Corey Robin — Sheldon Wolin, 1922-2015

More than a tribute to Sheldon Wolin.

Corey Robin
Sheldon Wolin, 1922-2015

Vasilis Trigkas — TTIP & TTP: A Race to the Bottom Not the Top

Instead of trade regionalism driven by security imperatives, the three big elephants in the room, the EU, the USA and China, should join forces and with a trilateral trade commission shape a vast economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The West along with China must put the welfare of the citizen above all other operations and co-decide the standards of future mass technologies and the path of humanity to a sustainable destiny.

China US Focus
TTIP & TTP: A Race to the Bottom Not the Top
Vasilis Trigkas | Onassis Scholar & research fellow at the institute for China-EU relations at Tsinghua University, non-resident WSD Handa fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS, advisor to the president of the Hellenic Foundation for Culture and a researcher at www.thinkinchina.asia – the leading community of young China experts in Beijing

Paul Grenier — Nikolai Starikov And The Problem Of History

Complains about Nikolai Starikov's abuse of history.

This raises the question of false equivalence., What he doesn't mention about US history is the entire American myth that is also based on a pack of outright lies, as well as misinformation through selection and embellishment. 

The American myth has been explored and exploded by Howard Zinn, in The People's History of the United States, for example. (PDF version,  read online version)

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People’s History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term, A People’s History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.

Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s iconic A People’s History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those. . . whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way American history is taught and remembered.

Under the aegis of Gov. Mitch Daniels, The People's History was banned from teaching history in Indiana since it brings up inconvenient facts about genocide, slavery and violence playing a key role in the development of the America as "the land of the freed and the home of the brave."

History is written by the victors.

This is not an isolated issue. The Chinese are trying to get Japan stop historical revisionism that excludes atrocities committed against Chinese by Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War and WWII, and Russia and China have also accused the US and NATO of historical revisionism with respect to WWII, minimizing the contribution of Russia in stopping the Nazi advance, which was the game-changer.

Russia is hardly the only country that has used an airbrush, and history is littered with false flags, some which have no doubt not yet been discovered, if they ever will.

After all, we are talking about folks who hold that "perception is reality" (Lee Atwater) and that perception can be shaped.

Irrusianality
Nikolai Starikov And The Problem Of History
Guest post by Paul Grenier

See also

Grasping Reality
Weekend Reading: Charlie Stross: 21st Century: A Complaint [really a satire — funny, but serious]
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

Roger Farmer — Demand Creates its Own Supply

I have been teaching basic Keynesian economics this week to my undergraduate class and I have just completed a new book manuscript with the working title of Prosperity for All, that will be coming soon to a book store near you. I am thus highly attuned to the debate over the connection between savings and investment.

That debate resurfaced with a vengeance this morning on Twitter when Noah Smith and Jo Michell, among others, engaged in a sometimes testy exchange on the role of the State in promoting investment. Since that debate is at the core of Keynesian economics, and since my class is prepping for Monday’s midterm, this seems like a great opportunity to enlighten readers of all varieties on what Jo and Noah were on about.…

Roger Farmer's Economic Window
Demand Creates its Own Supply
Roger Farmer | Distinguished Professor of Economics at UCLA

David S. Wilson and Dag O. Hessen — Bernie Sanders and His Critics Should Know Why Norway Is a Success—An unorthodox approach to understanding economic systems

Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders stated many times that America should emulate the Nordic model in terms of economic policy. Is this so unrealistic, as many critics point out? And what if we took a totally unorthodox approach to examining why Norway appears to be a success story? That is what biologists David Sloan Wilson and Norwegian Dag Hessen do in their essay titled “Blueprint for a Global Village”, which appeared with commentaries in the Evolution Institute’s Social Evolution Forum and is reprinted here. We think that both Bernie and his critics can learn a lot about good governance by approaching it from a multi-level evolutionary perspective.

Evonomics
Bernie Sanders and His Critics Should Know Why Norway Is a Success—An unorthodox approach to understanding economic systems

David Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University, and Dag Hessen, Professor of Biology at the University of Oslo

See also

David Sloan Wilson, "Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms" Series

This series is a must-read if you haven't yet.

Polina Aronson — Romantic regimes

Love in the West is consumerist – we choose a partner to give us what we think we need. But Russians do things differently.

