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Clever teenagers of today are not as bright as kids in the class of 1976, according to researchers. Skip related content

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Class of 76 'cleverer' than kids of today

The intellect of even the brainiest 14-year-olds has deteriorated dramatically over the decades despite an increase in the number of pupils achieving top grades in exams.

Their cognitive abilities are level with those of 12-year-olds in 1976, the study found.

Researchers at King's College London compared the mental agility of 800 bright 13 and 14-year-olds with similar tests carried out some three decades ago.

Daniel Kahneman (Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן‎ (born 5 March 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate, notable for his work on behavioral finance and hedonic psychology.

With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973, Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982), and developed Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in Prospect theory. Currently, he is professor emeritus of psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology.

Bread and Circuses

If the proposition is correct that compassion is biological,
that we feel an "animal pity" looking upon the suffering of
our fellow, then our civilization, in order to accomplish
cruel or immoral goals, must find a way to counter pity.

In the previous
essay, I quoted Zygmunt Bauman for the proposition that
bureaucracy overcomes pity by distancing the human subject and
by spreading responsibility across the organization and diffusing
it down the hierarchy. The distancing is accomplished in two ways:
the human affected by our actions is redefined as an "animal",
as "the other"; and technology permits us to act upon humans
who are at such a distance that we cannot directly observe what
we have done to them. This last point--that the psychological
consequences are less when technology permits us
to act at a distance-- is supported by studies
comparing the post-Vietnam war suffering of infantry, who had
shot people at close range, and of pilots who had dropped
bombs on them from higher altitudes. Bauman says that animal
pity is inspired by the proximity of the sufferer, and
it seems contradictory but true that it is harder to kill
one person with one's hands than a million by pressing a
button.

Not much, it seems

:(

We've had a lot of rights removed over the past decade or so, rights we've had since the magna carta, but which have been discarded without debate or thought.

As an example:



• The government can ban any groups it labels ‘terrorist’ (Terrorism Act 2000)
• The government can monitor any and all private communication (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
• Armed forces can be deployed on UK soil in peacetime (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
• Property and assets can be seized without warning or compensation (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
• Spontaneous protest is now illegal around Parliament (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005)
• Without trial, any British citizen can be tagged, put under house arrest and banned from using the telephone or internet (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005)
• Any citizen can be imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days has passed the house of commons) (Terrorism Act 2006)
• The executive can change any current legislation without consulting Parliament, with very few exceptions (Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006)
• Arbitrary punishments with no legal precedents can be issued with little legal recourse, based on hearsay evidence (
  Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003)
• British citizens can be extradicted to the United States with no evidence presented (Extradition Act 2003)
• Compulsory identification for all British citizens, with an unlimited amount of details stored in a central database, which the private sector will have access to (Identity Cards Act 2006)
• Upon arrest the police have claim to your DNA, even if you are released without charge (Criminal Justice Act 2003)

Taken from the site protests.org.uk [protests.org.uk]

What we cannot escape is the fact that the amount of money in the banking sector far outweighs the value of the assets that it was lent against. This is how it works. You want to buy a house, and you need to borrow £100,000. You go to a bank and they create the loan, and at the same time deposit £100,000 in your bank account. This money did not exist before: it is new money. You buy your house, and at the other end of the chain, the sellers deposit the £100,000 back into the banking system. The amount of money in circulation has risen by £100,000 and is represented by the seller's bank "savings". But those savings are a reflection of the value of the house. If the price of the house doubled while they owned it, then £50,000 of those savings is a result of inflation caused by the banking sector creating money.

Supposing the housing market crashes. There is now more money in the banking system than the value of housing stock. The value of that the money has to fall as well. During the Asian crisis 10 years ago, this is exactly what happened. Many banks went insolvent, many savers lost their deposits, and the value of money in the economy fell so as to reflect the new and lower value of assets in the economy. This was exactly what happened in Thailand, but unlike us, their government was simply too poor to bail out savers who happened to have their deposits in the wrong bank.

I've said this in other threads today, but it bears repeating.

As an indicator of whether or not the bailout is working, the index funds are at best, a secondary indicator. What you really care about is the LIBOR.

If you see the LIBOR with a large upward divergence from the fed suggested rate (currently at 2%), what you are really seeing is an indication that banks are unwilling to loan to each other. They are afraid that if they do loan the money to another entity, that that entity might vanish overnight, and their investment evaporates.

In normal times, you see a 20-30 basis point spread over the suggested rate. On Sept 30th, you had an all time high spread of something close to 500 basis points, so ~20x the normal margin for risk in a loan.

The idea of the bailout was to take some of the worst assets that banks are holding, and get them off their books so that they present less of a risk for intra-bank lending, and you get the credit markets moving again.

That will trickle down into the greater economy, which is why the index funds act as secondary indicators. But if you really want to know if your tax dollars are working to fix the problem, check the LIBOR and euro-equivalent TED rates.