Capitalism in transition to...something?

What's the movie meme with the woman shouting "What's happening?!" ?  Oh yeah - one of my all time favourite Spielberg related movies - Poltergeist.   Disappointing that I had to Google that to double check.

Seems to me that those in the field of economics ought to be doing more of that, because I've been increasingly suspecting over the last few years that there is a crisis of confidence going on with respect to the understanding of some of the very basic concepts in the whole field. 

I don't know that John Quiggin would agree, but I take support for my gut feeling from his recent post:  The End of Interest.  Some extracts:

Amid all the strange, alarming and exciting things that have happened lately, the fact that real long-term (30-year) interest rates have fallen below zero has been largely overlooked. Yet this is the end of capitalism, at least as it has traditionally been understood. Interest is the pure form of return to capital, excluding any return to monopoly power, corporate control, managerial skills or compensation for risk.

If there is no real return to capital, then then there is no capitalism. In case it isn’t obvious, I’ll make the point in subsequent posts that there is no reason to expect the system that replaces capitalism (I’ll call it plutocracy for the moment) to be an improvement.....

In thinking about the future of the economic system, interest rates on 30-year bonds are much more significant than the ‘cash’ rates set by central banks, such as the Federal Funds rate, which have been at or near zero ever since the GFC, or the short-term market rates they influence. These rates aren’t critical in evaluating long-term investments.

The central idea of capitalism is, as the name implies, that of capital. Capital is accumulated through saving, then invested in machines, buildings and other capital assets to be used by workers in producing goods and services. Part of the value of those goods and services is paid out as wages, and the rest is returned to capital, as interest on loans and bonds or as profits for shareholders. Some of the return to capital is saved and reinvested, allowing growth to continue indefinitely. Workers, on this account, can become capitalists too, by saving and investing some of their wages. At a minimum, they should be able to save enough, while working, to finance a decent standard of living in retirement.

I await his further posts with interest.

Still surprising to be reminded of this...

More information on this topic:

The national exit polls have broken out their survey results by racial group since 1976, and since that year, the Republican nominee for president has received, on average, 54.8 percent of the white vote, while the Democratic nominee has garnered an average of 40.6 percent. In 1980, 1992, and 1996, third-party candidacies affected the distribution of the white vote. The highest percentage secured by a Republican was the 66 percent won by Ronald Reagan in his landslide re-election in 1984; the lowest Democratic number was Walter Mondale’s 34 percent in that same election. Jimmy Carter received the largest percentage of white votes for a Democrat with 48 percent in 1976; George H.W. Bush received the lowest at 41 percent in 1992 when Ross Perot ran, splitting the white vote and dropping Bush from the 60 percent white share he received in 1988.

Singapore builds a COVID ward

There was a lot of scepticism about the quality of the Chinese COVID hospital built from scratch in ridiculously short time, but if you want to see a country doing something similar with a high quality outcome, watch this video about Singapore building a COVID ward in a hospital car park:



Once again, I will swoon over the technocratic success story of Singapore, and Homer will complain I am supporting a disgusting authoritarian regime.  

Big in Turkey

When I turned the TV on yesterday morning, SBS was showing its re-broadcast of foreign news services, and the one from Turkey was just beginning.  After about 20 minutes of (I think) a 30 minute evening news show, I switched over, because it was still talking about Hagia Sophia going back to being a mosque.

It was, it would seem, a popular move amongst most Turks.  Some polling would indicate that's right.

Yet some polling earlier in the year indicated that private religious beliefs were not as devout as they were a decade ago.  The suggestion is that it might be a bit of youth rebellion against their conservative government trying to get people to be more religious.

Going more conservative in Islam in particular has probably never turned out well for a country's economic development, has it?   I see now, Googling the topic of Islam and economic development generally, there's been some pretty negative analysis around for a long time. Here's an abstract:

This essay critically evaluates the analytic literature concerned with causal connections between Islam and economic performance. It focuses on works since 1997, when this literature was last surveyed. Among the findings are the following: Ramadan fasting by pregnant women harms prenatal development; Islamic charities mainly benefit the middle class; Islam affects educational outcomes less through Islamic schooling than through structural factors that handicap learning as a whole; Islamic finance hardly affects Muslim financial behavior; and low generalized trust depresses Muslim trade. The last feature reflects the Muslim world's delay in transitioning from personal to impersonal exchange. The delay resulted from the persistent simplicity of the private enterprises formed under Islamic law. Weak property rights reinforced the private sector's stagnation by driving capital out of commerce and into rigid waqfs. Waqfs limited economic development through their inflexibility and democratization by restraining the development of civil society. Parts of the Muslim world conquered by Arab armies are especially undemocratic, which suggests that early Islamic institutions, including slave-based armies, were particularly critical to the persistence of authoritarian patterns of governance. States have contributed themselves to the persistence of authoritarianism by treating Islam as an instrument of governance. As the world started to industrialize, non-Muslim subjects of Muslim-governed states pulled ahead of their Muslim neighbors by exercising the choice of law they enjoyed under Islamic law in favor of a Western legal system. 

