Eisenhower: hidden hand, or itchy trigger finger?

Review of Evan Thomas's "Ike's Bluff"

I picked up, from my library's wonderful "new" rack, a biography of Dwight Eisenhower that focuses on his foreign policy as president. The H-bomb was created while he was in office, multiplying the conundrum (and unthinkability) of pulling the trigger. These bombs can be made to literally any scale desired, given enough materials.

The conundrum it presented Eisenhower was that he wanted to save money and reduce the size of the military by brandishing various nuclear threats, but he didn't actually want to use them. The author tries to make the case that Eisenhower was perhaps the only person respected and feared enough to pull off such a bluff persuasively, and to do so, he knew that he had to tell no one of his inmost decision, whether or not to drop the bomb. It was a lonely position.

So the country practiced its duck-and-cover drills, built its bomb shelters, and employed the "Bland" corporation to devise ever more esoteric, even shamanic, rationales for mutual assured destruction.

But this kind of bluffing that wears thin pretty fast. A few crises further along, (at least), it became clear that no one really wanted to use nuclear weapons under any non-existential circumstances, (or even then), so we went back to fighting wars the old-fashioned way, with guns and proxy fighters in far-away countries. The Korean war had already demonstrated all this, so the idea that anyone, including the Russians, took Eisenhower seriously when he dropped his various hints about using nuclear weapons is really a bit hard to swallow.

Thomas works valiantly to make Eisenhower look commanding and wise in his conduct of all these policies, heading an administration noted for its ostensible blandness while a happy and prosperous country took its cue from its chief and went golfing. Internationally as well, Eisenhower was mostly respected and even loved, as America was still the colossus, leading the way both morally and materially out of World War II.

Retrospectively, there are definitely high points, such as Eisenhower's brutal string-pulling to march the English and French out of their Suez adventure. It is not well remembered that less than a decade after Israel declared itself a country, it launched an unprovoked war on Egypt, after Egypt started buying arms from Russia and nationalized the Suez Canal. Israel's attack plan was hatched in secret with Britain and France, who were supposed to magnanimously broker a peace where the European powers would take back ownership of the canal- for the good of all, no doubt. The US was also playing for influence in the Mideast, and, with some lip service to anti-colonial principles, used its dominant financial position to destroy England's exchange rate and starve it for oil.

Another positive was the U2 spy plane program. Eisenhower was receptive to technological advances, and was intimately involved in the approval and running of this plane that flew at 70,000 feet, twice the height of today's commercial airliners, and (for a time), beyond the Soviet air defenses as well. The U2 gathered immensely useful photo reconnaissance, making it clear to Eisenhower that the Soviets were far behind the US in nuclear armaments. There was no bomber gap, and no missile gap.

But did Eisenhower tell his jittery countrymen? No. I find this very hard to understand. The rationale was that such announcements would betray the U2 program, so its findings needed to kept secret. But it was not as though we had no other capabilities, and couldn't just generally state that we had, through various means, a very good idea of Soviet capabilities. It would have been very positive for US leadership on all fronts to make it clear that we had no doubt of our overall position in this arms race, preventing the kind of domestic fears, divisive politics, and foreign adventurism that happened through this time.

Unfortunately, the blowup over the U2 after Gary Powers was shot down derailed the blossoming detente that Eisenhower was pursuing with Khruschchev, whose sight-seeing trip through the US had been so successful in thawing up the cold war. But it really wasn't Eisenhower's fault, in my view. The more information was available, the better, both for us and for the general stability of the world, as Eisenhower had earlier advocated with his "open skies" program. And which would later be implemented in various test ban and arms control agreements.

Eisenhower also refused to get involved in Vietnam, letting the French face anihilation (decolonialization?) at Dien Bien Phu. On the other hand, Eisenhower coined the fateful "domino" theory of communist expansion in Southeast Asia, and started US support for the disastrous Ngo Diem in Vietnam. Would he have gone back in later on, when the South came under mortal danger? It is doubtful that he would have done nothing, but, having extricated us from Korea, I think he would have been very reluctant to escalate into another quagmire on China's doorstep.

On the other hand, Eisenhower let the CIA run horribly amok, staging coups and other more or less amateur operations all over the world. Meddling freely without getting the US into a shooting war seems to have been the theme of the Eisenhower presidency. Coups in Iran and Guatamala, attempted coups in Indonesia and Syria. This theme continued through the cold war, with the Bay of Pigs and the overthrow of Allende in Chile by the Nixon administration. Our record of picking rulers for other countries, has been, to say the least, poor (cough... Karzai). And the eventual blowback from our meddling in Iran in particular has been epic in scale and duration.

So on the whole, I find the Eisenhower foreign policy to fall short of the model of far-seeing statesmanship. Notably unsuccessful in his own stated goal of reducing the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower did keep the US out of wars small, large, and apocalyptic. But then we were the most powerful nation by far, making that task a little less difficult. His enthusiasm for covert operations was not only damaging by its direct effects, but infected future administrations with misguided bravado and sullied the US's reputation into the present day.

• Conversely, how has Hillary done?
• Meanwhile, we are slipping into our own rogue policy problems.
• Filibuster, still killing democracy and government.
• Geithner, stabilizer of finance, blind to the long term.
• Car of the future?
• Bill Black continues on the toxic and ideological pusillanimity of our current elites.
• A glorious anniversary- the income tax is 100 years old.
• The university is so yesterday.
• But Facebook is evil.
• Austerity- cover for class war. And for pro-cyclical futility.
• Dell deal is a tax dodge.
• Why some people just aren't very good at lying, or even BS. (Or religion.)
• Economic graph of the week- :

Guns- a love story

The archetypal and psychological valence of guns.

It is pretty clear that our gun debate has little to do with reason. Even less with the consitution, militias, self-government, or self-protection. It is about psychology.

In this fallen age, when the old patriarchial verities are in decline, men marry other men, women run for president, bromances dot the cinema, and sources of virility are thin on the ground, guns stand forth as an undisputed fount of macho manliness, projecting potent globules far and wide.

Far more than a simple tool, guns are civilizationally transformative, and blatantly symbolic of male power. Owning a gun is deeply personal, conferring on the owner and the home the combined potency of fire and phallic symbologies. Can you say "pump action"? Not to mention the flirtation with killing and murder, the most potent act of all. One never forgets that a gun is in the house.

Therefore, taking guns away from people conjures up castration anxieties, prompting endless rationalizations of how many armed intruders one might have to battle with one's pleasingly long AR-15 with plenty of juice in its thirty or ninety-round clips, holsters, and bandoleers.

Unfortunately, once we are in this kind of twilight territory of the archetypes, the attraction of guns for unstable, embittered losers looms even larger than it does for the usual red-blooded male. Which then leads to the occasional complete breakdown, enacting a fantasy of glorious retribution for all the belittling, emasculating affronts that the world, and especially females, have heaped upon this frustrated male.

