From "What scientific idea is ready for retirement"

From The Edge
 'Science is self-correcting' by Alex Holcombe "Publication bias is the tendency to not publish "negative" or non-confirmatory results. Its effect, the suppression of corrections, can prevail even when much work has gone into obtaining the negative results. Ideally, such findings would move quickly and easily from individual scientists' laboratories to public availability. But the path can be so difficult, and is so infrequently used, that many areas of science do not deserve the self-correcting moniker."
'Unlimted and eternal growth' by Hans Ulrich Obrist "Another way of interpreting Binswanger's ideas is as follows: for most of human history, a fundamental problem has been the scarcity of material goods and resources, and so we have become ever more efficient in our methods of production and created rituals to enshrine the importance of objects in our culture. Less than a century ago, human beings made a world-changing transition through their rapacious industry. We now inhabit a world in which the overproduction of goods, rather than their scarcity, is one of our most fundamental problems. Yet our economy functions by inciting us to produce more and more with each passing year. In turn, we require cultural forms to enable us to sort through the glut, and our rituals are once again being directed towards the immaterial, towards quality and not quantity. This requires a shift in our values, from producing objects to selecting amongst those that already exist."
And many more.

New cold war?

From Possible New Cold War? High Fives in the Halls of Pentagon
" Amlie was a brilliant weapons engineer and did not hesitate to speak his mind. With an understated but intense demeanor that sometimes came across like the Doc Emmitt Brown character in the Back to the Future movies, Amlie committed truth in this interview based on his decades of knowing how the DOD worked. The interview, which stopped me in my tracks at the time, was memorialized by his boss and friend Ernest Fitzgerald in his book The Pentagonists:

The morning after the April 1986 bombing of Libya by the USAF, my associate Tom Amlie appeared live on Cable News Network and explained that the raid was necessary: “It was that time of year.” In other words, military budget time. “The budget is in trouble, aid to the Contras is in trouble,” Tom said. And Khadafi was an ideal enemy. As Tom pointed out, he was “not a Christian, he talks funny and he’s probably guilty of most of the things we accuse him of.” Tom then got the hook from CNN, but he had made his point.

I remember the CNN anchor’s look of horror as they quickly went to a commercial. "

A strike that failed

How Asian women made trade union history and shattered stereotypes . Interesting article but it also has this statement from Jayaben Desai "You have to remember that, back in India, we came from an aristocratic background," Desai says. "My ancestors used to be ministers and dignitaries under the Raj. Desai is the name of a title, like lord, and my ancestors were very wealthy compared to the rest of the population. We were landowners and we were respected because of our position."
That was 1976; I still see this in Melbourne. Many housewives from 'upper' castes work in factory jobs but complain of labour problems back home. Many marriages seem to have about four to five celebrations, two in Australia, two in India in both party's places and often one in Tirupati.

Robert Parry on Ukraine

here. More about Robert Parry in the wikipedia.

Interesting article by Patrick Higgins

The Intercept's Interference: Notes on Media, Capitalism and Imperialism (via Naked Capitalism links). There are bits about Glenn Greenwald's predicament, Ukraine where the conflict seems quite different that in Thailand in terms of long term interests of capitalism. These all sound plausible and well worth a read. Somewhat long and the blog looks interesting

Reading Capital via The Economist

continued here (registration may be needed). The kindle edition of Piketty's book should be available by March 10 or so. As Yves Smith noted about a a recent paper by Gabriel Zucman on tax havens, "It means income inequality is even worse than indicated by the already-grim analyses of experts like Thomas Piketty and Edmund Saez; they don’t attempt to allow for tax haven income and assets."

Interesting discussion on fraudulent research

from Andrew Gelman. Comment from Kaiser:
"With blogging, TEDtalks, popular science books, etc., we now have a bypass of the traditional peer review process and the traditional way of diffusing new research. So it is more important for bloggers and others to participate in putting such materials to the smell test. Some of these efforts are tied to PR efforts in which the sole objective is to generate attention, clicks, etc. and those are particular cases in which the science is bent and misappropriated.
The other thing is bear in mind is that people reading this blog might think the fraud is obvious but the average person does not have the training to notice the fraud – in fact, the average person is often sold that “conventional wisdom” is wrong."