To be honest, I would have thought that the Ramadan fast would not apply to pregnant women, and the issue of it hurting pre-natal development is something I hadn't heard of before.*   The full paper for that abstract is available here.  It's very long, so I skipped to the end summary, and yeah, things look bad for the connection between Islam and economic development.  (Unless, I guess, you're a tiny country sitting on top of a giant pool of oil.)


* Or maybe I have, but forgotten.  When I Google the topic, there are lots of articles about it as a controversial topic.  Apparently, pregnant women are told that they do not have to fast if they are concerned bout the health of their fetus, but many chose to do so anyway.   One study from Iraq seem to say that more of the better educated chose not to fast.  I find it hard to imagine how pregnant mothers in the countries with severe heat during it can think that not drinking during the day is OK for the baby.    

Snowflake cavemen

In research that strikes me as kind of amusing, though particularly useless, it turns out there is good reason to suspect that Neanderthals had a low pain threshold:

As several Neandertal genomes of high quality are now available researchers can identify genetic changes that were present in many or all Neandertals, investigate their physiological effects and look into their consequences when they occur in people today. Looking into one gene that carries such changes, Hugo Zeberg, Svante Pääbo and colleagues found that some people, especially from central and south America but also in Europe, have inherited a Neandertal variant of a gene that encodes an ion channel that initiates the sensation of pain.

By using data from a huge population study in the UK, the authors show that people in the UK who carry the Neandertal variant of the ion channel experience more pain. "The biggest factor for how much pain people report is their age. But carrying the Neandertal variant of the ion channel makes you experience more pain similar to if you were eight years older," says lead author Hugo Zeberg, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Karolinska Institutet. "The Neandertal variant of the ion channel carries three amino acid differences to the common, 'modern' variant,'" explains Zeberg. "While single amino acid substitutions do not affect the function of the ion channel, the full Neandertal variant carrying three amino acid substitutions leads to heightened pain sensitivity in present-day people."

There's a little bit more in the article here.

All rather unfortunate if you had a higher than modern chance of being gnawed on by a sabretooth.

As noted by lots of other people...

....Andrew Bolt is approaching Donald Trump levels of lack of self awareness:

Add caption

No, no they are not...

Article at The Guardian:

Rediscovering the male soap opera: 'The highs and lows of wrestling rivalry are intoxicating' 

It seems to be about a gay (or queer, to use his term) bloke saying that the camp drama of TV wrestling really appealed to him as a queer kid.   I guess I can get that - and still be completely puzzled as to why adult straight men or women would want anything to do with this lurid form of cosplay.

Things going "bang" in Iran

An interesting article at ABC News on the question of why Iran seems to be having so many infrastructure explosions.

It notes that Israel could well be behind some of it, aiming to prevent Biden re-negotiating the nuclear deal if he wins in November. 

Not sure Taleb is his friend

Well, that's odd.

James Allan, the conservative law lecturer at UQ who I have previously pointed out makes statements unsupported by, you know, facts, has a typical Australian right wing conservative blowhard's take on COVID-19:  its danger has been vastly overestimated and the lockdown approach has been a terrible error.

But in the Spectator column in which he is opining this, he starts with citing Nassim Taleb's "skin in the game" idea as being crucial to understanding why governments have got it wrong. 

Which seems odd for this reason: I think Taleb is far too idiosyncratic to spend much time paying attention to, but as far as I know, from my brief looks at his Twitter account since the pandemic started, he has never been a sceptic of the danger of COVID 19 and lately has spent time arguing that governments requiring face mask wearing would be a good policy they should have been pushing earlier.  

In other words, Allan seems to be using one idea of Taleb's to make an argument, but ignoring Taleb's actual opinion on COVID and risk.  Which seems a foolish (that is, typical Australian version of a conservative) thing to do. 

Perhaps Jason can confirm this is correct, as I assume you still follow Taleb much more closely than I do....

The man for whom the 1950's has never ended

I've said many times before he is a reincarnation of a middle aged Catholic man from the 1950's, but the extent to which Catholic conservative CL seems to think other people all share his viewpoint still amazes me sometimes:
 

And I say this even on the basis that, sure, I'm socially conservative enough to say that I think its better for parents to be married rather than in de facto relationships.   But it's ridiculous to suggest that unmarried mothers are in no position to set workplace relationship standards because they are unmarried.

I should also mention - he is profoundly ignorant (and arrogant) on anything to do with science:

Donald Trump was right along. And all the “experts” were wrong. Absolutely, totally, unambiguously…wrong. If the figure really is closer to 500,000 (or higher), COVID-19 is not a whole lot worse than the sniffles. This is the biggest episode of mass hysteria in modern history and if you’re still denying that, you’re a crank.

But Sinclair Davidson likes to run a blog for for the dangerous promotion of bad science takes that endangers people both now and into the future.


 

A completely normal observation

Way, way stranger than fiction.

That new climate sensitivity estimate

The report in Science seems pretty good in its explanation of what the new paper considered.

