Antidepressants and Violence

In 1989, Joseph Wesbecker shot dead eight people and injured 12 others before killing himself at his place of work in Kentucky. Wesbecker had been taking the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant fluoxetine for four weeks before these homicides, and this led to a legal action against the makers of fluoxetine, Eli Lilly [1]. The case was tried and settled in 1994, and as part of the settlement a number of pharmaceutical company documents about drug-induced activation were released into the public domain. Subsequent legal cases, some of which are outlined below, have further raised the possibility of a link between antidepressant use and violence.

They were dispensing care to soldiers, that the soldiers themselves called cookie-cutter treatment where everyone would be given a 20-minute briefing and sent off with a prescription for the anti-depressant Zoloft.

UPDATE: My contacts in the pharmaceutical forensic community are pointing to the anti-malarial drug Lariam, routinely administered to deploying troops, which has a history of inducing psychotic side-effects. The product information says, "Mefloquine (the generic name for the drug) may cause psychiatric symptoms in a number of patients, ranging from anxiety, paranoia, and depression to hallucinations and psychotic behavior." Vanity Fair is on the case. Was Nidal Malik Hasan Taking Lariam?

THE LONG-TERM PROBLEM OF FULL EMPLOYMENT

J.M. Keynes (May 1943):

1. It seems to be agreed today that the maintenance of a satisfactory level of employment depends on keeping total expenditure (consumption plus investment) at the optimum figure, namely that which generates a volume of incomes corresponding to what is earned by all sections of the community when employment is at the desired level.

2. At any given level and distribution of incomes the social habits and opportunities of the community, influenced (as it may be) by the form and weight of taxation and other deliberate policies and propaganda, lead them to spend a certain proportion of these incomes and to save the balance.

3. The problem of maintaining full employment is, therefore, the problem of ensuring that the scale of investment should be equal to the savings which may be expected to emerge under the above various influences when employment, and therefore incomes, are at the desired level. Let us call this the indicated level of savings.

4. After the war there are likely to ensure [sic] three phases-
(i) when the inducement to invest is likely to lead, if unchecked, to a volume of investment greater than the indicated level of savings in the absence of rationing and other controls;
(ii) when the urgently necessary investment is no longer greater than the indicated level of savings in conditions of freedom, but it still capable of being adjusted to the indicated level by deliberately encouraging or expediting less urgent, but nevertheless useful, investment;
(iii) when investment demand is so far saturated that it cannot be brought up to the indicated level of savings without embarking upon wasteful and unnecessary enterprises.

5. It is impossible to predict with any pretence to accuracy what the indicated level of savings after the war is likely to be in the absence of rationing. We have no experience of a community such as ours in the conditions assumed, with incomes and employment steadily at or near the optimum level over a period and with the distribution of incomes such as it is likely to be after the war. It is, however, safe to say that in the earliest years investment urgently necessary will be in excess of the indicated level of savings. To be a little more precise the former (at the present level of prices) is likely to exceed £m1000 in these years and the indicated level of savings to fall short of this.

6. In the first phase, therefore, equilibrium will have to be brought about by limiting on the one hand the volume of investment by suitable controls, and on the other hand the volume of consumption by rationing and the like. Otherwise a tendency to inflation will set in. It will probably be desirable to allow consumption priority over investment except to the extent that the latter is exceptionally urgent, and, therefore, to ease off rationing and other restrictions on consumption before easing off controls and licences for investment. It will be a ticklish business to maintain the two sets of controls at precisely the right tension and will require a sensitive touch and the method of trial and error operating through small changes.