Obviously, then, the answer is to test each gun owner with a simple, if paradoxical, question: may I take your gun away? If the answer is no, then the gun really does need to be taken away. Can our social collective transcend this psychological difficulty? Can the superego rule the id, to continue with this Freudian line? We shall see.

• What I am talking about..
• Department of injustice.
• Treasury gave $37 million to bankers bank accounts.
• Is crony capitalism now hopelessly entrenched?
• From the Atlantic- the most knowledgeable investors and analysts have no idea what lurks inside the banks.
• Are things not getting worse all the time?
• Reform, or serfdom for a select group of immigrants?
• The coming storm in Afghanistan.
• Who is running the show? Afghan conference of clerics to condemn suicide bombing... cancelled by the Taliban. Islam seems more than a little conflicted.
• Cats kill billions of birds in the US each year. Feral cats need to die.
• The wild and wooly world of atheism.
• Economics quote of the week, from Bill Black:

"The liar’s loans “crisis” of 1990-1992 in Orange County, California was stopped in its tracks without any expensive failures because we (the OTS West Region) realized that such loans inherently would lead to endemic fraud and losses."

• Bonus economic graph of the week: GDP has been dragged down by declining government spending, of all things. 

WaMu-ellujah! Forgetfulness and greed

The failure of Washington Mutual, and a new paradigm of corporate responsibility.

A blurb on the back of "The Lost Bank", by Kirsten Grind, calls it "entertaining". If having your teeth pulled is entertaining ... perhaps. It is tragedy of a classic sort, except that the main protagonist (the CEO) rides off rich as sin, leaving behind a landscape of smoldering properties, empty bank accounts, and angry mobs.

Washington Mutual began as a well-loved local bank of the northwest, focusing on customer service. It barely survived the S&L crisis, but thrived thereafter, buying up like-minded banks and integrating them into its low-key, family-oriented atmosphere. The key transition during this era was from a beloved CEO, Lou Pepper, to Kerry Killinger, a more MBA-style, somewhat inscrutable, and socially awkward banker. It turned out that he had enormous ambition and energy, however, and drove the bank to new heights of acquisition, all based on its retail banking prowess, honed through many years of takeovers and careful back-office integration.

Eventually, the company outgrew its small town values, became the sixth-largest bank in the US, hosted blowout parties featuring such inspirational messages as WaMu-ellujah! Along the way, the company acquired mysterious loan issuers in Southern California that reaped ever-increasing profits, while keeping the details murky. For a bank, loans equal assets. This means that if customers can be convinced to take out loans far beyond their ability to pay, the loan is, at least in the short term, booked as a higher asset for the bank.

Washington Mutual spent a long time torn between its addiction to these profits, and its underwriting standards, which gradually fell by the board. Risk officers came and went like ghosts in the night. Killinger became a rock star, by the standards of the business press, at least. As S&L crisis veteran Bill Black explains with regularity, the easiest way to rob a bank is to own one and run a control fraud on it. The money is guaranteed. (Short term, at least.)

The question that the author does not address is the most difficult one- how much of this was conscious, and how much unconscious? How much was the bubbly atmosphere where collapsing house prices were inconceivable, real estate assessors were bullied into marking to the desired price rather than to value, ratings agencies colluded with their bank customers to mark toilet paper as AAA, and real estate bundled-security investors trusted that someone else was minding the store?

Or how much was a conscious decision by Killinger and his lieutenants to throw the core banking concept of underwriting standards into the circular file and let the money roll in? How much was the negligence of auditors, investors, regulators, analysts, and journalists to connect the flow of profits to the sewer of underwriting that Washington Mutual was tending in secret?

We are not told, and it might take a psychoanalyst to address properly. In any case, we have heard a great deal about "moral hazard", a concept that applies here in spades. The institution of Washington Mutual was destroyed, absorbed into the ever-growing colossus of JPMorgan. But the executives responsible for all the bad decisions and betrayed standards and trusts ... they kept their loot and retired in comfort.

This is a problem- that corporations and their officers pay insufficient attention to the long term. Only corporations that thumb their noses at conventional business advice and analyst pressures (think Apple) have an inner culture strong enough to ignore the short term temptations and to focus on the long-term. The default criterion is the quarterly earnings, by which executives live and die, and get the bonuses and options whose time horizon is a few years at most. Take the money and run has become the normal way of business in the US, and it is damaging not only in rare crises, but in broader cultural terms.

Washington Mutual was mainlining the drug of greed- raking in money from its shady lending operations, and getting patted on the back in the bargain for extending credit to previously underserved communities(!) Internal risk assessment was subverted, long-standing cultural norms over-ridden. The regulatory establishment likewise lost its mind, likewise captured by criminal amnesia (especially considering the S&L crisis had blown through less than two decades before) and subject to the same Minsky cycle of forgetfulness as the bankers.

What to do? I think the answer is to create a societal mechanism to extend clawbacks deep into the ill-gotten gains of the executives and others profiting from this kind of toxic, antisocial activity. We need to think beyond simple criminal accountability. Corporations are organized to have limited liability. And as far as shareholders, that is perfectly fine. They takes their risks, and they gets their rewards. But when it comes to the general public interest, no such liability protection is appropriate. If corporations are to be people, they can not be immune from basic duties to the public interest, especially in view of their vastly expanded influence on that public interest, relative to the scope available to an individual citizen, due to their size and organization.

Just as lawyers are deemed officers of the court, and are held to some professional standards that go beyond fulfilling the letter of the law, corporate executives should be deemed officers of the state, with extra duties and liabilities that extend beyond the letter of the law. Prime among them would be general and long-term liability for all their gains beyond a base salary of perhaps the median for their company. All other monies would be subject to long-term review and surrender based on legislative findings of culpable irresponsibility and harm to the public good.

Now, all businesses are in the more or less culpable in cutting corners, transforming public goods into private gains, imparing markets, and the like. This proposal wouldn't be aimed at typical businesses. On the other hand, there are many corporate endeavors that are socially positive but are not sufficiently rewarded in the market. Those who invent the lasers, microchips, diagnostic tests, and other great things do not always get their due, and might be beneficiaries of some of the funds gathered from the malefactors held to account by the above process.

Obviously, this is a highly problematic type of proposal. Now that corruption is standard practice in the revolving door between business and government, how could we possibly expect this nakedly political process to work any better than the criminal process that has already so obviously failed to bring financial criminals to account? Would this new process of accountability not skirt the protections of the rule of law and lead to hyper-political battles that leave the country even more corrupt, and well-connected but disastrous businessmen even better off than before?

I do not have good answers. All I know that it is fundamentally unjust and wrong to see someone like Mr. Killinger hide his ill-gotten gains behind a curtain of legalism, when the whole idea of law is to create a just society, and the whole idea of business is to render people useful to each other, not only for a New York minute, but over the long term.

