Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[y66]

From Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? by John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

 

In 1930, the English economist John Maynard Keynes took a break from writing about the problems of the interwar economy and indulged in a bit of futurology. In an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he speculated that by the year 2030 capital investment and technological progress would have raised living standards as much as eightfold, creating a society so rich that people would work as little as fifteen hours a week, devoting the rest of their time to leisure and other “non-economic purposes.” As striving for greater affluence faded, he predicted, “the love of money as a possession . . . will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.”

 

This transformation hasn’t taken place yet, and most economic policymakers remain committed to maximizing the rate of economic growth. But Keynes’s predictions weren’t entirely off base. After a century in which G.D.P. per person has gone up more than sixfold in the United States, a vigorous debate has arisen about the feasibility and wisdom of creating and consuming ever more stuff, year after year. On the left, increasing alarm about climate change and other environmental threats has given birth to the “degrowth” movement, which calls on advanced countries to embrace zero or even negative G.D.P. growth. “The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we damage the environment,” Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, writes in his manifesto, “Degrowth.” “There is no way to both have your cake and eat it, here. If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down.” In “Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities,” Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian environmental scientist, complains that economists haven’t grasped “the synergistic functioning of civilization and the biosphere,” yet they “maintain a monopoly on supplying their physically impossible narratives of continuing growth that guide decisions made by national governments and companies.”

 

Once confined to the margins, the ecological critique of economic growth has gained widespread attention. At a United Nations climate-change summit in September, the teen-age Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg declared, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” The degrowth movement has its own academic journals and conferences. Some of its adherents favor dismantling the entirety of global capitalism, not just the fossil-fuel industry. Others envisage “post-growth capitalism,” in which production for profit would continue, but the economy would be reorganized along very different lines. In the influential book “Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow,” Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, in England, calls on Western countries to shift their economies from mass-market production to local services—such as nursing, teaching, and handicrafts—that could be less resource-intensive. Jackson doesn’t underestimate the scale of the changes, in social values as well as in production patterns, that such a transformation would entail, but he sounds an optimistic note: “People can flourish without endlessly accumulating more stuff. Another world is possible.”

 

Even within mainstream economics, the growth orthodoxy is being challenged, and not merely because of a heightened awareness of environmental perils. In “Good Economics for Hard Times,” two winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, point out that a larger G.D.P. doesn’t necessarily mean a rise in human well-being—especially if it isn’t distributed equitably—and the pursuit of it can sometimes be counterproductive. “Nothing in either our theory or the data proves the highest G.D.P. per capita is generally desirable,” Banerjee and Duflo, a husband-and-wife team who teach at M.I.T., write.

 

The two made their reputations by applying rigorous experimental methods to investigate what types of policy interventions work in poor communities; they conducted randomized controlled trials, in which one group of people was subjected to a given policy intervention—paying parents to keep their children in school, say—and a control group wasn’t. Drawing on their findings, Banerjee and Duflo argue that, rather than chase “the growth mirage,” governments should concentrate on specific measures with proven benefits, such as helping the poorest members of society get access to health care, education, and social advancement.

 

Banerjee and Duflo also maintain that in advanced countries like the United States the misguided pursuit of economic growth since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has contributed to a rise in inequality, mortality rates, and political polarization. When the benefits of growth are mainly captured by an élite, they warn, social disaster can result.

 

That’s not to say that Banerjee and Duflo are opposed to economic growth. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, they noted that, since 1990, the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day—the World Bank’s definition of extreme poverty—fell from nearly two billion to around seven hundred million. “In addition to increasing people’s income, steadily expanding G.D.P.s have allowed governments (and others) to spend more on schools, hospitals, medicines, and income transfers to the poor,” they wrote. Yet for advanced countries, in particular, they think policies that slow G.D.P. growth may prove to be beneficial, especially if the result is that the fruits of growth are shared more widely. In this sense, Banerjee and Duflo might be termed “slowthers”—a label that certainly applies to Dietrich Vollrath, an economist at the University of Houston and the author of “Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success.”

