Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Is it a thing? https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/01/athens-review-of-books-under-threat-from-politically-motivated-legal-action-1.html#more You will gather from that source that Greek courts don't seem to have an equivalent of the TIMES v. SULLIVAN rule in the US. They are open to the use of civil defamation lawsuits by butt-hurt politicians as a way of stifling free speech. The first signatory of the letter of protest is Bruce Ackerman, a professor of both law and political science at Yale University -- and someone who knows the SULLIVAN rule quite well. It is worthwhile watching as this one unfolds.

The Federal Lawyer will soon run a review of mine of GAME OVER, a memoiristic account of the crisis of Greek debt in the period 2009-2011, when the book's author, George Papaconstantinou, was finance minister. I won't steal my own thunder by going over the material of that review here. Instead, I'll simply mention this: my birthday plays a prominent part. Specifically, my 52d birthday -- October 18, 2010. So pardon me a flashback Friday. In October 2010, French and German officials met each other in the seaside resort town of Deauville, in the Normandy region of France. They discussed Greece. The two countries involved in the summit were until that time taking somewhat different positions, but each wanted to present a common front. So, as Papaconstantinou (who wasn't there) reconstructs it -- On October 18th ... Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel -- both clad in raincoats -- went strolling on the famous Deauville promenade. In the culmination of months of behi...

From Mervyn King's book, The End of Alchemy (2016): "The inevitability of restructuring Greek debt means that taxpayers in Germany and elsewhere will have to absorb substantial losses. It was more than a little depressing [in 2015] to see the countries of the euro area haggling over how much to lend to Greece so that it would be able to pay them back some of the earlier loans. Such a circular flow of payments made little difference to the health, or lack of it, of the Greek economy."

Greek politics. The left-wing party Syriza, which took office as the result of a populist revolt against pressure from the northern European powers, and especially Germany, and as a rebellion against the perceived willingness of earlier Greek governments to bow before that pressure ... that party, in office, has bowed, in a big way, to just that pressure. That's a short history of recent Greek politics and a primer in why a civil war is now underway in Syriza. Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (pictured here) has now taken to criticizing his former boss, prime minister Alexis Tsipras. But here's the reason I'm writing about the subject just now. On Monday of this week, YV said that AT had become "the new DeGaulle." Press reports say that this insult constitutes a new level of acrimony between the two men, indicative of the depth of the intra-Syria split. Really? If I were called a new DeGaulle I'd probably feel flattered. Churchill and Rooseve...

The back-and-forth over whether Greece (1) wants to stay in the Eurozone, or (2) if it doesn't, whether it will be able to leave, and (3) if it does, whether it will be able to stay, continues, and indeed intensifies. Back in April I wrote here: The problem seems to be that there is no 'clean' way for Greece to leave the Eurozone. Bringing back the drachma would require at the least an extremely complicated period of transition, one with which the rest of Europe would have no incentive to co-operate. So the Eurozone is like the roach motel of yore. Roaches check in, but they can't check out. Yet there is no a priori reason to believe that the single monetary policy maintained by the European Central Bank and related authorities is best for all the countries involved. So one might naturally hope that thought will be given to an orderly exit mechanism. -------------------- I still believe that statement, though brief and simplistic, is roughly speaking a soun...

Greece is dominating financial news just now.  I'll keep my thought for today quite brief, though the subject is complicated. The problem seems to be that there is no 'clean' way for Greece to leave the Eurozone. Bringing back the drachma would require at the least an extremely complicated period of transition, one with which the rest of Europe would have no incentive to co-operate. So the Eurozone is like the roach motel of yore. Roaches check in, but they can't check out. Yet there is no a priori reason to believe that the single monetary policy maintained by the Europen Central Bank and related authorities is best for all the countries involved. So one might naturally hope that thought will be given to an orderly exit mechanism.

  Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, has said that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written. Every year at about this time I like to check the newspaper with his list in mind, to see if he is right. I'll start with his wording unmodified by examples. 1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE 2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE 3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL 4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX 5. EXPERT WARNS OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY 6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY 7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING 8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS 9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL I surveyed the news on one day (a few days back as it happens). Just by convenience, these headlines are all from January 19th. Well, actually, I cheated a little with one of them, but I'll let you dear reader do the work of figuring out which one that is. Without further ado.... 1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE Catastrophic flo...

A quote from the opening passage of her 1961 book, ON REVOLUTION. "Justifications of wars, even on a theoretical level, are quite old although, of course, not as old as organized warfare. Among their obvious prerequisites is the conviction that political relations in the normal course do not fall under the sway of violence, and this conviction we find for the first time in Greek antiquity, in so far as the Greek polis, the city-state, defined itself explicitly as a way of life that was based exclusively upon persuasion and not upon violence." Like many thinkers before and some since, Arendt tended to romanticize the Greek polis. I believe this passage exhibits that fact. Surely the slaves within the walls of Athens could have told stories about the use of violence against their persons to keep them in their status as beasts of burden. I doubt "persuasion" in a contrary sense had much to do with that. Still, I see her point. Before anybody would have thought ...

