"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Apr 13, 2010

On Taking the Spectacle Too Seriously

A New Hampshire woman could hear from the family of the man she was convicted of running down and killing after he was said to have taunted her for being a New York Yankees fan.

Forty-five-year-old Ivonne Hernandez is in court Tuesday to be sentenced for a December conviction of second degree murder for the May 2008 death of 29-year-old Matthew Beaudoin in a Nashua parking lot.

Police have the dispute outside a bar started as an exchange about the Yankees and Red Sox, when people in the crowd made comments such as "Yankees suck."

Hernandez testified she was terrified because Beaudoin and others pounded on her windows when she made a comment about how many baseball World Series the Yankees had won compared to the Red Sox."

The Urine Leaker

4 comments:

BDBlue said...

OT, but I believe you mentioned in a thread at stopmebeforeIvoteagain that you had managed to educate yourself some on Modern Monetary Theory, including areas of potential issues. I've started the process of trying to educate myself and was wondering what you read to bring youself up to speed.

Love your blog, btw.

Jack Crow said...

BDBlue,

Humbly, thank you.

I've only just come in contact with the theory, via Corrente, and then SMBIVA.

My questions are tentative, mostly originating in basic ignorance, I imagine - and probably ill conceived at that.

In attempting to understand what the MMT theory was about, I did stumble across this:

http://chartal.blogspot.com/

But, I also noted a relationship to Keynes, which wasn't all that surprising after just checking Wiki, since Keynes credits Chartalists at a number of points.

My understanding of Keynes, of course, is rather rudimentary and informal, so I could also just have the connection plain wrong, there, as well.

All that dispensed with, I'm probably not much help, as I'm not yet up to speed myself.

My question, at SMBIVA, on the other hand was an honest one: assuming that governments do create some intrinsic value simply by issuing/receiving money, how does this theory apply outside of those "developed" regions where the state lacks the officiating organs?

And how does this theory enable an understanding of exchange in social environments where no formal, European style state exists?

BDBlue,

These questions/objections may just follow from my own ignorance, but it seems to me that the theory ignores the interaction between "core" and "periphery," and skips entirely over the value of labor.

Hope that's not too ridiculous, or too ridiculously convoluted,

Respect,

~ Jack

Jack Crow said...

BDBlue,

I should also note that I tend to treat with "economics," even that which I think I understand, as an "adulterated art."

Whole lot of jargon and fancy graph making so that its practitioners can treat with human decisions as non-human populations, to discover "laws" by imposing them on limited study models.

There is, it seems, a studied and abstracted attempt to treat with all human originated phenomena as if it were merely the outflowing of governed mathematical systems, systems where A doing B will lead to C, when D is a condition, but E is not.

Or, to stop being as hypocritically obtuse as possible:

Economists treat with their theories as rational, mathematical predictive models. I call shenanigans.

BDBlue said...

I couldn't agree more with you about economics. If you haven't read Yves Smith's book, ECONned, you should. She completely takes apart neoclassical economics as well as finance economics. The "assumptions" one has to make for a lot of the models to work are ridiculous.

I have many of the same questions you do, although I think mine are even more rudimentary than yours. I'm hoping this MMT teach in comes off in DC primarily because I want to learn as much as I can to try to figure out what I agree with and what I don't. Right now, I feel like I'm at the mercy of "experts" and they've been wrong about, well, everything.