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"Again, we don’t know for sure, but we suspect that the analogy with biological disease is badly flawed. For example, whereas it is probably true that most people are susceptible to HIV, our susceptibility to any particular idea, product, musical artists, etc. varies tremendously, depending on our tastes, backgrounds, and circumstances. Unlike for influenza, to which you’re either exposed or not exposed, even the ideas you do encounter have to compete for attention with everything else that you’re exposed to. And unlike models of disease, which assume that disease spreads exclusively from person to person, information can be disseminated by the media and advertising as well as by word of mouth.
All of these differences, along with many others, could dramatically alter the prospects for social epidemics, as well as introduce other mechanisms entirely by which social change can come about, yet models of social influence reflect very little of this added complexity"
"As I see it, there are three main complaints one can make about economists and their role in the current crisis. First is the complaint that economists fell down on the job by not seeing the crisis coming. Second is the complaint that economists failed even to see the possibility of this kind of crisis — and that by pointing out the possibility, they could have helped head the crisis off. Third is the complaint that they have either failed to offer useful advice on what to do after the crisis struck, or that they have offered such a cacophony of voices as to provide no useful guidance for policy.
As I see it, the first complaint is mostly — though not entirely — unfair. The second is much more substantial: anyone with some knowledge of history should have realized that the age of financial crises was far from over. But the most damning failure of economists, I’d argue, was their acquired ignorance of what I’ve called depression economics — the principles that should govern policy after a financial crisis has left conventional open-market operations impotent."
"This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons supposedly learned from and justified by the ‘new sciences’ made their way to the highest reaches of the US Department of Defense under President G.W. Bush, and served as a foundation for acting quickly and preventively against ‘gathering threats’. In addition to allowing us to understand better the origins of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, this paper improves our understanding of the relationship between the sciences and the state/military in the post-Cold War US — in particular the role of scientific metaphor in national security discourses that have focused on the challenges and opportunities of new information and communication technologies. "
"This paper examines a fundamental problem in applied mathematics. How can one model the behavior of materials that display radically different, dominant behaviors at different length scales. Although we have good models for material behaviors at small and large scales, it is often hard to relate these scale-based models to one another."
"In these wide-ranging reflections, Cohen describes the transformations that signaled the break between the industrial and the post-industrial eras. He links the revolution in information technology to the trend toward flatter hierarchies of workers with multiple skills—and connects the latter to work practices growing out of the culture of the May 1968 protests. Subcontracting and outsourcing have also changed the nature of work, and Cohen succinctly analyzes the new international division of labor, the economic rise of China, India, and the former Soviet Union, and the economic effects of free trade on poor countries. Finally, Cohen examines the fate of the European social model—with its traditional compromise between social justice and economic productivity—in a post-industrial world.
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in list: Books Noted
"Abbott offers a fruitful new way to read science fiction, one that also greatly enriches our understanding of western history and its impact on our collective imagination. Detailing the overlap of science fiction and western fiction—especially relating to their mutual interest in and concerns about frontier expansionism—he reveals an unsuspected common ground that informs the writings of both camps."
"The main objective of the paper is to propose a frequentist interpretation of probability in the context of model-based induction, anchored on the Strong Law of Large Numbers (SLLN) and justifiable on empirical grounds."
"Preferences are the central notion in mainstream economic theory, yet economists say little about what preferences are. This article argues that preferences in mainstream positive economics are comparative evaluations with respect to everything relevant to value or choice, and it argues against three mistaken views of preferences: (1) that they are matters of taste, concerning which rational assessment is inappropriate, (2) that preferences coincide with judgments of expected self-interested benefit, and (3) that preferences can be defined in terms of choices. "
in list: Economic Crisis
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The core agreed meaning is that an asset is liquid if you can buy something with it right here right now. Cash is definitely liquid. Other assets, such as the balances of checking accounts, are very similar to cash. Such balances are counted in estimates of total "liquidity" here a synonym for "money." So the first financial definition of "liquidity" is
1) Liquidity n. the amount of liquid assets or "money supply". -
2) Liquidity A property of an asset which indicates that it can be converted into money quickly and with low transaction costs.
This implies that if an asset is illiquid a rational person would not be willing to buy it intending to sell it again in the near future. - 5 more annotation(s)...
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