Weekend reading. More on what it means to be "rational" and "irrational," and why rational choice theory's assumption a homogenous "human nature" is simplistic, reflected in different ways of choosing a mate.

Aeon Magazine
Romantic regimes
Polina Aronson, Russian Writer and a lecturer in sociology at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin

Zaid Jilani — Poll: More Democrats Now Favor Socialism Than Capitalism

Feel the Bern. The Overton window has shifted.

AlterNet
Poll: More Democrats Now Favor Socialism Than Capitalism
Zaid Jilani

Andrew Prokop — Good news for GOP elites: Trump's not winning Iowa anymore. Bad news: Ben Carson is.

The key to winning the Republican Iowa caucuses is winning the evangelical vote. Though evangelical or born-again Christians make up about a quarter of the state's population, they made up 57 percent of GOP caucus attendees in 2012 and 60 percent in 2008, according to entrance polls.…

For now, it appears they really like what they see in Carson. Selzer's poll finds that he's now drawing a third of evangelical support, the best of any candidate. And, far from hurting him, the various controversial statements he's made might even be helping him — more than 70 percent of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers liked his statements that Obamacare was the worst thing since slavery, that a Muslim maybe shouldn't be president, and that gun control helped lead to the Holocaust….

Evangelicals breaking for Carson.

Vox
Good news for GOP elites: Trump's not winning Iowa anymore. Bad news: Ben Carson is.

Andrew Prokop

Don Quijones — The “War on Cash” in 10 Spine-Chilling Quotes

You can't make this stuff up.

Citigroup’s Chief Economist Willem Buiter responds to the monetary economist Charles Goodhart’s description of abolishing currency as “shockingly illiberal.”

(T)his cost has to be seen against the cost that the anonymity of currency presents to society. Even though hard evidence is hard to come by, it is very likely that the underground economy and the criminal community are among the heaviest users of currency.

This, I believe, is the hidden intent behind all the excited talk about banning cash: to do away with the personal anonymity it offers.

Raging Bull-Shit
The “War on Cash” in 10 Spine-Chilling Quotes
Don Quijones
(Reposting of April 15, 2015 post at Wolf Street)

The Saker interviews Cynthia McKinney

An insider's view of the Deep State.

The Vineyard of the Saker
The Saker interviews Cynthia McKinney
The Saker

See also

Cynthia McKinney four part post on capitalism at RT

Don’t be fooled by “Inclusive Capitalism” It’s still a disaster!

American capitalism: A disaster with no ‘moral center’

Time to imagine: From ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a system of our own

'We need a vision of transformational change' - ex-US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney

She also mentions Seymour Hersh's The Sampson Option, and the works of her dissertation committee member, Dr. Peter Dale Scott,

Andrea Terzi — More Target2 divergence: This time is different

In conclusion, the QE liquidity largely goes to banks in the “core” and sits there. This also means that “core” banks are the ones most penalized by negative rates.

Money And The Real Economy
More Target2 divergence: This time is different
Andrea Terzi, Professor of Economics, Franklin College, Switzerland

Gordon M. Hahn — More Distortions of Russia’s Military Intervention

It is apparent that the U.S. media and its sponsors believe that the only way Russia can be outmaneuvered on the world stage is to lie. No longer does the West — including and perhaps in particular Washington — have the confidence that it can maintain leadership in the world based on the attractiveness of its way of life and a commitment to ‘not live by lies,’ as one great Russian writer and Soviet dissident once implored.

This is especially important because of who said it. Gordon Hahn's credentials are decidedly conservative. He is the coordinator of Russian Archives Research Projects at the Hoover Institution, for example. When you start losing people like him, that's a problem.

Russian And Eurasian Politics
More Distortions of Russia’s Military Intervention

Gordon M. Hahn, Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation. Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View, and Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California.

Hunter Maats — The Rational Case for Emotions

Perhaps, in our excitement over our technological progress, we have trained ourselves to worship a false idol. We have gone so far in the direction of being obsessed with technology, robotics, big data—the cold, calculated, and rational— that we have forgotten that the most valuable asset we have in solving human problems is, in fact, our humanity.

