CapitalistImperialistPig

Status: In Lisboa.  First time.  In Europe for first time in many years. Profound Insights: Europeans all look alike, though I was able to guess the ethnicity of the three English ladies, even though I couldn't understand their language. Profound Insecurities:  Europeans dress better than us, or at least the locals do.  Though the other tourists mostly looked pretty relaxed too. Television News:  I can't really follow it, but the economic news doesn't sound great.

Paul Krugman charges a German/Brussels windmill . What happened to Spain was a housing bubble — fueled, to an important degree, by lending from German banks — that burst, taking the economy down with it. Now the country has 23.6 percent unemployment, 50.5 percent among the young. And the policy response is supposed to be even more austerity, with the European Central Bank, natch, obsessing over inflation — and officials claiming that the incredibly foolish rate hike last year was actually something to be proud of. I’m really starting to think that we’re heading for a crackup of the whole system. See link for relevant numbers.

A friend, who was planning to be out of town, wanted to leave the following message for the housekeeper: If you have time, could you clean the back patio. It's not necessary to wash the sheets this week. Since the housekeeper had limited English, she decided to leave the message in Spanish, which, with a bit of help from Google Translate became: Si tienes tiempo, podria limpiar el patio trasero. No es necesario [lavar*] las hojas de esta semana. Not sure what the housekeeper made of this, but Google put it back into English as: If you have time, could you clean the back yard? It is not necessary to wash the leaves this week. *Add per comments

I have a new IOS device with a "retina" output display. Unfortunately, my retinas seem to lack an equally capable input.

Spain has a problem. It imports more stuff than it exports and is having trouble paying its bills. Its wages and prices are too high for its productivity. Brussels prescribes austerity, which is supposed to force down wages and prices of Spanish production. Perhaps it eventually might,but in the meantime employment has collapsed - half of workers under twenty-five are unemployed - and the economy is collapsing. As Paul Krugman frequently tells us, wages and prices are sticky. If Spain had its own currency, it would devalue the peseta, and everyone would be poorer, but the economy would be far better off. The hazards of the Euro trap were correctly understood by many economist from the beginning, but they were ignored. Probably this is an example of the kind of self-delusion in human affairs that I have argued about in the past. The central tragedy is that the collapse of the economy leaves the country less and less able to pay. Can Europe afford to bail out Spain? Will it try? ...

A fundamental challenge of human nature is that our fellow humans are not only our primary evolutionary competitors but also essential for our survival. This tension probably has a lot to do with our instincts about morality and behavior. Most of the time, we need to do some social calculations concerning whom is with us and whom is against: "us" and "them". It's complicated because those boundaries shift a lot. My guess is that our moral instincts are mostly about how we manage those calculations.

We humans have an analytical side. We like to break things into more elementary parts and see what we can build out of them. The atomic theory of matter seems to have been conceived at least 2500 years before it achieved real success, but that success is now overwhelming. The crucial detail was getting the atoms right. Earth, air, fire and water were a cute attempt, but they didn’t work out. Jonathan Haidt has sought for the atoms that constitute our moral intuitions, as he calls them, and builds his characters out of some that he thinks he has found in The Righteous Mind. As with matter, the strategy would seem to make sense. He makes a good case that our moral and political opinions are indeed built on a foundation of moral intuitions – I would probably call them instincts – beyond the normal reach of logic. So if I accept that step of his logic, my next question is what do I think of his atoms? It’s hard to criticize his approach. He and colleagues travelled the world, ...