J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 307

I am genuinely confused here: Do we have an "eastern hear...

I am genuinely confused here: Do we have an "eastern heartland" problem? Or do we have a "prime age male joblessness" problem? Those two problems would seem to me to call for different kinds of responses. yet Summers, Glaeser, and Austin are smooshing them into one: Edward L. Glaeser, Lawrence H. Summers and Ben Austin: A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland: "In Flint, Mich., over 35 percent of prime-aged men���between 25 and 54���are not employed...

...In Charleston, W.Va., the joblessness rate for this group is 25 percent. These places represent some of the more extreme examples of what may be America���s largest and least understood social problem: the rise of prime-aged male joblessness, which has reached over 15 percent for most of the past decade from under 6 percent for all of the late 1960s....

The Eastern Heartland['s]... relative G.D.P. would have been more than 50 percent higher had it grown at the rate of America���s Coastal states....

The earned-income tax credit has been effectively promoting employment for over 40 years, but its design makes it poorly suited to fighting the ocean of male joblessness..."

And I am confused about the geography. Pennsylvania is not a coastal state. And I would assign Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa to the "eastern heartland"���i.e., the midwest plus the non-seaboard south���rather than to the "western heartland". And the "western heartland" seems to me to be Texas-Arizona-Colorado (40 million total, and Colorado is very different from the other two) plus a whole bunch of other places that are very different and add up to only half as many people.

Cass R. Sunstein: It Can Happen Here: "In They Thought Th...

Cass R. Sunstein: It Can Happen Here: "In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer decided to focus on ten people, different in many respects but with one characteristic in common: they had all been members of the Nazi Party. Eventually they agreed to talk, accepting his explanation that he hoped to enable the people of his nation to have a better understanding of Germany. Mayer was truthful about that and about nearly everything else. But he did not tell them that he was a Jew...

...In the late 1930s���the period that most interested Mayer���his subjects were working as a janitor, a soldier, a cabinetmaker, an office manager, a baker, a bill collector, an inspector, a high school teacher, and a police officer. One had been a high school student. All were male. None of them occupied positions of leadership or influence. All of them referred to themselves as ���wir kleine Leute, we little people.��� They lived in Marburg, a university town on the river Lahn, not far from Frankfurt.... When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt ���that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man,��� and that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not ���by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.��� Many Germans ���wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.���... Mayer���s subjects ���did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now.��� Seven years after the war, they looked back on the period from 1933 to 1939 as the best time of their lives....

Even in retrospect Mayer���s subjects liked and admired Hitler. They saw him as someone who had ���a feeling for masses of people��� and spoke directly in opposition to the Versailles Treaty, to unemployment���to all aspects of the existing order. They applauded Hitler for his rejection of ���the whole pack���������all the parliamentary politicians and all the parliamentary parties������and for his ���cleanup of moral degenerates.��� The bank clerk described Hitler as ���a spellbinder, a natural orator. I think he was carried away from truth, even from truth, by his passion. Even so, he always believed what he said.���... The killing of six million Jews? Fake news. Four of Mayer���s subjects insisted that the only Jews taken to concentration camps were traitors to Germany, and that the rest were permitted to leave with their property or its fair market value. The bill collector agreed that the killing of the Jews ���was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did.��� He added that ���some say it happened and some say it didn���t,��� and that you ���can show me pictures of skulls��� but that doesn���t prove it.��� In any case, ���Hitler had nothing to do with it.��� The tailor spoke similarly: ���If it happened, it was wrong. But I don���t believe it happened.���...

Focusing largely on 1933, in Defying Hitler Haffner offers a radically different picture, in which the true nature of Nazism was evident to many Germans from the start.... Terror began quickly, as members of the SS made their presence felt, intimidating people in public places. At the same time, citizens were distracted by an endless stream of festivities and celebrations. The intimidation, accompanied by the fervent, orchestrated pro-Nazi activity, produced an increase in fear, which led many skeptics to become Nazis. Nonetheless, people flirted, enjoyed romances, ���went to the cinema, had a meal in a small wine bar, drank Chianti, and went dancing together.��� Sounding here like Mayer���s subjects, Haffner writes that it was the ���automatic continuation of ordinary life��� that ���hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horror.���... In Haffner���s telling, the collapse of freedom and the rule of law occurred in increments, some of which seemed to be relatively small and insignificant....

