Sucking my cock, turn giraffe to porpoise
Till on thy face I come like a tortoise
Anally raped, pucker other cheeks
Pride's portion swallow to inherit the meek's
Friday, 31 December 2010
Sunday, 26 December 2010
Coase's 100th birthday- hip, hip
This is a link to a lecture by Coase filmed in 2003. Riveting stuff and very funny especially the bits about Abba Lerner (he tried to convince Trotsky of the virtue of marginal cost pricing- as opposed to machine gunning peasants).
Like Coase, but with a time lag of plus or minus 50 years, I too attended a Grammar School in North London before moving on to the L.S.E and, like him, I too did not follow any of the Econ courses taught there- in his case, this was because that wasn't his subject, in mine it was because I was drunk- but since then our paths in life have much diverged.
Coase fell under the influence of Sir Arnold Plant- born, entre nous, in the Borough of Hoxton- and, hoping perhaps to mitigate the ignominy of so declasse a connection, rather than despairing of slaying the dragon represented by Lord Reith- Coase ultimately emigrated to the Colonies- not the good ones, but those flagrantly and contumaciously defiant of the authority of our Gracious Queen.
An honorable impulse we might think, but it was in vain that Coase crossed the Atlantic's black and bitter waters, the impertinent attentions of the Nobel Prize Committee chivvied him out of his wigmam and broadcast his shame- thus bringing him to my notice.
In the video linked to above- Coase, remarks on Chicago's difficulty in understanding the traditional Wicksteed & L.S.E concept of opportunity cost- it appears they thought the cost of something one possessed was lower than something one paid for, not grasping that anything owned might be sold (absent transaction costs) at the same price as that at which it was bought.
Wicksteed hammered home the London School's insight regarding opportunity cost by making the housewife the paradigm of the economist. The Edwardian household, more happily than my own, was founded upon the essential fungibility and gross substitutability of the housewife's various functions whereas perhaps the patriarchal meat-packers of Chicago could stomach no similarly chilling a reflection on their own place in the scheme of things.
Borrowing one or two of the hackneyed hueristics of socio-biology, one might argue that this is a weakness of Coase's 'theorem'. Men think more about stuff they own and less about stuff they don't. This changes not some Platonic opportunity cost, but the sort of opportunity cost profiles actually accessible to living human beings.
A different point relates to mimesis as a motive for action and a method of control, but that is to introduce a de Maistrean, a Girardian, note, in what is otherwise Wicksteed's Unitarian Kingdom where Guelph and Ghibelline are reconciled.
If anyone deserves to enter that Kingdom, it is Coase- if for nothing else then for his splendidly cavalier dismissal of the theorem that disgraces his name.
To see why- this is a link to Steven Landsburg saying Coase's theorem means Econ theory can't say in advance whether BP should pay for the recent oil spill. Alternatively, here is Walter Block ranting on about how Coase is worse than Communism because he abolishes property rights- Judges should let O.J kill his wife coz he can pay more for the transgression than she (Block sniggers and says she had low self-esteem) would have paid not to be killed.
This is nonsense. Coase said, and says, no such thing. Following Sir Arnold Plant, Coase saw the dangers in endless Govt. regulations, that's all. For British law, the corollary is that it is a good idea to vest rights to potential economic income streams from goods and services in the existing title holder. It's just that the potential income stream of some other title holder may conflict at which point there is a bargaining problem which lawyers and and arbitrators and. for test cases, judges can facillitate with a view to minimizing transaction costs.
Clearly, transactions costs rise if
a) there is uncertainty as to who owns what or where the burden for compensation rests.
b) the threat of a nuisance, or strategic usage of nuisances, becomes a factor.
This is common sense. However, in neither case does Govt. intervention not worsen things because
1) under (a) the Govt may have a perverse incentive to increase rather than mitigate Economy wide uncertainty (though reducing it in the specific case where it gives a ruling)- for example, by retrospectively legalizing illegal structures or the reverse- simply so as to extort bribes or garner political support.
