Sheridan and faith

I had missed that Greg Sheridan has been making a bit of a splash with his religious writings, until I read this article in The Catholic Herald.   Oddly:

Although a practising Catholic, Sheridan is married to Jasbir Kaur “Jessie” Sheridan, who practises the Sikh religion along with their three sons.

Even more odd is choosing this description for his political views:

A conservative, Sheridan describes himself as politically “bisexual” (or, if you prefer, ambidextrous). That is, he leans neither to the Labor nor the Liberal party. His position is summarised by former prime minister, John Howard, who has said: “Last time I checked, God voted neither Labor nor Liberal; he certainly didn’t vote Green.”

I'd like to know when the "bisexual" Sheridan last voted Labor!

But generally speaking, I have usually found him relatively un-offensive for someone who writes in The Australian.  

Probably not a hell hound

Good Good Omens

I've signed up for a free one month on Amazon Prime just to watch the series based on the much loved book Good Omens.

I saw the first episode last night, and was not disappointed. I've only read the book once, so I had forgotten how clever the whole premise was - an angel and demon who have spent so much time on Earth they have both "gone native", and don't want to see it end with a "too soon" Apocalypse.

It's cheerful, clever and amusing, and looks like it had a generous production budget.  Let's hope the quality keeps up throughout the 6 episodes...

More on the current state of capitalism

Axios had an article a couple of days ago that seems to not have attracted as much attention as it deserves:

A truly bizarre trend is having an impact on the economy — wealthy people and corporations have so much money they literally don't know what to do with it.

Why it matters: At a time when growing income inequality is fueling voter discontent and underpinning an array of social movements, the top 1% of earners and big companies are holding record levels of unused cash.

The big picture: U.S. companies raked in a record $2.3 trillion in corporate profits last year, while the country's total wealth increased by $6 trillion to $98.2 trillion (40% of which went to those with wealth over $100,000).

So, where is all the money going? The IMF notes large companies around the world are overwhelmingly and uniformly choosing not to reinvest much of it into their businesses. They're hoarding it in cash and buying back stock.

"There are only 2 things that money can do — sit on a balance sheet unused, where it's just earned income earning an interest rate of zero," ICI chief economist Sean Collins points out. "Or it makes sense to release it to share buybacks or dividends."

• Companies could pay their workers more, but "that would be terrible for the stock market," says Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics — half-jokingly.
• Companies made a record $1.1 trillion in stock buybacks in 2018 and are on track to surpass that number this year. But they still have record cash holdings of close to $3 trillion.

 And more:

But even that hasn't been enough to account for all the new money. The top 1% of U.S. households are holding a record $303.9 billion of cash, a quantum leap from the under $15 billion they held just before the financial crisis.

How we got here:

• The Fed's quantitative easing program pushed the cost of borrowing money to next to nothing for nearly a decade, allowing companies to splurge on debt for mergers and acquisitions and to boost revenue.
• At the same time, globalization allowed them to reduce labor costs, meaning that gains effectively were returned as profit and used by public companies to boost stock prices.

Between the lines: These factors, combined with legislative policies that have consistently favored business owners over workers, eroded unions and reduced employees ability to demand higher wages.

Lots of people on Twitter are saying that if this is a surprise to anyone, they need to remember Marx.    Lots of GIFS of guillotines are involved too - rather unhelpfully allowing the wingnut right to get hysterical that "Socialists!" really want another run at violent Marxist revolution.   (Actually, they just want wingnuts to stop being idiots who count their money and hug their guns at night.)

But I am of  the view that libertarian (sorry, "classical liberal") economists have nothing useful to say about this situation at all.    They love the idea of accumulation of money so much that they never see any reason to stop or slow anyone or anything - no matter how rich - from accumulating more.   

The very convincing Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz has a very lengthy piece at the TLS, reviewing three books on capitalism but with a lot of his own commentary.

It's a great read.   Wasn't Judith Sloan sneeringly rude to him when he was out in Australia last?   When she can write as well and as convincingly as him, rather than being an overpaid free market shill for a billionaire's loss making vanity paper, I'll reconsider their respective merits.

Some extracts I liked:

By now it is clear that something is fundamentally wrong with modern capitalism. The 2008 global financial crisis showed that the system as currently constructed is neither efficient nor stable. If a slew of data hasn’t already convinced us that during forty years of slow economic growth in advanced economies the benefits overwhelmingly went to the top 1 per cent – or 0.1 per cent – the anti-establishment votes in the United States and United Kingdom certainly should. The mainstream economists, central bank governors and “centrist” Blairite and Clintonite politicians who set us on and maintained this dismal course and confidently pronounced that globalization and financial-market liberalization would bring sustained growth and financial benefits for all, have been soundly discredited.