Jarausch���s topic is a century... more than seventy personal memoirs produced by Germans who were mostly born in the 1920s. His aim is to produce a ���vivid and personal picture of what it meant to live through the twentieth century,��� rooted in the perspectives of people who were born after the carnage of World War I, and who generally enjoyed happy and even carefree childhoods in the Weimar Republic. It���s a wide-ranging, panoramic, revealing treatment, and for the most part, it���s very dark.... For those who seek to understand the German experience in the twentieth century, Jarausch has done a tremendous service. He paints on a much broader canvas than Mayer and Haffner....

All three authors are keenly aware that their narratives offer important lessons, and these should not be lost on contemporary readers.... The Nazis applied the term L��genpresse (lying press) to the mainstream press; President Trump refers to the ���FAKE NEWS media,��� which, he says, ���is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!��� In significant domains (including climate change), his administration denigrates science; he has even failed to fill the position of White House science adviser. The Nazis also dismissed or politicized science (especially Einstein���s ���Jewish Science���) in favor of what they claimed to be the spirit of the Volk. If the president of the United States is constantly lying, complaining that the independent press is responsible for fake news, calling for the withdrawal of licenses from television networks, publicly demanding jail sentences for political opponents, undermining the authority of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, magnifying social divisions, delegitimizing critics as ���crooked��� or ���failing,��� and even refusing, in violation of the law, to protect young children against the risks associated with lead paint....

Mayer, Haffner, and Jarausch show how habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness make terrible things possible. They call attention to the importance of individual actions of conscience both small and large, by people who never make it into the history books. Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: ���Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks���no form of government can render us secure.��� Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in ���decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.���

#shouldread

Would faster productivity growth raise wage growth? That ...

Would faster productivity growth raise wage growth? That is, would other things stay not equal but at least not become more adverse? Probably: Anna Stansbury and Lawrence H. Summer: Productivity and Pay: Is the Link Broken?: "Since 1973 median compensation in the United States has diverged starkly from average labor productivity...

...Since 2000, average compensation has also begun to diverge from labor productivity. These divergences lead to the ques- tion: Holding all else equal, to what extent does productivity growth translate into compensation growth for typical American workers? We investigate this, regressing median, average, and production/nonsupervisory compensation growth on productivity growth in various specifications. We find substantial evidence of linkage between produc- tivity and compensation: Over 1973���2016, one percentage point higher productivity growth has been associated with 0.7 to 1 percentage points higher median and average compensation growth and with 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points higher production/nonsupervisory compensation growth. These results suggest that other factors orthogonal to productivity have been acting to suppress typical compensation even as productivity growth has been acting to raise it. Several theories of the cause of this productivity-compensation divergence focus on technological progress. These theories have a testable implication: Periods of higher productivity growth should be associated with periods of faster productivity-pay divergence. Testing this over the postwar period in the United States, we do not find substantial evidence of co-movement between productivity growth and either the labor share or the mean/median compensation ratio. This tends to militate against pure technology-based theories of the productivity-compensation divergence. Together these results suggest that faster future productivity growth is likely to boost median and average compensation growth close to one-for-one...

#shouldread

Tom Sugrue: "Geoffrey Kabaservice, whose scholarship on m...

Tom Sugrue: "Geoffrey Kabaservice, whose scholarship on moderate Republicanism and internal GOP debates is excellent,: "has launched a sharp critique of histories of conservatism in Politico.... He... falls prey to the crudest identitarian assumptions about who is and isn't a legitimate narrator...

...(Time to fold your tents medievalists, white historians of slavery, millennials who write about the 1960s, scholars of the French revolution, et al.)... Who is @RuleandRuin to say that we historians of modern conservatism have not experienced it (is that true for anyone alive for the last half century?) or don't have friends or family members who are on the right (many in my case) and right-wing colleagues (yep, several)?[But] I'm not just name-dropping obscure scholars here: these historians���and many more���have completely transformed our understanding of the history of modern America. Few of them are polemicists and I would bet that, like me, many of them actually know some conservatives....

.@NancyMacLean, a nemesis of Kabaservice... collaborated on a history of conservatism with none other than Donald Critchlow, a man of the right who wrote an admiring bio of #PhyllisSchlafly. I am left-of-center and have used Critchlow's work with great success. Heck, I have even assigned William Rusher. I make my students read Barry Goldwater. Conscience of a Conservative. Why? Because we have to understand.... As someone who recently co-wrote on the history of modern America (These United States), I took the right seriously and wrote about it in some depth, drawing from scholars as diverse as MacLean and Kabaservice himself. This is not an impoverished subfield, stunted by bias, distortion, and oversight. I have arguments with many of these scholars���and they often argue with each other. But to charge ostensibly liberal historians of the right with ignorance displays Kabaservice's ignorance....