2) If preferences are too diverse there may be no common-sense meaning to 'nuisance'. I may claim that my loud rock music is to me as the Muezzin's call to prayer and, in consequence, to mitigate the nuisance I cause my neighbors is to imperil my hope of Satanic salvation. My neighbors may consider stabbing me regularly to be an essential complement to the ceremony. To call in the Govt. to resolve the issue however- far from allowing a relative harmonization of preferences- may lead to nuisances burgeoning into cults and ideologies. (Surely the correct explanation for their origin).
A common sense view, and Coase is a common sense guy, is that nuisances and catastrophic consequences are the responsibility of the producer- assuming he has agency and capacity to curtail them (lack of either can be compensated for- as with children, lunatics, Belgians, etc- and generally is done so in some bilateral or multilateral manner. The fundamental premise here is that Society always wants less of bad things and more of good things- so there is a certain amount of give and take, a certain notion of civility and the common good underlies everything..
Libertarians invoke the homely metaphor of 'homesteading' quite abstract property rights, though that notion never extended to things the homesteader could not develop just as well as anybody else. Courts have tended to quash 'cybersquatters' who buy domain names only of real use to some other party. The notion that 'a Coasian Judge' is doing this for some Benthamite reason is nonsense. Leo Strauss's discussion of property rights absent scarcity makes this clear. Coase is a common-sense, solid values, empirically driven kind of guy and that's why he is revered in the 'Law and Economics' field.
Coase points out that the proper function of lawyers is reducing transaction costs not padding their bills. Well, that's worth a Nobel Prize in my book.
Like Coase, but with a time lag of plus or minus 50 years, I too attended a Grammar School in North London before moving on to the L.S.E and, like him, I too did not follow any of the Econ courses taught there- in his case, this was because that wasn't his subject, in mine it was because I was drunk- but since then our paths in life have much diverged.
Coase fell under the influence of Sir Arnold Plant- born, entre nous, in the Borough of Hoxton- and, hoping perhaps to mitigate the ignominy of so declasse a connection, rather than despairing of slaying the dragon represented by Lord Reith- Coase ultimately emigrated to the Colonies- not the good ones, but those flagrantly and contumaciously defiant of the authority of our Gracious Queen.
An honorable impulse we might think, but it was in vain that Coase crossed the Atlantic's black and bitter waters, the impertinent attentions of the Nobel Prize Committee chivvied him out of his wigmam and broadcast his shame- thus bringing him to my notice.
In the video linked to above- Coase, remarks on Chicago's difficulty in understanding the traditional Wicksteed & L.S.E concept of opportunity cost- it appears they thought the cost of something one possessed was lower than something one paid for, not grasping that anything owned might be sold (absent transaction costs) at the same price as that at which it was bought.
Wicksteed hammered home the London School's insight regarding opportunity cost by making the housewife the paradigm of the economist. The Edwardian household, more happily than my own, was founded upon the essential fungibility and gross substitutability of the housewife's various functions whereas perhaps the patriarchal meat-packers of Chicago could stomach no similarly chilling a reflection on their own place in the scheme of things.
Borrowing one or two of the hackneyed hueristics of socio-biology, one might argue that this is a weakness of Coase's 'theorem'. Men think more about stuff they own and less about stuff they don't. This changes not some Platonic opportunity cost, but the sort of opportunity cost profiles actually accessible to living human beings.
A different point relates to mimesis as a motive for action and a method of control, but that is to introduce a de Maistrean, a Girardian, note, in what is otherwise Wicksteed's Unitarian Kingdom where Guelph and Ghibelline are reconciled.
If anyone deserves to enter that Kingdom, it is Coase- if for nothing else then for his splendidly cavalier dismissal of the theorem that disgraces his name.
To see why- this is a link to Steven Landsburg saying Coase's theorem means Econ theory can't say in advance whether BP should pay for the recent oil spill. Alternatively, here is Walter Block ranting on about how Coase is worse than Communism because he abolishes property rights- Judges should let O.J kill his wife coz he can pay more for the transgression than she (Block sniggers and says she had low self-esteem) would have paid not to be killed.
This is nonsense. Coase said, and says, no such thing. Following Sir Arnold Plant, Coase saw the dangers in endless Govt. regulations, that's all. For British law, the corollary is that it is a good idea to vest rights to potential economic income streams from goods and services in the existing title holder. It's just that the potential income stream of some other title holder may conflict at which point there is a bargaining problem which lawyers and and arbitrators and. for test cases, judges can facillitate with a view to minimizing transaction costs.
