Wallerstein, Wallenstein & Ghalib, the Grand Turk

Like many fat, sedentary. and deeply unadventurous Tamil Brahmins, I have an unreasonable and unreasoning love for the Turks and Mongols and, dunno, like Magyars and Bulgars and Khazars and so on. Why? I guess it has to do with the origin story of the Gokturks. They were slaves forced to labour in the iron mines of the Altai Mountains till one day, a little less or more than two thousand years ago- i.e. a time when the Greeks and the Romans and the Iranians and the Indians and the Chinese were already middle aged and the Copts and Hebrews and Babylonians virtually senescent- they just Spartacized themselves and upped and rebelled and began the second (the Bronze age was the first) great process of Globalization- i.e. the creation of a World Historical System-  in a manner that clearly established that, for this World, Tengri- the Sky- is the limit. Oppression and exploitation aint fucking karmically ordained and don't fucking move things along towards the proper Hieros-gamos, or sacred marriage, between Earth and Heaven which, like the samadhi/satori of the Buddhists, arises absent, or irrespective of, any structure to events or, indeed, the hysteresis of history.

Mutatis mutandis, as of the Turks, much the same thing can be said about a bunch of adventurous fishermen off the Western coast of Eurasia whose courage and good cheer outlasted the walls of wood that defended them from the stupidity of slavery in situ, granting them instead a Marine passage to Ariosto's moon.

The great, good and always utterly wrong, Immanuel Wallerstein- who, sadly, never got drunk with Obama's dad, even vicariously, though sharing the same vantage point on 'African Socialism'- is my target for a Tesco-Champagne fueled mugging today coz like he didn't connect with the young Graciella Chichilnisky, preferring to talk to the likes of Samir fucking Amin back in the Seventies. As I have often explained- '68 was nothing special- not because History reached a turning point but failed to turn, but by reason of the patriarchal attitudes, the misogynistic practices of the 68-ers- the soixante-huitards as pseudo-intellectuals term them- who failed to understand that 69- pace Ahdaf Soueif-  is sublime and always present as a liberative praxis outside history and sans any fucking Structure at all. Had Wallerstein's tickly mustache been pressed into service against Chichilnisky's immaculate, mathematical and uterine font- rather than a dialogue with other hairy Seventies' Marxist or soi-disant Marxist men- the project of a World Systems Analysis would not have been still-born. 

Oh dear.
If structures pre-exist and Historical processes are structural- then there is no convergent evolution, everything is genealogical; the human faculty for Mathematics, for abstraction, is unavailing- there was no reason for it to evolve- a casteist karma, a biological destiny, binds us- & as in 'the Death of Wallenstein' all that is left for us to say is-
Stern is the on-look of necessity,
Not without shudder may a human hand
Grasp the mysterious urn of destiny. 
But this is a funeral, not Keat's Grecian, urn which once grasped, at last gasp, you grasp only ashes.

Ghalib, proud of his Gokturk origins, says- 

Since Sorrow can tax the Free no more than one breath

Lightning's the lone candle we light for a death

butm because Ghalib was an Indian pensioner of John Company he adds-

Ours too is a World- but one barren to its own passion, tumult & wrath

& we the nuptial taper of the heart's bed-chamber of its moth

Graciella Chichilnisky & Third Worldism

   Tiebout models deal with local public goods and show that when consumers can 'vote with their feet' then there is a market type solution. What about transfers between Tiebout Economies? Will they create a perverse 'Transfer paradox' such that the donor is benefited and the recipient impoverished? Graciella Chichilnisky   did path-breaking work on the 'Transfer paradox' but was kept out of mainstream publication for quite some time as she recorded in a rueful essay from the early Nineties. Her important work on the concept of 'limited arbitrage' as being the other side of the coin of restricted social diversity- i.e. there shouldn't be too little or too much social diversity so gains from trade exist- seems to have a natural application to Tiebout models with a Transfer paradox. The question is whether this fits something like Kyoto Carbon trading- i.e. does the apparent altruism of the developed countries have the perverse effect of impoverishing the objects of its charity such that they become, let us say, Tiebout producers of 'bad' local public 'goods'- and restricting social diversity is, in a sense, a local public good- like crazy Religious or stupid Economic ideas while the developed countries have Science based Environmentalism which, if nothing else, can improve local conditions and inculcate decent human values as opposed to the desire to chop cartoonists heads off?
  Chichilnisky has written about the greater volatility in knowledge markets. If Third World 'knowledge-as-local-Public-good' production follows a Tiebout model and if there are Transfer paradoxes and, further, if such resource or other shocks have a ratchet effect, then we could predict that Third Worldism will just get stupider and stupider, tripping over its own preference falsification availability cascades any time anything sensible is suggested, until it ends up crucifying, our man of sorrows, Dr. Manmohan Singh- the International Trade expert whom our dirigiste Indianism has chosen as its not savior but scapegoat.

Refuting Graciela Chichilnisky- an axiomatic approach.

I shall refute the strong version of the theorem that Graciela Chichlnisky is one of the great minds of our age. With scrupulous fairness I will first enumerate her so called claims to fame and refute them with advanced topological methods (these are the statements in bold)
1) Her 1994 paper. 'Intersecting Families of Sets and the Topology of Cones in Economics”, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,  showed that the basic structure of the most important forms of resource allocation was connected with Arrow's social choice paradox . The same mathematical structure was also the cause of problems of market equilibrium as well as the core in game theory. Significantly, the common root of all these problems was the issue of when sets intersect, which in economic terms measures social diversity. This is the key issue in finding a solution to market equilibrium, for social choice and for game solutions.

She writes 'In this work I showed with Geoffrey Heal the first necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of social choice rule. By myself I showed later a rather surprising result: that the same condition is necessary and sufficient for the existence of market equilibrium, the core and social choice—unexpectedly, it is the same conditions in the three cases. Social diversity holds the key. Beyond a certain point, it prevents the economy from reaching market equilibrium, a core solution or social choice rules. This validates the key role of diversity in allowing gains from trade, while at the same time limiting most forms of resource allocation beyond a certain point.'

So what? She does not have a penis.
2) She turned International Trade & Development on its head by incorporating things like increasing returns and the importance of property rights in land to get results that actually mean something.
Her penis is probably quite small. In any case, it's not just about length, girth also counts
3) Listen, you cunt- she's not some silly little Freakanomics media whore pushing factoids at Joe the Plumber- on the contrary she's a big wheel with the U.N and an architect of the Kyoto Protocol- y'know the guys with black helicopters who've got secret censors fitted to your toilet to measure your output of greenhouse gases-so just watch it that's all.
What about testicles? Does her ball sac reach half-way down to her knees? Mine does and it aint a pretty picture. You really wanna go toe to toe with me on this? Well do you, punk?No? That's what I thought.
Q.E.D.

Fucking women economists! Alfred Marshall was right... fuck's that? A helicopter? Not one of them black helicopters? Can't be coz they're all like stealth and shit so I wouldn't actually hear them till they were right on top of me... no, it wasn't a helicopter...just the neighbor's T.V. Hang on, the neighbors are out of town, what is that bright light? It's moving towards me... pod people! They're gonna replace me with a pod person...say, this anal probe aint so bad...well, that's it for tonight folks. Tomorrow, I'll refute Al Gore.