recent series of decisions from our neo-con court system may force Argentina to pay back these illegitimate debts, which could drain billions of its hard earned dollar reserves. This is crony capitalism of the worst kind; sociopath-investors like Paul Singer are using America’s court system to force the sovereign government of Argentina back into client-state status. The already unstable Argentine peso, which has caused some farmers to start reverting to commodity currency, could fall even further as the result of this decision. In the purest sense, it’s hard to see how human welfare, except for the top 0.001%, will improve as a result of this decision.

Thom Hartmann — The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.…

The Smirking Chimp
The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
Thom Hartmann

Prachi Gupta — Russell Brand calls upon thousands for “peaceful, effortless, joyful revolution”

Back to the Sixties.

Salon
Russell Brand calls upon thousands for “peaceful, effortless, joyful revolution”

Prachi Gupta

Evolution Don't Care About Metallic Or Any Other Imagined Peg For Adaptive Rate.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Week In FX Asia: India Caught Between Inflation And US Fed

?? What? Surely it's more accurate to say that India is caught between conformity & lack of bold leadership?

Expanding options call for bold exploration? And increasing quality of distributed decision-making?

Not complaints as to why someone or some agency doesn't make life easy for the co-dependent 1% parasitizing the middle-class in given countries?

Life was tough back in the 1920's/1930's, when most countries went back off the intra-nation gold std for good, and instead opted for policy agility, and using their brains more often.

It was also tough in 1944, when the US Gov re-started inter-gov convertibility of $US for gold (can't be smart all the time!), and again in 1971, when the US Gov finally ended inter-gov convertibility of $US for gold.

Listen. Why the hell can't all nations & all citizens go back to the time-honored convertibility of general welfare of the people for Public Initiative, aka FIAT?

Is there any other floating correlate that matters?

Evolution don't care about metallic or any other imagined peg for adaptive rate. Social evolution follows the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision-making. Get over it, Luddites & Libertarians, we're a social species, not independent hermits.

Tim Duy — Inflation Hysteria

They're baaaack.

Tim Duy's Fed Watch

Inflation Hysteria
Tim Duy

Sober Look — Rental home shortage is America's next housing crisis

Economists, politicians, and the media continue to focus on slow home sales as an indication of weak housing markets. But they are simply "fighting the last war". The looming crisis is not about how often homes change hands, but about the shortage of rentals and the rising cost of shelter that the new generations of Americans will increasingly face.

Sober Look

Rental home shortage is America's next housing crisis

Free will could be the result of 'background noise' in the brain, study suggests

Some interesting scientific findings being reported by brain researchers, story here at The Independent.

It has previously been suggested that our perceived ability to make autonomous choices is an illusion – and now scientists from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, have found that free will may actually be the result of electrical activity in the brain. 

According to the research, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, decisions could be predicted based on the pattern of brain activity immediately before a choice was made. 

Volunteers in the study were asked to sit in front of a screen and focus on its central point while their brains’ electrical activity was recorded.

With the left libertarians who are often caught up in pharma, I could see how their whole body electro-chemistry could be effected by the introduction of the chemicals directly into the body, but how can metals be looked at for the right libertarians who (usually) do not ingest the matter, but seem to be just effected by its physical presence or existence.

Could there be electro-magnetic effects of the metals on the brain functioning of the right libertarians which only requires proximity of an ungrounded conductor?

So it looks like there could be an electrical connection with the behaviors exhibited by the libertarians whose "will" seems to be one of constant rebellion against authority.

But based on this research outlined in the story, if the electrical functions of their brains was effected by the introduction of these two types of materials they are usually associated with, ie pharma and metals, it may not be a result of any of their "free will".

Merijn Knibbe — Oh my. Do DSGE economists really misunderstand the concept of ‘government consumption’?