7. Perhaps this first phase might last five years,-but it is anybody's guess. Sooner or later it should be possible to abandon both types of control entirely (apart from controls on foreign lending). We then enter the second phase, which is the main point of emphasis in the paper of the Economic Section. If two-thirds or three-quarters of total investment is carried out or can be influenced by public or semi-public bodies, a long-term programme of a stable character should be capable of reducing the potential range of fluctuation to much narrower limits than formerly, when a smaller volume of investment was under public control and when even this part tended to follow, rather than correct, fluctuations of investment in the strictly private sector of the economy. Moreover the proportion of investment represented by the balance of trade, which is not easily brought under short-term control, may be smaller than before. The main task should be to prevent large fluctuations by a stable long-term programme. If this is successful it should not be too difficult to offset small fluctuations by expediting or retarding some items in this long-term programme.

8. I do not believe that it is useful to try to predict the scale of this long-term programme. It will depend on the social habits and propensities of a community with a distribution of taxed income significantly different from any of which we have experience, on the nature of the tax system and on the practices and conventions of business. But perhaps one can say that it is unlikely to be less than 7 per cent or more than 20 per cent of the net national income, except under new influences, deliberate or accidental, which are not yet in sight.

9. It is still more difficult to predict the length of the second, than of the first, phase. But one might expect it to last another five or ten years and to pass insensibly into the third phase.

10. As the third phase comes into sight; the problem stressed by Sir H. Henderson begins to be pressing. It becomes necessary to encourage wise consumption and discourage saving,-and to absorb some part of the unwanted surplus by increased leisure, more holidays (which are a wonderfully good way of getting rid of money) and shorter hours.

11. Various means will be open to us with the onset of this golden age. The object will be slowly to change social practices and habits so as to reduce the indicated level of saving. Eventually depreciation funds should be almost sufficient to provide all the gross investment that is required.

12. Emphasis should be placed primarily on measures to maintain a steady level of employment and thus to prevent fluctuations. If a large fluctuation is allowed to occur, it will be difficult to find adequate offsetting measures of sufficiently quick action. This can only be done through flexible methods by means of trial and error on the basis of experience, which has still to be gained. If the authorities know quite clearly what they are trying to do and are given sufficient powers, reasonable success in the performance of the task should not be too difficult.

13. I doubt if much is to be hoped from proposals to offset unforeseen short-period fluctuations in investment by stimulating short-period changes in consumption. But I see very great attractions and practical advantage in Mr Meade's proposal for varying social security contributions according to the state of employment.

14. The second and third phases are still academic. Is it necessary at the present time for Ministers to go beyond the first phase in preparing administrative measures? The main problems of the first phase appear to be covered by various memoranda already in course of preparation. insofar as it is useful to look ahead, I agree with Sir H. Henderson that we should be aiming at a steady long-period trend towards a reduction in the scale of net investment and an increase in the scale of consumption (or, alternatively, of leisure) but the saturation of investment is far from being in sight to-day The immediate task is the establishment and the adjustment of a double system of control and of sensitive, flexible means for gradually relaxing these controls in the light of day-by-day experience

I would conclude by two quotations from Sir H. Henderson's paper, which seem to me to embody much wisdom.

"Opponents of Socialism are on strong ground when they argue that the State would be unlikely in practice to run complicated industries more efficiency than they are run at present. Socialists are on strong ground when they argue that reliance on supply and demand, and the forces of market competition, as the mainspring of our economic system, produces most unsatisfactory results. Might we not conceivably find a modus vivendi for the next decade or so in an arrangement under which the State would fill the vacant post of entrepreneur-in-chief, while not interfering with the ownership or management of particular businesses, or rather only doing so on the merits of the case and not at the behests of dogma?

"We are more likely to succeed in maintaining employment if we do not make this our sole, or even our first, aim. Perhaps employment, like happiness, will come most readily when it is not sought for its own sake. The real problem is to use our productive powers to secure the greatest human welfare. Let us start then with the human welfare, and consider what is most needed to increase it. The needs will change from tune to time, they may shift, for example, from capital goods to consumers' goods and to services. Let us think in terms of organising and directing our productive resources, so as to meet these changing needs, and we shall be less likely to waste them."