This is not a recent development. Since the time of Plato, the West has worshipped reason. It is the ability to think critically that separates man from the beasts. Reason allowed Plato to philosophize, Pythagoras to perform his mathematics, and Aristotle to explore the precursors to science. Reason was considered to be pure, unsullied by our animal instincts.

The natural implication, then, was that emotions were the enemy—base and dirty, coming from our most animal selves. Emotions like fear and shame could shatter the philosopher’s stoicism and turn him into a cringing wretch. Even celebrated emotions, such as love (be it romantic or filial), drew contempt for being “irrational.” With the Scientific Revolution, our reverence for reason has only grown. And today, we depend on computers and technology more than ever before, using them to reduce or eliminate what we call “human error.” Plato seems poised to emerge the victor.

There are myths in every field and this a one of the chief myths of philosophy. The ancients were not under the spell of reason as most people think. Rather, this occurred in Europe at the time of the rise of modern philosophy beginning especially with Descartes and the success of modern science.

Nor were modern philosophy and modern science as separate as some imagine either. Descartes is considered the originator of analytic geometry and Leibniz of the calculus, although Newton took it a step further. It is at this stage that reason began to be differentiated from passion in the way described above. Kant then writes a critique of "pure reason." Cognitive science reveals what the ancients realized. Reason and emotion are bound up and cannot be disentangled.

Ancient thought and the medieval thought that was based upon it were more nuanced about the relationship of reason and emotion than modern rationalism. In Republic Book IV, 426-435, Plato distinguished four "virtues" or excellences — prudence (φρόνησις, phronēsis), justice ((δικαιοσύνη, dikaiosynē)), temperance (σωφροσύνη, sōphrosynē), and fortitude (ἀνδρεία, andreia).

These are also found in the Bible.

The deuterocanonical book Wisdom of Solomon 8:7 reads, "She [Wisdom] teaches temperance, and prudence, and justice, and fortitude, which are such things as men can have nothing more profitable in life." Wikipedia

To these virtues, Saint Paul added the three theological virtues — faith, hope and love — Πίστις, Ἐλπίς καὶ Ἀγάπη (Pistis, Elpis, and Agape). Medieval Scholastic philosophy was founded on the four "cardinal virtues" of ancient Greek thought and the three Pauline "theological virtues."

The ancients and medievals held that there are two types of feeling, one associated with the "animal passion," which arises from the sense appetite. It was symbolized as the stomach and its virtue was temperance, which is the ability to socialize animal passions.

The second type of feeling was taken to be particularly human. It arises from the rational appetite, the perfection of which is unconditional altruistic love. It was symbolized by the chest, specifically "the heart." "The heart" in this sense is not the physical organ on the left side of the body, but the center between the breasts. It is where one points when one points to oneself. This is the seat of the self, so to speak, although self is non-localized.

Prudence or practical wisdom was symbolized as the head. Justice is the harmony and balance of these three in an integrated human being.

It was not until after the Scientific Revolution that this view changed to blaming the dichotomy between reason and emotion on Plato and the ancients. Nor were all moderns under its spell. William Blake excoriated it in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." However, there was a divide between rationalism and romanticism that opened into a chasm. "Thinking people" inhabited on side of academia, for example, and "feeling people" the other. This battle is still being fought in the halls of education.

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis criticized the modern Western conception of human nature as overlooking the rational appetite, conflating emotion with sense appetite as animal passion that reason must overcome.

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

This is a major flow at the heart of the contemporary conception of rationality that has infected many important areas of thought, including economics.

John Stuart Mill criticized the naïve approach to Utilitarianism on these grounds.

“It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.” — Utilitarianism

Evonomics
The Rational Case for Emotions

Hunter Maats

Chris Dillow — Markets need Marxism

All this poses the question. Why, then, haven't we seen state help to create what Robert Shiller has called financial democracy?

It's certainly not because of a commitment to laissez-faire: the massive implicit subsidy to banks tells us that the state is very happy to intervene in the financial system.

Instead, the answer was pointed out by Marx: the state serves the interests of capitalists, not the people. And financial capital would rather financial markets consisted of rent-seeking than of enhancing aggregate welfare. Crony capitalism has encouraged financialization (pdf), not financial democracy. 