#shouldread

The rise of the factory���shift from home production to p...

The rise of the factory���shift from home production to production under the eye of a boss, at a workplace���was underway, long before mechanization, in numeric calculation as well as in craft piecework: Lorraine Daston (2017): Calculation and the Division Of Labor, 1750-1950: "On an August morning in 1838, the seventeen-year-old Edwin Dunkin and his brother...

...began work as computers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, under the directorship of Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy:

We were at our posts at 8 a.m. to the moment. I had not been many minutes seated on a high chair before a roomy desk placed on a table in the centre of the Octagon Room, when a huge book was placed before me, very different indeed to what I had anticipated. This large folio book of printed forms, was specially arranged for the calculation of the tabular right ascension and north polar distance of the planet Mercury from Lindenau���s Tables.... After very little instruction from Mr. Thomas, the principal computer in charge, I began to make my first entries with a slow and tremulous hand, doubting whether what I was doing was correct or not. But aft er a little quiet study of the examples given in the Tables, all this nervousness soon vanished, and before 8 pm came, when my day���s work was over, some of the older computers complimented me on the successful progress I had made...

Two boys sent out to support their widowed mother, the high chair and the huge ledger, the twelve hours of eye-straining, handcramping calculation (alleviated only by an hour���s dinner break), the standardized printed forms that divided computation into steps like the manufacture of pins���it could be a vignette from Dickens, and both Airy and his predecessor in the office, John Pond, have been cast by contemporaries and historians alike in the roles of Bounderby or Scrooge.

But the reality of massive calculation of the sort that went on in astronomical observatories since at least the medieval period in parts of Asia and in Europe since the sixteenth century (and since the nineteenth century in insurance offices and government statistical offices) was considerably more varied ��� as varied as the nature of work itself in different historical and cultural contexts. The only constant was that calculations on the large scale needed to reduce astronomical observations, compute life expectancies, and tally statistics on everything from crime to trade was indeed work: the first Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed, appointed in 1670, called it ���labour harder than thrashing.��� Before and even after the invention and diffusion of reliable calculating machines, the challenge to astronomers and other heavy-duty number crunchers was how to organize the work of deploying many algorithms, over and over again. These combined experiments in labor organization and algorithmic manipulation ultimately transformed both human labor and algorithms.

Let us return to young Edwin Dunkin perched on his high chair in the Octagon Room of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Edwin���s father William Dunkin had also been a ���computer������a word that until the mid-twentieth century referred primarily to human beings, not machines���and had worked for Airy���s predecessors, Astronomers Royal Nevil Maskelyne and John Pond, to calculate tables for the Nautical Almanac, a navigational tool for the globalized British navy that had been produced under the direction of the Astronomer Royal since 1767.

Unable to supply the labor necessary to compute the Almanac���s numerous tables from the Greenwich Observatory���s own resources, Maskelyne organized a network of paid computers throughout Britain to perform the thousands of calculations according to a set of ���precepts��� or algorithms, to be entered on pre-printed
forms that divided up calculations (and indicated which values had to be looked up when from which one of fourteen different books of tables) into a step-by-step but by no means mechanical process. What is noteworthy about Maskelyne���s operation (which involved a computer, anti-computer, and comparer to check each month���s set of calculations) was its integration into an established system of piecework labor done in the home and often involving other family members. Each computer completed a whole month���s worth of lunar
position or tide prediction calculations according to algorithms bundled like the patterns sent to cottage weavers to produce finished textile wares.

Just as the mid-eighteenth-century manufacturing system, in which many workers were gathered together under one roof and subjected to close managerial supervision, began to replace the family textile workshop long before the introduction of steam-driven looms, so the development of Big Calculation traced a parallel arc a good half-century before algorithms were calculated by machines. The careers of William and Edwin Dunkin, father and son computers in the service of the British Astronomers Royal, span the transition between piecework and manufacturing���but not yet mechanized���systems of labor organization...

#shouldread
#economichistory
#riseofgtehrobots

Theodore Nash: Creta Capta: Late Minoan II Knossos in Mycenaean History: Weekend Reading

Following up on: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/07/ancient-technologies-of-organization-and-mental-domination-clerks-linear-b-and-the-potnia-of-athens.html: Theodore Nash: Creta Capta: Late Minoan II Knossos in Mycenaean History: "The revolutionary changes on mainland Greece in LH IIB-IIIA which saw the leap from Prepalatial to Palatial society were the result of the Mycenaean presence at LM II Knossos...