 

As his subtitle suggests, he thinks that slower rates of economic growth in advanced countries are nothing to worry about. Between 1950 and 2000, G.D.P. per person in the U.S. rose at an annual rate of more than three per cent. Since 2000, the growth rate has slowed to about two per cent. (Donald Trump has not, as he promised, boosted over-all G.D.P. growth to four or five per cent.) The phenomenon of slow growth is often bemoaned as “secular stagnation,” a term popularized by Lawrence Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury Secretary. Yet Vollrath argues that slower growth is appropriate for a society as rich and industrially developed as ours. Unlike other growth skeptics, he doesn’t base his case on environmental concerns or rising inequality or the shortcomings of G.D.P. as a measurement. Rather, he explains this phenomenon as the result of personal choices—the core of economic orthodoxy.

 

Vollrath offers a detailed decomposition of the sources of economic growth, which uses a mathematical technique that the eminent M.I.T. economist Robert Solow pioneered in the nineteen-fifties. The movement of women into the workplace provided a onetime boost to the labor supply; in its aftermath, other trends dragged down the growth curve. As countries like the United States have become richer and richer, Vollrath points out, their inhabitants have chosen to spend less time at work and to have smaller families—the result of higher wages and the advent of contraceptive pills. G.D.P. growth slows when the growth of the labor force declines. But this isn’t any sort of failure, in Vollrath’s view: it reflects “the advance of women’s rights and economic success.”

 

Vollrath estimates that about two-thirds of the recent slowdown in G.D.P. growth can be accounted for by the decline in the growth of labor inputs. He also cites a switch in spending patterns from tangible goods—such as clothes, cars, and furniture—to services, such as child care, health care, and spa treatments. In 1950, spending on services accounted for forty per cent of G.D.P.; today, the proportion is more than seventy per cent. And service industries, which tend to be labor-intensive, exhibit lower rates of productivity growth than goods-producing industries, which are often factory-based. (The person who cuts your hair isn’t getting more efficient; the plant that makes his or her scissors probably is.) Since rising productivity is a key component of G.D.P. growth, that growth will be further constrained by the expansion of the service sector. But, again, this isn’t necessarily a failure. “In the end, that reallocation of economic activity away from goods and into services comes down to our success,” Vollrath writes. “We’ve gotten so productive at making goods that this has freed up our money to spend on services.”

 

Taken together, slower growth in the labor force and the shift to services can explain almost all the recent slowdown, according to Vollrath. He’s unimpressed by many other explanations that have been offered, such as sluggish rates of capital investment, rising trade pressures, soaring inequality, shrinking technological possibilities, or an increase in monopoly power. In his account, it all flows from the choices we’ve made: “Slow growth, it turns out, is the optimal response to massive economic success.”

 

Vollrath’s analysis implies that all the major economies are likely to see slower growth rates as their populations age—a pattern first established in Japan during the nineteen-nineties. But two-per-cent growth isn’t negligible. If the U.S. economy continues to expand at this rate, it will have doubled in size by 2055, and a century from now it will be almost eight times its current size. If you think about growth-compounding in other rich countries, and developing economies growing at somewhat faster rates, you can readily summon up scenarios in which, by the end of the next century, global G.D.P. has risen fiftyfold, or even a hundredfold.

 

Is such a scenario environmentally sustainable? Proponents of “green growth,” who now include many European governments, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and all the remaining U.S. Democratic Presidential candidates, insist that it is. They say that, given the right policy measures and continued technological progress, we can enjoy perpetual growth and prosperity while also reducing carbon emissions and our consumption of natural resources. A 2018 report by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, an international group of economists, government officials, and business leaders, declared, “We are on the cusp of a new economic era: one where growth is driven by the interaction between rapid technological innovation, sustainable infrastructure investment, and increased resource productivity. We can have growth that is strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive.”

 

This judgment reflected a belief in what’s sometimes termed “absolute decoupling”—a prospect in which G.D.P. can grow while carbon emissions decline. The environmental economists Alex Bowen and Cameron Hepburn have conjectured that, by 2050, absolute decoupling may appear “to have been a relatively easy challenge,” as renewables become significantly cheaper than fossil fuels. They endorse scientific research into green technology, and hefty taxes on fossil fuels, but oppose the idea of stopping economic growth. From an environmental perspective, they write, “it would be counterproductive; recessions have slowed and in some cases derailed efforts to adopt cleaner modes of production.”

 

For a time, official carbon-emissions figures seemed to support this argument. Between 2000 and 2013, Britain’s G.D.P. grew by twenty-seven per cent while emissions fell by nine per cent, Kate Raworth, an English economist and author, noted in her thought-provoking book, “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist,” published in 2017. The pattern was similar in the United States: G.D.P. up, emissions down. Globally, carbon emissions were flat between 2014 and 2016, according to figures from the International Energy Agency. Unfortunately, this trend didn’t last. According to a recent report from the Global Carbon Project, carbon emissions worldwide have been edging up in each of the past three years.