• On the relative duties of lenders and borrowers.
• Blinder on what to do.
• J.P. Morgan's management ain't so hot either.
• Stiglitz: the dream is dying.
• Antarctica used to be tropical... and might be again.
• Maleness and murder.
• Cheney- yes, he was that bad.
• But for Obama too, white collar crime is now OK. 
• Conservative locutions weirdly corrupt our language and discourse, via conventional wisdom of VSPs.
• Who knew? Scientology a fraudulent scam.
• The retirement system needs to actually become a retirement system, rather than a tax shelter system for the well-to-do. Recall Romney's $100 million "IRA"?

How do we get five digits?

Hox genes control the number of digits (fingers and toes) in an interesting way.

Once the trail of animal development research was blazed in the fruit fly, mammalian investigators eagerly followed, using similar methods and looking at related genes. Some of the most interesting have been the Hox genes, which control patterning at a very high level- the identities of segments in flies, and the identities and numbers of related body areas in mammals (vertebrae, ribs, limbs, digits, etc.)

Genomic diagram of Hox genes in various organisms. A rough phylogeny is on the left, and diagrams of where some of the genes are expressed and have their effects is on the right. The middle shows the clusters of Hox genes, where the entire clusters has been quadruplicated in the vertebrate lineage, creating A, B, C, and D clusters of genes 1 to 13, though a few are missing here and there due to later loss. Note the general rule of linear expression of Hox genes from front to back in the organism, coordinate with genomic position.

The wiki page on Hox genes supplies this graphic of the Hox gene clusters of various species, related by a rough phylogenetic tree (left; tetrapods are us). Each colored box represents one protein-coding gene, positioned roughly as it appears in the genome (not to scale). Note that vertebrates picked up a quadruplication of the entire Hox cluster, after which a few individual genes were later lost. This expanded the body plan repertoire of this lineage substantially- a significant evolutionary event. The original Hox cluster was incidentally already the result of long-ago duplication of a single gene encoding a transcription regulatory protein. All Hox proteins have very similar structures.

Hox stands for homeobox, which stands for homeotic transforming transcriptional regulator protein containing a diagnostic protein sequence that binds to DNA and was called a "box" of sequence, due to its appearance in sequence alignments. And homeotic? That is not kinky at all, but refers to genetic effects on the body plan, i.e. the transformation of one part of the body into one "like" another via mutation, from the Greek for similar. Hox proteins all have their effects by binding to other genes and controlling their expression, though unfortunately little is known about these details, at least in mice, since this end of things rapidly becomes extremely complex.

Another part of the story of digit control is a different DNA-binding protein, Gli3. When mutated, Gli3 is known to cause polydactyly- the production of typically a sixth digit- as well as many other malformations (see image at bottom, left side). Gli3's activity (details of which are largely unknown) is the effect of a gradient of another protein, called sonic hedgehog (Shh) in the developing limb bud, and which at last is a protein that forms an actual physical gradient in the tissues of a developing limb.

Shh protein forms gradients that help direct development of body patterns during early embryonic times. But it can't do its job alone.

A recent paper showed that these two systems, the Shh/Gli3 system and the Hox system (specifically Hoxa13 & Hoxd11-13, the last genes in the tetrapod clusters above, dark blue) interact to generate the five-finger pattern. The last ingredient believed to be involved is another gradent forming protein, fibroblast growth factor 1 (Fgf1), presumed to be downstream of the various Hox regulators. The researchers speculate that these two gradients, of Fgf1 and Shh, are controlled by different genetic inputs, and interact to create patterns. In this case it is fingers, but in other organisms, similar processes are thought to make zebra stripes, wing patterns, shells, etc..

One molecular gradient can provide some information about where to put things, but probably not anything very consistent or detailed. The interesting part of this story, though the actual biology is unfortunately not yet well developed, is that the combination of two molecular gradients generates far more interesting possibilities. This was, intriguingly enough, pointed out by one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Alan Turing, who, taking time off from inventing the computer, provided the mathematical foundations of a two-component chemical system which, across a gradient field of both chemicals, which react at different rates as they go forth, can create amazingly stable and interesting patterns, somewhat counter-intuitively.

Abstract model of a Turing wave 2-component system, resolving itself over time spontaneously from a homogenous solution into a complex binary pattern.

Naturally, these researchers made mutations to look at the effects of these genes. The complete deletion of Hoxa13 turns out to be lethal in early embryos. On the other hand, they find that the Hox code is rather complicated, such that deletion of Hox members d11 to d13 causes added effects that mimick or accentuate deletion of a13. In early embryos, they can see the hand region setting up dramatically more fingers (marked by staining for the protein Sox9, a marker of pre-cartilage/bone formation) as they delete either of the gradient-forming or responding genes Gli3 and Hox*.

Early embryonic (day 12.5) limb-buds stained for finger primordia, from mice mutated for various genes, as noted. "+" is wild-type for one or both genes, while "-" is deleted or otherwise inactivated. While deletion of Gli3 alone has some effect on finger number, only with the added deletion of the Hox genes do finger numbers become truly uncontrolled.

There is something amazing going on here. By the time all these genes are deleted (-, or other non-"+" variants) for Gli3, Hoxa13, Hoxd11, Hoxd12, and Hoxd13, there are no individual digits left. The whole zone has turned into a smooth non-digital mess. Lesser amounts of the Hox genes in particular lead to dramatically rising numbers of digits.

Mice mutated for various genes as noted, now at birth, stained for cartilage (blue) and bone (red).

In roughly the same amount of tissue, many different numbers of digits can develop, based on a few genetic alterations.  Clearly the researchers are hot on the trail of how this pattern develops and will be looking for the particular components downstream of the Hox genes that carry out its regulatory directions, especially the protein or other chemical that forms the counter-gradient to Shh. It is a common theme in biology, that most of the action lies in complex layers of regulation (i.e. management) so that the ultimate actors can toe their lines with precision even in a variable genetic and external environment.

• Jared Diamond on religion.
• No religion is the future. Or does it make us insane?
• The numinous, and largely non-military, role of nuclear weapons.
• I think someone else's thoughts, therefore I am ... mad. Schizophrenia vs Descartes.
• Networks are dictating our broadcast & technological freedoms. Or lack thereof.
• GOP in search of sensitivity...
• Austerity, not a good idea in Europe or other places outside the Wall Street Journal.
• Krugman on what is really worth worrying about for 2035.
• Economics quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell. (Note the accompanying graph, Of course there is a recession going on, if regular people don't have money to spend.)

"It reports recent cases such as the US iconic firm Caterpillar which “reported record profits last year” but “insisted on a six-year wage freeze for many of its blue-collar workers”. That is not an isolated case. Indeed it is the norm and is one of the defining characteristics of the neo-liberal era that has dominated economic policy making over the last three decades.
... Everybody should benefit from productivity growth – that is what we call a society."

Our parents give us meaning

We crave meaning in the approval of the parent, real and imagined.