...Strong Minoan cultural and cultic influence on the new Mycenaean lords... the Knossos Throne Room... as a locus for that transition of Minoan cultic elements to the Mycenaeans... the blueprint for the megaron, which spread to the mainland as a result of the adoption of the ������������ into Mycenaean culture. At Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos, the megaron was... the location of a legitimising ritual for the ������������ just the same as the Throne Room was at Knossos.... LM II Knossos... it was only there that the Linear B script could have been developed.... Linear B... was devised as a response to the manifest problem of administering the palatial territories of Knossos.... By contextualising LM II as a period of Mycenaean history, many of the questions about the origins of the Mycenaean palaces can be answered. Old, teleological readings for indigenous development should be considered with a great deal of circumspection, as it has been argued here that the origins of the active processes by which the megaron, ������������, and Linear B entered Mycenaean society can now be situated at LM II Knossos. With apologies to Horace (Ep. 2.1.56): "Creta capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes intulit agresti Graecia"...

Ancient Technologies of Organization and Mental Domination, Clerks, Linear B, and the Potnia of Athens

SOMETIMES I LOVE THE INTERNET SO MUCH!:

@e_pe_me_ri: I still can't believe I got away with this footnote:

Now I want to read the article this footnote is drawn from...

@e-pe-me-ri: You can! (Though I can't promise that the rest is quite so pithy): https://www.academia.edu/34570648/Creta_Capta_Late_Minoan_II_Knossos_in_Mycenaean_History

So your theory is that a bunch of telestai from the Peloponnesos wind up ruling Knossos, and there adopt and develop organizational technologies: clerks and Linear B; one of their number, the wanax, as specially favored of the Potnia; and the Megaron. Then they bring all of these back to Akhaia, where they turn out to be extraordinarily effective in concentrating wealth and power. And then we are off and running, toward Agamemnon, King of Men; the unpleasantness at Wilusa with Alexandru; and everything else?

Seems highly plausible, but whaddooino?

@e_pe_me_ri: That's it! Too often, I think, we consider palatial society on the mainland inevitable; I wanted to contextualize its development better.

But what happened to the Potnia of Pylos? And of Argos? And of Mykenai? And of Thebes? Why only Lady Athena survives to join the pantheon?

@e_pe_me_ri: Good question! There probably wasn't a *pu-ro-jo po-ti-ni-ja, just because we'd expect to have some record of her in the Pylos tablets. As for the others, we can't know if they ever existed. Certainly for Mycenae and Argos syncretism with Hera might be considered probable.This is an area of huge doubt, so the only honest answers are "we don't know" and "this is possible."

"Syncretism with Hera..." touch��... And somehow the Potnia of Ithaka gets syncretized with Athene Potnia comprehensively...

But there definitely was a *pu-rojo wa-na-ka... Where did his special authority then come from? I mean, doesn't Thucydides Herodotos tell us that Peisistratos was still enacting something that looks like a blessing-by-the-Potnia-of-Athens ceremony in mid-6th century BC?

@e_pe_me_ri: Here's where it gets tricky: there's a lot we don't know about the goddess Potnia, including whether she's one or many goddesses. If one, she's one with many aspects (a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja = "Our Lady of" Athens). Otherwise there are many (a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja = Athena).

With Goddesses... "one" or "many" gets complicated. Roman: "This temple on Capitol Hill is the shrine of Jupiter, his wife Juno, and the Lady who protects our city, Minerv..."

Athenian: "Oh, the Lady protects our city too. But 'Athena' doesn't have to share a temple. Zeus Pateras���that's what you said right? It didn't quite catch it���and his consort have their own temples too..."

@e_pe_me_ri: But it does seem clear that there is an undifferentiated po-ti-ni-ja, either an individual goddess or aspect. And it's this "Potnia" that I argue is the one linked with the wanax-not a local version or aspect. So we don't need a *pu-ro-jo po-ti-ni-ja at Pylos, *mu-ka-na po-ti-ni-ja at Mycenae, etc., just one "Potnia."

The big question, then, is why she doesn't survive-the tablets attest her significance. My theory: too closely linked with palaces. So when the palatial system collapsed, "Potnia" disappeared; maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but certainly by Homer.

Interesting... Peisistratos... is there any other patron goddess-king relationship anywhere in classical literature like Athene-Odysseus?

