At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news. Here are the twelve stories, by month, that especially caught my attention and that in retrospect I recommend to yours. I'll make no effort to rank their importance against one another, so I will simply order them by month. January: Multilateral Trade Agreement. The Trans-Pacific Partnership reconstituted itself despite the US withdrawal, in an agreement announced on the 23d. This is a fine example of a broader and (for the US) an unfortunate trend. The US is locking itself out of free trade areas. To the extent free trade does work to stimulate economic productivity, the US is withdrawing from that. February: Offshore natural gas. A dispute between Cyprus and Turkey over offshore drilling rights for natural gas nearly became a war as the Turkish navy obstructed a drilling vessel. This, too, I take as a token of a broader develo...
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Grandfather paradox The “grandfather paradox” is an argument used to prove the impossibility of time travel. The idea is that an individual (usually called "Tim" because the name looks a lot like "time") who could travel backwards in time, could kill his grandfather, prior to the conception of his father. But this would imply that Tim’s father would never have been born, and that in turn would imply that Tim would never be born. And if Tim was not born, Tim could not go back in time. This situation leads to a contradiction. Tim both could and could not kill his grandfather. He could (because he would by hypothesis be in the right time and place with a weapon) yet he could not (because he would have to have been born!) And since our “Tim” could be anyone this means that nobody could - that time travel is impossible. Syllogistically, the macro argument is this: Premise 1. If time travel is possible, then contradictions are possible. Premise 2...
I only recently learned this word: perdurantism. It means the philosophical position that holds that an object can be defined as having parts by virtue of their distance from one another in time. We might speak of my old shoes and I may say regretfully, "Ah, they were great when they were new shoes, before I wore out the sole." A perdurantist (like Ted Sider) will speak of the old shoes as a different "part" of the pair from the new shoes, just as one speaks of the heel as a different part from the tongue. Separation by time is not distinct from separation by space. The contrary view is endurantism: it rejects the notion that the now-shoe is a part of the shoe. It holds the shoes are fully present in the now just as they were fully present in the then. Just a little vocabulary lesson I've given myself. Happy to have you listening in....
I was about to ask my readers a question: "who is responsible for that now-classic image of a diner at a street corner with James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and I believe Elvis Presley sitting nonchalantly inside? "The viewer is supposed to imagine himself driving by that street corner, getting a glimpse of these legends, but of necessity hurrying on...." But then I realized -- hey, you're on the internet thing, dummy! You can find it. So here it is. Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I had misremembered the created/captured moment. Elvis isn't sitting about nonchalantly -- he's working there, behind the counter, serving Monroe, Dean, and Humphrey Bogart. And the artist? Gottfried Helnwein, working a variation on Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. I find Helnwein's image much more arresting than Hopper's. But you can judge for yourself, dear reader, because this is after all the internet.
I'm thinking today, for no good reason, of an encounter I had at a Dublin airport many years ago. This was on a year when Bloomsday (June 16) fell on a weekend -- I believe on a Sunday. I had freed my US bound schedule for a few days and flew to Dublin, arriving on a Friday. I was not in a relationship at the time, so I arrived alone. Further, I was not dressed in attire that would suggest I was there for any business purpose. So ... I was a youngish man, traveling alone, dressed casually, and this might have been enough to put me on somebody's radar as a possible trouble maker who needed to be questioned. The usually casual question, "business or pleasure, sir" turned into something more searching. I found myself explaining not only that I was there for Bloomsday but that, yes I was sort of familiar with Ulysses . I was asked to name some major characters. I started up and listed four before I was interrupted by an obviously satisfied security guard. Perha...
Let's state The Prisoner’s Dilemma explicitly. Just 'cause I'm in a mood. Suppose two criminals have together robbed a bank. Police have captured and are interrogating them both. The police could get them both on a lesser charge (say, reckless discharge of their weapons) even if neither confesses on the big charge (the armed robbery). They are interrogating the prisoners in separate facilities, thus with no chance to communicate. The police offer each prisoner, simultaneously, the following deal: “Confess, ratting on your buddy, and you will be set free. We will convict your buddy and he will serve three years in prison. If you refuse to confess, your buddy may well take this same deal, and you will serve three years in prison, he will walk free. “If you rat on him and he rats on you, we’ll have to convict and punish both of you.But we won’t w ant your cooperation to go unrewarded, so in that case we promise a one-year cut on your sentence...
A recent submission to the Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship, and the Law looks at the “Brokaw bill” of 2016 and at the facts said to have motivated it. There are lessons to be drawn from this about how things work in the world, about how the managers of failed enterprises like to think they work, and about who politicians believe. In March 2016, Sens Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced a bill to “increase transparency and strengthen oversight of activist hedge funds.” Bernie Sanders, then in the midst of a campaign for the Democratic nomination for POTUS, signed on as a co-sponsor. The proposal was said to have been inspired by the cloture (five years before) of a paper mill in Brokaw, Wisconsin. That paper mill had provided jobs to some of Senator Baldwin’s constituents for years. According to Baldwin and Merkley, the mill closed because a predatory activist hedge fund bought control of the Wausau Paper Company and demanded immediate returns “at th...