Pudding

PRODUCTIVITY AND COSTS
Third Quarter 2009, Preliminary

Nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased at a 9.5 percent annual rate during the third quarter of 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was the largest gain in productivity since the third quarter of 2003, when it rose 9.7 percent. Labor productivity, or output per hour, is calculated by dividing an index of real output by an index of hours of all persons, including employees, proprietors, and unpaid family workers. Output increased 4.0 percent and hours worked decreased 5.0 percent in the third quarter of 2009 (All quarterly percent changes in this release are seasonally adjusted annual rates).

Paradoxically (perhaps), these productivity gains should lead to employment growth in the future, provided that growth is not constrained by a decline in purchasing power.

The thing about China

Browsing through last month's 'Epoch Times' (delivered direct from Kalgoorlie this week) there's an interesting article on page 16 entitled 'China's economic Achilles' heel'.

That 'heel' says the author, He Qinglian, is composed of a number of contradictions. First that China could never have been both a cheap source of labour for the global capitalists as well as a huge consumer market. "Among the 1.3 billion Chinese people, approximately 800 million have, accordingly, no buying power".

The other great attractions for the world's large transnational corporations, those that settled their manufacturing operations in the Special Economic Zones in China, has been the appeal of cheap land, low environmental costs for their operations as well as the ready availability of cheap energy.

However, the quantity of cheap land is withering fast as land costs escalate and, in terms of the low environmental costs, China's outspoken deputy minister of China's environmental protection agency declared that the Chinese economic miracle will end soon. In 2004 Pan Yue said this was "because the environment can no longer keep pace."[1]

In the energy sector China's crude oil consumption in the last few years "is going up by 5.77 per cent per year. During the same period, China's domestic oil supplies have only been increasing 1.67 per cent per year. In 1993, China...became a net importer of oil." [2] In January this year it was reported that "China is aiming to increase its coal production by about 30 per cent by 2015 to meet its energy needs...in a move likely to fuel concerns over global warming." [3]

The only sustained bargaining chip that China appears to still have going for it is the continued availability of cheap labour. But there are many more individuals willing to work for low wages elsewhere when global employment opportunities are few and far between.

Whichever way one looks at the problems in China's economy they look very much like those of the world economy in general:

“The biggest problem in China’s economy is that the growth is unstable, imbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable.” Wen Jiabao, China’s premier in 2007. [4]

[1] The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global
Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?
Jacques Leslie. December 10 , 2007. MotherJones.com
http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/01/the-last-empire.html

[2] 'China's economic Achilles' heel' by He Qinglian. Epoch Times, October 9-22, 2009. Page 16.

[3] China to increase coal output by 30pc
9/01/2009 1:00:00 AM
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/business/china-to-increase-coal-output-by-30pc/1403090.aspx

[4] The China Puzzle by Bob Dinetz
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: May 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/magazine/17china-t.html

The Autumn of the Paradigm: A Fairy Tale

Seems everyone these days is talking about a "new paradigm".

The Wall Street Journal: "Crisis Compels Economists To Reach for New Paradigm"

"'We could be looking at a paradigm shift," says [Prince?] Frederic Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve governor now at Columbia University.

George Soros:

In response to the policy challenges presented by the economic crisis and the need to develop fresh approaches to economic theory, a group of top academics, policy-makers, and private sector leaders today announced the creation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).

David Leonhardt in the New York Times Magazine, August 2008:

The second point Obama wanted to make was about sustainability. The current concerns about the state of the planet, he said, required something of a paradigm shift for economics. If we don’t make serious changes soon, probably in the next 10 or 15 years, we may find that it’s too late.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch:

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur....

Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes:

MANY, many years ago lived an emperor, who thought so much of new clothes that he spent all his money in order to obtain them; his only ambition was to be always well dressed. He did not care for his soldiers, and the theatre did not amuse him; the only thing, in fact, he thought anything of was to drive out and show a new suit of clothes. He had a coat for every hour of the day; and as one would say of a king "He is in his cabinet," so one could say of him, "The emperor is in his dressing-room."

Problem is, the pursuit of the new paradigm is being conducted in the same way the King's son searched for Cinderella.