  We have travelled a long way. A look back is a good way to end a journey. We began with a discussion of some of the concepts essential to any discussion of contemporary finance. Why do stock prices move? Do they move randomly? We discussed the fact that modern finance theory has long used the bell curve as a randomness base line. Related to this, we said that the efficiency of markets, built as it is upon their liquidity and transparency, as well as the fact that a lot of very smart people are looking for an edge in competition with one another, is an adequate explanation for random movements, but that inefficiencies of inefficiencies of markets, which show up as skewed or otherwise non-normal curves, require other explanations. From there we moved to the questions: how stock options derive their value? And, what are the defining facts about bonds, either corporate or sovereign? We also discussed accounting, and so the balance-sheet difference between stock...

A quote about Frank Ramsey and his approach to the idea of truth. "[T]he usual label for Ramsey's approach, 'redundancy theory,' is potentially misleading -- laconicism would be a better term. For Ramsey was well aware that, far from being redundant, the word 'true' plays an important role." To that there is a neat footnote.  The word "laconicism," Haack says, "is not mine, but was coined by Dr. Kiriake Xerohemona. It is exactly the mot juste, the English word 'laconic'  means 'terse, short' and 'Laconia' was the ancient Greek name for Sparta." Kiriake Xerohemona? Yes.

Susan B. Anthony List is an organization opposed both to abortion and to the Obamacare Act. During the congressional campaigns on 2010, the SBA List bought a billboard ad in the 1st Congressional District of Ohio (which includes most of the city of Cincinnati, and which was represented at the time in the US Congress by Steven Driehaus). The ad would have consisted of a photo of Driehaus and the words, "Shame on Steven Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion!" I say it "would have" consisted of this, because the billboard was never actually erected. Driehaus' campaign, with the help of the Ohio Elections Commission, was able to persuade the billboard company to refrain from running it on the ground that it stated a plain falsehood.  The question of the accuracy of that ad seemed a fairly straightforward one. Driehaus had voted for Obamacare. SBA doesn't seem to have had any other vote that he might have cast in mind, other than that ...

HARPER's has recently excerpted the following from a new translation of Herodotus's THE HISTORIES. I submit it with no further intrusion. Just suppose that someone proposed to the entirety of mankind that a selection of the very best practices be made from the sum of human custom: each group of people, after carefully sifting through the customs of other peoples, would surely choose its own. Everyone believes his own customs to be far and away the best. Indeed, there is a huge amount of evidence to support the conclusion that this attitude to one's own native customs is universal. Take, for example, this story from the reign of Darius. He called together some Greeks who were present  and asked them how much money they would wish to be paid to devour the corpses of their fathers -- to which the Greeks replied that no amount of money would suffice for that. Next, Darius summoned some Indians called Callantians, who do eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of t...

For my week-by-week desk calendar through 2014, I will rely on an unflashy but serviceable volume from American Express. As with last year's Amex calendar, there are factual tidbits on each page about various destinations where I can presumably enjoy a debt-financed vacation with my Amex card. The earliest pages tell me various facts for example with reference to Mykonos, in Greece, the red dot in the map you see here.  I learn in this way that Mykonos is home to the a neighborhood known as Little Venice, "whose waterfront houses with their colorful balconies recall the quarter's Italian namesake." While Mykonos gets January, the site of this year's winter Olympics, Sochi in Russia, gets February. Events will be clustered in two distinct parts of Sochi, "a coastal cluster for indoor ice events and a mountain cluster for skiing ... in Krasnaya Polyana." Separately, my month-by-month wall calendar for the new year is entitled "Railroads: Illustratio...

A couple of quotes from the book Greekonomics by Vicky Pryce. Speaking of the countries other than Germany that agreed to the initial deal creating the exchange rate mechanism and later the single currency, she writes, ""[T]his was a political project sold as an economic one to the electorates across Europe. In the rush to bind Germany into a union covering most of the countries in Europe, very little thought was given to whether the result might bear any resemblance to an optimal currency area." A little later, speaking specifically of Greece and why it joined,  she writes: "Interestingly, when the Greek nation expressed a real desire to join the EEC and then the euro, they were in reality secretly hoping that the Brussels bureaucrats would take over and free them from the control of their politicians, who they regarded as corrupt. Educated Greeks longed for a 'technocratic' government that would move them away from a rather Soviet-style economy su...