@britishmuseum: Athens was named after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Her symbol was an owl and was used on coins for over 300 years!

@e-pe-me-ri: RThe Linear B evidence suggests that it's the other way around-Athena was named after Athens. I explored the evidence for this here: https://twitter.com/e_pe_me_ri/status.... Word of the day: a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja = ������������� ��������������, to the ������������ of �����������. This is often taken as a reference to Athena:

@Nakhthor: How does as local a deity as that achieve proto-pan-Hellenic currency?

@PhiloCrocodile: We can model it out on comparative data, surely? Personally I think in Athena's case 1) Athens status as being unconq'd in LBAIII and 2) (possible) point of dispersal for immigrants unto e.g Anatolia and 3) fame as a cultic focal point. Plus 4) Athena great candidate for syncretism throughout antiquity anyway.

@e_pe_me_ri: This is one of the problems with the theory, but I think @PhiloCrocodile is mostly right. In LB, she's only attested once, so not yet of Panhellenic importance (we never see her at Pylos, despite some pretty extensive records of the gods). But by LH IIIB Athens is clearly the leading centre in Attica, so that could start to explain the spread of her worship. (If we had Linear B from Athens, I suspect this would all be much more clear, but that's an impossible dream.)

Was Athens big enough then for its wanax to feel the need to hire a Linear B scribe?

@CoeurDeCresson: Palace of merchant-prince on the Acropolis, apparently. So as the place got total reconstruction on several occasions, finding #LinB unlikely...

Maynard Handley said: I think this sort of theorizing about ancient religion is too much based on current monotheic religion which has a very strong us vs them (gods are VERY different from humans) post ~100CE or so vibe. The right way (IMHO) to think of ancient religion (and much of lived medieval European religion vis a vis saints) is that gods played the same role as celebrities in our time. They bigger, better, more outrageous than us. Some of us are lucky enough to be their hairdressers and pool cleaners, a few more maybe saw them one time on the street walking down Rodeo Drive, ad the rest of us have to make do with photos and whatever gossip is being reported right now.

Celebrities are not expected to be especially rational or moral, or to carve up control of the universe in some scientific fashion. Sure, if you're interested in adopting kids Angelina Jolie is probably your go-to-girl, whereas if you're about famine somewhere-or-other Bono is your guy; but there are not precise lines of delineation. And if you want to be that guy, the school weirdo that no-one else understands, you can adopt Baudelaire, or Byron, as your totem.

Point is, within this context, the fluidity of ancient religion should make much more sense. You get a few stars, like Marilyn, who manage to persist for more than a generation, but there's a constant stream of new celebs. Most of them scratch only a temporary itch, they don't have the it-factor that has them persisting as a lived presence across generations -- but some do...

Kaleberg said: A good book on this is The Gods of Olympus which tells the story of the Greek gods from early ancient times through the Renaissance and into the modern era. As MH notes here, the gods were celebrities. They had temples and festivals, and they were associated with particular areas - think product endorsements. A good pageant retelling some the god or goddess's story made for big business, so it was worth cultivating the divinity's popularity and, now and then, when it made marketing sense, to add a bit here and there to the canon.

Roman Catholicism preserves a bit of this with its saints who have been adopted by cities, nations, professions and causes. Their stories grow and change to fit society's needs. We know Athena in the pre-Roman era mainly through the writers of Athens. Athens had a patron saint / celebrity back when it was a goatherd's hut on a hill with a fishing cove below. When the city turned into a regional power, Athena was powered up as well. Gods and goddesses don't have much of an existence without their worshipers and fans, as gods and goddesses have known through the ages.###

#history
#shouldread

Self-Locating Belief and the Sleeping Beauty Problem Once Again...

Note to Self: Apropos of the Sleeping Beauty Problem: Adam Elga: Self-Locating Belief and the Sleeping Beauty Problem...

There are three �� here:

��1: a parameter of nature that describes the probability that the coin, when tossed, will come up heads: ��1 = 1/2
��2: a number that Sleeping Beauty should keep in mind when deciding at what odds to bet that the coin came up heads if she wants to make money: ��1 = 1/3
��3: a number that Sleeping Beauty should tell a third party who asks her: "I'm going to make one and only one bet this week as to how this coin came out. What number should I have in mind in deciding at what odds to take heads if I want to make money?": ��3 = 1/2

Which of these ��1, ��2, ��3 is the "right" answer Sleeping Beauty should give?