Clearly, transactions costs rise if
a) there is uncertainty as to who owns what or where the burden for compensation rests.
b) the threat of a nuisance, or strategic usage of nuisances, becomes a factor.
This is common sense. However, in neither case does Govt. intervention not worsen things because
1) under (a) the Govt may have a perverse incentive to increase rather than mitigate Economy wide uncertainty (though reducing it in the specific case where it gives a ruling)- for example, by retrospectively legalizing illegal structures or the reverse- simply so as to extort bribes or garner political support.
2) If preferences are too diverse there may be no common-sense meaning to 'nuisance'. I may claim that my loud rock music is to me as the Muezzin's call to prayer and, in consequence, to mitigate the nuisance I cause my neighbors is to imperil my hope of Satanic salvation. My neighbors may consider stabbing me regularly to be an essential complement to the ceremony. To call in the Govt. to resolve the issue however- far from allowing a relative harmonization of preferences- may lead to nuisances burgeoning into cults and ideologies. (Surely the correct explanation for their origin).
A common sense view, and Coase is a common sense guy, is that nuisances and catastrophic consequences are the responsibility of the producer- assuming he has agency and capacity to curtail them (lack of either can be compensated for- as with children, lunatics, Belgians, etc- and generally is done so in some bilateral or multilateral manner. The fundamental premise here is that Society always wants less of bad things and more of good things- so there is a certain amount of give and take, a certain notion of civility and the common good underlies everything..
Libertarians invoke the homely metaphor of 'homesteading' quite abstract property rights, though that notion never extended to things the homesteader could not develop just as well as anybody else. Courts have tended to quash 'cybersquatters' who buy domain names only of real use to some other party. The notion that 'a Coasian Judge' is doing this for some Benthamite reason is nonsense. Leo Strauss's discussion of property rights absent scarcity makes this clear. Coase is a common-sense, solid values, empirically driven kind of guy and that's why he is revered in the 'Law and Economics' field.
Coase points out that the proper function of lawyers is reducing transaction costs not padding their bills. Well, that's worth a Nobel Prize in my book.
Saturday, 25 December 2010
Gandhi and Masturbation-
Gandhi recognized Masturbation as one of the major causes of India's weakness- though, unlike Katherine Mayo, he did not consider it the sole or even predominating factor.
Thus it comes as something of a surprise to me that the late Prof. Ragavan Iyer did scant justice to the one truly novel aspect of the Mahatma's multi-dimensional approach to tackling the root cause of this detestable vice.
The fact that masturbation- as Shrilal Shukla has pointed out- enfeebles the very faculty it seeks to exercise led Gandhi to the insight that only by masturbating masturbation itself- and this includes relentlessly tugging the todger of that very imaginative power whereby the desired image is perceived, or, indeed, uremittingly pulling the pudding of all thought and deed- thus alone, could the demon of masturbation be defeated, that too non-violently, for having bashed its own bishop to Beckett like death- and it was to this praiseworthy end that, from that day to this, the entire panoply of Gandhism's platitudinous puerility endlessly wanks weiners West or East..
Thus it comes as something of a surprise to me that the late Prof. Ragavan Iyer did scant justice to the one truly novel aspect of the Mahatma's multi-dimensional approach to tackling the root cause of this detestable vice.
The fact that masturbation- as Shrilal Shukla has pointed out- enfeebles the very faculty it seeks to exercise led Gandhi to the insight that only by masturbating masturbation itself- and this includes relentlessly tugging the todger of that very imaginative power whereby the desired image is perceived, or, indeed, uremittingly pulling the pudding of all thought and deed- thus alone, could the demon of masturbation be defeated, that too non-violently, for having bashed its own bishop to Beckett like death- and it was to this praiseworthy end that, from that day to this, the entire panoply of Gandhism's platitudinous puerility endlessly wanks weiners West or East..
Friday, 24 December 2010
Martha Nussbaum- magnifying India's problems.
This is a hilarious interview with Prof. Nussbaum which ends like this-
JOANNE MYERS: Thank you so much for magnifying all the problems of India.
Says it all really.
JOANNE MYERS: Thank you so much for magnifying all the problems of India.
