Interview with Paul Mattick Jr

More business as usual. It complements very well his book Business as usual and is fairly comprehensive. I wonder whether some human elements are ignored though he talks of the way people organize during disasters, of Paris commune and Russia around 1918. There is more recent one in Telanagana from 1946-52 led by communists. Finally it was crushed by the Government of India by the liberation of the Hyderabad state and the communist high command's lack of independent thinking; they looked up to Stalin for advice. In the current Telangana movement, some of the leaders are descendants of those who lost power (The son also rises). There is also theory of capitalism as power where Differential accumulation rather than absolute capital mattershttp://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue66/BichlerNitzan66.pdf 
And then there is the special role of USA with dollar as de facto international currency. So many countries are forced to accumulate dollar reserves which means that USA will have perennial problems with deficits in both trade and budget unless they can export the problems to other countries. This may explain the scramble for Africa and developing countries which is also mentioned by Paul Mattick. So my reading is that American type capitalism will survive for a few more decades.

Trying to convert my granddauhter Ava

When I told Ava that Aishwarya Rai married Amitabh Bachan's son, she was not happy. She said "But she likes Shah Rukh Khan more?" Reminded me of my disappointment when Akkineni Nageswararao did not marry S.Varalakshmi after Balaraju 1948. I am tryin to convert her to Sridevi. The video seems to be working. A song from Balaraju

Economics seems to be hard

For the first time, I bought an economics book looking for a point that bothered me: "Predatory State" by James Galbraith. The passage which he confirms my doubt is this. " And as the new global monetary system developed, the growing need for dollars-for monetary reserves-held outside the United States would come to guarantee that the United States would necessarily experience both trade deficits and budget deficits almost all the time." Many of other economists I try to follow via Mark Thoma's 'Economist's View" do not seem to emphasize this. This bit of understanding of just one sentence came from a discussion in Naked Capitalism. It may be long time before I understand any economics. The discussion is in the thread of Naked Capitalism. There is also a link to this summary of the book by Aaron Swartz. 

Kishore Kumar dancing with KumKum and Nimmi

Joys of crowded living

Interesting article on creative writing funding

How Iowa flattened literature by Eric Bennett (via 3quarksdaily)
Abstract: With CIA help writers were enlisted to battle both communism and egghead abstraction. The damage still lingers

Singularity links

A friend writes "The common theme that appears to underlie everything from the Snowden revelations to Kurzweil’s mission at Google to Netflix to the LHC experiments and, I suspect, to the future of politics is the acquisition and successful analysis of seriously big data.  The increment in size and its on–going management leads to a definitive change in the quality of resulting predictions.  Instead of there being a huge democratic enhancement, as these developments could produce, they provide a manifestation of the power that such techniques provide for their ultimate owners."And links to

Computers cleverer than humans in fifteen years
More in the same vein

Bharata natyam documentary featuring Kumari Kamala

posted by Minai. The video

Gregory Clark on social mobility

in Your ancestors, your fate "When you look across centuries, and at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution." 
This was not apparent to me since I have seen lot of social mobility in some castes. But the point may be as Suvrat  Kher said in his summary of David Reich et all "The findings indicate that there is a larger amount of genetic variation between Indian groups than there is between say European groups. This the authors suggest is a result of a small number of individuals founding different ethnic groups that then remained endogamous and therefore genetically divergent. This has important medical value as recessive diseases may correlate with ethnic groups." 

A Nashad song from Bara Dari 1955

A thoughtful article on democracy

Can the internet democratize capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis. Many comments too. Fames Macdonald's ideas on the role of public in the rise of democracy or notions of subsidiarity are discussed. May be ban at every level people over certain income to hold electoral positions and appointments by elected representatives for a start.
P.S. A response to my suggestion "Unworkable (for reasons of access additionally), as is the wonderful proposition that anyone with an “indispensable” occupation be ineligible for public office. Lawyers and accountants would be all over this like flies on sh*t."

C.Ramachandra music from Nirala

Beyond Wendy Doniger

Beyond Batra and Wendy Doniger: Reflections on the study of Hinduism in the American Academy in Chapati Mystery
Such investigations are recommended by Garrett Field in his review of Amanda Weidman, Lakshmi Subramanian books on South Indian music"This would lead to larger questions about the history of the interaction of American universities, American financed but South Asian based language-training programs, and fellowship organizations, fieldwork experience, and with the scholarship ethnomusicologists produced in the twentieth century. Such a history of scholarly patronage would include a comprehensive understanding of change in historicism. Moreover, while there has been a surge of interest in the ways academic disciplines like philology articulated central aspects of European modernity, the emergence of institutional support in America for the ethnomusicological task of studying the entire world’s music must articulate something significant about American history in the 1950s and 1960s.

These kinds of inquiries are reflexive in their own way since they shift the focus onto “us,” the imagined community of ethnomusicologists, and the institutions that enable us to produce scholarship on the music of India. “Reflexive” writing often means bringing our subjective experience as ethnographers into the fabric of our texts, holding out the promise of “distancing us from historically colonialist approaches” (Kisliuk 1997:23). However true this is, reflexive writing often ignores the fascinating interactions of American universities, language-training programs, and fellowship organizations, with fieldwork, scholarship and the maintenance of academic disciplines. These kinds of investigations would get at the logic behind the paradigm shift found in the scholarship of Higgins, Neuman, Weidman, and Subramanian."

