Universal basic income: how much would it cost? — Crooked Timber

5 Aug

An interesting exercise by a smart economist, though like all such exercises one must pay attention to the details and be judiciously skeptical.

Summing up the exercise, I’d say that a universal basic income of the type I’ve sketched out here is economically feasible, but not, in the current environment, politically sustainable. However, while economic feasibility is largely a matter of arithmetic, and therefore resistant to change, political sustainability is more mutable, and depends critically on the distributional questions I’ve elided so far. A shift of 10 per cent of national income away from working households might seem inconceivable, but of course that’s precisely what’s happened in the US over the last twenty or thirty years, except that the beneficiaries have not been the poor but the top 1 per cent. So, if that money were clawed back by the state, it could fund a UBI at no additional cost to the 99 per cent.

via Universal basic income: how much would it cost? — Crooked Timber.

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Bruno Latour: Love Your Monsters | Breakthrough Journal – MONSTER THEORY

5 Aug

Like France’s parks, all of Nature needs our constant care, our undivided attention, our costly instruments, our hundreds of thousands of scientists, our huge institutions, our careful funding. But though we have Nature, and we have nurture, we don’t know what it would mean for Nature itself to be nurtured.7

The word “environmentalism” thus designates this turning point in history when the unwanted consequences are suddenly considered to be such a monstrosity that the only logical step appears to be to abstain and repent: “We should not have committed so many crimes; now we should be good and limit ourselves.” Or at least this is what people felt and thought before the breakthrough, at the time when there was still an “environment.”

But what is the breakthrough itself then? If I am right, the breakthrough involves no longer seeing a contradiction between the spirit of emancipation and its catastrophic outcomes, but accepting it as the normal duty of continuing to care for unwanted consequences, even if this means going further and further down into the imbroglios. Environmentalists say: “From now on we should limit ourselves.”

Postenvironmentalists exclaim: “From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever-increasing scale, namely, intervening, acting, wanting, caring.” For environmentalists, the return of unexpected consequences appears as a scandal (which it is for the modernist myth of mastery). For postenvironmentalists, the other, unintended consequences are part and parcel of any action.

[Boldface mine, BB.]

via Bruno Latour: Love Your Monsters | Breakthrough Journal – MONSTER THEORY.

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When the Army Was Democratic by William Pfaff | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

4 Aug

The final paragraph (my boldface):

What fundamentally was destroyed in Vietnam was the democratic army. The all-volunteer professional army enables undemocratic wars, ideological in nature and inspiration, and, it would seem, without real end.

Pfaff opens by recountin Gen. McCrystals’s call for a universal draft if it intends to continuing fighting wars. However

But I cannot think that he is so far out of touch with his country as to fail to understand that the restoration of American national morale, unity, and sense of solidarity and patriotism he wants to see would come not as the result of universal national military service, but as the condition that makes universal service possible.

The war in Vietnam destroyed the draft:

The US had national service from September 1940, just before World War II, until 1971, when the Vietnam War was ending. It was accepted with patriotic resolution at its start, and hated by its end. I am of an age to have put on my country’s uniform in high school ROTC in 1942, when I was fourteen years old. I put it on again for the Korean War, and did not take it off for the last time until 1958, after limited active reserve service. That was a total of sixteen years.

I can’t say that I enjoyed military service, but I learned a lot, about myself and about others—including the young black men who made up a good half of my all-southern, and mostly rural, basic training company (where I was not only the sole college graduate but probably the only high school graduate)… The regular army…hated and feared the consequences of that order, but said “yes, sir” and did it, producing undoubtedly the biggest and most successful program of social engineering the United States had ever experienced …

The army, in my opinion, did more to desegregate the United States than the civil rights movement of the 1960s. From 1948 on, nearly every able-bodied young man in the United States served and lived side by side with Americans of all colors, all in strict alphabetical order, in old-fashioned unpartitioned barracks, sleeping bunk to bunk, sharing shelter-halves on bivouac, in what amounted to brotherly endurance of the cold, heat, discomfort, and misery of military training—and following that, of service…

When their war was over, the survivors, white and black, didn’t go home to Georgia and hang out together on Saturday nights. They hardly saw one another again. But those two years changed them. It certainly changed many of the younger generation of white southerners who served and who a decade and a half later were ready to accept desegregation, even though they disliked it. A man-to-man respect existed for their black contemporaries.

via When the Army Was Democratic by William Pfaff | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.

Wave of Volatile Trading Unsettles U.S. Markets – NYTimes.com

1 Aug

Whoops! Better not do that again. All this technology, all these mistakes.

The runaway trading suggests that regulators have not been able to keep up with electronic programs that increasingly dominate the supercharged market and have helped undermine investor confidence in stocks.

Traders on Wednesday said that a rogue algorithm repeatedly bought and sold millions of shares of companies like RadioShack, Best Buy, Bank of America and American Airlines, sending trading volume surging. While the trading firm involved blamed a “technology issue,” the company and regulators were still trying to understand what went wrong.

via Wave of Volatile Trading Unsettles U.S. Markets – NYTimes.com.

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Hiroshima to grade states on disarmament | The Japan Times Online

1 Aug

Looks like Hiroshima’s going to start its own foreign policy.

A prefectural official told The Japan Times on Tuesday that Hiroshima will conduct its own research and analysis of nuclear disarmament around the world and grade each country on its commitment to abandoning atomic weapons.

