CapitalistImperialistPig

Professor Harari's latest is filled with those insights that I love and some of my critics disdain. Its subject is the remarkable decline in wars that we have seen in the last several decades and its causes and prospects. Wars of conquest have become remarkably rare, in fact so rare that in many places people cannot even imagine a major war between their country and one of its neighbors. This was essentially unknown in any other period of history. Why has this happened? Harari gives five major reasons. 1. Wars have become much more expensive, due to the vastly increased destructiveness of modern weapons. He especially singles out nuclear weapons, and adds that the physicists who invented it deserve another one of those ultimate Nobel Peace prizes like the one he awarded to Gorbachov. 2. Wars have become much less profitable. For most of history, wealth consisted mostly of material things like mines and control of other resources. I've been translating an article on ...

Paul Krugman performs the autopsy. It's a story familiar to anyone who has taught elementary physics - writng down equations doesn't help unless you know what you are applying them to, and how they relate to it. You also might want to read the comments on his original post.

Matthew Yglesias on Keynes in China : China is an extremely large country with over triple the population of the United States of America. It's also got a moderately corrupt government and a massive surge in infrastructure investment going on. Under the circumstances, there are doubtless dozens of ill-conceived projects under way on any given day. But I am astounded by the regularity with which things I see western observers denounce as examples of excess end up looking quite sensible. There is more, of course.

The Freshwater (anti-Keynesian) economics school has been batting in the low oughts ssince the start of the Great Recession. Now it seems that the Minneapolis Fed has shown a couple of them the door. Of course the bigs remain protected by tenure and Norwegian hardware. Details here.

The theme of my latest Harari lecture was the remarkable decrease in violence the world has seen in the last several decades. People today are more likely to die by suicide or in car accidents than from interpersonal or state violence. Several hundred years ago, about 400 of every 100,000 people would die by violence at the hands of others every year. Even in Detroit, the US murder capital, the figure today is about 50/100,000 and in Western Europe, Japan, and Australia it is only 1/100,000. The global average is 9/100,000 but most of those deaths are concentrated in a few violent regions. The huge decline has occurred in two categories: interpersonal violence and interstate violence (wars). The decline in interpersonal violence has come about as a result of increased state power. Large and well-equipped police forces suppress both violence and many of its provocations. Harari attributes the decrease in interstate violence largely to the historically unusually peaceful fall of...

It's easier than ever for a bright and motivated student to get a good education - without ever setting foot in a traditional bricks and mortar school. College may be getting less attractive for the students who don't meet those criteria. If so, that might explain why higher ed shows signs of crumbling, at least in the down market portion. Maybe And here Tyler Cowen: It is no surprise for many of these changes to start at the lower end of the market, just as the financial crisis started with subprime. Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Carrie Conko. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/the-great-reset-education-edition-hi-future.html#sthash.c5zerGzy.dpuf

Gross has a few riffs on the Pope's Apostolic Exhortation. Selected excerpts: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” I guess Pope Francis doesn’t watch Bloomberg TV. ... As I read this, I imagined a fresco depicting the economic section of the document. In the central panel, Sen. Elizabeth Warren whispers into the ear of the Pope as Mitt Romney and hedge fund managers are flayed. To one side, a group of union organizers rip up a copy of the Republican Party’s 2012 platform. In one corner, a pile of Apple iPads and Google glasses are torched in a bonfire. In another, makers, personified by the small, suited figure of Paul Ryan beg forgiveness from a gallery of takers, which include bedraggled peasants with the faces of Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky, and Che Guevara. And Alan Greenspan, clutching a copy of Atlas Shrugged, boils in a bath of molten gold. That last image...