 

The pause in the rise of emissions may well have been the temporary product of a depressed economy—the Great Recession and its aftermath—and the shift from coal to natural gas, which can’t be repeated. According to a recent report by the United Nations and a number of climate-research institutes, “Governments are planning to produce about 50% more fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with a 2°C pathway and 120% more than would be consistent with a 1.5°C pathway.” (Those were the targets established in the 2016 Paris Agreement.) In a recent review of the literature about green growth, Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, concluded that “green growth is likely to be a misguided objective, and that policymakers need to look toward alternative strategies.”

 

Can such “alternative strategies” be implemented without huge ruptures? For decades, economists have cautioned that they can’t. “If growth were to be abandoned as an objective of policy, democracy too would have to be abandoned,” Wilfred Beckerman, an Oxford economist, wrote in “In Defense of Economic Growth,” which appeared in 1974. “The costs of deliberate non-growth, in terms of the political and social transformation that would be required in society, are astronomical.” Beckerman was responding to the publication of “The Limits to Growth,” a widely read report by an international team of environmental scientists and other experts who warned that unrestrained G.D.P. growth would lead to disaster, as natural resources such as fossil fuels and industrial metals ran out. Beckerman said that the authors of “The Limits to Growth” had greatly underestimated the capacity of technology and the market system to produce a cleaner and less resource-intensive type of economic growth—the same argument that proponents of green growth make today.

 

Whether or not you share this optimism about technology, it’s clear that any comprehensive degrowth strategy would have to deal with distributional conflicts in the developed world and poverty in the developing world. As long as G.D.P. is steadily rising, all groups in society can, in theory, see their living standards rise at the same time. Beckerman argued that this was the key to avoiding such conflict. But, if growth were abandoned, helping the worst off would pit winners against losers. The fact that, in many Western countries over the past couple of decades, slower growth has been accompanied by rising political polarization suggests that Beckerman may have been on to something.

 

Some degrowth proponents say that distributional conflicts could be resolved through work-sharing and income transfers. A decade ago, Peter A. Victor, an emeritus professor of environmental economics at York University, in Toronto, built a computer model, since updated, to see what would happen to the Canadian economy under various scenarios. In a degrowth scenario, G.D.P. per person was gradually reduced by roughly fifty per cent over thirty years, but offsetting policies—such as work-sharing, redistributive-income transfers, and adult-education programs—were also introduced. Reporting his results in a 2011 paper, Victor wrote, “There are very substantial reductions in unemployment, the human poverty index and the debt to GDP ratio. Greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by nearly 80%. This reduction results from the decline in GDP and a very substantial carbon tax.”

 

More recently, Kallis and other degrowthers have called for the introduction of a universal basic income, which would guarantee people some level of subsistence. Last year, when progressive Democrats unveiled their plan for a Green New Deal, aiming to create a zero-emission economy by 2050, it included a federal job guarantee; some backers also advocate a universal basic income. Yet Green New Deal proponents appear to be in favor of green growth rather than degrowth. Some sponsors of the plan have even argued that it would eventually pay for itself through economic growth.

 

There’s another challenge for growth skeptics: how would they reduce global poverty? China and India lifted millions out of extreme deprivation by integrating their countries into the global capitalist economy, supplying low-cost goods and services to more advanced countries. The process involved mass rural-to-urban migration, the proliferation of sweatshops, and environmental degradation. But the eventual result was higher incomes and, in some places, the emergence of a new middle class that is loath to give up its gains. If major industrialized economies were to cut back their consumption and reorganize along more communal lines, who would buy all the components and gadgets and clothes that developing countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam produce? What would happen to the economies of African countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, and Rwanda, which have seen rapid G.D.P. growth in recent years, as they, too, have started to join the world economy? Degrowthers have yet to provide a convincing answer to these questions.