How many times do you hear.. if only my father had said I was doing OK, if only my father said he loved me, if only I had a chance to show my mother how well I was doing before she died...? We grow up competing for our parent's attention and utterly dependent on it. If there is one sure influence from childhood, it is the frame of reference and attitudes of the parents. Sometimes this happens in reverse, by rebellion, but inevitably we later become our parents, so enmeshed in their world that leaving entirely is not an option.

And when they are gone? What then? The Romans, Japanese, and many other cultures made cults of their parents (in patriarchial fashion, just the male line). The parent is called to an alter where their judgement, forgiveness, boons, and advice are sought. Their gifts to us and ongoing effects are recognized. Their utter absence is so inconceivable that prayer starts to make sense. After all they are so much a part of us that even if we are mumbling to ourselves, we speak to them too.

But why keep a different flame at every alter and hearth? They are ultimately the same supervisory concept, and a culture gains solidarity from giving them the same name. God. It is funny how, no matter the theological complexity and reasoned mystery of one's god, it is never "it", but always "Him" (or in outré cases, "Her").

The model never strays far from the father/mother model, which makes it immensely powerful- as a way to acculturate children with concepts the actual parents are not strong enough to convey, as a way to sanction whatever the reigning powers want to do, as a way to comfort and soothe adults who remain children deep inside. It goes to the extreme of denying death itself, as if putting our heads under the covers will make the horror go away.

And of course, it gives the deepest meaning to those who believe most "deeply". Who see the universe as a machine to give them meaning through the imagined directives of the invisible father, who gives them the most arduous tasks, attends to their most minute needs, and gives them the most glorious rewards. It almost makes you wonder just how far that great principle of neoteny can go- how far humans can go by refusing to grow up. For creating meaning is the true task of the adult.

• Robert Ingersoll, anti-religious hero.
• Platitudes ahoy!
• On parenting.
• Pax Americana, working too well, clogging the arteries of trade.
• Is fraud even against the law anymore? Or coverups of fraud?
• Is finance above the law, and so corrupt we no longer even care?
• Free markets don't apply to Goldman Sachs. Anatomy of the AIG bailout.
• The manned space program has become a freak show as well as a boondoggle.
• The full evolutionary program, for wonks.
• What ever became of the proverbial 40 acres for freed slaves?
• Sam Harris jumps the shark, fatally.
• Economics graph of the week, arguing that the stock market is still substantially overvalued, based on  long-term P/E metrics.

The music of working memory

An analysis of brain oscillations binding content between the frontal and parietal cortices.

I'll admit it- I am fascinated by brain waves. They seem to provide dynamic structure to the activity coursing through the static anatomy of the brain, organizing all those things we love about it, like consciousness. There is also a deep connection to music, as the the various "bands" of the neural oscillations, going in very rough terms (delta ~2Hz, theta ~4Hz, alpha ~10Hz, beta ~20Hz, gamma ~40Hz) can be seen as octaves in an internal, ongoing symphony.

But knowledge about how these oscillations work has been very slow in coming. It is obviously a very complicated system, and our scientific tools are still woefully unequal to the vast scale of tens of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. A recent paper describes at a very gross level the function of oscillations between the frontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex as carrying some kinds of working memory.

"We tested the hypothesis that neuronal synchronization across the fronto-parietal network carries content-specific information that contributes directly to visual working memory. The pattern of fronto-parietal synchronization should thus vary as a function of the object held in memory."

Their memory test (done in macaque monkeys) was: first, an image is displayed, then turned off, and then after a pause of one to three seconds, two images are displayed, one of which matches the first one. The pause is the important part, during which the researchers hunt through their electrode recordings for the ghosts of working memory. The monkeys finally get a reward for correctly tracking their eyes to the matching image of the pair that are displayed later. It's an extremely simple test, and one could imagine that it hardly touches the capabilities of these monkeys for remembering things.

They have inserted a series of electrodes into the macaque's brains, in the areas putatively involved in keeping the first image "in mind". These locations are the side of the prefrontal cortex, and the posterior of the parietal cortex:

Macaque brain, marked for the areas studied- lateral frontal cortex (right), and posterior parietal cortex (left).

The idea is that the first image needs to be kept in mind to rapidly match it in the test, so the researches are hunting for neural correlates of this mental content. They know it is visual content, which narrows things down slightly. They also know about prior work which has observed some brain wave synchronization between these two brain areas during focussed attention and task performance, and which involves the parietal cortex closely with visual working memory.

Their observations take the form of correlations between the oscillations detected in one location compared with those in the other. An example is shown below, where a sample electrode trace from each area is shown in B, and from that data, a graph of correlation (coherence) with respect to time and frequency (C) is developed. The correlations are detectable at 20Hz

The visual test is diagrammed in A, while a pair of local field electrode recordings is in B. dPFC = dorsal prefrontal cortex, PEC = posterior parietal cortex, caudal section of arbitrary area E.

Fine, so correlation is not so hard to establish. But causality between the two brain areas and content of what these oscillations are encoding? That is a taller order.

To start, they sift through many trials on one monkey, choosing electrode pairs that show the kind of correlation seen above, to see whether the identity of the displayed shape or its location had additional effects on the oscillation correlations. This would indicate that the relationship was related to the visual content, not just part of the more global attention system or something similar. They develop a metric called coherence selectivity index (CSI), related to mutual information theory, that can be graphed:

Coherence selectivity index showing the degree to which correlations (of electrical oscillations) between the anatomical locations are also correlated with the content of the visual image, either of location or of image identity.

This supports the idea that the oscillations being observed as related between the two brain locations also are related to the tested content- the images of the memory test, during the time when the images are not visible. I have to say that this is pretty meagre stuff, both in terms of the statistics being used to ferret signals out of messy data, and conceptually, in that the connection between this kind of wave correlation and something called "working memory" is pretty faint. I am not saying that they are misrepresenting anything, just that the technical means for figuring out what is on someone's "mind" by electrodes is still awfully primitive.

Lastly they ask questions about which parts of the brain lead these synchronizations, and which follow. They use another statistical method, of Granger causality, which allows them to classify sub-regions where they have electrodes- paired and showing image-identity correlations as discussed above- as either senders or receivers of signals. That is to say, the oscillations (and perhaps detailed spike trains) are reliably offset in one or the other direction.

The conclusions are mixed, that while the parietal areas they measure are more often "senders" than "receivers", causality goes in both directions. This follows a growing theme in brain science, where most higher-level activity happens in recurrent networks, not in linear processing streams. For example, attention is believed to be an interaction between top-down selection and bottom-up processing streams to form coalitions of synchrony. But of course, the result could also just reflect muddy data.

They also note that the relative phases of the presumptively correlated oscillations are not firmly related, which is quite different from the highly structured phase relations of neural signalling and oscillations in the memory storage system of the hippocampus. Again, this may reflect their muddy data, or perhaps suggests that such detail can not be retained in this much longer-range, yet still functional, inter-cortical synchronization.