Tim Taylor on Ukraine's economic problems

From Primer on Ukraine's Economic Troubles "Ukraine's economy has some strengths. Inflation is under control. Unemployment at about 8% is not  super-high. The accumulated public debt, at about 41% of GDP, is not especially high.  But Ukraine is also a highly open and not very diversified economy, and thus highly vulnerable to movements of a few key prices on world markets--steel exports, energy imports, its own exchange rate. Add undisciplined government spending that hands out copious energy and wage subsidies, together with an unstable financial sector and a lack of productivity growth, and Ukraine's economy is primed to melt down, as it did in 2008 and again in 2013. With the current turmoil, it's obviously not a convenient time for Ukraine to be building stronger economic and political institutions. But without such reforms and institutions, Ukraine's economy will remain highly unstable."
According to Wikipedia "The nation has many of the components of a major European economy - rich farmlands, a well-developed industrial base, highly trained labour, and a good education system. At present, however, the economy remains in poor condition."

On sample sizes

Freeman Dyson "In 1866, the year Mendel’s paper was published, but without any knowledge of Mendel, Darwin did exactly the same experiment. Darwin used snapdragons instead of sweet peas, and tested the inheritance of flower shape instead of pod color. Like Mendel, he bred three generations of plants and observed the ratio of normal-shaped to star-shaped flowers in the third generation. Unlike Mendel, he had no understanding of statistical fluctuations. He used a total of only 125 third-generation plants and obtained a value of 2.4 for the crucial ratio. This value is within the expected statistical uncertainty, either for a true value of 2 or for a true value of 3, with such a small sample of plants. Darwin did not understand that he would need a much larger sample to obtain a meaningful result." in The case for blunders   Professor Karandikar talks about sample sizes here which is not clear to me "This held good even if the sample size was as small as 4,000 irrespective of whether a constituency had one lakh voters or 20 lakh voters, he said.

“This is something which is counterintuitive but it is not a matter of faith but of calculation…the point is that it is only the percentages and not the absolute numbers that determine the accuracy,” Prof. Karandikar said." The two parts seem to point to different things; may be the clue is in 'the percentages'.

Dark matter in global imbalances

Tax Havens Make US and Europe Look Poorer than They Are, Exaggerate Size of “Global Imbalances” by Yves Smith

P.S. This probably means that the top one percent have even more wealth than we thought and this effort  UK seeking to ensure Russia sanctions do not harm City of London

For a quick overview of Shaxson's book, see David Runciman review

Small farmers seem to have future

From Bio inputs give better yields to brinjal growers in Chittoor, A.P.:
"Mr. Muniratnam owns about two acres and in the last two years he has been able to construct a new pucca house from the income he got from his land by growing brinjals (common variety available in the market)."
He used 
"Jivamrita is a growth enhancer which is used for almost all crops like paddy, vegetables and flowers.

It is made by adding 10 kg of desi cow dung and 10 litres of urine dissolved in 200 litres of water. To this two kg of jaggery (or four litres of sugarcane juice) and pulse flour each (any pulse) is added and stirred well.

The solution is kept under a shade for a week to ferment well and then allowed to mix with the running irrigation water. For the fruit borer pest farmers have been trained to use agniastra or neemastra.

Agniastra

Agniastra is made by soaking one kg of crushed tobacco leaves in 10 litres of desi cow urine.

To this, 500 grams of chilli and garlic pulp (ground into a paste) each and 5kg of crushed neem leaves are added. This is diluted in 100 litres of water and sprayed.

Neemastra is made by mixing five litres of cow urine, two 2kg of dung and five kgs of crushed neem leaves in 100 litres of water and allowed to ferment for 24 hours. Later after filtering it is diluted in water and sprayed on brinjal to control the pests."

Interview with Sydney Brenner

(via Rahul Siddhathan) How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner. Wide ranging interview with this connection to some of the recent posts:
" Today the Americans have developed a new culture in science based on the slavery of graduate students. Now graduate students of American institutions are afraid. He just performs. He’s got to perform. The post-doc is an indentured labourer.""

Skidelsky on Keynes and Marx

Robert Skidelsky, a biorapher of Keynes has a short article in 2012 Keynes, Hobson and Marx. From the conclusion of the article:
"Recent events have persuaded me that there is something intuitively right about the Marxist analysis. It is especially illuminating about globalisation. It seems to me quite reasonable to interpret the off-shoring of US production to China and East Asia as an attempt to restore the profitability of American capital by locating production in regions where labour was cheap and trade unions did not exist. This raises the crucial question of to what extent globalization as now practised is in the interests of the citizens of developed countries.

 

This brings me to my main criticism of Keynes. The idea that economic outcomes could be impacted by class power was beyond his ken. Essentially, unmanaged capitalist systems failed to maintain full employment because classical economics gave the wrong message. It assumed away uncertainty, and thereby mandated a high degree of laissez-faire. Light-touch regulation of the financial system was all that was needed because banks were optimally self-regulating.