Considering the devastation wrought by misguided financial policies over the past decade in particular, one might reasonably have expected a revolution in the economics profession akin to the Keynesian one in the aftermath of the Great Depression. But we tend to forget that, back in the 1930s, as the economy sank ever deeper into depression, many economists in the US and UK stuck to laissez-faire. Markets would correct themselves, they said; no need to meddle. And even after John Maynard Keynes brilliantly articulated what was wrong, and how government actions could set things right, a great number of economists did not want to follow his prescriptions, out of ideological fear of excessive government intervention. So it is no surprise, really, that the economics profession’s response to the 2008 crisis has been slow and halting.

And then this:

Our current economic system is often referred to as capitalism, a term – as Fred L. Block points out in Capitalism: The future of an illusion – that the left once used pejoratively and the right now champions as if it’s an unchanging and noble framework that delivers miraculous, never-ending growth from which everyone benefits, or would if only government didn’t interfere. But all the underlying premisses of this blanket term are wrong: no economy, and certainly no modern economy, has a private sector that functions in a vacuum. The government is right there alongside it, enacting rules and regulations, enforcing trading standards, backing up the banking system and stabilizing the market economy. Capitalism isn’t one, rigid system. It’s ever changing. And the promises made by its most reductive advocates – that deregulation, privatization and globalization will bring wellbeing to most citizens in all countries – have proven to be horribly wrong. (Globalization, to its credit, has contributed to the enormous decrease in global poverty: the successes in East Asia, in particular in China, where some 740 million have been moved out of poverty, wouldn’t have been possible without it. Still, mismanaged and inequitable globalization, with large agriculture subsidies for corporate farms in the advanced countries, has hurt the poorest of the poor: rural workers in the least developed countries.)

Two other crises accompany the crisis in our economy. The first is a crisis in our democracy, for the two are inseparable. It is through our political system that the rules of the economy are set, and when the outcomes of those rules are unacceptable – as in the 2008 crisis – the consequences must be addressed, and addressed through radical change. And those kinds of changes have to be made through the political system – otherwise, matters will only get worse, especially when a third interconnecting crisis is taken into consideration: the environment. Unfortunately, none of these books faces up to our system’s failure to address the existential question of the moment: climate change.

But read the whole thing...

Bunch of weirdos

No one seems to have too firm a grip on what may come of the George Pell appeal.   In one of the more unusual bits of media to come out of it, I saw Leigh Sales and David Marr on 7.30 last night discussing the matter of whether the Appeal Court covered in detail the issue of whether a fully vestment-ed Pell could plausibly get his penis out to commit the offence - and David Marr assured us that the judges had all agreed the vestments did not present a insurmountable restraint on such an act. 

That doesn't sound so great for the appeal prospects, but on the other hand, it seems the Crown's barrister didn't perform well on his submissions, perhaps because he was sick?   (He had to be asked to speak louder, more than one, apparently; and is reported to have stumbled in his answers to judges.)

But anyway, the bunch of ageing culture warrior Conservatives, when they are not comparing disastrous illnesses at Sinclair Davidson's cyber-home for the old and obnoxious, are dead keen on a Pell victory, and then a return to Rome to lead the church to some weird imaginary triumph.   Look at this comment:

Bunch of weirdos. 

A new (to me) crime reduction theory

Pretty interesting suggestion:

Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist,  and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.

“The cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s, turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high.

The cellphone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship between that and violence is different.”

The rest of the article goes on to note how this is just one of many theories about the crime reduction in that period:

The University of New Haven criminologist Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo published a review of the contending theories in 2018 that found no fewer than 24 different explanations for why crime began a multi-decade decline in the early 1990s, through economic times good and bad, in different countries and cities, under draconian policing regimes and more progressive ones.

Go read the whole article, at The Atlantic.

David Roberts vents

David Roberts has an angry (but, I think, pretty accurate) twitter thread reaction to the apparent outbreak of hostilities between the Conservative religious culture warrior arm of the American Right and the libertarian-ish arm (now rebranded as "classical liberal", because they realised "libertarian" is too associated with nerds with such atrocious taste they can stomach Ayn Rand novels) which is not so keen on Donald Trump.

The hostilities are detailed in this article at Vox:  David French vs. Sohrab Ahmari and the battle dividing conservatives, explained

David's reaction culminates in this:

The topic of the inherent conflict between these two arms of the Right, and the ridiculous and harmful alliance they managed to forge on climate change science, is the defining story of the last 50 or so years of American politics.  

Fake meat boom?

Axios reports that fake meat (or at least, fake burger meat) is proving to be so popular that the manufacturers are having trouble meeting demand:

The fake-meat boom is real, propelling startups to incredible heights while creating shortages of its own.