WGC is Wiener-Granger causality, PPC is posterior parietal cortex,  PFC is prefrontal cortex, and time is as above, relative to the image memory task. Inthe lower panels, various sub-areas of the parietal cortex area are colored blue, and sub-areas of the prefrontal cortex are red. Parietal are

"Our findings demonstrate that fronto-parietal synchronization during visual working memory is widespread, task-dependent, and content-specific during the delay period."

This seems a bit strong, though perhaps if one adds in all the prior work that has been done in this network and how visual memories are handled in the parietal cortex, it makes more sense. From what I see in this paper, however, the conclusions are more preliminary than final. At any rate, it is clear that scientists are gaining (slowly) on this significant problem, and pinning down just what constitutes our various memories and thoughts.

• The pervasive neuro-toxic legacy of lead from gasoline.
• Debt is the time-honored weapon of class warfare.
• It is time to put an end to the debt ceiling craziness, and if it takes a trillion dollar coin, so be it.
• Three cheers for fiat money.
• Anorexia as metaphor for self-imposed austerity.
• What happened to the starry-eyed left?
• A review of sociobiology- still with us after all these years. (The CS bibliography)
• Riding into Jalalabad.
• Afghan army cargo planes wasted, at $0.6 billion. Whence the Afghan army?
• What an appreciative audience, for George Duke.
• Economics graph of the week- the striking relation between the long-term low interest rate regime pre-1981 and the high interest rate regime thereafter, minus GDP. High rates put a serious damper on growth over the long as well as short terms.

Clash of civilizations

It's the White House vs the State Department vs the Military vs USAID vs Marines vs Army, vs Pakistan, vs ... oh yes, Afghanistan! A review of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book about our war in Afghanistan.

Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Little America" is highly painful reading. Almost every sentence is about some stupidity by which we shot ourselves in the foot in Afganistan during the recent surge. (A boiled down version of Chandrasekaran's points.) This was the time when we finally really "got it", when we really understood the lay of the land, had a non-deluded president in charge, and put the right resources in play. Yet the accomplishments have been meagre, to say the least.

The Marines have cleaned up Helmand province for the moment, but Eastern Afghanistan has languished and overall security is little better. And Pakistan? It responded to our surge by egging the Taliban into a surge of its own, while preventing any negotiations. Some ally! More importantly, though, the long game seems nowhere in sight. The (Afghan) government is as corrupt and incompetent as ever, and the Taliban waits in Pakistan to move right back in as soon as the US leaves. The Afghan army and police, which were supposed to be trained and ready to replace the US forces, are nowhere near ready, filled with unmotivated clock punchers (and abusers of their fellow citizens) with little logistical apparatus.

What happened? Well, for one thing we continue to be befuddled by the Afghan culture. The surge was all about installing district-level governance that would provide the services, at least some of which the Taliban was so famed for: quick justice, local policing, schools, and agricultural aid. Is that what the Afghans wanted? Is that what President Karzai wanted?

It turns out, no- that is not what they wanted. The Afghans already had a governance structure in the form of a very hierarchical tribal / warlord system. Each woman has a male who controls her, each family has its male head, or elder, and each family has its tribal council of elders with a commander, and each tribe fights tooth and nail with other local tribes to put its man in charge as the local warlord. Afghans are educated in the school of social power in a way that we in the west can hardly even conceive of any more, despite all our technological power (exhibit A: Obama's weirdly absent negotiating skills).

It is, however, as old as humanity, from ancient Greece and beyond- a life of constant warfare and power struggle. The West has made a long journey through the Roman legal system and medieval constitutions like the Magna Carta (with detours through the Tudors!) to arrive at the Nobel prize-wining EU. Our children are plunged into some of this primitive schooling in junior high, but we diligently try to civilize them out of it as soon as possible.

However Afghanistan has been on a different road, one strangely abetted by the militant bigotry of Islam. And its people (at least those in power, who have the guns and typically the most highly honed conception of how to screw others) were and are apparently not ready to make this fast-forward transition to a non-tribal system of "good governance" as we understand it.

Chandrasekaran presents an interesting example, portraying president Hamid Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai as Hamid's answer to governing Kandahar, which went quite well, except that the Taliban was all over the place. It was a beautiful bit of corruption, served the local population to some degree, kept a superficial peace, and displayed Hamid Karzai's evident disinterest in taking on the Taliban in any direct way or providing western-style governance. While he vociferously complained about Pakistan harboring the Taliban, he didn't seem to have much problem with Taliban on his own doorstep, and indeed threated to join the Taliban himself in one particularly unhinged press conference.

Why? Perhaps because when all is said and done, Pashtun tribal solidarity, which the Karzais share with the Taliban, trumps the national interest, and certainly trumps the interests of the US. In any case, after working for years to sideline Ahmed Wali for his corruption, putative drug interests, and ineffectiveness vs the Taliban, the US finally started working with him late in the surge, with postive effects, at least until he was assassinated by the Taliban. Who's the boss now?

Another theme of the book is the peace negotiations with the Taliban that Richard Holbrook in particular was keen on, on the theory that our surge gave us the time of maximum power to extract a reasonable peace deal. But the surge also had a deadline, allowing the Taliban to simply wait us out and reap the rewards of what they sensed to be the continuing gross incompetance of the Afghan government, helped along by a few choice assassinations.

This is one place where I think the book goes off the rails. It goes into excruciating detail about why the negotiation idea failed. Holbrook was hated by the rest of the bureaucracy, Pakistan wouldn't let the Taliban negotiate, the military didn't want to hear about it, much rather playing with its toys and killing people. Etc. and so forth. But the basic idea is not questioned, and the distinct impression is given that these talks were some brilliant solution that died a bureaucratic death.

But to me such negotiations were a non-starter, and I agree (reluctantly) with the military on this one. Doubtless Holbrooke had sugarplum-like visions of his personal heroics at Dayton (on the post-Yugoslav war) and the Paris negotiations (on the Vietnam war), which explains his desire to put himself at center stage. But I think the parallel with Vietnam is uncomfortably and instructively close.

We never gained anything by our negotiations to end the Vietnam war. The brutal truth is that the North took over the South, and the US lost about 60,000 soldiers and the local countries well over a million people. The only thing the negotiations proved (by confidence-building measures like bombing pauses and the like) was that the US had civilian control over the military. Which is not an insignificant point, but not one likely to impress an enemy which had a sanctuary from which to attack, an incredibly effective quasi-religious ideology (including a healthy dose of nationalism) that motivated its own citizens and infected those of the enemy, and which faced a terminally corrupt and incompetent government in the South. And which, incidentally, had perfectly effective civilian control over its military as well.

Sound familar? But instead of working with the time-honored governing structures of Afghanistan, such as they are, (and they are typically extremely corrupt), our armed forces cleared areas in horribly painstaking fashion, only to wait for a "government-in-a-box" that never arrived, or if it did, was an ineffective token, ignored by all. Nor did pouring money into the zone alter the fundamental situation, since the long game was always about politico-military power.

