Ron Paul made an impassioned speech today. One of his points is that we can't simply re-inflate the bubble. He further claimed that we certainly can't solve our crisis by attempting to create "capital" with a printing press. He claims that we are at a sea change, and that we need to learn to live within our means. He's got my attention.
Based on a new study reported by the NYT, people who do things badly
are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
Humor-impaired joke-tellers rated themselves as funny . . .
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
It would seem, then, that you shouldn't ever ask someone whether they are good at what they do. This is a good reason to downplay the importance of oral interviews.Richard Wolff has been a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts since 1981. Media Education Foundation has just released a new video of Wolff, offering his opinions on the current economic crisis. Here's the trailer, which offers some dramatic motion-graphs illustrating wage stagnation versus productivity in America. Here's the blurb from MEF:
Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today's economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown. By placing the crisis within this larger historical and systemic frame, Wolff argues convincingly that the proposed government bailouts, stimulus packages, and calls for increased market regulation will not be enough to address the real causes of the crisis, in the end suggesting that far more fundamental change will be necessary to avoid future catastrophes.
I haven't viewed the entire video, only the trailer, but even the trailer presents important context for our current economic crisis. I do hope that, in the full video, Wolff puts blame not only on the profit-makers but also on American consumers, who have clearly made quite a few terrible decisions in their attempts to live beyond their means. Not all of that accrued individual debt was for the purpose of buying essentials such as food, housing and health care. There is a LOT of blame to go around: my targets include the greedy and corrupt financial sector and many irresponsible consumers. Not that all businesses are greedy, nor all consumers irresponsible. With this caveat, though, I did want to link to this video trailer because the graphs are mind-blowing. Further, MEF has put out terrific videos that offer clarity regarding many of our country's most contentious issues. One example is the MEF production, War Made Easy.Barack Obama has quite a knack for addressing deep themes with his surface eloquence. What are those deep themes? Linguist George Lakoff has taken the time to set them out in a recent Huffpo article, and I think he's thought it through impressively. Lakoff's article is well worth a slow read. What is Obama really about?
Behind the Obama Code are seven crucial intellectual moves that I believe are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute. They are not all obvious, and jointly they may seem mysterious. That is why it is worth sorting them out one-by-one.
Note that for Lakoff (and Obama), "progressive values" (#2) are the natural result of genuine and uncorrupted empathy:Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider--who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire "free market," which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone's interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama's foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states--with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.
Here are Lakoff's seven insights into the ideas that drive Obama's spoken words:1. Values Over Programs 2. Progressive Values are American Values 3. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship 4. Protection and Empowerment 5. Morality and Economics Fit Together 6. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk 7. Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language
Would you like to learn the unvarnished story about oil sands, an often highly-touted source of fuel? The March issue of National Geographic has a detailed article on oil sands, focusing on a production facility in Alberta Canada: "Scraping Bottom." It's an already profitable environment-unfriendly carbon-irresponsible way to feed America's often-wasteful craving for fuel. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]
