CapitalistImperialistPig

I'm not usually a big fan of Tom Friedman's column but he is so so right this morning: I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing. I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all. And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish settler as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did. Others have already r...

The culprit is debt. Financial crises occur because there is too much debt. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have looked at eight centuries of financial crises and find that the culprit is clear. This is almost as surprising as finding out that too much rain can cause floods, but its nice that some serious academic economists have gathered the data and done the arithmetic. Martin Wolf reviews their book in the Financial Times. As the authors note, “If there is one common theme to the vast range of crises we consider in this book, it is that excessive debt accumulation, whether it be by government, banks, corporations or consumers, often poses greater systemic risks than it seems [to do] during a boom”. Thanks Alan Greenspan and George Bush. A fourth lesson is that bad things go together. In a boom, property prices jump, current account deficits explode, fiscal receipts soar and governments borrow easily; then, in the slump, property prices tumble, the financial system implodes, cap...

Six decades before Columbus and Vasco da Gama, huge Chinese treasure fleets journeyed to India and Africa. Their ships dwarfed the European vessels in both size and numbers. It seems very unlikely that Europe could have prevailed against such fleets if ever they had met, but in one of the strange turns of fate on which whole empires depend, China withdrew from the seas, abandoned ship building, and forbade foreign trade. Why did they do it? The answer is probably not simple, but one aggravating factor was that due to turbulent successions and other problems, the Chinese throne lost much of its tax base - the rich had largely escaped taxation altogether. I wonder what lessons there are for the US in the blunders of the foolish emperor who tossed away China's world eminence and condemned it to centuries of relative backwardness and foreign domination. We have recently seen the damage one fool can do to our Nation and its place in the world. We are seeing today the continuing da...

Eric Morris at Freakonomics asks what people know about their gas mileage. Quick, how many of you can tell me: 1. Your cars’ fuel economy in miles per gallon or, even better, gallons per mile. 2. How much you drove in the last year. 3. The cost to fill your tank. 4. Your monthly and annual fuel expenditures. 5. How your cars’ fuel economy sits in relation to other cars in their classes. 6. What your fuel savings in gallons and dollars would be if you switched to a hybrid or other highly economical vehicle. The most economically salient questions are probably 4, 5, and 6, but I found the others easier. I check my mileage frequently (~26 mpg) and I know that 1/26 is close to 0.04. I know how far I drive in a year and I know how much I spent to fill my tank last time but it fluctuates a lot. The others require calculation. For most people, says Morris, fuel economy didn't even influence their purchase decisions. Well, it surely did influence mine, but hardly minutely. Even if I ...

As an experiment I added a ratings widget at the bottom of each post for those who would like to express their opinions even if they don't feel like writing a whole comment. Just click on what you consider a suitable score. One to five stars.

Steve Benen has Joe Tapper with this quote from Obama: President Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner last night, discussing false claims made about the health care reform bill, told a little anecdote. "I was up at the G20 -- just a little aside -- I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them," the president said. "One of the leaders -- I won't mention who it was -- he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind. "He says, 'Barack, explain to me this health care debate.' "He says, 'We don't understand it. You're trying to make sure everybody has health care and they're putting a Hitler mustache on you -- I don't -- that doesn't make sense to me. Explain that to me.'" That would be a good question for the Sunday idiots to ask their conservative guests.

Math is hard...............Barbie Doh!.............................Ken. Math is one of many things that seems harder as I get older. I am studying a rather easy math book, but lately am having a bit of trouble solving the problems. A field is a set of number like things that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided, with the result always being in the field [UPDATE: except division by zero is not allowed!]. The integers, for example, are not a field, since their ratios aren't always integers, but the rational numbers (positive and negative ratios of numbers, aka fractions) are. Additional infinite fields include the real and complex numbers. There are also finite fields, the simplest one consisting of just 0 and 1, with 1+1 defined to be = 0. (Arithmetic modulo two, or Z2). Doing our arithmetic mod 3, mod 5, or mod 7 also works, but not mod 4 (or 6, or 8, or 9...). The problem is that you can't have a field when you have zero divisors (e.g., 2 X 2 mod 4 = 0). Galois, be...