 

Given the scale of the environmental threat and the need to lift up poor countries, some sort of green-growth policy would seem to be the only option, but it may involve emphasizing “green” over “growth.” Kate Raworth has proposed that we adopt environmentally sound policies even when we’re uncertain how they will affect the long-term rate of growth. There are plenty of such policies available. To begin with, all major countries could take more definitive steps to meet their Paris Agreement commitments by investing heavily in renewable sources of energy, shutting down any remaining coal-fired power plants, and introducing a carbon tax to discourage the use of fossil fuels. According to Ian Parry, an economist at the World Bank, a carbon tax of thirty-five dollars per ton, which would raise the price of gasoline by about ten per cent and the cost of electricity by roughly twenty-five per cent, would be sufficient for many countries, including China, India, and the United Kingdom, to meet their emissions pledges. A carbon tax of this kind would raise a lot of money, which could be used to finance green investments or reduce other taxes, or even be handed out to the public as a carbon dividend.

 

Taking energy efficiency seriously is also vital. In a 2018 piece for the New Left Review, Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has helped design Green New Deal plans for a number of states, listed several measures that can be taken, including insulating old buildings to reduce heat loss, requiring cars to be more fuel efficient, expanding public transportation, and reducing energy use in the industrial sector. “Expanding energy-efficiency investment,” he pointed out, “supports rising living standards because, by definition, it saves money for energy consumers.”

 

To ameliorate the effects of slower G.D.P. growth, policies such as work-sharing and universal basic income could also be considered—especially if the warnings about artificial intelligence eliminating huge numbers of jobs turn out to be true. In the United Kingdom, the New Economics Foundation has called for the standard workweek to be shortened from thirty-five to twenty-one hours, a proposal that harks back to Victor’s modelling and Keynes’s 1930 essay. Proposals like these would have to be financed by higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy, but that redistributive aspect is a feature, not a bug. In a low-growth world, it is essential to share what growth there is more equitably. Otherwise, as Beckerman argued many years ago, the consequences could be catastrophic.

 

Finally, rethinking economic growth may well require loosening the grip on modern life exercised by competitive consumption, which undergirds the incessant demand for expansion. Keynes, a Cambridge aesthete, believed that people whose basic economic needs had been satisfied would naturally gravitate to other, non-economic pursuits, perhaps embracing the arts and nature. A century of experience suggests that this was wishful thinking. As Raworth writes, “Reversing consumerism’s financial and cultural dominance in public and private life is set to be one of the twenty-first century’s most gripping psychological dramas.”

Related: Put a Stop to Economic Growth? Huge Mistake by Noah Smith at Bloomberg

[y66]

How Technology Is Changing the Future of Higher Education by Jon Marcus at NYT.

 

How do you say good stuff in Mandarin?

[Winstonm]

How Technology Is Changing the Future of Higher Education by Jon Marcus at NYT.

 

How do you say good stuff in Mandarin?

 

Ga-ooh-Duh ssst uhf en Ma-n-dah-ren.

[Winstonm]

Father Hazmat has been ordered to the front:

 

Pope Francis Tells Italian Priests: Go Out and Visit Coronavirus Patients

[Winstonm]

More good news:

 

Economists from Goldman Sachs are forecasting a dramatic 24% drop in the nation’s gross domestic product in the coming months, as governments, businesses, schools and more announce increasingly strict measures to keep people at home and apart to try to slow the spread of coronavirus nationwide.

 

In an analysis released Friday, economists with the major bank revised their previous forecast of a 5% drop in U.S. GDP for the second quarter (April through June) to a 24% drop, citing expected declines in manufacturing activity and services consumption. If that materializes, it would be historic: In modern history, the largest quarterly decline in U.S. GDP was a 10% drop in the first quarter of 1958.

 

“The sudden stop in U.S. economic activity in response to the virus is unprecedented,” the economists wrote, adding that in just the last few days, “social distancing” measures across the country have “shut down normal life” and have already led to a rise in layoffs and a “collapse” in consumer spending.

[Winstonm]

Bad news for tin foil makers stock:

 

Conspiracy theories claiming COVID-19 was engineered in a lab as part of a biological attack on the United States have been gaining traction online in recent weeks, but a new study on the origins of the virus has concluded that the pandemic-causing strain developed naturally.