Do DSGE economists really exclude ‘government consumption’ from their concept of household prosperity? Yes, they do.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Oh my. Do DSGE economists really misunderstand the concept of ‘government consumption’?
Merijn Knibbe

Peter Dorman — Net Savings and Trade: Krugman is Simply Wrong

I was going to let Paul Krugman’s aside about the trade deficit being “determined” by net national savingspass, but Dean Baker has unintentionally prodded me into action.

It’s actually worse than what Dean says. The sum of a country’s domestic budgets, private and public, is not “equal” to its current account (mostly trade) position; it is the current account position. The two are the same thing. It’s as if my team played your team and you won while we lost. Your victory didn't “determine” our defeat or vice versa: they are one and the same. It’s such a simple idea, but top flight economists like Krugman (who knows trade and open economy macro about as well as anyone on the planet) mess it up just as readily as my introductory students. I've wondered why this is, but it is. (You can read some speculation about why economists don’t distinguish between identity and equality here; see p. 169.)

EconoSpeak

Net Savings and Trade: Krugman is Simply Wrong
Peter Dorman

Lars P. Syll — Did Keynes accept the IS-LM model?

Six reasons why not.

Lars Syll's Blog
Did Keynes accept the IS-LM model?
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Wikipedia — Inverted totalitarianism

Inverted totalitarianism is a term coined by political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in 2003 to describe the emerging form of government of the United States. Wolin believes that the United States is increasingly turning into an illiberal democracy, and he uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to illustrate the similarities and differences between the United States governmental system and totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.[1][2][3][4] In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, inverted totalitarianism is described as a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics trumps politics.[5] In inverted totalitarianism, every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse and the citizenry are lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in their government by excess consumerism and sensationalism.

Contents
1 Inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy1.1 Managed democracy2 See also3 Notes4 References5 External links

See also
SuperpowerCorporatocracyNeoliberalismIlliberal democracyTotalitarian democracyAmericanism (ideology)Prison-industrial complex

Inverted totalitarianism
Wikipedia

Raging Bull-shit — The Global Corporatocracy Is Just A Pen Stroke Away From Completion

Quietly, subtly, almost imperceptibly, the rules governing global trade and financial markets are changing. It is not happening by accident, but by wilful design. And despite the enormous impact it will have on all our lives, the public is not being consulted on any aspects of the process. Indeed, most people are not even aware it is happening.

The main driver of this change are the bilateral and multilateral trade and investment treaties being negotiated in complete secrecy and behind closed doors between corporate lobbyists, free trade activists and our own elected “representatives” (a term I use in the loosest possible sense, especially given the context). The ultimate goal of these treaties is to reconfigure the legal apparatus and superstructures that govern national, regional and global trade and business – for the primary, if not exclusive, benefit of the world’s largest multinational corporations.

Corporations have long been powerful economic and political entities, but in recent decades some have grown to drawf even middling-sized national economies. According to a ranking published by Global Trends, 58 percent of the world’s biggest 150 economic entities in 2012 were corporations. They include oil, natural gas and mining majors, banks and insurance firms, telecommunications giants, supermarket behemoths, car manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.

Right now, the representatives of many of these firms are engaged in late-stage negotiations with the U.S. and European political leaders that would make it financially calamitous for a nation-state to take any actions against the interest of corporations. If passed — and at this rate, it almost certainly will be — it will be the biggest bilateral trade deal [read power grab] in the history of mankind.….

Anyone still wondering whether global capitalism is compatible with liberal democracy?

Based on the draft copy recently released by Wikileaks, the treaty seeks to (among many other things):

• “Lock in” the privatisations of services – even in cases where private service delivery has failed – meaning governments can never return water, energy, health, education or other services to public hands.
• Restrict a government’s right to regulate stronger standards in the public’s interest. For example, it will affect environmental regulations, licensing of health facilities and laboratories, waste disposal centres, power plants, school and university accreditation and broadcast licenses.
• Specifically limit the ability of governments to regulate the financial services industry at exactly the time when the global economy is still recovering from a crisis caused by financial deregulation. 