In this sense, a well-functioning market economy requires that the state be freed from the grip of capitalists. In some respects it is capitalism that is the enemy of a market economy, and Marxism that is its friend.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Markets need MarxismChris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Yanis Varoufakis — Schäuble’s Gathering Storm

[French Economy Minister Emmanuel ] Macron is very different from [Italian Prime Minister Matteo] Renzi in both style and substance. A banker-turned-politician, he is President François Hollande’s only minister who combines a serious understanding of France’s and Europe’s macroeconomic challenges with a reputation in Germany as a reformer and skillful interlocutor. So when he speaks of an impending religious war in Europe, between the Calvinist German-dominated northeast and the largely Catholic periphery, it is time to take notice.…

Exasperated by Schäuble’s backtracking from his own plan for political union, Macron recently vented his frustration: “The Calvinists want to make others pay until the end of their life,” he complained. “They want reforms with no contributions toward any solidarity.”

Here we go again.

Replay of the Thirty Years War and Peace of Westphalia, which established the principle of national sovereignty as fundamental in international relations? (Russia and China are relying on Westphalia in their counter to unipolarism.)

If Yanis is correct, the euro is toast.

Nothing short of macroeconomically significant institutional reforms will stabilize Europe. And only a pan-European democratic alliance of citizens can generate the groundswell needed for such reforms to take root.

That's not in the offing given either current or foreseeable conditions. 

Project Syndicate
Schäuble’s Gathering Storm
Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard — Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from power

Constitutional crisis looms after anti-austerity Left is denied parliamentary prerogative to form a majority government.

Portugal has entered dangerous political waters. For the first time since the creation of Europe’s monetary union, a member state has taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking office on the grounds of national interest.

Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.

Greece gone exponential. Dictatorship descends on Portugal! Democracy in the EZ implodes.

Democracy must take second place to the higher imperative of euro rules and membership.

AEP summarizes:

Europe’s socialists face a dilemma. They are at last waking up to the unpleasant truth that monetary union is an authoritarian Right-wing enterprise that has slipped its democratic leash, yet if they act on this insight in any way they risk being prevented from taking power.

Brussels really has created a monster.

The term "authoritarian Right-wing enterprise" sounds like fascism or dangerously close to it.

The Telegraph
Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from power
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Brad DeLong — Must-Read: Marshall I. Steinbaum and Bernard A. Weisberger: Economics was Once Radical: Then It Decided Not to Be

Related factoid.

Until 1886 [John Bates] Clark was a Christian socialist reflecting the view of his German teachers that competition is no universal remedy – especially not for fixing wages. Wikipedia 

WCEG — The Equitablog

Must-Read: Marshall I. Steinbaum and Bernard A. Weisberger: Economics was Once Radical: Then It Decided Not to Be

Brad DeLong

Merijn Knibbe — Economics, concepts, language and the progress of science

"You can't tell the players without a scorecard."

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Economics, concepts, language and the progress of science

Merijn Knibbe

Joe out with a Platinum Coin Update

Joe provides the latest on the coin made from a metal NOT from column 11 of the Periodic Table and Yves/Lambert some context.

And as Lambert says, “Now the coin is in Brookings, the Inner Citadel!” Well, even if, as Joe Firestone points out, they can’t bring themselves to give it an intellectually honest treatment: “What’s their response? Marginalize it, of course!” But the fact that Brookings feels it has to address it at all is a form of progress.

And MMT has reached the scrambled eggs inside the craniums at the AEI we found out this week too. At least a couple of positive revelations this week.

Joe Firestone: The Platinum Coin Returns #NakedCapitalism https://t.co/Ihj40wxKd8

— peterc (@heteconomist) October 23, 2015

David Glasner — Keynes on the Theory of Interest

Criticism of Keynes on the Theory of Interest

Uneasy Money

Keynes on the Theory of Interest
David Glasner

My August 24 inteview on MyFoxNY telling people not to panic. Buy stocks. What a geat call!

Roger Farmer — A Bridge Too Far?

Closing in. Roger Farmer weighs the options and their consequences.