 

An analysis of the evidence, according to the findings first published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, shows that the novel coronavirus "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," with the researchers concluding "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

[Winstonm]

The right has won in Hungary:

 

Balazs Csekö

@balazscseko

·

1h

Hungarian Parliament passes bill that gives PM Orbán unlimited power & proclaims:

 

- State of emergency w/o time limit

- Rule by decree

- Parliament suspended

- No elections

- Spreading fake news + rumors: up to 5 yrs in prison

- Leaving quarantine: up to 8 yrs in prison

[Cyberyeti]

The right has won in Hungary:

 

I feel Orban is portrayed by lefties as much further right than he actually is. That party does exist in Hungary, it's called Jobbik and they're a nasty piece of work, I don't feel Orban is as far right as plenty of republicans. People cite his disagreement with Hungary's Jewish community, but that was over a pretty narrow point (a monument which absolved the wartime collaborationist regime on the basis that they could not have stood up to the Nazis where the Jewish people felt they could have done more), not for the reasons suggested in some articles.

[Winstonm]

I feel Orban is portrayed by lefties as much further right than he actually is. That party does exist in Hungary, it's called Jobbik and they're a nasty piece of work, I don't feel Orban is as far right as plenty of republicans. People cite his disagreement with Hungary's Jewish community, but that was over a pretty narrow point (a monument which absolved the wartime collaborationist regime on the basis that they could not have stood up to the Nazis where the Jewish people felt they could have done more), not for the reasons suggested in some articles.

 

Anyone who is willing to accept those kinds of powers is very far right. (See George Washington history for reference)

 

PS: When I use "the right" politically, I mean those that skew toward authoritarianism and away from democracy.

[Cyberyeti]

Anyone who is willing to accept those kinds of powers is very far right. (See George Washington history for reference)

 

PS: When I use "the right" politically, I mean those that skew toward authoritarianism and away from democracy.

 

Most of them are actually far left

[Winstonm]

Most of them are actually far left

Authoritarianism is far right, and authoritarians are good at using whatever means at their disposal to further their aims, including socialistic or communistic government structure that hides the fact that the power within the government is neither socialistic nor communist but totalitarian.

[Cyberyeti]

Authoritarianism is far right, and authoritarians are good at using whatever means at their disposal to further their aims, including socialistic or communistic government structure that hides the fact that the power within the government is neither socialistic nor communist but totalitarian.

 

That's a very unusual take, most people accept the authoritarian left as a concept (as the libertarian right can be), they're pretty much independent.

[Winstonm]

That's a very unusual take, most people accept the authoritarian left as a concept (as the libertarian right can be), they're pretty much independent.

 

Language is tricky and understandings even more so.

[Winstonm]

Wow. I am flabbergasted that Pat Robertson on The 700 Club hasn't declared this God's punishment for Brexit. B-)

[Cyberyeti]

Wow. I am flabbergasted that Pat Robertson on The 700 Club hasn't declared this God's punishment for Brexit. B-)

 

I'd have thought there are a lot of things he could have declared it as god's punishment for before he got to Brexit

[Cyberyeti]

Language is tricky and understandings even more so.

 

Yes, particularly when you use a definition that 99.9% of Brits would say you're utterly mad, and I suspect most Americans. Try telling a libertarian Republican they're far left and try not to get shot.

 

Boris is by inclination very much a libertarian and would see himself as a person of the right.

 

I suppose it's just possible it's simply used completely differently across the atlantic, but I don't think so in this case (I've just discovered that what you call an elk is a completely different animal (wapiti) to what we call an elk, which is your moose)

[Winstonm]

Yes, particularly when you use a definition that 99.9% of Brits would say you're utterly mad, and I suspect most Americans. Try telling a libertarian Republican they're far left and try not to get shot.

 

Boris is by inclination very much a libertarian and would see himself as a person of the right.

 

I suppose it's just possible it's simply used completely differently across the atlantic, but I don't think so in this case (I've just discovered that what you call an elk is a completely different animal (wapiti) to what we call an elk, which is your moose)

 

How did you manufacture the assumption that I would classify libertarians as "left"? Just because authoritarians are far right and can use socialistic governments to hide their totalitarianism has nothing to do with the small-government mindset of libertarians. On the political scale, small-government thinking tend right - that has nothing to do with those who are authoritarian within a Communist country - who are right because they are totalitarian, regardless of the system of government they use to hold onto power.

 

You may want to think that the world has seen left wing communist authoritarianism; but left wingers are pro-democracy. There is no way that the authoritarians who have ruled most communist countries can be classified as pro-democracy. Hence, they cannot be called left or left-leaning. If anything, they are right leaning.