Says it all really.
India's imminent break-up- the dead-man's switch.
I read somewhere that high-speed trains have a 'dead-man's switch' such that if the driver suffers a heart-attack while reading this blog or loses consciousness by reason of the extreme paroxysms of auto-erotic self-strangulation to which the task of imagining my dewy dhoti clad form must inevitably drive him to, then the engine cuts out automatically causing the train to come to a halt.
In a sense, the union of India is like that train- we might imagine that it has some sort of auto-pilot or inbuilt stabilizer (indeed, in theory, the sedition law should operate in this manner) such that the train continues to speed on while the driver keels over from sheer onanistic exhaustion- but the reverse is the case, India has a dead man switch and, it appears, that switch has now been triggered.
Last year, an obscure Chinese political Scientist suggested that China should try to break up India into a collection of 20 or 30 smaller states. At the time, the very notion seemed risible- but, today, watching Swami Agnivesh explain why his friend Dr. Binayak Sen has been given a life-sentence for Sedition (the bastard worked for the poor! He spoke out against the Sab pe Zulum cut-throats! Worse, he was friends with a Hindu Swami! Hanging is too good for him!) while, over on Al Jazeera, there's a segment on a poor woman sleeping on the pavement in New Delhi because some Minister bilked the Exchequer of 40 billion dollars- what can one say? The dead-man's switch is in operation. There is no such thing as an Indian Nation State. The project of synoecism has run out of steam. There is merely theft and a Parliamentary 'chor bazaar'- a thieves' market place- operating at the heart of things.
From the point of Economic theory, it appears to me that there is now too much diversity, not just at the level of outcome but also preferences, for a National Politics to make sense. In a sense, politically imposed poverty could make it appear that there was this huge constituency for more of the same but that is simply not true any more. Kerala has already gone through demographic transition. A malnourished woman in Kerala may look like a malnourished woman from somewhere else, but she doesn't want the same things. Kerala could get a windfall 20% gain by going its own way right now (provided it tackles its own craziness) and do a Chinese style 5 year income doubling thing- this generates pay-offs for local satraps at the level of Capital Gains so vast as to give them an incentive to fix the system.
The same can be said to one degree or another of other progressive states. True, appalling poverty statistics mean that better implementation of Poverty Relief programs may appear a money-spinner but those sorts of programs have inbuilt efficiency costs and superior mechanism design can help local power-brokers to switch from rent-seeking to capitalizing dynamic gains.
Another constraint on the Center's capacity to hold things together is the bogey raised by the doctrine of command responsibility such that when these kleptocrats go abroad to visit their money, they may be unceremoniously chucked in jail for Human Rights abuse and War Crimes and so on. Who needs that headache?
A Congress Minister, that too a Hindu, is now calling for Azadi for Kashmir- the thing makes sense. Why paint a target on your back for the vociferous Kashmiri constituency in the West? What actually is lost, from your Swill Bank account, if Kashmir is lost? Your portfolio is already diversified. Thanks to Manmohan Singh, any asset in India has already been borrowed against and the money transferred outside via false invoicing or bogus transactions- i.e the capital gain has already been realized in hard currency and hedging what remains isn't particularly expensive.
Blue sky Globalized capitalism already has its weather system of cyclones sustained by the very volatility they create such, where it matters, a sort of Cloud computed 'dominance without hegemony'' can operate and dividends accrue- yet, civil society needs hegemony to cohere- but, it appears to me, that will be supplied under the rubric of Separatism not Synoecism because, for India, the moral equivalent of the dead man's switch has already been triggered.
In a sense, the union of India is like that train- we might imagine that it has some sort of auto-pilot or inbuilt stabilizer (indeed, in theory, the sedition law should operate in this manner) such that the train continues to speed on while the driver keels over from sheer onanistic exhaustion- but the reverse is the case, India has a dead man switch and, it appears, that switch has now been triggered.