"No one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits."

No one shall be the new paradigm but he whose epistemologically-vapid rational actor microfoundations this stultifying, putrefying growth imperative fits.

...for the only thing that gave us security on earth was the certainty that he was there, invulnerable to plague and hurricane, invulnerable to Manuela Sanchez's trick, invulnerable to time, dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for us that did not have our measure, for he had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny...

The Contrary Commonwealth of Virginia

Before anybody makes too much of the gubernatorial election results in Virginia, whether from the Right that this is a Warning Shot to Obama or from the Left that Creigh Deeds just did not hew to the Obama line enough, everyone should keep in mind the contrary record of Virginia since the main part of the old Byrd machine that used to run the state switched from the Democratic to the Republican parties back in the 1970s. With its elections coming one year after the presidential ones, it has exhibited an anti-Washington attitude appropriate to the location of the former rebellious Confederacy, electing someone from the party not in the White House every time starting in 1977. Here is the record.

1977: Dem Jimmy Carter in WH, GOP John Dalton wins in VA
1981: GOP Ronald Reagan in WH, Dem Charles Robb wins in VA
1985: GOP Ronald Reagan in WH, Dem Gerald Baliles wins in VA
1989: GOP George H.W. Bush in WH: Dem L. Douglas Wilder wins in VA
1993: Dem Bill Clinton in WH: GOP George Allen wins in VA
1995: Dem Bill Clinton in WH: GOP Jim Gilmore wins in VA
2001: GOP George W. Bush in WH: Dem Mark Warner wins in VA
2005: GOP George W. Bush in WH: Dem Tim Kaine wins in VA
2009: Dem Barack Obama in WH: GOP Bob McDonnell wins in VA.

Who Killed More: Communism Or Naziism?

With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall upon us, various folks are popping up with all kinds of arguments, including in the 11/2 Washington Post, one Paul Hollander, an emeritus sociology prof once at U-Mass-Amherst, now at the Cato Institute, and a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian uprising writing on "Murderous Idealism." He resurrects the argument that the Communists killed more than the Nazis, indeed, a lot more: "There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism [sic] (which led to far fewer deaths)."

Now, I will agree that there is more awareness of the deaths caused by the Nazis than by the Communists. However, this meme that the Communists "killed" many more has been increasingly pushed since it appeared in the 1990s in works by R.J. Rummel and the The Black Book of Communism by Stephane Courtois. The former claims over 140 million, the latter around 100 million, their main difference being an extra 39 million or so Rummel claims died on the way to or in the gulag that Courtois and others do not accept. These are large numbers and are indeed larger than any that anybody attributes to the Nazis. But, this argument has some serious problems in the way it gets mentioned by people like Hollander.

In particular, starting from Courtois's 100 million, about 55 million of those are famine deaths, the largest single number being from the Great Leap Forward disaster in China at the end of the 1950s, with the other biggies being 1921 and the early 1930s in the USSR. This still leaves a really huge number, although if one focuses on people specifically killed on orders of leaders, the remaining number gets much smaller, although still well up into the millions. I am sorry, but while one can blame "the system" for the famines, I do not buy the argument some make (especially some Ukrainian nationalists about the 1930s famine in the USSR) that the Soviet and Chinese leaders actively wanted these deaths rather than having them happen due to bungling and errors.

So, what are the Nazi numbers? Well, Courtois claims something like 20 million roughly killed by them in World War II. I am not sure where he got those numbers, but I just looked at Wikipedia's accounting of deaths in that war. I went through the countries of Europe where the Germans and Italians fought (and, I do think the Nazis must be held responsible for WW II, not the Soviets, despite the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact), and I got a figure of about 43 million, with more than half of those (26 million) coming out of the Soviet Union. Now, of course, one can argue that many of those 43 million were killed by Allied soldiers or bombings. But these would not have occurred if the Nazis had not sought to conquer the world and invaded their neighbors. With the 6 million from the Holocaust, that puts the dead due to the Nazis at around 49 million by my count, arguably slightly ahead of the dead due to the Communists if one does not count famine deaths, and over a much shorter period of time and a much larger population ruled.

