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Did Christianity Cause the Crash? - The Atlantic (December 2009)
America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.
Not every cloud has a silver lining: Cory Doctorow | Technology | The Guardian
There's something you won't see mentioned by too many advocates of cloud computing – the main attraction is making money from you
Firedoglake » It Takes The Village To Raze the Economy: Some Notes On Krugman and the Return of Keynes
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So far, so good. Except, there's a hole. That hole is that the Fed hasn't followed the simple "Taylor rule." In fact, there's been a significant gap between Taylor rule and interest rates. Or more exactly, two of them.
The first was between 1994 and 1998 -- the Fed was consistently above the Taylor rule. This lead several more left-leaning economists to call for lower interest rates to get more growth. The second was between 2001 and 2008 - the Fed was consistently below the Taylor rule. What a coincidence. So the argument that the Fed was a transparent carrier of the economic demand for funds breaks down. The other point is that there is a simple explanation for all three - short term rates, inflation, and budget deficits moving in tandem over the last 10 years, namely that they represent the same thing, not a market that is clearing, but three different forms of the same thing, namely, risk aversion.
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The reality is that Federal Reserve interest rates, government bond auctions, and federal budget deficits all have one thing in common: they aren't markets in the sense of "many independent actors making independent decisions." The Fed's decision is in the hands of a few people, most of the buyers of government treasuries is a small number of large players, and of course, the Federal budget deficit is written by a few hundred people and their staff members. These are not large markets, but small ones. Hillary was pilloried for saying that it takes a village to raise a child; but the evidence here -given that the results of the last 10 years have been a market crash, a terrible recovery, and a massive global downturn- is that it took "The Village" to raze the economy.
Money And The Brain: More Weirdness - Planet Money Blog : NPR
reports some experiments by Kathleen Vohs
FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Real Problem with The Senate's Small-State Bias
What this means is that senators from small states tend to be relatively more dependant on special-interest money -- it makes up a larger share of their overall take. Senators from the ten smallest states have received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the ten largest.
Joe Bageant: The Bastards Never Die
A short history of why we eat oil, can't smoke pot, and why assault weapons are so expensive in our hour of need
What Would a Fair-Labor iPod Cost? - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
The results are surprising. An American made iPod Classic costs just 23% more than a Chinese made iPod Classic: $58 more, to be precise. The same relationship holds across the iPod family (price differentials in the 20-30% range) The iPod is a durable good, so that's a difference — but smaller than one might expect.
FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Debt is capitalism’s dirty little secret
The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.
Ah, Wall Street. Seeing the real you at last. » New Deal 2.0
Financial innovation was presented to us in a way that suggested that great things were happening for mankind. The presentations were usually vague. To understand them, we had only the power of our own imaginations, or perhaps, failing that, our awe in the face of this powerful expertise, confidently propelling us to a greater future....
Malarky. This is all code for defer to the wishes of those who make money from these techniques.
Paranoids have enemies too | TPMCafe
There is no lack of irrationality on offer in the behavior of those who make up "the market." And the consequences certainly entail chaos. But the historical record of bubbles is too long and repetitive to ascribe behavior to individual deficiencies...
What's missing from the meliorist framework of my fellow bloggers is the concept of Power. We're getting progressivism when we need populism.
apriceformusic.com - home
The Price for Music Model strives to provide artists and music rights holders with a monetary return for music content consumed via the internet, addressing the revenue gap arising from digital content being downloaded via non-legitimate channels.
Lost Garden: Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 1
Here's the theory behind asking for money for a game.
1. Players have access to lots of games. Most of which are free. This is the reality of the market.
2. However, at a certain point, they start playing your game.
3. If you've created a great game, some players will fall in love. They will be in the thrall of your reward system and your in game value structures. At this point, they don't care that there are other games. They don't care that they are playing on a portal. All they care about is your game. Games create value through play.
4. When a player is in love, money is no object. If you ask the player for cash in exchange for more value, they will often agree. It is a good exchange in their eyes: They give you a small bit of change and in return, they get proven, addictive experience that they love.
Code Red - Phillip Longman
Done right, digitized health care could help save the nation from insolvency while improving and extending millions of lives at the same time. Done wrong, it could reconfirm Americans’ deepest suspicions of government and set back the cause of health care reform for yet another generation.
Rest Stops, R.I.P. | GOOD
State governments are shutting down interstate rest-stops because of money woes and competition from KwikMats and McDonalds.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Beckham: an Adler superstar?
Moshe Adler comes in. People, he said, like to consume the same art that others do, or to talk about the same people that others do (pdf). They want, therefore, to focus disproportionate attention upon one or two people. And these people get greater fame or wealth than other similarly talented persons. Beckham, then, is profiting not from his superior talent, but from being a focal point - though, of course, he and his missus have strived for this.
Clogged Arteries - The Atlantic (March 2008)
The map above shows an estimate of road-traffic congestion in 2010. In most major metro areas, it is steadily worsening. The cost of congestion, including added freight cost and lost productivity for commuters, reached $78 billion in 2005. Half of that occurred in just 10 metro areas.
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