Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I've made no effort to edit or make sense of this. It's just what I jotted down at the time. He is in his reading-carefully-from-the-teleprompter mode. "Horrors on the scale of September 11, and we can never forget that, have not been repeated on our shores." "The American people are weary of war without victory."  Criticized nation building, not interested in re-creating other countries so that they are "in our own image."  His first instinct was "to pull out," but ...  he has come to distrust his instincts.  Three conclusions 1) our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome...  2) consequences of a rapid exit are predictable and unacceptable.  [But isn't this what HRC was saying? She took flak on that both from Sanders and then from Trump himself.] 3) security threats we face in Afghanistan and the broader region are immense.  With regard to the "broader region," he soon bring...

Wikileaks is now saying that it is about to release more information about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It'll be a 30,000 word document. Okay, you're saying "be still my beating heart" wiseguys, aren't you? But this could be significant. A year ago, Wikileaks released its first satchel [e-satchel?] of TPP documents, the Intellectual Property agreement. The participating nations constitute about 40% of the gross net product of the planet. They include: the U.S., Canada, Japan, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Peru and Mexico. Critics of the TPP interpreted the materials disclosed in late 2013 as an effort to get higher prices for drugs, higher profits for Big Pharma.   So: what has Wikileaks got in store this year? ------------------ The above photo shows the leaders of all the TPP member states as a 2010 summit.

Below I'll provide a link to a well-written blast at the expense of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book, Anti-Fragile. The thesis of the book is that there are three different states-of-being for institutions, individuals, even academic theories: fragility, robustness, and anti-fragility. These are also, in order: really bad, not so bad, good. [I've written about one aspect of this book in this blog quite recently -- Taleb figures in my series of posts about  Krugman and Gould. ] A brief illustration of the thesis might run this way: a nation that has built its whole economy around the production and sale of wine would be fragile. It would depend for its livelihood on the international market for wine, and, (even if demand for wine holds up forever) it could be devastated by climate changes that make its own terrain less hospitable to grapes. A nation that was less dependent on any single market or product would be robust. But better than robustness...

Taleb (above)  also, on October 19th, put his response to Krugman's dissing of Gould in twitter form: "How econ models fragilize (or how Krugman blames others yet does not understand much risk & economics)." Daniel Davies then took up the twittering cudgels on behalf of Krugman, telling Taleb "your stuff always has one or two things in in that just can't be stood up." Tweet fight! A wonky tweet fight about economic and evolutionary theory, but a tweet fight still. It came to my attention through Salmon's column, here . And with that, I have said most of what I want to say on all this, except for three points: who is Daniel Davies?  how much of a Ricardian is Krugman really? and, where do I stand on the underlying Krugman/Taleb debate over trade? 1. Davies? I don't know.  His twitter account has nearly 3,000 followers, though. 2. Krugman and Ricardo. Here I admit my earlier reference was rather slighting. I said Friday that Krugman a...

Headnote: I have just learned that the great scholar Jacques Barzun has died. It is hardly a life cut short -- he was born on November 30, 1907, so he was about a month short of turning 105. Still, for those of us to whom his life and work mattered, he had come to seem immortal. And in any sense that scholarship can secure: he is. For now, I will proceed with the material prepared for this and the following two entries in this blog. But I will have more to say about Barzun here soon enough.] Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist who did a good deal to educate the non-scientists of the world about the biology of evolution, passed away back in 2002. He might be surprised to learn that his name has now become a bone of contention [a fossilized bone of contention?] among economists. Of course it isn't all that surprising that there should be cross-fertilization between biology and economics. Ask Malthus about this. Ask Herbert Spencer. Still, my understanding is that this wasn...