Tag Archives: history

I think this article is partially true as an articulation of one factor in a complex and emergent challenge. It is from a conservative think tank and was published in Foreign Policy (CFR organ behind a paywall). My take is as a have been saying, following Alexander Dugin. The underlying dynamic of the 19th century was socialism-capitalism and its political manifestation as communism-fascism versus liberalism. The fundamental dynamic in the early 21st century is the historical dialectic...

Some philosophy in the broad sense that is neither MMT nor economics-related but important owing to its contemporary relevance in determining the social, political and economic dialectic that the world is experiencing at this point in time and which is shaping the future for some time to come.Are we in another Gramsci interregnum? The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. — A....

How the West rewrites history. Andrei Martyanov sets the record straight.Reminiscence of the FutureHm, Something Is Missing....Andrei Martyanov

If you were a Roman citizen around, say, 200 BC, you probably would have assumed Rome was going to last forever.At the time, Rome was the greatest republic in human history, and its institutions had proven resilient through invasions and all kinds of disasters. But the foundations of Rome started to weaken less than a century later, and by 27 BC the republic had collapsed entirely.The story of Rome’s fall is both complicated and relatively straightforward: The state became too big and...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A wonderful back and forth between David Evans and DFID Deputy Chief Economist Nick Lea, ostensibly about regressions, but to me resonated more broadly on methods. Papers seem to have to need the magical pixie dust of a regression to get accepted for publication, but is it the case that every problem in development is a nail waiting for a regression hammer? Lea wonders if methods are constraining the kinds of questions economists...

Need education outcomes explained in a more intuitive way? Better call Dave Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A lovely tribute to Dave Evans, who’s been a boon to the field, and a prolific producer of public goods, from David McKenzie and his Development Impact Blog colleaguesI ran a quick search, and I’ve cited him about 50 times in my links It’s fitting that Dave’s final Dev Impact post is in one of his specialities, making research more understandable to...

Systemic uncertainty in a complex adaptive system. Spontaneous natural order is messy.Cassandra's LegacyShould we Prepare for a New World War? Answers from the Patterns of Past Ugo Bardi | Professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of FlorenceSee alsoStatistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social ScienceHey! Here’s what to do when you have two or more surveys on the same population!Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied...

Mythos Der Kapitalismus ist entzaubert und bringt uns das größte Faschismusproblem seit den Dreißigern Was im Herbst 2008 an der Wall Street geschah, hatten die allermeisten Menschen bis dahin für unmöglich gehalten, schließlich hatte man ihnen jahrelang weisgemacht, dass etwas Derartiges schlichtweg nicht passieren könnte. Es war, als ob man dabei zuguckt, wie die Sonne, kurz nachdem sie am Horizont aufgeht,...

Again, follow the money, here the conversion of the Reichsmark to the DM. Very interesting from the monetary point of view — who controls the money, and all that. I think some of you may have heard on more than one occasion about how that bloodthirsty tyrant Stalin set up a blockade of West Berlin in 1948 and how the freedom-loving nations organized the Berlin airlift to circumvent it. But today we’ll let you in on what really happened.... Russia InsiderWho Really Put up the Berlin Wall?...

Every so often humanity manages genuinely to surprise itself. Events to which we had previously assigned zero probability push us into what the ancient Greeks referred to as aporia: a state of intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The Crash of 2008 was such a moment. Suddenly, the world ceased to make sense in terms of what, a few weeks before, passed as conventional wisdom –...