Last year, an obscure Chinese political Scientist suggested that China should try to break up India into a collection of 20 or 30 smaller states. At the time, the very notion seemed risible- but, today, watching Swami Agnivesh explain why his friend Dr. Binayak Sen has been given a life-sentence for Sedition (the bastard worked for the poor! He spoke out against the Sab pe Zulum cut-throats! Worse, he was friends with a Hindu Swami! Hanging is too good for him!) while, over on Al Jazeera, there's a segment on a poor woman sleeping on the pavement in New Delhi because some Minister bilked the Exchequer of 40 billion dollars- what can one say? The dead-man's switch is in operation. There is no such thing as an Indian Nation State. The project of synoecism has run out of steam. There is merely theft and a Parliamentary 'chor bazaar'- a thieves' market place- operating at the heart of things.
From the point of Economic theory, it appears to me that there is now too much diversity, not just at the level of outcome but also preferences, for a National Politics to make sense. In a sense, politically imposed poverty could make it appear that there was this huge constituency for more of the same but that is simply not true any more. Kerala has already gone through demographic transition. A malnourished woman in Kerala may look like a malnourished woman from somewhere else, but she doesn't want the same things. Kerala could get a windfall 20% gain by going its own way right now (provided it tackles its own craziness) and do a Chinese style 5 year income doubling thing- this generates pay-offs for local satraps at the level of Capital Gains so vast as to give them an incentive to fix the system.
The same can be said to one degree or another of other progressive states. True, appalling poverty statistics mean that better implementation of Poverty Relief programs may appear a money-spinner but those sorts of programs have inbuilt efficiency costs and superior mechanism design can help local power-brokers to switch from rent-seeking to capitalizing dynamic gains.
Another constraint on the Center's capacity to hold things together is the bogey raised by the doctrine of command responsibility such that when these kleptocrats go abroad to visit their money, they may be unceremoniously chucked in jail for Human Rights abuse and War Crimes and so on. Who needs that headache?
A Congress Minister, that too a Hindu, is now calling for Azadi for Kashmir- the thing makes sense. Why paint a target on your back for the vociferous Kashmiri constituency in the West? What actually is lost, from your Swill Bank account, if Kashmir is lost? Your portfolio is already diversified. Thanks to Manmohan Singh, any asset in India has already been borrowed against and the money transferred outside via false invoicing or bogus transactions- i.e the capital gain has already been realized in hard currency and hedging what remains isn't particularly expensive.
Blue sky Globalized capitalism already has its weather system of cyclones sustained by the very volatility they create such, where it matters, a sort of Cloud computed 'dominance without hegemony'' can operate and dividends accrue- yet, civil society needs hegemony to cohere- but, it appears to me, that will be supplied under the rubric of Separatism not Synoecism because, for India, the moral equivalent of the dead man's switch has already been triggered.
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
The education of Henry Adams- WTF?
This is a story of a guy who just couldn't get no edumication no matter how hard he tried but who still somehow started to begin to see that education had ceased to be possible save as a branch of Mathematics- Pareto's, if I were to hazard a guess.
Unfortunately, coz he didn't know any Math and was as thick as shite, he wrote this crap book which Americans are forced to read coz they have no Medieval History, but since this fuckwit taught it at Harvard for a few years, well, this book is all that falls to their lot of that branch of the tree of Knowledge best fit for mereticious, for ultimately Manchesterist, skoptsi self-flagellation.
What does education actually mean? Well, its stuff you can study and pursue such that after a given point the actions of other equally 'educated' people around you become predictable such that stable Nash equilibria emerge and so on and so forth.
So - a kind of ars dictaminis facilitating Civilization rather than the blind engine of Civil faction.
Adams discovers that no such education existed. His bunch of assholes fucked up the country big time for no good reason- or rather, for no reason good to themselves. It was all just pretence and pi-jaw- that's all.
Nobody had any problem with the Southerners sticking it to the 'Negro' till their dicks were slicker than shit so long as they didn't come to Boston to recapture their slaves- coz. like once the Niggers cross the Mason-Dixie they're ours to stick it to.
The British Cabinet- where Pam turns out to be the good guy and Earl Russel a demon of mendacity and fucking Gladstone the ultimate shit-head- teaches Adams that education don't exist.
His second big education comes with the Banking Crisis in 1893, but of course the asshole doesn't get that his own pro-Silver silliness was part of what made that inevitable. So Adams turns Anti-Semite, the precious little flower, does diddums hate dem nasty Jews? What? Diddums does? What an aristocratic litttle diddums it is! Bless my soul and fuck me sideways if I tell a lie.