The big picture: The fake-meat market could be 10x its current size by 2029, Barclays analysts estimated in May.

• "In fact, we believe that there is a bigger market opportunity for plant-based (and maybe even lab-based) protein than perhaps was argued for electric vehicles ten years ago."

Why it matters: The stock market in particular is treating Beyond Meat like a superstar, with its stock price up 4x from last month's IPO. But the companies must prove they can handle the demand.

• "Last summer, locations of A&W Food Services of Canada Inc. were sold out of Beyond Meat’s burger for weeks," the WSJ notes.
• "This spring, restaurants including American WildBurger locations around Chicago have run short of Impossible’s burgers. ... Craft & Crew Hospitality in Minneapolis hasn’t received scheduled shipments of Impossible burgers for weeks from a local distributor."
• Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have ramped up production to meet demand.

Cool.

Not to my taste, part 2

The Guardian has a lengthy article with the headline:

Winx's brother among Australian racehorses killed for meat in South Korea 

Seems family connections don't count for much in South Korea, then.  

In the past five years Australia has exported 158 racehorses to South Korea, mostly two-year-olds purchased in the Magic Millions sales for the purpose of racing or breeding. Analysis of a single year, 2014, shows that of 58 horses exported, 12 were confirmed to have been slaughtered and a further 11 were also likely to have been used in the meat trade.

That sounds odd.  Were these horses found to be duds one way or another, or do South Koreans like paying big dollars for well bred horse meat?

Anyway, as much as I don't care for horses as an animal, I find something more gruesome in the imagination about their slaughter for meat than the slaughter of smaller animals.  Maybe it's the idea of how much blood would be involved, or something.  

I haven't ever (knowingly) eaten horse meat, but I would decline if offered.

Not to my taste

NPR notes that there is another series of Black Mirror coming out.

I've only watched two episodes, including the movie length Bandersnatch, and I find I can't really warm to its bleakness.  (Even my son, who has watched more, doesn't seem to hold it in very high regard.)  

I have enjoyed Twilight Zone in its couple of incarnations, as well as the old Outer Limits, neither of which could be described as full of cheery optimism, but I find Black Mirror's modern version of worrying about where we're going unappealing.   Not entirely sure why.  Maybe because I find concerns about AI and computer technology generally overblown?   (Except for the problem of social media and misinformation - which is greatly underestimated.)

Heat deaths noted

I noted earlier in the week the extremely high temperatures in parts of India.  It's still continuing.

Pakistan has had them too - and it's hard to imagine in these countries how the poorest people survive.

In some pretty tragic news, even being in a hospital in Pakistan might not save you:

Dubai: In an incident which shocked the nation, at least five infants died of heat and suffocation after the air-conditioning units broke down at the intensive care unit in a hospital in Sahiwal, Pakistan.

Silence

I seem to be having an unusually long stretch without any comment from anyone , even Homer, despite posts on various (what I think are) interesting topics.

What's wrong, my extremely small readership?

A milestone reached (with some unpleasant associated news)

Yesterday was our 20th wedding anniversary.   My wife and I will eat out at the weekend, but last night we ate big at home and drank French champagne (which again made me note how I don't get any more enjoyment from them compared to the much cheaper Australian version).  Anyway, it was very pleasant.   We both consider ourselves lucky to have had children, making a start at it late in life, and having a boy and girl, both basically healthy and without significant drama in their lives, is something to be thankful for.

In the related unpleasant news, on Monday I learned that the priest who married us is now facing a historic sex abuse charge.   That's sad, whether it turns into a conviction or not.

Good to know I don't have to...

...become a vegan for climate change, according to Michael Mann:

Though many of these actions are worth taking, and colleagues and friends of ours are focused on them in good faith, a fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold corporate polluters accountable. In fact, one recent study suggests that the emphasis on smaller personal actions can actually undermine support for the substantive climate policies needed.

This new obsession with personal action, though promoted by many with the best of intentions, plays into the hands of polluting interests by distracting us from the systemic changes that are needed.

There is no way to avert the climate crisis without keeping most of our coal, oil and gas in the ground, plain and simple. Because much of the carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries, our choices in the next few years are crucial, and they will determine the lives our grandchildren and their grandchildren. We need corporate action, not virtue signaling. 

Massive changes to our national energy grid, a moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure and a carbon fee and dividend (that steeply ramps up) are just some examples of visionary policies that could make a difference. And right now, the "Green New Deal," support it or not, has encouraged a much needed, long overdue societal conversation about these and other options for averting climate catastrophe. 

But we need more than the left wing of the Democratic Party on board. We need a national plan of action that will include everyone.