Two weeks ago, Eugene Fama, Lars Hansen and Robert Shiller were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their contributions to "Trendspotting in Asset Markets."
Since then, some thinkers have questioned whether economics deserves to be called a "science".
Here is a round-up of their arguments:
Liam Halligan (Telegraph UK): "Time to stop this pretence – economics is not science"
Economics isn't a science, and as a field, doesn't deserve a Nobel along with the hard sciences like Physics, Chemistry and Medicine.
Unlike scientists, economists don't provide solutions to the broad, macro problems humans face today.
The research findings of the 2013 winners don't agree with each other, which is the opposite of what "science" is.
Economics relies too much on "soft" fields like politics, sociology and history to be a science.
"Economics is a study of human behaviour – above all, the allocation of scarce resources between competing ends. It requires the analysis of economic, commercial and financial life in all its institutional richness, or it is nothing. A solid grounding in theory and numeracy is essential but so, too, are broad dashes of politics, history, sociology and common sense.
Recent “Nobel” recipients have been rewarded, instead, for work that claims to have established “certainties”, made “findings” and discovered “relationships” – all of which, when it comes to economics, is bunkum."
__________________ In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie...
I would not want to dismiss economics as a non-science. But I think that it deserves to be considered a "soft" science, despite all its number crunching and theoretical modeling. Those are more typical of the "harder" sciences, especially the physical sciences.
Please note that Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is not one of the prizes named in the will of Alfred Nobel and is not funded by the Nobel Foundation, it is funded by Sweden's Central Bank.
Who does that fucker think he is, Alexander the Great? Don't be surprised if you wake up tomorrow to find that you're living in Obamaxandria, one of several thousand newly-renamed cities of the same designation.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
For a minute there, I thought it was Obamelettes, made with government cheese.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Berkley PD 'won' this years tactical portion. The same dept a year ago that arrested peaceful and silent occupy Berkley medic (who was wearing obvious Medic gear) calling her "menacing, threatening, belligerent, and obscene."
The now fired man for daring to protest a police state, "The Oakland police called my company and lied to them about my truck being involved in a hit and run." "They found out the garage I parked in and got pics of my truck. Also got me at the rally."
Also to be clear, he was fired for a protest on friday the 25, the Oakland PD saw him as such a threat it only took a 2 day weekend turn around on their 'investigation' which happened *during* their weekend training event.
Speaking of Occupy activity I find it quite suspicious that the violent and militarized 'black blok' which was not controlled or supported by occupy and was also not arrested vanished as the larger protests ended. When protests eventually start back up I expect to see this Police infiltration group suddenly pop up again too.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Big Brother is Watching... only if you're a protestor.
OPD is spending $10m to build a city wide surveillance hub to track, among other things, protests and Occupy.
So that feeling that things are rigged against the ordinary man? The feeling that maybe you're just being cynical, and it's really all about merit, not connections?
Secret Handshakes Greet Frat Brothers on Wall Street
Conor Hails, head of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sigma Chi chapter, was in a Philadelphia hotel ballroom last month for a Barclays Plc (BARC) recruiting reception. A friend pointed out a banker from their fraternity. Hails, 20, approached with a secret handshake.
“We exchanged a grip, and he said, ‘Every Sigma Chi gets a business card,’” Hails recalled. “We’re trying to create Sigma Chi on Wall Street, a little fraternity on Wall Street.”
As students vie for 2014 internships in an industry where 22-year-olds can make more than $100,000 a year, interviews with three dozen fraternity members showed a network whose Wall Street alumni guide resumes to the tops of stacks, reveal interview questions with recommended answers, offer applicants secret mottoes and support chapters facing crackdowns.
That’s one reason men continue to dominate on Wall Street, where no woman has run a big bank. General Motors Co. (GM) announced Dec. 10 it would make Mary Barra the auto industry’s first female chief executive officer, the same day research firm Catalyst Inc. showed women holding about one in eight executive roles in U.S. finance.
The fraternity pipeline helps undergraduates beat odds three times steeper than Princeton University’s record-low acceptance rate, with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) choosing 350 investment-banking interns this year from 17,000 applicants.
Penn’s Alpha Epsilon Pi, which gave up its charter in 2012 to escape sanctions for hazing, got a member into Morgan Stanley for the fourth year in a row. Dartmouth College’s Alpha Delta, an inspiration for the 1978 comedy “Animal House,” sent someone to the New York-based firm from the fifth consecutive class days after a New Hampshire court reprimanded the chapter for providing alcohol to someone underage, filings show.
[...]
Secret Motto
When alumni don’t reach out, fraternity members know how to find them. Von Bonin, 21, asked two at one of the world’s largest banks for interview advice, he said. They taught him to describe the benefits of the firm’s U.S. growth, fast-paced environment and training program.
“They really gave me valuable advice,” said von Bonin, who got the internship this year. A job offer came later.
Students and graduates on Wall Street said they didn’t see much wrong with a fraternity path to finance. Even applicants with the right handshake need to show drive, dedication and diligence, they said, and many kinds of groups foster bankers, just as houses spawn surgeons and senators.
The network sometimes works so well that it can help accidentally. Jeff Librot, a former head of the University of Delaware’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter, wasn’t looking to use its connections when he applied for a Bank of Montreal (BMO) equities internship, he said. A banker there sent him an e-mail with the frat’s secret motto, “Phi Alpha.” Librot was picked.