The odd thing about Harvard is that, despite Game Theory having been on the Menu for over 50 years them 'educated' clunkheads aint got a lot further down the road- 'cept they keep a lid on the cussing out of niggers and kikes & shite.
But, like that's gonna help Obama. Yeah, right!
One last point- America does have a Virgin, America has a Madonna- her name was Marilyn Monroe and she too had her education and we are all her children.
Unfortunately, coz he didn't know any Math and was as thick as shite, he wrote this crap book which Americans are forced to read coz they have no Medieval History, but since this fuckwit taught it at Harvard for a few years, well, this book is all that falls to their lot of that branch of the tree of Knowledge best fit for mereticious, for ultimately Manchesterist, skoptsi self-flagellation.
What does education actually mean? Well, its stuff you can study and pursue such that after a given point the actions of other equally 'educated' people around you become predictable such that stable Nash equilibria emerge and so on and so forth.
So - a kind of ars dictaminis facilitating Civilization rather than the blind engine of Civil faction.
Adams discovers that no such education existed. His bunch of assholes fucked up the country big time for no good reason- or rather, for no reason good to themselves. It was all just pretence and pi-jaw- that's all.
Nobody had any problem with the Southerners sticking it to the 'Negro' till their dicks were slicker than shit so long as they didn't come to Boston to recapture their slaves- coz. like once the Niggers cross the Mason-Dixie they're ours to stick it to.
The British Cabinet- where Pam turns out to be the good guy and Earl Russel a demon of mendacity and fucking Gladstone the ultimate shit-head- teaches Adams that education don't exist.
His second big education comes with the Banking Crisis in 1893, but of course the asshole doesn't get that his own pro-Silver silliness was part of what made that inevitable. So Adams turns Anti-Semite, the precious little flower, does diddums hate dem nasty Jews? What? Diddums does? What an aristocratic litttle diddums it is! Bless my soul and fuck me sideways if I tell a lie.
The odd thing about Harvard is that, despite Game Theory having been on the Menu for over 50 years them 'educated' clunkheads aint got a lot further down the road- 'cept they keep a lid on the cussing out of niggers and kikes & shite.
But, like that's gonna help Obama. Yeah, right!
One last point- America does have a Virgin, America has a Madonna- her name was Marilyn Monroe and she too had her education and we are all her children.
Sunday, 19 December 2010
the Kerala model- why it wont work elsewhere.
Kerala is different. Why? It's actually quite a nice place to live. Kidnapping isn't a heavy industry. Movies and novels and magazines aint utter shit. That means some Doctors are going to want to live even in backwater villages- especially if they've inherited land there.
Furthermore, its radically fucked economy means you have cheap nurses part of whose reproductive cycle occurs in the province.
But what happens if Kerala's economy gets a little less fucked coz like the Cubans are backtracking and. anyway, the other alternative of cutting off the hands of lecturers is soooo last decade?
Well, then the statistics go into reverse- like what happened in China when the barefoot doctors got shoes and ran the fuck out of the rural backwaters and didn't stop running till they'd started to do well for themselves.
Still, the Kerala Model DOES offer a beacon of hope, not alas! for Kerala but for ...urm... dunno...Cambridge?
Furthermore, its radically fucked economy means you have cheap nurses part of whose reproductive cycle occurs in the province.
But what happens if Kerala's economy gets a little less fucked coz like the Cubans are backtracking and. anyway, the other alternative of cutting off the hands of lecturers is soooo last decade?
Well, then the statistics go into reverse- like what happened in China when the barefoot doctors got shoes and ran the fuck out of the rural backwaters and didn't stop running till they'd started to do well for themselves.
Still, the Kerala Model DOES offer a beacon of hope, not alas! for Kerala but for ...urm... dunno...Cambridge?
Some place with a lot of caste complexity. Oh yes, and land reform.
So not Cambridge then.
Pity.
But don't tell Amartya Sen- there's a dear.
But don't tell Amartya Sen- there's a dear.
In any case he turns up his nose at poor old England's N.H.S, preferring the other Cambridge for medical help.
This I think is his lasting contribution to the Capital reswitching debate and the War between the two Cambridges. Joan Robinson would have been so proud!
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