“This is the first time Hiroshima Prefecture has embarked on such a project,” the official said. The study is “a duty that Hiroshima must carry out,” the prefecture says on its website.

Experts are expected to start meeting soon and publish a final report in Japanese and English within the fiscal year.

via Hiroshima to grade states on disarmament | The Japan Times Online.

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Greens and Libertarians

1 Aug

This piece is ancient (1992), but worth a read.

Over the past three decades, people have become dissatisfied with both major parties, and two new minor parties are showing promise of growth and success. They are the Libertarian Party and the Green Party. These are not the only new parties, but they are the only ones that promise to attract people from across the political spectrum. Most other small parties are either clearly to the left of the Democrats or to the right of the Republicans. Such parties would have a place in a system that accommodates multiple parties, but are doomed to failure in a two-party system.

The Libertarian Party is made up mostly of former conservatives who object to the Republican Party’s penchant for militarism and its use of government to entrench powerful interests and shield them from market forces. The Green Party is made up mostly of former liberals who object to the Democratic Party’s penchant for centralized bureaucracy and its frequent hypocritical disregard for natural systems of ecological balance, ranging from the human metabolism and the family unit to the ecology of the planet.

Both minor parties attempt to adhere to guidelines that are much clearer than those of either major party. Libertarians focus on rights of individuals to control their own lives, limited only by the prohibition against interference with the rights of others. These rights include their right to the fruits of their labor and the right to freely associate and form contracts. They advocate limiting government to protecting those basic rights.

Greens advocate ten key values (ecological wisdom, grass roots democracy, social justice, non-violence, decentralization, community-based economics, post-patriarchal values, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and sustainable future focusas a guide for government as well as for their own party organization.)

These different guidelines underscore basic differences between the approaches of the two parties and their members. Libertarians tend to be logical and analytical. They are confident that their principles will create an ideal society, even though they have no consensus of what that society would be like. Greens, on the other hand, tend to be more intuitive and imaginative. They have clear images of what kind of society they want, but are fuzzy about the principles on which that society would be based.

via Greens and Libertarians.

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Empty Town Halls and ‘Easter Bunny Epiphanies’: On the Campaign Trail With Gary Johnson | Swampland | TIME.com

1 Aug

Gary is indeed “the pot guy.” He’s a libertarian who wants to legalize drugs, downsize government and balance the budget in one year by slashing spending by 43%. He would toss out the tax code and replace it with a Fair Tax on consumption, and solve America’s illegal-immigration problem by handing out more work visas. Johnson is a pro-choice, pro-civil-union fiscal conservative who doesn’t wear religion on his sleeve—a perfect fit, by his analysis, for New Hampshire. But he’s not a plausible contender in a Republican Party that has already had to adjust its contours to make room for Ron Paul.

via Empty Town Halls and ‘Easter Bunny Epiphanies’: On the Campaign Trail With Gary Johnson | Swampland | TIME.com.

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The Green Team: Jill Stein’s Third-Party Bid to Shake Up 2012 | Swampland | TIME.com

1 Aug

Wednesday morning at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein spoke to about a dozen people–and a couple dozen empty chairs. She had gone to the capital, in advance of the Green Party convention in Baltimore, to announce her running mate: Cheri Honkala. So who is Honkala? And for that matter, who is Stein? Here’s the first thing they’ll tell you: They’re candidates not named Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

Born in the 1980s, the Green Party’s national profile peaked in 2000, when Ralph Nader took 2.7% of the popular vote in the chaotic presidential election that put George W. Bush in office. (One imagines Al Gore still wakes in the night cursing Nader’s name.) Not long after, in 2002, the Green Party recruited a physician and health advocate named Jill Stein to run for governor in Massachusetts. She lost that race and three more in the state over the next decade, while making two successful bids for Lexington Town Meeting representative. Meanwhile, the Green Party candidates in 2004 and 2008 failed to get more than 150,000 votes.

The election fight between Obama and Romney will be close, and a third-party candidate who mounts a significant campaign might be cause for concern as November nears–whether that’s libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Party’s Stein. For now, Stein says she’s still introducing herself to the American people, trying to generate interest in the party that’s deflated over the past decade.

via The Green Team: Jill Stein’s Third-Party Bid to Shake Up 2012 | Swampland | TIME.com.

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Build a Business on Transition Principles?

1 Aug

What might a social enterprise founded on Transition principles be like?

The concept of “social enterprise” has been gathering traction in the U.S. It’s kind of like a hybrid of the business world and the nonprofit world. In its most basic form, there’s the example of a gift store within a museum: the profits from the store fund the cause of the museum. In more complex forms, there are micro-loan businesses that fund third-world startups, bakeries that employ at-risk workers, and a myriad of creative examples.

What might the “social enterprise” model be like if it were founded around the types of business we need for a localized, post-petroleum, leaner economy world?

via LA Transition Enterprise.

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Harkin Report Condemns For-Profit Colleges – NYTimes.com

31 Jul

According to the report, which was posted online in advance, taxpayers spent $32 billion in the most recent year on companies that operate for-profit colleges, but the majority of students they enroll leave without a degree, half of those within four months.

“In this report, you will find overwhelming documentation of exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation,” Mr. Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a statement on Sunday. “These practices are not the exception — they are the norm. They are systemic throughout the industry, with very few individual exceptions.”

via Harkin Report Condemns For-Profit Colleges – NYTimes.com.

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