Just now getting back to the world of the internet.
Warning - it sucks.
Also, I just procrastiwatched this video and it is actually great. Great. To toss Snyder some money I also just bought this book which I've been meaning to red for a while.
I should say I watched part of it. The whole thing is like over an hour.
That's a disturbing lack of commitment to procrastination, RH.
I felt sorry for him when Letterman fired him, but I never watched the show.
Also, I just procrastiwatched this video and it is actually great. Great.
It sounds good. I probably won't listen to it today, but will try to do so in the next day or so.
When I knew Tim Snyder, he was a lumpen kid in the back row of my English class who talked exclusively about petty crime and professional sports. Glad to see he's come a long way since then.
I listened to the whole thing! Interesting! Thanks, Mossy!
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I am the dumbest dummy who cannot figure out how to do this google art face match thing on my phone. To the point where I am suspecting that somehow my phone is not giving me the same options on my version of the Arts & Culture app that everyone else seems to have been doing all weekend. On topic because I'm just now getting back to the internet.
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I've been told the app is not available everywhere (I haven no idea why) from twitter.
"[America] has only been a democracy in the sense that we understand it for about as long as I've been alive."
Correlation is causation.
I'll be damned I'll watch a whole video before I figure out how Snyder is misusing the word neoliberal. I will just denounce him, content-free. You're wrong, Snyder!
I should read some of his books. I like history, but I like the kind that is a specific story about an event or series of events instead of "this is what it all means" histories.
I used to like the "what it all means" books, but having now lived through some actual history and having become expert on some actual topics, I feel like they're mostly bullshit. For example, the dominant fact of the last 150 years has been economic growth, and I know that the best summary of the economic literature on the question of causes of economic growth is "dunno".
....and I know that the best summary of the economic literature on the question of causes of economic growth is "dunno".
I thought the answer was "Neoliberalism".
The other dominant fact of the last 150 years has been natural resource extraction, that may have something to do with it.
I think that's covered by "neoliberalism". It means everything and nothing.
20: Economists have heard of this, and yet have surprisingly not converged on it as an explanation. I mean, the reductio (if all of the natural resources never existed there wouldn't have been much economic growth) is true, but it doesn't explain much of the variation. Japan has fuck all natural resources. China had just as much coal in 1960 as it does now, while GDP contracted like 10% in 1960, and averages 6% growth now. The US has pissed away resources on economically inefficient suburbs because resources aren't currently an important constraint on US growth.
China had just as much coal in 1960 as it does now
Unless they're replacing the stuff they burn, I suspect it had more coal in 1960 than now.
15 - he's on team it's become a meaningless signifier that expresses nothing other than a vague gesture and shuts down conversation by being nonspecific. He's one of the good guys on this topic.
International banking and joint stock companies, according to Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle." (Everything I know I learned from SF writers.)
OT: To those in Washington, happy "Temperance and Good Citizenship Day".
"Japan has fuck all natural resources"
Really? I thought it at least had a fair amount of coal.
Yes. And copper, and silver, that I know of.
I'm just under 20 minutes in and it's excellent. The point about Britain and France never having been nation-states is really good.
Before googling, I think Japan started with a decent amount of coal, but it dwindled enough to be uneconomic to mine by maybe the 60's.
Japanese Wikipedia: in 2002 there was only one coal mine in operation in Japan, but energy prices since then have led to a few more reopening. 2015 production 1.2m metric tons.
best summary of the economic literature on the question of causes of economic growth is "dunno".
At the risk of insulting some of our commentariat, I confess to being fond of the description of the field of economics as "astrology for bros".
37: Economics is a bit more serious than that. The real astrology for men is analyzing stock charts.
There's a rather sweet Japanese film, Hula Girls, about a defunct mining town attempting to transform itself into a Hawaiian-themed spa resort. It's very like British comedies with similar social settings - think Brass or The Full Monty.
37: It really isn't, though. Maybe Econ 101 is? The field has a definite right-wing bias, but is tightly intertwined with the empirical evidence. You are better off reading a right-wing empirical economics paper (with some critical distance) on any economics subject than you are reading 99% of non-economist sources. Very few astrology horoscopes can be summarized as "dunno".
Economics is completely fucked up, and it would be great if there were an influx of critics to keep it honest. Sadly, though, the existing critics are largely super-lazy, and work backwards from whatever their desired answer is -- usually CAPITALISM SUCKS LOL, but sometimes GOVERNMENT SUCKS LOL. (Though part of the reason that economics has fewer right-wing critics is that the right has literally no idea what actual economists think.) The spirit to understand how capitalism works, and not just why it sucks in every way, is lacking.
Coal is what counts. And iron ore i suppose. Once you have that you can build an industrial civilisation and a fleet and go and grab whatever else you need.
Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided...but by iron and blood!
41: To the extent that isn't a joke: TTBOMVLK Japan industrialized by borrowing foreign money to pay for foreign imports it needed to make stuff, until it had enough of its own stuff to manufacture more exports than it imported (which only happened in IIRC the later 1960s). In this story having coal only mattered to the extent it reduced the amount of stuff that had to be imported (which maybe wasn't trivial).
Anyhow everyone should watch this video. In part it can be read as a call for exactly the kinds of people Walt is talking about in 40.2, though honestly most economists these days are empirical enough to be part of the solution, not the problem.
Anyhow everyone should watch this video.
I've started listening to it in the background and it is very interesting. I expect that I'll want to (background) listen to it a second time because I feel like I'm missing things and it's good enough to be worth getting the details.
Neoliberalism is the post-1980 glorification of markets and skepticism about the efficacy of government intervention in domestic affairs. People seem to be thrown by the fact that mainstream democrats and republicans both support it but it is an actual thing that has a historical beginning and will have a historical end.
Things that are not neoliberalism: socialism, social democrats, FDR and LBJ style liberal interventionists (and on the bad side -neo reactionaries, fascists, white nationalists)
The spirit to understand how capitalism works, and not just why it sucks in every way, is lacking.
Marx must be rolling in his grave.
Hegel was buried standing on his head.
I almost pedantically explained fa's joke. God, please take me home before I hurt too many others.
OT: Two-hour delay tomorrow. Hooray.
53: Marx said that he was turning Hegel on his head.
If he's buried standing on Marx's head, then somebody must have flipped him back.
11: You're not the dumbest dummy. It turns out Texans are blocked! from the google arts face-matchy thing! Also Illonoins.
I suppose that having people upload their faces to an app owned by the Borg, for purposes of having AI match it against a database, is not entirely unproblematic.
Since I'm apparently defending economists today, I just found an example of how far the reputation of the Freakonomics guy has fallen. This is an actual quote from an actual econ journal: "In fact,Levitt's work demonstrates that it is no longer even necessary to do the regressions correctly in order to achieve fame and superstar status in the dumb and dumber regime we're in. Two of Levitt's most famous papers are false..."