They believed--and perhaps it is fair to put this first--that they were being   perfectly sensible, that they alone of men were clear-sighted, and that the   policies which sought to interfere with the ideal international division of   labor were always the offspring of ignorance out of self-interest.

In the second place, they believed that they were solving the problem of poverty,   and solving it for the world as a whole, by putting to their best uses, like   a good housekeeper, the world's resources and abilities.

BEYOND FED TRANSFERS AND DEBT: 95% Of Americans Are Getting Poorer Every Year

   

The Class-Domination Theory of Power

, the owners and top executives of the largest corporations, banks, investment firms, and agri-businesses come together as a corporate community. Their enormous economic resources give them the "structural economic power" that is the basis for dominating the federal government through lobbying, campaign finance, appointments to key government positions, and a policy-planning network made up of foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion groups.

Some of the information may come as a surprise to many people. In fact, I know it will be a surprise and then some, because of a recent study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) showing that most Americans (high income or low income, female or male, young or old, Republican or Democrat) have no idea just how concentrated the wealth distribution actually is. More on that a bit later.

Steve Denning

Why Is The World Run By Bean

The Clash of Generations

 

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

  

Published: July 16, 2011

That is because there is a deep sense of theft in both countries, a sense that the way capitalism played out in Egypt and Greece in the last decade was in its most crony-esque, rigged and corrupt deformation, letting some people get fantastically rich simply because of their proximity to power

REVEALED: The Secrets To Netflix's Success

What China’s five-year plan means for business 

     

McKinsey analyzed the potential impact on 33 industries. Two dimensions stood out: the plan’s effect on profit pools and on the competitive landscape.

China’s recently announced 12th five-year plan aims to transform the world’s second-largest economy from an investment-driven dynamo into a global powerhouse with a steadier and more stable trajectory.

A Roadmap to a Life that Matters

A Tale Of Two Countries: The Growing Divide Between Silicon Valley And Unemployed America

In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.

What hope is there for us if America is driven to the brink of meltdown?

   

If the US cannot service its public debts and defaults, the outcome will have catastrophic consequences

World economy: a perfect storm in August?

gust?

Americans' Wealth Is Stolen

 

By Rep. Dennis Kucinich,

that our entire government has been turned into a machine which takes the wealth of a mass of Americans and accelerates it into the hands of the few.

The Capitalist Threat

 

George Soros

In The Philosophy of History, Hegel discerned a disturbing historical pattern -- the crack and fall of civilizations owing to a morbid intensification of their own first principles.

By the BIS report, you’d hardly know that there are almost 45 million unemployed in the advanced countries, up 50 percent from 2007. But can governments do anything about it? The BIS has no answer. Economic policy seems paralyzed. There’s an almost palpable sense of helplessness, whether reading the BIS report or listening to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at his recent news conference. Economics seems to have emptied its toolbox. Patience and prayer are what’s left: Last week’s release of oil stocks, for example, was a desperate prayer for lower gasoline prices.

Russia has announced it will send two army brigades, including special forces soldiers, to the Arctic to protect its interests in the disputed, oil-rich zone. 

 Russia, the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway have all made claims over parts of the Arctic circle which is believed to hold up to a quarter of the Earth's undiscovered oil and gas.

Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability

 

by Joseph Tainter

 

Few questions of history have been more enduring than how today’s complex societies evolved from the foraging bands of our ancestors. While this might seem of academic interest, it has important implications for anticipating our future. Our understanding of sustainability depends to a surprising degree on our understanding of the human past. My purposes today are to show that the conventional understandings of cultural evolution are untenable, as are assumptions about sustainability that follow from them, and to present a different approach to assessing our future.

The topics for the philosophy of social science should not derive from apriori speculation about society; instead, they should be selected on the basis of careful engagement with serious empirical and theoretical attempts to explain the social world.

This is the kind of book that would benefit from a simultaneous digital edition. An affordable Kindle edition would help; but more radically, an online, hypertexted and cross-linked version would be fantastic. It would be fascinating to see a concept map linking the articles by theme or keyword; it would be illuminating to see some analysis of the patterns of citation across the articles in the volume; and it would be great for the reader to be able to click to some of the references directly. (Jarvie provides something like a map of themes in his tables representing "Principal Problems in Philosophy of the Social Sc

But how have we been doing recently relative to trend? The first chart shows the natural log of post-1947 aggregate real GDP (not per-capita) with a fitted linear trend, which implies average growth of 3.3%. The next chart shows the percentage deviations of real GDP from the trend. The interesting thing about this chart is the recent history. Note that the largest recent positive devation from trend was 3.43% in 2000, and that the growth rate in real GDP has (roughly) been below the post-1947 average of 3.26% since. The current deviation from trend is an enormous -13.4%, which is unprecedented in the 64-year sample.

Thus, in this sense things definitely look bad. Given the slow recovery from the recent recession, we are continuing to lose ground relative to the post-1947 trend. Can we say that the post-1947 trend is "potential GDP," and that we currently have a 13.4% output gap? Of course not.