{"id":34,"date":"2005-06-23T11:48:34","date_gmt":"2005-06-23T15:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2005\/06\/23\/is-this-dotart-ii\/"},"modified":"2005-06-23T11:48:34","modified_gmt":"2005-06-23T15:48:34","slug":"is-this-dotart-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2005\/06\/23\/is-this-dotart-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this DotArt? II"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

On comparative economic systems. Young Dr. Rainer thinks he knows what I think. He is probably wrong.
\nI will not presume to deny the barbarism that his relatives may have
\nsuffered due to Joseph Stalin. I am in general<\/span>
\nunequivocally opposed to denying
\nholocausts. However, capitalism as currently configured does need more
\nthan a light rinse. The Russian economy, however, is a problem. If
\nProf. Cohen is right, that it cannot be considered capitalism by any
\nreasonable standard, is it an outlier? Millions of peoples lives
\nreduced to a dot that the “rational mind” should ignore. Weird
\n“science”. Worse than dismal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“><\/p>\n

Perhaps something like this will make a cleaner wash.<\/p>\n

“><\/p>\n

further, this is being done by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers<\/a>. [I’ll look into the treatment of the Electrical Sisters.] This windmill<\/a> is in Dorchester at the Freeport Street headquarters of Local 103<\/a>. [And management says labor is Luddite<\/a>!
\nPishtosh I say! ] So bravo for the Brothers and Sisters. But are the
\nrest of us moving fast enough to avoid the further ravages of peak
\noil?  Dr. Hubbert<\/a> turned out to be right about U.S. oil production and predicted a similar phenomenon for world oil production. I can prove<\/span> his theory. It was mentioned in an episode of the West Wing. Qued Erat Demonstrandum. I’m betting with him.<\/p>\n

Like everything else in my life, this is a work in progress. I need to
\nsee what fraction of GDP goes into the financial services sector before
\ndeciding if the “free market” is really a costless allocator of
\ncapital. The “empiricists” are loathe to consider this. Also, I need to
\nconsider whether the $0.3 Trillion “incursion” in Iraq can be ignored
\nas a perturbation or be renormalized away, before I decide if the “free
\nmarket” is unconstrained. The answer from upstairs so far, “That was
\ndone by another department.”<\/p>\n

 Dr. Hubbert was not an economist, but a geophysicist. But he had an interesting idea about the interaction between physics and economics<\/a>
\nor more correctly matter-energy and money.  Matter-energy, of
\ncourse, is conserved. Money presumably is tied to real physical wealth,
\nbut the events of late 2001 clearly show how elastic that connection
\nis. Growth is assumed to be unbounded. [I guess we all agree that the
\nfirst derivative is bounded.] I think Dr. Hubbert is onto something,
\nbut should really factor in labor. Marx had to exist, because Smith
\nunderstood the power of the division of labor, but not the power of
\nwhat was being divided up. This will, of course, get you a job as an
\neconomist, but does it really lead to maximum productivity? <\/p>\n

In the U.S. economy over the last three and a half decades wealth has
\nmoved into fewer and fewer hands near the top of the distribution.
\n[There was a brief uptick in the Gini just before the crash of ’01. The
\nundergraduate who argued that this was proof of “all boats being
\nlifted” never came back for re-examination. \ud83d\ude42 ] This may have
\nsupported the illusion among the movers and shakers that growth is some
\nkind of magic that is immune to physics. There is something special
\nabout life that it can appear to violate the 2nd Law [entropy]. But,
\nthat is only apparent. And we can no longer afford the illusion.<\/p>\n

[Tired. Later.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On comparative economic systems. Young Dr. Rainer thinks he knows what I think. He is probably wrong. I will not presume to deny the barbarism that his relatives may have suffered due to Joseph Stalin. I am in general unequivocally opposed to denying holocausts. However, capitalism as currently configured does need more than a light […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}