[Winstonm]

I'd have thought there are a lot of things he could have declared it as god's punishment for before he got to Brexit

 

He has. There is a litany of his assertions of natural acts he attributed to the un-righteous.

[Winstonm]

I am posting this here as not to detract from Ken's post which follows:

 

 

 

Posted Today, 09:45

 

View Post

johnu, on 2020-April-15, 02:42, said:

 

I'll admit that I have rightfully complained about the incompetent, delayed. slow, and muddled response to the COVID-19 crisis by the Manchurian President. I am happy to report that the Grifter in Chief has finally done something decisive and game changing.

 

Trump's Name Will Appear On Stimulus Checks

 

 

I'm sure our fellow citizens who have lost their jobs, emptied out their bank accounts without a paycheck coming in, and desperate for money to pay for food and other necessities will rejoice at having to wait several more days before they get their relief checks. I certainly hope that those who receive their checks will treat the Grifter in Chief well for his generosity in personally paying them from his personal checking account.

 

 

I thought nothing Trump did would still stun me, but I was wrong.

 

I was 12 when I saw Quo Vadis in 1951 and I was overwhelmed by Peter Ustinov's portrayal of Nero. Ok, the film was not exactly what you would call historically accurate, but I was 12.

 

Now we have Donald J Trump. No one has to make anything up to portray Donald J Trump.

 

I think civilization will survive the virus. Whether this country will survive Trump is less clear to me. Never mind whether this imprinting will or will not slow down the issuing of checks, although it is hard to see how it wouldn't. I just can't imagine any other president, or any other would be president, or anyone at all, doing such a thing at such a time. He might as well have the check say "I, Donald J Trump, wish to make it completely clear that I am totally nuts". Egocentric doesn't cover it. Narcissist doesn't cover it. Just plain nuts comes closer. A person does not need a Ph. D. in psychology to recognize a nut.

 

Yes, the stopping of financial support of WHO is, at Bill Gates says, just as dangerous as it sounds. It's irresponsible,it's stupid. etc. Yes,of course/ But I see this putting of his name on the checks as a moment of clarity for anyone still fining reasons to support Trump. It's the act of a nut.

Ken

2

 

Just a little further comment on this issue. Nuts only scratches the surface of how mentally ill this man is and how dangerous he is due to that illness. It is hard for any of us to understand this kind of personality as they comprise only about 1% of the population so we don't run into them often. But the only way to truly understand is that the need for affirmation is so all-encompssing that nothing else matters to him - nothing. That is the reason he lives within his own reality that changes minute-by-minute according to the needs of his ego. That he insists on having his name on the stimulus checks shows his thinking - that because he won the presidency the government is his and he wants everyone to thank him personally for his benevolence. The danger comes when this reality barrier crashes and he is faced with genuine criticism or worse, failure. We have seen it recently in his daily propaganda shows about the virus, how immensely defensive and angry he gets when a question challenges the reality he is trying to sell.

 

The real difficulty lies with the issue that his base of support comes from a group of people whose worldview contains a promise that the right kind of magic - their kind of magic - is real. That belief in magic and magical solutions makes whatever action Trump takes a protected act - it can't be wrong. With this kind of magic, there are only 3 possible outcomes: 1) it will happen now 2) it will happen in the future 3) it will never happen. Of course, those are the only 3 possible outcomes. So, when all of those possibilities are then considered to be an act of that magic, it obviates any possible method to refute by reason the basic claim that the claimed magic is real.

 

See, that's the problem. To this group, it doesn't matter if Trump is nuts - because he was chosen by the "magic" to be the leader, and there is no way that the magic can fail, therefore, whatsoever Trump says or does must be part of the great magic plan and thus "perfect".

 

I'm not sure if we're at the Nero moment - I'm thinking Caligula - or maybe Alice in Wonderland.

[Zelandakh]

Most researchers in the political sphere use a 2-dimensional graph for tracking political beliefs, though some use more. The most popular graph tracks conservative vs liberal independently from tough-tender. What is found is that political parties tend to spread out as a circle within the graph, with socialist parties on the left, liberal and social-democrats at the bottom, conservatives to the right and communists/fascists at the top. America is a special case in that it traditionally has 2 right-leaning parties and therefore specialists in American politics sometimes use a different set of tracking graphs. In recent times the Democratic party has moved somewhat further to the left in standard terms though.