The Counter insurgency (COIN) strategy was a fundamentally political strategy, aiming to turn the resident populations away from the Taliban and towards the government. But we had in mind a fundamentally different government (something from Switzerland, perhaps!) than the Afghans themselves had, and fundamentally different from what they are willing to provide on the long term. Perhaps we were spoiled a bit by Iraq, which, while tribal in significant areas, also has a long-standing central state and bureaucratic tradition (several millennia old, indeed) that enabled us to eventually hand off power to someone, despite our many blunders.

In Afghanistan, however, that someone is Hamid Karzai, who has proven himself to be a disaster, solidly in the Afghan tradition of tribal politics and small-minded corruption, utterly uncomprehending of the possibilities of western-style governance where power is heavily restricted so that it can be channeled into lawful, productive, and legitimate pursuits, not zero-sum feuds and wars. Our neglectful treatment of him during the Bush administration also left him with little choice but to run his country the old-fashioned way, rather than through a modern state system that had some chance to appeal to the lowest and most populous rungs of the society, rather than the warlord caste.

In any case, here we are, at the end of the surge, with the Taliban bloodied, but convalescing peacefully in its Pakistani resorts, with the Afghan government hated almost as much as the Taliban, and with the Afghan army a shell of whatever it was supposed to be, to conduct the coming civil war.

Chandrasekaran is most enamored of the advice of one of his well-fawned sources, diplomat John Weston, who thought the surge was misguided in its temporary nature. Better to commit smaller forces for the long term- as long as it might take to protect the core of the Afghan state and wait for the Taliban fires to burn themselves out. The Afghans have been whipsawed so often by one strategy after another, from boots on the ground to light footprints to no-nation-building to yes-nation-building to surges to COINs, etc.. they are exasperated and sick of us, not to mention their own civil wars.

But this assumes that the Taliban were not winning the war and were not gaining territory, and that some modest level of special forces, advisors, and a few other coalition forces could do what they had spent the previous decade not being able to do, which was to put the Afghan government on its feet in some form. The surge has surely helped that process, mostly by increasing the Afghan army and police (another long story of bumbling, waste, and incompetence...). And perhaps also by clarifying all around what each side really means by governance.

It is horrifying to read about the wasted lives, wasted limbs, wasted time, wasted money, ignorance, and mismanagement that has been brought to bear on Afghanistan. That is not to say that other institutions of the West, like finance, or our political system, are paragons of good management. But in Afghanistan we are faced with the most elemental contest of power with extremely experienced and ideologically strong adversaries, which deserves much better from our Western intellectual capacities than what we have so far deployed. We were plunged into a maelstrom of political complexity, and bringing along only one tool- EU-style governance- while admirable in some respects, was also deluded.

Our capability to change foreign cultures is limited. If we really wanted to set up a democracy with women's rights and secular governance for all in Afghanistan, we would have had to shave off the entire top of the social system and sit on the county with about 3 million soldiers for a decade or two (for a country of ~35 million) till our bright new modern generation of Afghans came of age. Social revolution takes work. Pursuing the same aims with fewer resources was doomed, unless there was a local mechanism to sponsor it. That was not Hamid Karzai, or anyone else we were working with who had any power.

On the other hand, just tipping the balance of existing social dynamics, (and blowing things up), as we did for the Northern Alliance to let it topple the Taliban ... that was easy. But then we decided that despite the light footprint, (lightened even more by our diversion to Iraq), we didn't want the Northern Alliance to rule the country outright, and indeed wanted the trappings of a democracy, women's rights, and modern administration. But didn't want to do nation-building. It was completely incoherent, with only the excuse that powerful Afghans were happily lying to us the whole time about how they naturally shared our aims if only they could share our money for a little while.

It is a country whose national sport is civil war. Pakistan knows this well, and happily encourages more to keep Afghanistan weak. A cynic would say that we should do the same, except that weakness in the last instance equates with Al Qaeda sanctuary, given the history and remaining strength of the Taliban. So we need to pick and choose what part of the social system to support, and which to combat (very little of it, necessarily). We also need to be better at knowing whom to trust and how far- a difficult job when we (still) know so little about the culture, fatally undermined by our one-year-and-gone tours of duty for virtually all the relevant personnel.

We have been schizophrenic in this task, as we fatally over-estimate what we can accomplish and continue to have precious little appreciation of the true aims and capabilities of the Afghans. I hope this book helps make these points to our policy makers, though at this point the die is mostly cast, as we await the coming battle between the Afghan government and the Taliban this year or next.

• Why so many whackos on the loose? Blame Reagan.
• Where religion is weak, atheism is weak.
• Theology is dead ... long live spirituality.
• Spinoza- killer of theology, originator of the modern perspective.
• Japan prepares the big guns against deflation.
• Krugman considers the robot end-point.
• Where are those concealed guns-for-protection when you need them?
• A lengthy history of New Deal Keynesian Mariner Eccles.

"He assiduously cautioned FDR to eschew a course of action that many economists have suggested Japan dolefully followed in the 1990s. “If we spend some every year, but not sufficient to give the required stimulus to private expenditures,” Eccles wrote in a prophetic memo in early 1935, “we can build up a large debt and still not be out of the depression.”"

What a real right to work would look like

It would start with a right for everyone to actually work, and get a decent living for it.

The recent GOP push to double down on their agenda for the rich and powerful by passing "right-to-work" laws was a typical instance of their love of Orwellian language, not to mention their utter corruption by the rich. It was really about whether a company should be faced with a unified, organized workforce, (i.e. a union shop), or not. Whether companies have an unbridled right to put people out of work.

I have plenty of problems with unions. They are clumsy, highly unfair, and in the public sphere have generated reprehensible corruption. It is a poor mechanism to foster labor power. But if no other way is offered, it is better than nothing.

What might be a better way? The most appalling aspect of our current economic crisis is that millions of people are being crushed- unions do not care about the unemployed, and nor does anyone else. They are forgotten, and after about six months, no one even wants to see their resumes.

The Fed has long been more concerned about inflation than unemployment, (though in fairness it is doing more about unemployment than most central banks around the world), and one of our political parties takes positive glee in celebrating the success of the successful and moralizing about how the victims of this downturn have no one to thank but themselves, so get out there and find a job, even when there are five or more applicants for every opening. Republicans cater to one interest- the rich, whose power over workers has been ironically and horrifyingly increased by the mismanagement of our economy by the fabulously rich and corrupt.

So the first ingredient in a humane economy is to provide work and income to anyone interested in working. This is well within the government's power to provide. We have crying needs for infrastructure renewal, ecological restoration, sustainable power, child care, not to mention the normal needs of any municipality- general cleaup, care for public properties, housing for the homeless, health care for the elderly, and a million other needs. (My prior, more extensive treatment of this concept, including how one pays for it.)

