The Associated Press reported (on Friday June 6, 2008) that the International Energy Agency claims a serious effort to combat global warming will cost $45 trillion. I happen to think this is an underestimate. But the idea is very good. And if we run the global economy with sound economic policy, such a project could lead to the greatest prosperity in human history.
The report by the Paris-based International Energy Agency envisions a "energy revolution" that would greatly reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels while maintaining steady economic growth.
"Meeting this target of 50 percent cut in emissions represents a formidable challenge, and we would require immediate policy action and technological transition on an unprecedented scale," IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said
Minnesota DFL Senate candidate Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer smiled and chatted easily as a small crowd of serious congregants gathered last Sunday in the basement of Northfield Minnesota’s venerable old UCC Church. In a town with two highly ranked private colleges, this little gathering contained a large percentage of authors, PhDs, and assorted other educated types. The rest were the sort of coupons clippers who give money to political campaigns.
In spite of its dour image as the church of New England Puritans, the Congregationalists have an unexpectedly progressive tradition—of which the Northfield congregation is a fine example. These are the folks who encouraged Paul Wellstone before anyone else had heard of him. Most of us would have been nervous before such a gathering, but NOT Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer. These were his people and he certainly knew their language.
The Second Congressional District of the Minnesota DFL held a debate for the Senatorial candidate Saturday Nov 10, 2007 in Prior Lake. These debates have been barely covered in the commercial media, so I arranged to have someone with a quality video camera to record the events.
The Second District is represented in Congress by John Klein, a loyal Bushie whose claim to fame is that he carried the nuclear “football” for many years. Geographically, it includes the southern suburbs of the twin cities and near-rural counties. There are parts that have been reliably Republican since the Civil War. Second District DFLers are not at all like the confident yuppies of South Minneapolis who overwhelmingly sent a Black Muslim named Keith Ellison to congress. They are timid and defensive and hyperpatriotic.
The Carleton College Democrats hosted a debate for the US Senate candidates last Monday October 22 in Northfield MN. Al Franken skipped the event. The are several reasons why candidates skip debates but two stand out in this instance.
Al Franken has discovered that wisecracking on Letterman or baiting Rush Limbaugh is a LOT easier than actually debating the sort of person who runs for Senator from Minnesota. For example, one of his opponents is arguably the best trial lawyer in the nation. Franken is so overmatched in a real debate his supporters should be forgiven for cheering when he doesn’t actually drool.
Carleton College is where Paul Wellstone was teaching when he first became involved in politics. One of Franken’s more absurd claims is that he is the next Paul Wellstone. About half of Northfield could say (with apologies to Lloyd Bentsen responding to Dan Quayle’s bizarre self comparison to J F Kennedy) “Mr. Franken. I knew Senator Wellstone long before he was elected Senator. Paul Wellstone was a friend of mine. And you, Mr. Franken, are NO Paul Wellstone!” Al Franken was probably afraid that someone from Northfield would stand up and say just that.
Class analysis is most commonly practiced by the political left. In fact, many consider class analysis a Marxist practice to this day. I personally never found Marxist class analysis very satisfying because I could think of so many examples that did not fit into his scheme. That did not, however, stop my interest in the subject.
So when I discovered in my early 30s that my favorite political economist, Thorstein Veblen, had postulated a VERY non-Marxist class analysis that described social reality much better than Marx ever did, I was quite excited. Veblen’s class analysis was several orders of magnitude more complex and nuanced and came buried in an even more complicated intellectual strategy called Institutional Analysis, so it is sometimes difficult to separate out.
What follows is my best estimate of Veblen’s ideas--described with modern examples. For example, the Business / Industry dichotomy is Veblen’s. Calling it an example of a rivalry between Predators and Producers is mine--with a hat tip to Ignatius Donnelley.
Anyone who witnessed James Cramer screaming on his MSNBC show that Ben Bernanke should open the discount window, got a brief look at how serious monetary discussions can get.
For most of us, Cramer could have been speaking in Urdu. Monetary discussions are designed to be difficult to understand. But not to fear, understanding money is pretty simple.
In the fall of 1967, I had just turned 18 and was a freshman at the University of Minnesota. This was a land-grant school with 45,000 students. I had lived virtually all of my childhood in villages smaller than 2000 people. I was nearly in a state of shock.
It wasn’t merely the size. I was choirboy from a devout Lutheran parsonage. Literally. The only organization I joined that made complete sense to me was the university’s chorus. I knew nothing about popular culture--our family didn’t have television until I was a high school sophomore, we were not allowed to go to movies, and “rock and roll” music had never been played in the house.
Not surprisingly, the word of a large bridge (8 lanes, 150,000+ vehicles a day) collapsing in Minneapolis has spread around the globe. And for good reason. Forty-year-old bridges are NOT supposed to fail.
I supposed I could have written this sooner. But quite frankly, I am embarrassed as hell. This is NOT the sort of reputation we want. This state is a creation of mostly Scandinavians and Germans--the kind of people who treat maintenance as an art form.
Recently, I got into another (pointless) debate about whether wind turbines were "eyesores." Debating aesthetics is hard enough, but relying on clever sentences and hand gestures is impossible.