 

In short, the flaw was theoretical, not structural. What was needed was a more accurate theory, not a redistribution of power. As Keynes famously put it at the end of the GT, 'ideas' are more powerful than 'vested interests' (GT, 283). The almost contemptuous dismissal of the non-ideational elements of the economic system as 'vested interests' shows that he lacked proper cognizance of them.

 

Keynes's re-definition of the economic problem of his day as a technical problem in economics was politically very convenient. Practical businessmen are quite receptive to new ideas providing they allow them to keep their profits and managerial prerogatives. In the interwar years deficient demand leading to mass unemployment was a threat to both, not least because it aroused social hostility to capitalism. Keynes was definitely preferable to Marx. So they were happy for the state to look after demand and protect them from the unions, even to acquiesce in modest measures of redistribution to keep the people happy.

 

However, the state proved unable to protect the Keynesian revolution itself from the consequences of the continuing full employment it guaranteed. Full employment strengthened union power; unions used their position to push wages ahead of productivity; wages started to encroach on profits. So the business class demanded an end to the full employment commitment, lower taxes, and freedom to export capitalism.

 

I think this analysis explains many features of the post-Reagan, post Thatcher economy: the much higher levels of unemployment, the weakening of the trade unions, the curtailment of the social safety net, the stagnation in real wages and concomitant surge in household indebtedness, the increased pressure on working hours, the capital-friendly changes in taxes, the de-regulation of finance, and much else.

 

But the Reagan-Thatcher solution to the problem of capitalism has recreated the Hobsonian problem of underconsumption. Since the 1980s, the rich, in western countries, have been able to appropriate the lion's share of productivity growth. So future crises are inevitable.

 

To avoid them we need to rebalance our economic life: away from consumption towards leisure, away from financialisation towards sustainability, away from globalisation towards community, away from love of money towards ethics.

 

How to do this is a political question, to which post-Keynesians should now turn. Keynes should remain our inspiration. But we need to go beyond him in both thought and action."

 

Interesting discussion on three current conflcts

in Thailand, Venezuela and Ukraine in Naked Capitalism starting with a piece by Paul Mason Why It's Still Kicking off Everywhere. A summary of Paul Mason's thesis is at the beginning of the article.

Keynes had doubts

A strange article from 1933 on 'Globalization and self-sufficiency'. It starts by extolling free trade both materially and morally for the whole world (either he was unaware of opium wars or was catering to the audience) and then expresses his doubts:
"The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous – and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed."
Possibly what was worrying him was the rise of USA. Earlier "The investment of British savings in rails and rolling stock to be installed by British engineers to carry British emigrants to new fields and pastures, the fruits of which they would return in due proportion to those whose frugality had made these things possible, was not economic internationalism remotely resembling in its essence the part ownership of a German corporation by a speculator in Chicago, or of the municipal improvements of Rio Janeiro by an English spinster. Yet it was the type of organisation necessary to facilitate the former which has eventually ended up in the latter. In the second place,..."
Elsewhere in the same article:
"Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.
For these strong reasons, therefore, I am inclined to the belief that a greater measure of national self-sufficiency and economic isolation among countries may tend to serve the cause of peace, rather than otherwise."

Whatever his motives were (my suspicion is that he was worried about Britain loosing out to USA) many economists and others who supported globalization could not have been unaware of this or Kalecki's views on unemployment.

Writers worried about status and money

Excerpt from The Guardian article
"Creativity begins with a genuine compulsion, an active desire to write, compose, etc. And what follows is the question of how society rates the artist. Does society regard such enterprises as important and worthy of status, or, as with hyper-capitalism, something that should live or die by the market and nothing else? "
May be minimal universal income would be one solution. I am not sure about money and status.

Freedom from Woodstock

Chillies

Apparently the new hot thing in medicine from Moheb Constandi in New Scientist. I eat a lot of chillies and so I am receptive to such advice. They seem to have found:
"Most of our sensory perception depends on specific "channels" on the surface of certain cells, each responding to a different kind of stimulation. When the channel is activated, its pores open up, allowing electrical charge in the form of ions – charged particles – to flow in. These ion channels are often found on nerves, where this influx of ions triggers an electrical impulse.

There were many candidates for the channel that responds to capsaicin, but with some nifty genetics work, Julius was able to pin it down. It is called TRPV1. Crucially, he then showed that the channel also responds to uncomfortably hot temperatures – about 43 °C or higher – that would be enough to damage tissue. This neatly explains why chillies feel like they are burning the mouth."

Some possible uses "Although the exact reason for this response is still under discussion, human trials so far have been promising. Subjects asked to take a regular dose of capsaicin every day, for instance, showed a modest increase in the calories they burn – enough for a steady weight loss over the course of months."

And more interesting hints in the article. Similar advice from Huffington Post. Apparently some can achieve such things through meditation.