We’ve Got The Power!

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Well not exactly. But we will, either tomorrow or Saturday. And in just a very few minutes I will have to shut down my compy at work to install new compys in the whole lab. (New to us anyways, we are th bastard stepchild of the main campus and get their hand me downs).

So I will be computer-less for at least 24 hours. Think of this as an open thread and leave me something nice to read when SCL finally brings me back to the 21st century. I’ll take thoughts, musings, haiku, rants, jokes, you name it.

And enjoy this picture. Behind every great woman there isn’t necessarily a great man, but this is too cute not to post.

Hillary & Roosevelt

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So I am reading this fabulous book about Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights (see weirdly formatted post by phone below) and the similarities between Hillary and Roosevelt are pretty striking.

Roosevelt was not a theorist. He was an experimental pragmatist. To pull our country out of the Great Depression he threw every kind of social program at it he could think of. The ones that worked, he kept. The ones that didn’t, he scrapped.

But he also understood that a program working was more than just how much of a tangible improvement it made to the economy. He was very aware of how much fear and insecurity played a part in the worsening of the economy and in the creation of war. He was working to make everyone free from fear and free from want. That he was doing anything at all to help the millions that were ignored by Hoover went far in improving prospects.

So we know that for 16 years Hillary has been championing one of the rights that Roosevelt laid out in his second bill- universal health care. She’s always pushed for more access to education and to for greater economic opportunities for everyone. But it is with her little gas tax holiday that we truly see her Roosevelt side.

It’s not a huge, long lasting program to make to gas prices cheaper. It is a short term fix meant to whip the oil companies in line with a windfall profit tax (something Roosevelt did with war profiteers) and to give the American people hope that someone is trying to help them out. It is a sample taste at Costco of the better things to come if we buy the whole package.

And speaking of war profiteers, I was struck by Roosevelt’s absolute disgust over them. He could not tolerate people turning war into profitable business and selling out their fellow citizens for easy money. This is such a marked contrast to the five years of war brought to us by Haliburton and KBR and other military contractors that think milking the American public for all they’re worth is a right and proper response to wartime and the friendly executive branch that is so willing to overlook millions (billions?)in over payments and shady invoicing.

And I have to wonder, will Obama, with all his talk of unity, be willing to go after the war profiteers who are so firmly entwined with the Republican party he wants to placate with appeasement?

I don’t think he will. He has proven that he is not a fighter for the American people. He is no Roosevelt. And he is certainly no Hillary Clinton either.

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Irony: sitting at my dark kitchen table reading about roosevelt’s second bill of rights.

1 the right to employment.

2 the right to earn enough to provide adequate food clothing and recreation.

3 the right of every farmer to sell his goods at a rate that will give his family a decent living.

4 freedom from monopolies for businesses big and small.

5 the right of every family to a decent home.

6 the right to health care.

7 the right to adequate economic protection from old age sickness accident and unemployment.

8 the right to a good education

*Editor’s note:  the little images you are seeing…well I don’t know what they are, and I am trying to fix it for the Queen.
hugs!
Chang’e

WWTSBQ- Backhanded Allies Edition

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I keep wanting to like Jeff Fecke, I really do. He really does want to be an ally.

But Jeff has thrown his hat into the “Why won’t that stupid bitch quit” already ring.

He couches it in kindler, gentler terms so us dumb girls don’t catch that he’s really saying “Either take your boobs and go home or play nice. Like a good girl. And stop with the meanness”. Or as one commenter at Shakes said “She can stay in the race as long as she’s not trying to win it”

Lemme point out a few things.

No other candidate with this many delegates has ever been put under the same kind of pressure to quit.

No other candidate who polls so well in the national election and keeps winning swing states has been under this much pressure to quit.

But she’s a girl. And the Precious doesn’t want to compete with a girl anymore. He won’t debate her anymore. And she is looking at a couple of major wins in the next round of primaries. And Florida and Michigan want their votes counted too. It’s just too much for the Precious to endure.

But according to Jeff, if Hillary wants to stay in the race she totally can. As long as she avoids any mention of her opponent. Or his flaws. Or his lack of experience. Or his sexism. Or the fact that the working class doesn’t trust him.

Wait- you know what. Hillary has been avoiding that kind of talk. She’s talked about policy and issues, how she would solve the serious problems of this country and how she really does care about us “bitter” little people.

