Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  One of the important financial economists writing today is Mohamed El-Erian, who grew up as the son of an Egyptian diplomat and was the deputy director of the IMF for three years in the 1990s. He is quite well known to folks like me, who look to his analyses to guide our work reporting day to day events.  But he is not well known at all to the "general public," where that term is taken to mean the sort of people who know that Paul Krugman or Robert Shiller are important economists.  I'm old enough to remember when Friedman and Galbraith were the economists whose name came to the tongue of many non-economists. They both passed away in the first decade of the new millennium, and the public attention has done what it does ... it has passed on. I may say more about El-Erian's non-celebrity work soon.  For now, I will only lay down that he has recently said that on June 24, "The most notable price action in US markets" was the fall by 9 basis points of US gover...

I just had a revelation about Gilligan's Island . Regular fans will remember that Gilligan would from time to time mention his favorite rock group The Mosquitoes. Eventually, the group itself visited the island, looking for a relaxing getaway after a difficult tour. Like all guest stars, the band left in a manner that didn't help the core seven castaways at all.  Anyway, it is obvious that the group was conceived as a Beatles parody. The insectile name, to start with,  The fact that the group appears to have had a single with the lyrics "don't go in there, yeah yeah yeah." It was not subtle parody.  But what only recently occurred to me was the clever way that the names of the members of the fictional group mirror the real-world names of the Fab Four.  The Mosquitoes had four members (of course): Bingo, Bango, Bongo, and Irving. Note that three of those names would be quite unusual for any of the men one meets on the street in any city in the Anglophonic world. ...

   An odd philosophical troika of philosophers in early modern Britain comes to mind today for no good reason.  Locke, Berkeley, Hume. I saw a random post in Quora asking for a brief summary of the significant contributions of each "the" three major philosophers.  No more specific context. I have no idea how one would pick THE troika the querent had in mind, But this is one troika if great significance. To summarize their “significant contributions” is a considerable task — or three different tasks, EACH considerable. But it does seem that together the three of them tell a tragic story.  In essence we can say this (ignoring the politics of Locke or of Hume, and the vision theory of Berkeley): Locke: Accepted a dualist picture of the world in which minds, conceived of as properties of souls, are intangible beings that must come to grips with a material world around them. His contribution was to think through this material world in Newtonian terms — what he called...

I always thought that was the name of the song!  (Spoiler alert: I was wrong.)  The Buffalo Springfield classic that begins with those two haunting chords. It wasn't about anti-war protests. At least (in the wake of the death of the author) you can make it about that if you will.  The catalyst for the creation of the song was the Sunset Strip curfew in Los Angeles in late 1966.  It has taken me sixty years to learn this.  Who knows how much learning is ahead for me?  For what it's worth.  

  I don't know about you, dear reader, but there are some of us who feel some excitement on the morning of 'decision days' in June.   The US Supreme Court is typically trying to clear its dockets ahead of its summer break, and this is when the hotly contested cases and the publicly most awaited make their appearance. Hence the fun.  "Is today the day they release their birthright citizenship decision? or a re-affirmation of central bank independence? or the weapons-for-the-stoners case?" Last Thursday did turn out to be the day for the weapons-for-stoners case. That came out right, as far as concerns the parties directly involved, though the precedential significance seems to be small. This morning? It is another announced decision day and the excitement is back. Okay, nerdy perpetual law student fun....  

  As you may have noticed, dear reader, I have for a long time been presenting new blog posts every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Yet today is Thursday and this is the first post this week.    My apologies if you are disappointed.  I hope to be back to a regular schedule next week.