How much should this kind of program pay? It should pay a living wage, which would be at least one and a half times the current poverty level. It should be available to anyone who asks, with the condition that it is real work, and the person can be fired for cause just as at any private sector job.

This would transform our society, from one based on fear of the employer, to one where everyone reasonably willing is welcome to work in a dignified manner. Private employers then would have to bid over this base level of income and in addition have to offer reasonable working conditions in order to get employees. Would that be a terrible or dangerous situation? No, though prices for services currently provided by the underpaid would certainly go up. Concomitantly, the need for welfare and incarceration (and probably mental health care and homelessness), would go dramatically down, if everyone had access to some basic level of dignified existence.

In addition, health care and pensions should be decoupled from the particular employer you work for, (or union you are a member of), but instead be universal. The pension "system" is phenomenally unfair, with no rhyme or reason to which employers offer them (fewer all the time, understandably) or not. Ideally, we would double social security for every worker, and do away with all private pension contracts, since they are unreasonably forward-looking commitments for corporations having much shorter time horizons. The only way to do this kind of thing fairly is to make it a modest, but universal program. Then it would be up to individuals to save for their retirements, over and above this decent minimum.

Beyond this, I would envision a much more vibrant job market, where workers are continually plugged into a market system that matches employers with candidates. The current online systems are OK, but I think the scope can be quite a bit more broad, as sort of a merging of linkedin with monster in a way that would convince employers to use this kind of service routinely and uniformly, as well as encouraging third-party matchmakers to actively roust up options for those not actively looking for work. Right now, only the least relevant and often diversionary postings seem to occur on these systems. In any case, once the power of employers over the health care, pension, and income of the worker is mitigated in these ways, we would see much more mobility in the workplace- more power in the hands of employees.

Proceeding along in my fantasy of an ideal employment world, the taboo of income secrecy would also be broken, and companies would all operate with open books, so that everyone's cards are on the table. This would eliminate a great deal of inequality and subterfuge, and again put a little more power into the hands of employees.

• Inequality of income has essentially nothing to do with marginal productivity or ability, and everything to do with power.
• Do we need unions for labor to have power? A very good discussion of the union shop.
• Full employment is going to be the next progressive narrative.
• We have a problem with guns. And gun control does work. And why is the right wing intent on jumping the shark?
• Self-medicating with weapons, which translate to more killing.
• A (second) Republican recession is brewing. Why do they have any economic credibility left?
• And it looks like they will be shutting down the government too, shortly.
• On how we are like Rome as it went from republic to autocracy.
• Summers on the unjustness of the tax system- now he is progressive, when he has no power!
• Krugman beats on the utterly bankrupt right wing economics.
• Google is the boss of you.
• Doomsday for Afghans, coming soon.
• Galbraith reviews the economic landscape.
• Bill Mitchell economics quote of the week, on the dominant modeling method in mainstream economics, quoting of Robert Solow:

"A thoughtful person, faced with the thought that economic policy was being pursued on this basis, might reasonably wonder what planet he or she is on. An obvious example is that the DSGE story has no real room for unemployment of the kind we see most of the time, and especially now: unemployment that is pure waste."

Genome junk: the history and usefulness of transposons

Why do we have so much, and bacteria so little? Because a junkyard has its uses.

The role of junk in the human genome continues to fascinate, since there is so much of it- perhaps 98% of the total. I reviewed some recent work that described how active much of this junk is, getting transcribed to RNA and bound by proteins of various sorts, though honestly, this may be more smoke than fire.

Another way to understand junk DNA is from a broader evolutionary perspective, which is what Nina Fedoroff offers in a fascinating recent review (sorry, not even a free abstract). The problem is that many workers (e.g. Richard Dawkins) have thought of this junk as parasitic, such as transposons of various sorts which carry protein-encoding genes and other sequences needed to replicate and pop themselves around the genome. (Much of the junky DNA arises more straightforwardly as errors in replication that pile up as boringly repetitive sequence.)

Transposons certainly have this capacity of propagation, but what Fedoroff focuses on is that eukaryotes have had these transposons and related junk from the very beginning. Bacteria are afflicted by them too. In addition, eukaryotes have had, from the beginning, various mechanisms inherited from bacteria which counteract transposon proliferation, such as the recently discovered micro-RNA mechanisms. One simple mechanism is homologous DNA recombination, which can delete duplicated DNA segments, even as it can also create them.

(Incidentally, introns, which are the junk that lie between the exons that encode our proteins, also were there from the very beginning, and possibly before, being descended from primordial transposable RNAs.)

So it has all been an ecosystem present from the beginning, and the reason why eukaryotes such as ourselves have a lot of junk (and plants have even more) is not that DNA transposons have become more infectious or diabolical, but that advanced organisms have relaxed their surveillance over this aspect of their genomes, for other reasons.

Sizes of genomes, from various species. Bacteria occupy a distinctly tiny range, (bottom), while genome size increases roughly with organismal complexity. Some plants (and amphibians) have allowed another order of magnitude amount of DNA in their genomes. The actual gene content of these genomes is much less variable than the gross DNA size shown here, ranging from about 3,000 genes to perhaps 45,000 genes. So the gross size at the higher end reflects "junk" elements almost exclusively.

One reason is that active shuffling of genomic elements can be highly advantageous, enabling faster evolution for larger organisms with longer generation times than bacteria. Unlike the highly compact arrangement in bacteria, our genes are modular pastiches of broken-up exons and far-flung regulatory elements whose duplications and rearrangements sometimes lead to cancer, but can more rarely also lead to the evolutionary innovation we are so familiar with from economic theory- Marx's "creative destruction".

Plants are a prime example of this. Barbara McClintock was amazed to see the variegation of maize, as shown by stunning varieties all over the American landscape.

Well, some of this variegation is driven by transposons, which hop in and out of the relevant pigmentation genes and their regulatory regions with abandon, and earned McClintock an Nobel prize for her assiduous, astonishing work bringing this to light in the 1940's and 50's, long before the molecular revolution in biology.

Now we know some of the molecular details, and they are pretty hard to believe. Fedoroff  offers a diagram of one locus of about six genes, from various maize strains (each row is a different strain). Each of the colored triangle insertions are transposons, and one can see in some cases they have piled up with time, one inserting within another.

A dramatic history of transposon (colored triangles) insertion into a six-gene segment of the maize genome. (The bronze locus, encoding an anthocyanin pigment in kernels.) Each row shows a different strain, from widely varying origins. Coding regions are the crayons in yellow, with exons dark, and the introns light. Click to see at full magnification.

There is a direct connection between the apparent physical plasticity of plants, including an ability to respond to many environmental conditions, and their genomic plasticity. Maize was clearly selected by prior generations of Americans to have additional flexibility to meet a variety of aesthetic and functional needs.