#shouldread
#cognitivescience

Resources on the Kinds of Uses of Math I Am Trying to Use in Econ 101b This Fall...

Street-Fighting Mathematics and Other Tools

Sanjoy Mahajan: Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving

George P��lya: How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1400828678

George P��lya: Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0691025096

George P��lya: Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Patterns of Plausible Inference https://books.google.com/books?isbn=069102510X
Paul Zeitz: _The Art and Craft of Problem Solving https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1118916662

Tools: Uses of Mathematics in Economics

Macro Textbook Chapter 3: Thinking Like an Economist

How to Think Like an Economist (If, That Is, You Wish to...)

Optional Teaching Topic: How to Think Like an Economist... (Provided, That Is, You Wish to...) (Pre-Class? Mid-Class?)

This File: http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_economics/street-fighting-math.html

Friedrich Engels (1843): Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: Weekend Reading

Friedrich Engels (1843): Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: "The eighteenth century, the century of revolution, also revolutionised economics. But... all the revolutions of this century were one-sided and bogged down in antitheses...

...It did not occur to economics to question the validity of private property. Therefore, the new economics was only half an advance.... It withdrew its favour from the producers and bestowed it on the consumers. It affected a solemn abhorrence of the bloody terror of the Mercantile System, and proclaimed trade to be a bond of friendship and union among nations as among individuals. All was pure splendour and magnificence���yet the premises reasserted themselves soon enough... struck down all those beautiful phrases about philanthropy and world citizenship. The premises begot and reared the factory system and modern slavery, which yields nothing in inhumanity and cruelty to ancient slavery. Modern economics���the system of free trade based on Adam Smith���s Wealth of Nations���reveals itself to be that same hypocrisy, inconsistency and immorality which now confront free humanity in every sphere.

But was Smith���s system, then, not an advance? Of course it was, and a necessary advance at that. It was necessary to overthrow the mercantile system with its monopolies and hindrances to trade, so that the true consequences of private property could come to light.... We gladly concede that it is only the justification and accomplishment of free trade that has enabled us to go beyond the economics of private property; but we must at the same time have the right to expose the utter theoretical and practical nullity of this free trade. The nearer to our time the economists whom we have to judge, the more severe must our judgment become. For while Smith and Malthus found only scattered fragments, the modern economists had the whole system complete before them: the consequences had all been drawn; the contradictions came clearly enough to light; yet they did not come to examining the premises, and still accepted the responsibility for the whole system. The nearer the economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty. With every advance of time, sophistry necessarily increases, so as to prevent economics from lagging behind the times. This is why Ricardo, for instance, is more guilty than Adam Smith, and McCulloch and Mill more guilty than Ricardo...

#shouldread

Weekend Reading: Sanjoy Mahajan: Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving

Highly Recommended: Sanjoy Mahajan: Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving: "Too much mathematical rigor teaches rigor mortis:the fear of making an unjustified leap even when it lands on a correct result...

.... Instead of paralysis, have courage���shoot first and ask questions later. Although unwise as public policy, it is a valuable problem-solving philosophy, and it is the theme of this book: how to guess answers without a proof or an exact calculation.

Educated guessing and opportunistic problem solving require a toolbox. A tool, to paraphrase George Polya, is a trick I use twice. This book builds, sharpens, and demonstrates tools useful across diverse fields of human knowledge. The diverse examples help separate the tool���the general principle���from the particular applications, so that you can grasp and transfer the tool to problems of particular interest to you. The examples used to teach the tools include guessing integrals without integrating, refuting a common argument in the media, extracting physical properties from nonlinear differential equations, estimating drag forces without solving the Navier���Stokes equations, finding the shortest path that bisects a triangle, guessing bond angles, and summing infinite series whose every term is unknown and transcendental.

This book complements works such as How to Solve It[37], Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning[35, 36], and The Art and Craft of Problem Solving[49]. They teach how to solve exactly stated problems exactly, whereas life often hands us partly defined problems needing only moderately accurate solutions. A calculation accurate only to a factor of may show that a proposed bridge would never be built or a circuit could never work. The effort saved by not doing the precise analysis can be spent inventing promising new designs.

This book grew out of a short course of the same name that I taught for several years at MIT. The students varied widely in experience: from first-year undergraduates to graduate students ready for careers in research and teaching. The students also varied widely in specialization: from physics, mathematics, and management to electrical engineering, computer science, and biology. Despite or because of the diversity, the students seemed to benefit from the set of tools and to enjoy the diversity of illustrations and applications. I wish the same for you.

#shouldread
#books