So, I find this ongoing effort to claim that the "large-scale atrocities [famines?], killings and human rights violations" by the Communists werre far greater in scale than those killed by the Nazis to be a pretty clear exaggeration.

Is A Completely Clean Solution To Global Warming Possible?

The latest issue of Scientific American says "yes." An article in the November issue by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A Delucchi, "Sustainable Energy," argues that by 2030 100% of all global energy demand could be supplied by wind, water, and solar. This would even involve a reduction in power demand globally from 12.5 terawatts to 11.5 tw, as we would replace inefficient internal combustion engine autos and fossil fuel using airplanes with hydrogen technologies, the hydrogen obtained from electrolysis of water, using clean electricity sources to do so. 51% would come from wind, with 3.8 million wind turbines, 40% from solar, and the rest from water, including most tidal and waves, with some geothermal thrown in as well. While admitting that costs are still a bit too high for the solar components, they argue that the wind and water parts are already competitive economically with existing tech, with only some further improvements in transmission capability needed to really do it.

They do admit some caveats. In particular some rarer metals will be pushed to the limit unless there are some further tech breakthroughs: silver for solar cells, neodymium for gear boxes on wind turbines (mostly located in China), tellurium and indium for thin film solar cells, lithium for electric car batteries (half of world supplies in Bolivia and Chile), and platinum for hydrogen fuel cells. They note that nuclear has high carbon output in building the plants, but agree it does not once they are built (although other problems). I think there are other problems, with listening to local environmentalists here going on again over the weekend against wind turbines, reminding me that there will be lots of opposition to much of this, even if it is cost effective (and if it is not cost effective, just forget China or India signing on at all). But, it certainly makes for a nice vision just prior to the Copenhagen conference on global warming.

Quick and Easy; Cheap and Cheerful

At the late Sandwichman's insistence, Dean Baker has stopped burying his lede:

The Obama administration came out with its first set of numbers on the jobs impact of its stimulus package. It's pretty much along the lines of what was predicted. To date, the package has created close to one million jobs. That is good news, but in an economy with more than 15 million unemployed workers, it is not nearly good enough. We need to do more, much more.

Fortunately, there is an easy and quick way to begin to get these unemployed workers back to work. It involves paying workers to work shorter hours. The mechanism can take the form of a tax credit to employers. The government can give them a tax credit of up to $3,000 in order to shorten their workers' hours while leaving their pay unchanged. The reduction in hours can take the form of paid sick days, paid family leave, shorter workweeks or longer vacations. The employer can choose the method that is best for her workers and the workplace.

Changing the Subject: Beyond Wishful Thinking

John Dryzek, Professor of Social and Political Theory at the Australian National University, wrote an article published 13 years ago titled "Foundations for Environmental Political Economy: The Search for Homo Ecologicus." Dryzek's article speaks directly to the central concern of my own book: to identify an alternative economic actor to Homo economicus. A copy of the article was one of only two supplementary sources I brought with me to Saturna Island two weeks ago when I went to (nearly) complete the first draft.

While waiting for the ferry, I retrieved the article from my bag to pass the time. There, on page 29, I was surprised to find that I had several weeks earlier scrawled "OSTROM!" in the margin. My ferry trip to Saturna took place the afternoon of the day her Swedish Bank Prize ("Nobel") was announced. So the name in the margin suddenly took on an unexpected resonance. Serendipitously, Dryzek's interpretation (at least) of Elinor Ostrom's work on common-pool resources dovetails quite nicely with what I'm trying to achieve in The Gift of Prosperity. It also addresses Brenda's and Carl Rogers's call for a "new kind of person."