 

What is absolutely incorrect to say is that Authoritarianism is only a thing of the right. It is a part of extremism. If your politics only contains a right wing then of course the extreme will be to the right but in global terms there are many countries for which the extremes are on the left and authoritarian regimes can easily be implemented from either side.

[y66]

I have a feeling that politics self-selects for authoritarians...it certainly self-selects for those who want power, and without subjects, power doesn't mean much.

 

https://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/28393-hows-your/page__view__findpost__p__321688

[y66]

via David Leonard at NYT: https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20200423&instance_id=17881&nl=david-leonhardt&productCode=TY&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=25802&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F2f7ef1c7-aef0-463f-a799-6ed82e94e1d7&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

Even the smartest guys in the world, the guys who spend hours with game film, can’t predict this with much success. There’s no crime in that. The crime is thinking you can predict it.

[Winstonm]

Most researchers in the political sphere use a 2-dimensional graph for tracking political beliefs, though some use more. The most popular graph tracks conservative vs liberal independently from tough-tender. What is found is that political parties tend to spread out as a circle within the graph, with socialist parties on the left, liberal and social-democrats at the bottom, conservatives to the right and communists/fascists at the top. America is a special case in that it traditionally has 2 right-leaning parties and therefore specialists in American politics sometimes use a different set of tracking graphs. In recent times the Democratic party has moved somewhat further to the left in standard terms though.

 

What is absolutely incorrect to say is that Authoritarianism is only a thing of the right. It is a part of extremism. If your politics only contains a right wing then of course the extreme will be to the right but in global terms there are many countries for which the extremes are on the left and authoritarian regimes can easily be implemented from either side.

 

I note your charts do not include "support democracy" "do not support democracy". Here in the U.S., it would be difficult to determine those categories as there are millions who think - because they live in a republic - that they support democracy when their views are closer to support of a form of soft authoritarianism.

[Winstonm]

Let no one say they were not warned:

 

The yield on two-year U.S. Treasury notes was higher than the yield on the 10-year for a while Wednesday, marking the first time since June 2007 this curve has inverted. Many market participants see this as a sign of a coming recession in the next year or two.

 

Aug 14, 2019

my emphasis

 

But this was probably a better warning sign:

 

Larry Kudlow says December jobs report shows ‘there’s no recession in sight’

FRI, JAN 4 2019

[y66]

From Satya Nadella's conversation with the NYT:

 

Unlike almost every other company, Microsoft has felt a “minimal net impact” from coronavirus, according its latest financial report. The tech giant’s stock price is up 14 percent this year; it is sitting on nearly $140 billion in cash; and it looks likely to emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever. The company’s C.E.O., Satya Nadella, spoke with editors and reporters from The Times yesterday about managing through the pandemic.

 

Respond, recover, reimagine.

 

Mr. Nadella sees the world going through three phases during the pandemic. The first is simply responding to the immediate impact through office closures, cost cuts and the like. Then comes recovery, which is already underway in many places, and will be more like a “dial” than a “switch.” He said, “There will be lots of movement of the dial, back and forth.”

 

In the “reimagining” phase, innovations born of necessity during the previous two phases will emerge, like remote control of manufacturing processes, A.I. bots helping diagnose patients and more effective distance-learning technologies.

 

“Be on the lookout for what is lost.”

 

Mr. Nadella said that raw productivity stats for many of Microsoft’s workers have gone up, but that isn’t something to “overcelebrate.” More meetings start and end on time, but “what I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you’re able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after.” That’s tough to replicate virtually, as are other soft skills crucial to managing and mentoring.

 

Switching from offices before the pandemic to an all-remote setup would be “replacing one dogma with another dogma,” he said. “What does burnout look like? What does mental health look like? What does that connectivity and the community building look like? One of the things I feel is, hey, maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?”

 

About all that cash ...

 

Microsoft spent $10 billion in its most recent quarter on share buybacks and dividends, up more than 30 percent from the year before. Is Mr. Nadella changing his thinking on how to spend it, through either returning it to shareholders, building up a safety buffer or spending it on acquisitions?

 

He answered that Microsoft will use “all of our levers” to grow. “We’re going to boldly allocate and acquire, build, innovate, partner, whatever,” he said. “And then, we are also going to make sure that we have the ability to do credit for small businesses and other organizations that need that help,” he added, saying that he has talked to several airline C.E.O.s about their troubles.

What is the metric for burning social capital? Networking effectiveness, i.e. productivity + turnover?