We, the people, have talked about his lack of experience, his sexism, the fact that we just don’t trust him.

Is it really slacking if I repost a good post

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While chatting with teh Hot Bulgarian (I wonder if he knows I was bragging about him in a post at Dr. Socks? I also wonder if he knows that according to the media he and I can’t possibly have sex because I am a Hillary supporter, but that’s another topic). Anyways, he asked what a recovering economist was and I thought the best way to describe it was this post from last summer.

HE had to read it so now you do too


Assumptions about power

A good friend once said to me “Economics is the math of self-fulfilling prophecies”. Since she can’t remember saying it (blames red wine) I am stealing it for myself.

Maybe a better way of explaining it is that economics is all about assuming that all actors start from a completely equal place and that all actors follow all the rules all the time.

Tell me, where in history have people ever actually acted like that? Can you? No, because people don’t act like that and people don’t start from the same equal playing field. There is no “law of gravity” when it comes to people’s behavior.

In economics when exceptions start pilling up to disprove a theory (like “trade benefits everyone”) instead of rethinking the theory economists will say “they weren’t following the rules”. But not following the rules is exactly what happens when power is concentrated. Look at any human system- be it politics, education, sex and relationships, employment, sports- anything where there is section of people with enough power (financial, physical, whatever) to alter the rules to their benefit- they will. Women live under the daily fear of rape from all men(when statistically is a small number of men who do most of the raping), employees (who massively outnumber employers) have little ability to alter their pay or benefits on their own, politicians are much more easy influenced by powerful lobbies than individual constituents, sports stars get away with rapes and murders- etc (but not with dog fighting- cause dogs have so much more social capital than women these days).

So a better way of saying “trade benefits everyone” is saying “trade benefits the more powerful actors in a situation”. That is decidedly different from everyone.

I’ll give you an example using corn- my favorite to pick on subsidized crop. We subsidize the hell out of corn, that’s why in America everything is sweetened with corn syrup instead of sugar cane and why ethanol additives in gasoline are from corn products instead of some other plant. Under NAFTA we were going to start shipping out super subsidized (and therefore super cheap) corn to Mexico. Now Mexico is not a corn-free country. You might have had these things called corn tortillas- they come from Mexico, and tamales, also Mexico. For a good chunk of the population, corn is a staple food and a staple crop. But it is not subsidized by the Mexican government. Corn farmers in Mexico do not have a giant agri-business lobby. They are mostly small family farms, the kind we romanticize, but filled with brown people who speak Spanish instead of white people in Iowa.

So the Mexican government agreed to import the subsidized corn as long as the US agreed to pay tariffs on the corn for several years so that corn farmers in Mexico would have a chance to transition to some other form of employment. That’s nice, a little band-aid for the family farms.

But that’s not what happened. Instead Mexican ranchers that wanted cheap feed, tortilla factories and businesses that wanted to switch from locally produced, unsubsidized sugar cane to cheap corn sweeteners got the Mexican government to ignore the tariffs as soon as NAFTA went into effect. Mexican corn farmers were reduced to subsistence farming.

Now an economist would say- they weren’t following the rules (either by subsidizing the corn in the first place or by ignoring the transition tariffs) except that is how most international trade agreements end up. Rules that are meant to protect those with less power are ignored while those with more power benefit. Actually, that phrase right there sums up our entire social structure.

There is an old joke about a chemist, an engineer and an economist stranded on a dessert island with one can of food. The chemist creates a solution that will open the metal of the can. The engineer builds a contraption open the can. The economist says “Assume there is a can opener”.

By making assumptions of a perfect world in order to study economics, we are trying to open a can with an imaginary can opener. There are too many exceptions to economic rules. That is why “math of self-fulfilling prophecies” is so fitting. In math or any other branch of science, if your results didn’t match up to your theories, a new theory would have to be created. In economics, when you results don’t match up to your theories, you can simply discard the parts that don’t fit by claiming they didn’t follow the rules. Therefore all your theories will match your findings regardless of the actual outcome.

UPDATE: After thinking about it some more I really think it should be “Economics is the science of self-fulfilling prophecies” since economics is a social science and is supposed to follow the scientific method (you know, until you start throwing everything out because it didn’t follow the rules).