Short story:

Now, in a landmark effort, a team of 25 scientists has significantly narrowed the bounds on this critical factor, known as climate sensitivity. The assessment, conducted under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and publishing this week in Reviews of Geophysics, relies on three strands of evidence: trends indicated by contemporary warming, the latest understanding of the feedback effects that can slow or accelerate climate change, and lessons from ancient climates. They support a likely warming range of between 2.6°C and 3.9°C

At least the Saudis are being sensible about this

Gee. Saudis are being more sensible than Adam Creighton. France 24 reports:

This year's hajj, which has been scaled back dramatically to include only around 1,000 Muslim pilgrims as Saudi Arabia battles a coronavirus surge, will begin on July 29, authorities said Monday.

Some 2.5 million people from all over the world usually participate in the ritual that takes place over several days, centred on the holy city of Mecca.

This year's hajj will be held under strict hygiene protocols, with access limited to pilgrims under 65 years old and without any chronic illnesses.

Here's a photo with the article:

 It's probably 35 degrees or something while they are doing this, but when you can see the floor like that, it looks rather like a skating rink.

I also find it odd how it seems people don't aren't acting with particular reverence while doing stuff around the Kaaba.   I know cleaners gotta clean, but zipping around on those industrial cleaning thinks look more like they're cleaning the tiles at a giant shopping centre than somewhere something sacred sits.   I don't know - maybe the cleaners doing the rounds inside St Peter's look the same?  Heh - yeah, I guess right: 

In some rare, good social media news

Twitter has announced sweeping measures aimed at cracking down on the QAnon conspiracy theory, including banning thousands of accounts.

The social media giant said it would also stop recommending content linked to QAnon and block URLs associated with it from being shared on the platform.

That's from the BBC.

I thought I read somewhere that Twitter wannabe competitor Parler was also taking action against it?  Can't find that now, though.  In any event, Parler has not taken off, and won't.  This, from Forbes, is rather amusing:

It’s all had the feeling of a fad and, as the Daily Beast noted earlier this week, there are signs it has begun to burn out. Sensor Tower data provided to Bloomberg also show new downloads slowing significantly in recent weeks. The reason comes down to a somewhat obvious point: People seeking a platform for their political views gravitate towards the places with the largest audiences.

Conservatives have struggled to break free from Silicon Valley’s social media behemoths before. Milo Yiannopoulos, who actually was banned from Twitter and Facebook Inc., complained last fall to his 19,000 Telegram followers that they weren’t worth his time. “It’s nice to have a little private chat with my gold star homies but I can’t make a career out of a handful of people like that,” he said, according to screenshots posted by Vice last September. Yiannopoulos went on to say that Gab, another social network the right once hoped would supplant Twitter, was full of teenage racists, and complained that "no one" uses Parler. “Unless something monumental happens, we are just going to be driven off the internet forever,” he wrote.

And they are getting caught up in the limits of free speech fights anyway: 

Parler is quickly discovering the limits of free expression. On June 30, Matze used Parler to explain its house rules, apparently frustrated with some of Parler’s new users testing the limits of its free-expression motto by posting pornographic images and obscenities.

Parler is facing the same evolution bigger social media companies have confronted for years — balancing free expression with creating safe and inviting online communities. Twitter early on referred to itself as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg maintained through the company’s early years that it is not a publisher, but a neutral platform. Facebook is still a place for free expression, Zuckerberg said in a speech last year, but he acknowledged some speech that is harmful and infringes on others’ rights shouldn’t be allowed.

The mysterious radio stations are still with us

I would have linked before to articles about the "numbers stations" (which I am pretty sure I had heard directly a few times when I used to twiddle around with a nice shortwave radio I had as a younger man.  I still have a short wave radio, as it happens, but haven't scanned the airwaves for many a year.)

This article, at BBC Future, is a very interesting look at a Russian station that doesn't even transmit numbers, and its purpose is unknown.

The article indicates that it being a "dead hand" signal is probably the most likely explanation:

“There’s absolutely no information in the signal,” says David Stupples, an expert in signals intelligence from City University, London.

What’s going on?

The frequency is thought to belong to the Russian military, though they’ve never actually admitted this. It first began broadcasting at the close of the Cold War, when communism was in decline. Today it’s transmitted from two locations – the St Petersburg site and a location near Moscow. Bizarrely, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than shutting down, the station’s activity sharply increased.

There’s no shortage of theories to explain what the Buzzer might be for – ranging from keeping in touch with submarines to communing with aliens. One such idea is that it’s acting as a “Dead Hand” signal; in the event Russia is hit by a nuclear attack, the drone will stop and automatically trigger a retaliation. No questions asked, just total nuclear obliteration on both sides.

It does talk about the history of coded signals, and we get this part which I don't think I have heard of before:

During World War Two, the British realised that they could, in fact, decipher the messages – but they’d have to get their hands on the one-time pad that was used to encrypt them. “We discovered that the Russians used the out-of-date sheets of one-time pads as substitute toilet paper in Russian army hospitals in East Germany,” says Glees. Needless to say, British intelligence officers soon found themselves rifling through the contents of Soviet latrines.

 Such glamorous work, being in intelligence!