The only question then is why all life forms have not availed themselves of such genomic plasticity. Plants have a particular need, not being able to respond to the world via nervous systems or locomation. But wouldn't bacteria be in the same boat? Yes, but they are trapped in a world of even more cut-throat competition, where the margins of victory and defeat are razor-thin, proportional to their microscopic size and especially their infinitesimal cell volume. A maize plant can lose a few seeds to mutation and still succeed, but a mutation in a bacterium presents a much more immediate threat.

Additionally, any extra DNA spent on junk is a metabolic cost- a cost high enough to prevent bacteria from accumulating much of it. A maize plant can gain large amounts of DNA without it being a significant metabolic load- due to its high cell volume, its DNA is a tiny fraction of its biomass. And this in turn, combined with a lack of recombination via sex and lack of modular gene units like exons, limits bacteria's ability to adapt to environmental challenges via genomic change. Instead, they rely on a great deal of promiscuous quasi-mating, infection, and DNA transfer from related and unrelated microorganisms to acquire new codes and traits, like antibiotic resistance. If evolution had stopped with bacteria, our planet would have an ocean alive with a bacterial soup, (and an atmosphere of oxygen), but few other signs of life.

It is a sort of ironic comment on this world of maximal competition and insufficient cooperation that bacteria have to resort to infecting and stealing from each other to advance even a small amount in evolutionary terms. We, on the other hand, are blessed with a much richer fund of internal diversity to draw on, which has (slowly) contributed to the development of multicellularity, terrestrial colonization, skeletons, (both animal and plant), cognition, sociality, and so many other complex biological bequests.

• A novel model of gene duplication, as more fodder for evolution.
• On the other hand, conifer genomes appear to be more stable, but keep plugging along anyway.
• You can fight climate heating.
• Job creators busy creating fewer jobs.
• What happens when the value of labor goes to zero?
• Economic value of revolving door corruption in the US.
• Afghanistan remains hopelessly corrupt. Leaders seem to be planning for return of the Taliban- the only entity with any spine.
• Al Qaeda is back, feeding on the nexus of Islamic bigotry and hatred of the US.
• Lying about Santa is OK. About god too?
• Children are narrative-driven. Do adults have to be as well?
• Platitude O' the day provides a model of theology.
• Spinal-watch: will the White House hold out for good public policy?
• The sick thought process of the anti-abortion forces. "Becoming like children", indeed.
• Really, cell phones are OK for your brain.
• Hadn't heard of Bon Iver before...
• Nor of Lianne La Havas.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week, from his quiz:

"5. Premium Question: The Australian National Accounts data came out this week and the federal government maintained its assertion that the annualised growth rate revealed (3.1 per cent) was around the trend established over the last decade (3.2 per cent). They reaffirmed their policy aim, which is to keep real GDP growth at that trend rate. If labour productivity grows at 1.5 per cent per annum and the labour force grows at 2 per cent per annum and the average working week is constant in hours, then this policy (if successful) will see the unemployment rate rising." A: true

If fish could scream

Does anyone care about overfishing?

As a preview of global biosphere destruction, (the big show, so to speak), the wanton destruction of fisheries around the world is a fair example, though many others can be cited. A common resource is plundered by commercial interests with a focus on efficiency, but little thought to tomorrow.

A recent paper summarized the sorry state of global fisheries, which they divide into two groups: "assessed", which were the subject of previous work by the authors (and the UN food and agriculture organization) in well-known fisheries such as the Bering sea, and "unassessed", comprising everything else around the world, of which there are thousands, large and small. The bottom line, surprise surprise, is that most fisheries around the world are depleted and, even in economic terms let alone ecological terms, are abused and declining.

Figure from the prior work, showing each of the "assessed" fisheries. Estimates of actual catch (u, blue circles); ratio of actual population to the population at maximum  sustainable yield (B/Bmsy, green triangles). Bands are also provided for catch levels consistent with msy (upper light blue), and levels consistent with rebuilding a depleted fishery (lower dark blue). The California current fishery seems to be the only one being managed back to some semblance of health, with New Zealand evidently undertaking a similar course. In contrast, the Newfoundland region has collapsed.

There are a few terms of art used here. One is biomass (B), the total quantity of fish in the sea, of the species of interest. Then there is maximum sustainable yield (msy), the yield available yearly in an optimally (from the managers and industry's perspective) managed fishery. How much pain and suffering are being inflicted.. how much ecological damage is being done in collateral damage to countless non-"fishery" species ... I think no one really wants to know. Also, fisheries managers tend to use a baseline of maximal yield from personal experience or other recent memory, not from the often enormously higher baseline of natural abundance predating human exploitation entirely. This is a general problem in appreciating losses in our standard of living, with respect to the natural world.

Status of various fisheries around the world, where "assessed" are relatively well-studied and -managed.

Even among assessed fisheries, "63% have a biomass below what would produce maximum sustainable yields". The main finding is that the unassessed fisheries are in much worse shape, which is a bit surprising, since they are not the prime economic hunting areas. But they are also less regulated and less organized. There is open season, more or less, on sharks in the open ocean.

Status estimates for a few "unassessed" fisheries.

It is a testament both to the failure of classical markets & the free market ideology that this is happening, and a call to international government with global purpose and teeth. Classical economists might make the point that this simply makes the case for "fencing-in" these commons and investing them with property rights that lead to sustainable resource extraction. But our experience with tree farms and other kinds of farming (see the Dust bowl) says clearly that environmental values always get short shrift in such systems. Not to mention that fish are mobile resources, making such fencing problematic even conceptually.

Needless to say, everyone would be better off in the long run if we could control our corporate ideologies and greed in the short run. Sadly, perhaps the best mechanism is put large regions of the ocean entirely off limits to commercial fishing. Simple, but a reflection of how more intricate rules by which we try to manage and regulate "free" markets are simply not up to the task of preserving what is obviously the common good.

• Can a fish even be seen? Death and fish in the movies.
• The scientific consensus on global heating has been too ... modest.
• Bob Costas, on guns.
• "The wealth of the Walton family – which still owns the lion’s share of Walmart stock — now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined."
• Gambling pays ... those in the house.
• Forget the dollar coin- how about if we phase out all coins? Indeed, all cash?
• Class war, continued.
• A soap opera, filmed from Middle Earth.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week..

I told an SBS Radio journalist today who was asking why the Government refused to lift the unemployment benefit despite admitting themselves that it is below the poverty line that the Government was deliberately impoverishing the unemployment but at the same time refused to create the macroeconomic policy settings necessary to generate sufficient jobs.
The way they defend that irresponsible and unethical policy stance is to claim the current unemployment rate is full employment. The dirty way out that governments of both political persuasions have employed since they became infested with the lies of neo-liberalism.

and...

The rise in acceptance of Monetarism and its new classical counterpart was not based on an empirical rejection of the Keynesian orthodoxy, but was according to Alan Blinder in 1988 “instead a triumph of a priori theorising over empiricism, of intellectual aesthetics over observation and, in some measure, of conservative ideology over liberalism. It was not, in a word, a Kuhnian scientific revolution”.