Dryzek himself is critical of the results of eco-philosophical efforts to specify the features of this new kind of person. He cites E.F. Schumacher, Theodore Roszak and others. "The ecophilosophical house is an attractive dwelling," he writes, "but nobody has any idea how to build it." Dryzek's sketch of an alternative relies not so much on positing an ideal as on searching for precedents. It is in Ostrom's Governing the Commons that he finds the rudiments of that "alternative, beyond wishful thinking." In Gift I believe I take this alternative a crucial step forward, addressing human labor as a Common Pool Resource. Waged work is, after all, the primary source of income for an immense portion of the earth's inhabitants.

Mischievously, I've decided to call this labor-as-CPR, "The Lump" or, more formally, the lump of labor. My rehabilitated lump of labor, however, is not a fallacious belief in a fixed amount of work to be done. That is grammatically awkward anyway. My new lump is about a finite amount of labor that it is prudent (and sustainable) for workers collectively to offer on the market at any given time. I think a case can be made that this new lump is not that different from what workers traditionally had in mind long before the economists, journalists and propagandists raised the lump-of-labor fallacy banner as a gesture of ridicule and disdain.

Jerry Brown: California Gubernatorial Front Runner, yes, but ...

Here is an interesting piece about how he operates

http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/politicians/articles/?storyId=30658

London Calling

Tuesday Nov 3rd 7-9pm

The Centre for Environment & Sustainability (UWO) presents: Dr. Peter Victor –
"Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, not Disaster"

Venue: Middlesex College Room 110

Growth, expansion, greater wealth – these have long been the standard policies of governments and business. But is growth effective in eliminating world poverty, solving unemployment, protecting the environment and contributing to individual happiness? What would happen to world economics if we had a no growth policy? Dr. Peter Victor will address these issues and others in his upcoming lecture as part of the E&S Special Lecture Series. An economist and Professor in Environmental Studies at York University, Dr. Victor has worked on environmental issues for nearly 40 years. Dr. Victor was one of the original founders of ecological economics and was the first President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics.

A reminder: Dr. Victor will be the guest author for E&S Reads – 10:30 to Noon, Nov. 3, 09 – Kresge Building Room 106. This is an excellent opportunity for a intimate discussion with the author. Copies of "Managing Without Growth" are available in the Bookstore.

Everyone is welcome to both events.
Presented by: The Centre for Environment and Sustainability, The Global and Ecosystem Health Interest Group at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and The McConnell Family Foundation.

A revolution is not a change in management. It is a change in man.

Forty years ago many writers and thinkers and poets (and even economists) talked of a revolution that was coming. The 'Age of Acquarious', the 'Limits to Capitalism', 'The Greening of America', the 'New World New Mind', the 'Limits to Growth' and 'The End of Certainty' etc.

One of these writers, Carl Rogers [1], wrote about the increasing disbelief in the democratic process in the early 1970s. He also stated unequivocably 'that a revolution was coming', not 'a gun carrying army with banners, not in manifestos or declarations, but through the emergence of a new kind of person, thrusting up through the dying, yellowing, putrefying leaves and stalks of our fading institutions.'

This new kind of person, Rogers wrote, would have the following traits:

** deep concern for authenticity against the climate of half-truth, exaggeration, scandal, sensation and double talk, or talk without meaning at all;

** an opposition to all highly structured, inflexible and impersonal institutions;

** fundamental indifference to material comforts and rewards, although accustomed to affluence [2];

** deep desire for close personal associations, not confined to the old 'familiar areas', with all others excluded;

** a rejection of national and racial discrimination;

** deep distrust of science and established truth with is so much in the 'head' that in fact it suppresses truth;

** strong desire for self-knowledge including dreams, mediation, mysteries and psychic phenomena, and for feeling and understanding rather than 'knowledge' which seems to have no real social value;

** a feeling of closeness to nature, an identification with it, and a desire to act in no way against it;

** an awareness of living in an ever-changing process in which he or she is vitally alive and willing to risk;

** a trust in one's own experience as a validation of life.

Unfortunately governments and political parties have continued to enforced authoritarian and capitalist hegemonies around the world. They "themselves need transformation almost as much as most of the people who elect them, or comprise them. That hegemony is central in control, bureaucratic in form, relying upon leadership, and embarassed at the very idea of liberation" wrote the ousted left-wing radical of the Australian Whitlam Labor Government, Jim Cairns. [3]