Shades of Uday Shankar

From Har Har Mahadev (1950)

Some mathematical forecasters

The mathematical model that predicted the revolutions sweeping the globe right now on the work of  Yaneer Bar-Yam (via Naked Capitalism)
Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays by Peter Turchin
Mathematical Fortune-Telling about the work of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Two interviews with Paul Mattick Jr, second part

From the second interview:
I n the early part, he talks of Marx critique of capitalism, its tendency for decreased returns on capital and resulting depressions. The keynsian interventions postpone the problems and the government debt increases until austerity kicks in...His suggestions of solutions seem to involve some conflict:
"Rail: Your book ends on a somber note—the vision of a coming catastrophe once the coming economic and ecological. We were hoping for a little more optimism from someone who believes, as you’ve said in another article, that another world is possible. Is this just an empty gesture or phrase? What is that other world, what does it look like, and what can people do to make it a reality?

Mattick: Well that’s what is so frustrating because it’s so obvious. We have this enormous productive apparatus. We have a world full of buildings, offices, schools, factories, farms, and technology. And there is absolutely no reason why people shouldn’t simply take that stuff and start using it. What holds them back is that, on the one hand, it doesn’t occur to them that they can do it and, on the other hand, that the police, the army—an enormous apparatus—prevents them from doing it. The way people are raised makes it very hard for them to think that you can just take this over, that this belongs to you. It’s funny—I was reading an article written in 1831 by the French revolutionary Blanqui with the wonderful title: “The man who makes the soup deserves to eat it.” He says it’s all very simple: if all the owners of capital were to disappear, the world would be exactly the same—you would have the same farms, the same factories—but if all the workers disappeared, then everyone would starve to death. We have not advanced one bit beyond that point of view. The problem is that people are so used to the existence of capitalism, they’re so used to the idea that you have to work for somebody else, that they don’t see that they can just take it over. What will move people to take that step? I think that it takes a very drastic experience to push people out of their normal mode of behavior."

Two interviews with Paul Mattick Jr

For my own reference to study later. In the first from 1991, he discusses 'This comparison between the fascist and Nazi programs and social democratic programs is scandalous for many people' , his father Paul Mattick Sr. who disagreed with both Lenin an Keynes,  Marx
 (Your father saw Marx mainly as a negative thinker., as a critic of capitalism. 
Yes.
... and not a positive thinker. 
Well, Marx explicitly refused to make, as he said, recipes for the future...)

"Did your father ever develop this theme on the nature of a socialist society? 

No. He wanted very much to, and he intended to, and was beginning to work on such a project at the time when he died...... But these, sort of speculations, about the possible future were developed really in the 1930s, and since by 1980 a great deal had happened in the world, he felt that the whole issue had to be re-thought, that, for example, the use of modern means of telecommunication, television, computer networks, made possible a kind of democratic decision making which was simply not -- for practical reasons -- possible in an earlier period.

So your father took seriously this kind of technological advance. 
Yes, absolutely. He thought these were potentially extremely powerful tools."

"I would like to return to the question of ideology. Because the idea of "socialism" or "communism" has been so badly discredited in the minds of so many people by the Bolshevik experience, do you think that anything can be saved from this, starting with the terms themselves? 

Well, as I said, I think that this movement, the workers' movement, which started in the 19th century, is now completely over. So you could say that the words "socialism" or "communism," which were very much disgraced by the Bolshevik movement, may be irretrievable. In my opinion, that doesn't matter very much. The fact is that capitalism remains. It has the same nature that it had before, except that it is much more highly developed. We now have, to a much greater extent than ever before in history, a world capitalist system, a global working class, which is facing the problem that the working class has always faced, namely that it has a choice between taking control over the system of production and distribution in its own hands or suffering indefinitely the consequences of the capitalist mode of production. At the present time, for example, that means, I believe, deep economic depression. And it certainly also means severe ecological disruptions and even major disasters, and continuous warfare."

(Next from the second interview)

The war on poor continues in UK

"The justice minister Shailesh Vara said: "The government has made clear that reducing the deficit is our top priority. It is right that the Ministry of Justice looks at all opportunities to bring down the cost of our services to the taxpayer.

"We believe that it is right to consider whether those who use tribunals should make a greater contribution to their costs, where they can afford to do so, which is why we introduced fees for employment tribunals last year.

"We will continue to keep the position under review, but we have no current plans to extend fee charging into other tribunals."" from People stripped of benefits can be charged for challenging decision.

Inequality increasing in Sweden too

Inequality-the bubonic plague of modern society by Lars P. Syll

Samuel Brittan's introduction to economics

A Swift lesson in the principles of economics at ft.com "An orthodox approach might start with supply and demand and the “invisible hand” and then go on to the complexities and controversies of modern macroeconomic policy. But an alternative might start with a quotation from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels , published in 1726. “Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together,” says the king of Brobdingnag. If he had been writing a century later he would surely been tempted to add “and economists” to his strictures on politicians."