__________________ In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie...
I don't think recreating the fraternity experience on Wall St. is necessarily a bad idea. In fact, I'd like to see it expand widely. They can swap their business cards, and those of us who aren't Wall St. stockbrokers can supply the paddles for their hazing.
Every once in a while I wonder about Jon Corzine. Last time I did it was posted in this thread here. But anyways, today I was all like, "I wonder what's up with the CEO of MF Global that used off-limit customer accounts to attempt to shore up massive losses on his speculative deals and then oops $1.5 billion down the rabbit hole and the company crashed and burnt. AND if you were MF Global's clients I guess it sucks to be you, who-coulda-known-this-would-happen, and Jon Corzine pretty much walks away?"
Anyway, the last I could find is this long article from November 2013 at CNN Money. A lot of it is wonk if you are interested in that kind of thing, and I think there is some rather blatant if gentle shifting of blame away from Corzine and MF Global's shitty internal record-keeping and safeguards and onto the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rules and Britain holding funds when MF Global crashed into bankruptcy. But it mostly highlights that customers will finally be getting their funds returned fully, due to the efforts of the court-appointed special trustee James Giddens; Corzine is arguing that this means that he never did anything wrong- if they got their money back then how can he be legally at fault is his pitch.
Quote:
In mid-October the company started regularly breaching its firm-wide segregation policy (dipping into the "regulatory excess" even when there wasn't enough "excess-seg" to cover it), but it was not yet breaching the actual CFTC segregation rules. On Oct. 26, however, it finally broke the actual CFTC segregation rules, though the MF Global officers whom the CFTC alleges knew about it -- O'Brien and, perhaps, a few others -- hoped to confine the breach to an intraday phenomenon that could be set right by the end of the business day.
When the money wasn't returned in time, they allegedly tried to fix the "seg problem" before the regulatory segregation report had to be filed the next day by noon. They couldn't. Then, to make matters worse, poor recordkeeping made the extent of the breach seem less grave to the MF Global officers involved than they really were -- at least at first. In any event, for whatever reason nobody told the CFTC and, five days later, close to a $1 billion of customer money had flown out the door. It took two years for Giddens to get it back.
So the argument is that it is hard to get a criminal charge to stick, as being a really terrible CEO who doesn't know (according to Jon Corzine) what his people are doing isn't a crime (I keep wondering if Sarbanes-Oxley will forever be nerfed), and despite the fact that the consultant group that MF Global hired specifically identified risk management as one of the improvements the company needed to make before Jon Corzine and MF Global staff blew it up.
I can't say I'm particularly surprised by any of this, but it's still disgraceful.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Finally, some justice for those Occupy protesters beaten by pigs:
Quote:
A trial that had become a rallying point for many Occupy Wall Street activists ended on Monday with a jury finding a protester guilty of assaulting a police officer at Zuccotti Park in 2012.
A jury of eight women and four men found that the protester, Cecily McMillan, 25, was still responsible for assaulting the officer, rejecting her contention that she had reacted instinctively when he grabbed her breast during a protest on St. Patrick’s Day. Ms. McMillan had said she could not distinctly recall what happened amid the chaos of the night.
Oh, sorry, did I say justice? I meant the other thing.
Bonus story that could go in the "Fuck tha Police" thrad:
Quote:
A Wisconsin woman lived for months with drunken driving charges hanging over her head after a sheriff’s deputy crashed into her car, although blood tests show she was sober and surveillance video shows the officer was at fault.
Tanya Weyker broke her neck in the Feb. 20, 2013, crash after Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Quiles rolled through a stop sign and wrecked into her vehicle, reported WTKR-TV.
She was hurt so badly she couldn’t submit to a Breathalyzer test or perform field sobriety tests, but she said deputies questioned her as she received medical treatment at the crash scene.
As the blog poast says:
Quote:
The cop has received benefits for the last year and has never been charged with a false report, and the city refuses to pay her medical bills.
America, Fuck Yeah!
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
this actually turned out... a lot better than it could have
Quote:
ON THE CECILY MCMILLAN VERDICT
It was a JURY that convicted Cecily of Assualt in the Second Degree – a Class D Violent Felony - not Judge Zweibel. The MINIMUM punishment is two years in jail, the max is seven. Cecily was given 90 days with time served (-14 Days). Trust me, Judge Zweibel was under tremendous pressure by the NYPD's union to give her the max, and they in no way ever expected him to go BELOW the minimum of two years. Heads are spinning and fuming at Union Headquarters. Judge Zweibel also was aware that the Union would do everything in it's power to ensure that he is not reappointed, if they were not satisfied with the sentence. Yet despite all of this, Cecily received 76 days.
What this comes down to is a TREMENDOUS victory for all those who worked so hard on supporting Cecily. You literally defeated the strongest Police Union in the country. Don't you dare feel disappointed. Cecily herself stated that she was expecting two years. Solidarity!
If there is one thing juries must realize, it is that in all trials, A COP'S WORD SHOULD CARRY NO MORE WEIGHT, THAN A DEFENDANTS. Extremely sad, but true.
P.S. I met Cecily in a unique way. To help raise money for the Yippie Cafe at 9 Bleecker St. NYC - my hangout - they held an auction of various donated items. I donated one of my Captain shirts, Phila. Police insignia, and all. It was purchased by Cecily.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
I have had compensation for false arrest. The problem is the Amsterdam city administration actually has insurance for that. So they pay up and do the exact same thing the next time, why shouldn't they?
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Re: Occupy Wall Street
Is nice!
Linear Mode