The trade treaties are not just about rewriting laws; they are also about enforcing them. As the author of Debt Generation, David Malone, explained in a recent talk on bilateral and multilateral trade agreements (essential viewing for anyone interested in the subject), what gives trade treaties such as TTIP and TISA their “claws and teeth” is the inclusion of an innocuous-sounding provision called the “investor-state dispute settlement”. This effectively allows private companies to sue entire nations if they feel that a law lost them money on their investment.

Read on. It gets worse.

Raging Bull-shit
The Global Corporatocracy Is Just A Pen Stroke Away From Completion
Don Quijones
cross posted at Naked Capitalism

See also Sunday Clip: “This is Not About Profit, It’s About Control”

Nafeez Ahmed — Ex-CIA Spy: The Open Source Revolution Is Coming and It Will Conquer the 1%

This is one of the most revolutionary posts I have ever encountered, especially at this level of military and intelligence credibility. Astonishing, really.

Alternet
Ex-CIA Spy: The Open Source Revolution Is Coming and It Will Conquer the 1%
Nafeez Ahmed

Merijn Knibbe — Piketty and the fixed-investment rate

Think using retained earnings for stock buybacks to increase the stock price and increasing CEO compensation instead of investing retained earnings productively in capital expansion, R&D, etc, or distributing it to shareholders.

Piketty's "capital" includes both real and financial wealth. The balance between real and financial is significant. Financial wealth can be growing substantially owing to change in valuation that is largely the result of rent seeking that adds nothing real, while real capital remains constant or even depreciates. It's a form  of looting a firm.

Almost no space has been devoted to looting as factor in increasing inequality, and rent seeking is only recently being appreciated, although it remains greatly under-appreciated.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Piketty and the fixed-investment rate
Merijn Knibbe

Mike the Mad Biologist — The Cost of Misunderstanding How Money Works: So Long Invertebrate House

Once again, it is essential to recognize that the federal government, which funds the National Zoo, can not run out of money since it issues dollars. If the absence of dollars is the only reason to close the Invertebrate House, then that is no reason at all. Mind you, there could be good reasons to do close it. You might think an Invertebrate House is stupid. Maybe you believe God sheds a tear every time an invertebrate zoologist gets her wings. And the notion that funding the Invertebrate House will lead to runaway inflation due to a wage spiral or a resource shortage is ridiculous, especially in light of the STEM glut.

Admittedly, compared to something like hunger or unemployment, the Invertebrate House isn’t tragic. But we use a supposed shortage of dollars to justify stinginess for those problems too.

Decades from now, people will wonder how we could be so utterly foolish and ignorant.

Mike the Mad Biologist

The Cost of Misunderstanding How Money Works: So Long Invertebrate House
(h/t Clonal in the comments)

I especially like his blog blurb.

Helping idiots who desperately need my assistance by calling them fucking morons since 2004

The Arthurian — Growth Modeling: The Asymptotic Decline of Output

Let's take this model that captures the pure impact that "savings = investment" has on the long run standard of living, let's take it and tweak it a tad. Let's NOT suppose there are no financial markets…. 

The assumption that financial markets exist has two effects on the Solow Growth Model: It makes growth slower and costs higher. The rate of growth is reduced, because productive investment is reduced. And productive sector costs increase, because income accrues to savings.
Growth is slower and costs are higher, because financial markets exist. Sounds like a stagflation problem, don't you think?. Lucky for us, this is only a model.

The New Arthurian Economics
Growth Modeling: The Asymptotic Decline of Output
The Arthurian

Pope Francis says he opposes making recreational drugs legal

Well he just antagonized the left-libertarians with this one.

Are you stoned? 

That's the message Pope Francis seemed to be sending lawmakers Friday, saying the growing worldwide trend toward legalizing recreational drugs is a very, very bad idea. 

"Drug addiction is an evil, and with evil there can be no yielding or compromise," he told participants at the International Drug Enforcement Conference in Rome.

Left libertarians are often advocates of such "recreational" drug use that Francis takes aim at here as much as you see the right libertarians get all excited about metals like gold and guns.