Rogers and Cairns were writing words as a silent plea for the world to find the individual and group strength to counter the zero sum game of imperialism, corporatism, and the coups and wars that go with it. Their predicament was dire and so eloquently put in a song by Simon and Garfunkel:

People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share
Noone dare
disturb the sound of silence

Fools said I
you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows

Hear my words that I might teach you ...
Take my arms that I might reach you

But my words like silent raindrops fell...[4]

Decades earlier George Orwell appeared to mirror this message when he wrote despairingly that "Traditions are not killed by facts."

[1] 'The Man and His Ideas', Richard I Evans (ed), EP Dutton and Co Inc New York, 1975. As quoted by Jim Cairns (former Australian Deputy Prime Minister in the early 1970s) in 1976 book entitled 'Oil in Troubled Waters'.

[2] "An important question here is whether affluence is needed to produce the new, emerging person." wrote Jim Cairns

[3] Jim Cairns.1976. 'Oil in Troubled Waters'. Page 151.

[4] Lyrics in the song: 'The Sounds of Silence'. Sung by Simon and Garfunkel

Dismantling the Economy

During the New Deal, the government left a legacy of buildings, parks, and public spaces. Gray Brechin deserves great credit for documenting this achievement.

http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/

In contrast, the U.S. is engaged in wasteful spending on war and bailouts that will leave a pitifully small legacy. What king of legacy will Obama leave?

I remember when the United States was going to prosper as an information economy, based on the premise that we are either the smartest or the best educated in the world. To ensure success in achieving this vision, the country is engaged in a massive defunding of education. California, of course, is the leader in this respect.

Presumably, imposing requirements multiple choice tests and scripted teaching in the poor neighborhoods will be all we need, once we can break the teachers' unions.

In line with the steady undermining of information in the information economy, the University of California is making some questionable choices. Here is one that has not been widely publicized:

California is contemplating a $10 billion bond to finance a massive statewide water project. One would assume that the state would want to have access to as much information for guidance in such matters.

Yet the University of California is getting ready to mothball its valuable Water Resources Center Archives, which a Sacramento Bee article observed, "For decades it has served as a shrine for engineers, lawyers and academics working to understand and improve the management of water, California's most precious resource." The problem is that the school cannot afford the $230,000 annual cost, probably equal to a couple of superfluous vice presidents.

Weiser, Matt. 2009. "UC Archives on Water Imperiled." Sacramento Bee (26 October): p. B 1.
http://www.sacbee.com/378/story/2281137.html

Workers' Ownership and Management and Work Sharing

If indeed, as the kurzarbeit evidence from Germany suggests, work sharing or other methods of reducing work hours during a recession preserves jobs, then it should be of interest what sorts of economic systems and organizations might lead to more of this. One form that has long been suggested as having this character is worker managed and worker owned firms, more conventionally called "cooperatives." The literature on this is simply huge, and a good summary can be found in John P. Bonin, Derek C. Jones, and Louis Putterman, "Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Producer Cooperatives: Will Ever the Twain Meet?" Journal of Economic Literature, 1991, 31, pp. 1290-1320. Indeed, in such enterprises owner-manager-workers are more likely to share the pain of a fall in demand by a shared cutback. These firms also tend to show greater short-term productive efficiency through flatter managerial hierarchies and the worker-owners monitoring each other for shirking.

The literature also cites possible disadvantages, perhaps a tendency to be reluctant to hire more worker-owners, possible tendencies to engage in ignoring externalities and trying to gain monopoley power, and so on. With a few exceptions, such as the Mondragon cooperatives, these firms rarely become very large, with financing a big issue. A few countries have tried to encourage them, but by and large they remain scarce in most economies, a vision, but not much of a widespread reality.