So I went and found some footage I have on wind turbines here in Minnesota and cut them together into a video I called "The Beauty of Windpower" and posted the thing on Youtube. (running time 5:20)
Of all those great debates we were exposed to at the university level, the only one I still find interesting concerns how we learn. As a published author, I probably should be a big proponent of reading books as the ultimate way to learn, but I don’t actually believe that books are all that effective. Given a choice for transmitting information, I would choose video in a heartbeat. The reason video is so effective is that while books merely explain information, video forces you to DEMONSTRATE why you know something.
In between pure text and video are the various other forms of illustration--still pictures, drawings, graphs, mathematical formulas, etc. In all these cases, however, these are only tools for transmitting findings between people. They do NOT address the far more interesting question what methods work best for learning new information.
"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than it is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist." John Maynard Keynes
Anyone wishing to make sense of the world will eventually have to spend some serious time studying the often dreary subject of economics. Economics is the only subject that people are so passionate about that they are quite willing to start wars and revolutions over the various interpretations of their economic worldview.
Of course, modern economics as taught in our finest universities has very little to do with the economic arguments that start revolutions. The modern economist has probably best been described as someone without the charisma to become an accountant.
Energy efficiency is the goal of every sane person on earth. What’s not to like? If energy is used more efficiently it solves pollution problems, foreign policy dilemmas, balance of trade issues, etc.
So why aren’t energy efficiency problems being meaningfully addressed? It is tempting to looks around for bad guys--oil industry executives, automobile manufacturers and their unions, spineless legislators, the advertising business, insane tax policy, etc.
Folks who wish to blame the “bad guys” have a small point. But when it comes to actually making a society more energy efficient, beating up on the “bad guys” is not very productive. Because the real reason a more energy efficient society never gets built is MUCH more simple and frightening: Energy efficiency is a LOT harder than it looks!!!
In my last diary I mentioned technological literacy without providing much definition or context to the concept. This caused quite a bit of misunderstanding and confusion. And so I find it necessary to explain what technological literacy is, and why it is important to have the technologically literate in any successful society.
The ability to operate tools is the main difference between humans and the other intelligent forms of life. Civilizations are the product of tool users. About the only thing humans can actually build by hand is a clay pinch pot--everything else requires tools.
Because everything we use requires tools to make, tool creation represents the most sophisticated form of manufacture. It is difficult to make DRAM chips: it is much MORE difficult to make the tools that can make the DRAM chips. And of course, it is insanely difficult to make the tools that can produce those DRAM making tools, etc.
In my last essay, I dipped my toes ever so gingerly into the troubled waters of class analysis. For my troubles, I was informed by some commentators that all studies of class were derived from Marx and that I had made fundamental errors because I had not properly understood the master.
Because this is a widely held belief, I believe I need to provide a history lesson on American progressive movements to clear up some confusion.
The study of class has one overwhelmingly powerful motivation--the belief that people of similar economic status should share political views. This was the official position of the Political Science, Sociology, and Economics departments at the University of Minnesota from 1967-74, so that is what I was taught.
However, to say I learned class analysis at UM would be misleading. This was the era of USA assault on Vietnam. Supposedly, the Vietnamese were to be killed with high explosives because they were Marxists. This message was not lost on my professors who either claimed their interest in class analysis had absolutely nothing to do with Marx, or in rare cases, taught party-line Marxism to demonstrate their opposition to the Vietnam War. Neither true believers nor weenies tend to be effective teachers.
I left school still fascinated with the idea of class analysis, a working understanding of the tools that could be used like the SPSS software, and a vague idea that this was something of an outlaw subject because of its historic roots in Marxism. This is somewhat less than the definition of learning a subject.
Any society formed by humans eventually has to grapple with the question, "what is private? and what belongs to the group as a whole?"
In spite of historical examples where virtually everything of value is thought to belong to individuals (laissez-faire capitalism) or the whole society (communism) such extreme examples have tended to be unstable because humans instinctively seem to believe that an effective social order must be a mixture of private and public.
The Populists of the late 19th century found themselves in the middle of this dilemma. On one hand, they believed that the owner-operator arrangement in agriculture was not only history's most efficient, it had been endorsed by Christ himself. On the other hand, they wanted to use government power to regulate big business. Even if these seemly conflicting demands made instinctive sense, it laid the Populists wide open to the charge inconsistency. "If," asked Populism's critics, "private ownership and management is such a good idea for farmers, why isn't it a good idea for Standard Oil?"
Populism keeps creating controversy here at Kos. Populism has never lacked for critics so it is not surprising when some of the good middle-class liberals who are most active at this site retell the standard slander. Joke Line summed up the prevailing mood when he described Populism as a "witlessly reactionary bundle of prejudices: nativist, protectionist, isolationist, and paranoid."
Anyone who took political science from any self-respecting liberal arts college in USA probably learned to spout the same reactionary nonsense.
Me too. However, since my university days I have discovered a great deal about the subject and have learned that virtually everything I was taught about Populism is a bloody lie.
Clueless newbie soccer fan that I am, I am forced to resort to other methods of picking teams.
Sometimes cultural clues are very telling. We folks who subscribe to predictions using Institutional Analysis are sometimes tempted to analyze sport. So with tongue firmly in cheek, I have tried to predict the World Cup outcome using I.A.