Roger Farmer's Economic Window
A Bridge Too Far?
Roger Farmer | Distinguished Professor of Economics at UCLA

Dirk Ehnts — Economists on the financial crisis – two competing views

Tear and compare.

econoblog 101
Economists on the financial crisis – two competing views
Dirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin

Andrew Lainton — ‘Thin Air’ and Economic Causality

Michael Pettis has a a long and interesting post which is effectively a critique of Steve Keen.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
‘Thin Air’ and Economic Causality
Andrew Lainton

Raúl Ilargi Meijer — Everything’s Deflating And Nobody Seems To Notice

Debt deflation taking hold globally. Get ready for the second leg down in the GFC.

With Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House, the US is not going to be able to get out of the way using fiscal.

The Automatic Earth
Everything’s Deflating And Nobody Seems To Notice

Raúl Ilargi Meijer

James Woods — Iceland sentences 26 bankers to a combined 74 years in prison

When Iceland’s President, Olafur Ragnar Grimmson was asked how the country managed to recover from the global financial disaster, he famously replied,

“We were wise enough not to follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies of the Western financial world in the last 30 years. We introduced currency controls, we let the banks fail, we provided support for the poor, and we didn’t introduce austerity measures like you’re seeing in Europe.”

US Uncut
Iceland sentences 26 bankers to a combined 74 years in prison
James Woods

Bill Mitchell — Neo-liberal myths constrain our understanding of poverty

I was on a panel last night discussing the causes of poverty in Australia. The panel was rather diverse with housing, welfare and other representatives. There was a crowd of around 400 I believe. The format was difficult given that the panel of six was assembled in line at a table so could not see each other easily. But the real problem was that the facilitator, a national journalist, who had the role of asking questions to the panellists, chose to assert the standard neo-liberal macroeconomic myths in response to statements I made with respect to the causes and solutions to poverty. I was confronted with as-if facts such as “they have to get the money from somewhere before they can spend” in response to questions about public debt eventually becoming too large and foreigners funding our national (currency-issuing) government. I thought a facilitator was not meant to have an agenda but in this case holding out these neo-liberal myths perpetuated the standard agenda which guarantees that poverty will continue to worsen. There is a lot of work to be done before people will identify these neo-liberal myths as non-knowledge and readily understand that national, currency-issuing governments such as in Australia have no financial constraints and they spend out of ‘thin air’. Once that knowledge is accepted a whole new world opens up that allows us to see the path to reducing poverty and inequality.

 "I thought a facilitator was not meant to have an agenda…" The person was not a facilitator but a gatekeeper. 

The correct question is whether the real resources are available for public purpose and if not, why not? 

No one has any difficulty with this regarding national security and projecting power, for example. Why is this different for creating a welfare state in which public purpose is viewed as the common good defined as a highly functional society with no dysfunctional aspects or sectors?

The simple answer is incorrect assumptions. The next question why these assumptions are wrong. Is it ignorance or narrow interest prevailing?

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Neo-liberal myths constrain our understanding of poverty
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

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Bearish YoY Results from Largest Iron Ore Miner

Interesting YoY data revealed here from the ore markets and a large Brazilian multi-national.

The Brazilian miner sold its iron-ore fines at an average $46.48 a wet metric ton, down from $68.02 a year earlier. 

Selling prices for nickel slumped 40 percent on the year, 

The more than 20 percent decline of the Brazilian real in the third quarter prompted a foreign exchange and swaps losses of $6.22 billion while the company also recorded a $530 million loss on the hedge of the bunker oil used to ship the ore.

Real has lost about 40% over the last year while iron ore is down about 30%, nickel down 40%.

For this firm, even though it seems they had some forex hedges on, they are still reporting losses of over $6B in the forex.  Maybe they thought higher policy rates in Brazil would support the currency while at the same time they were lowering the prices of their produce in USD terms thus fomenting the devaluation of their currency vs. USD.  If so might have cost them over $6B.

Top #ironore miner reports drop in quarterly earnings as prices slump https://t.co/AlMFWjax2z via @jpspinetto pic.twitter.com/JbpyQ1YI7U

— BN Commodities (@BNCommodities) October 22, 2015

It's gonna be Ryan at Speaker

Word coming in now is that we will get Ayn Rand boy, Paul Ryan, as Speaker of the House. He decided to go ahead after forcing his fellow Republican dogs to genuflect to him on everything. He's in. Ayn Rand must be celebrating, somewhere. Sociopath. Psychopath.