Time Horizons

Yesterday’s posting on the old, black, dial telephone escaped my control and turned into a rant; no wonder it amused quite a few readers. Today I’d like to look at the same subject, consumerism, but from a different angle. I’m thinking of our time horizons. On the one hand we have a market system with [...]

The Black Telephone

From the time of my arrival in America in 1951 to about the time when AT&T was busted up in 1984—ominous year; remember George Orwell’s novel?—we used the old black telephone and, frankly, never suffered any deprivation. It rang, it worked, it reached every point we wished to reach including Europe. Today a tour of [...]

Another Kind of Pyramid

 We can picture the economy as a structure that rests on the most basic harvesting and extraction activities, thus mining, logging, agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and fisheries. These activities provide us the basic raw materials for food, structures, and everything else.
Above this we could place those economic activities that actually transform the raw materials into [...]

Let’s Build a Pyramid

The crisis in finance is the consequence of a vast publicly-sanctioned pyramid. It was erected on a relatively simple contractual foundation, an ordinary mortgage, backed up by a physical object: a residence or a commercial structure. The lender provides the cash and gets a mortgage in return. He expects to get regular payments back consisting [...]

Telescope of the Economy

No—this isn’t a capsule of the Great Recession nor yet a projection of its future.  I rise today in praise of  statistics—and of the unsung heroes and laborers in our government’s several stellar agencies. Unless you’re an insider, you probably don’t give this any thought. But without these people we’d be blind. With their products [...]

Common Sense on Climate Change

I have a simple but, I submit, commonsensical take on this controversial subject. On the one hand, on the other…
One the one—I assume that, come what may, global warming true or not, humanity will consume what’s left of coal, oil, tar sands, methane, you name it.
One the other—I note that we’ve extracted and burned a [...]

The Market

When I came out of the service in 1961, I turned to the market to find me a job. I looked in the want ads, in other words, and, lacking any proper preparation, I responded to an ad looking for “management trainees.” If you’re not fit for anything, management is the natural path for you. [...]

Are We Entering a New Epoch?

Since my arrival in the United states in 1951, a great many things have changed, but not the fundamentals. Two big structural givens present then and still are that the United States is a democracy with a capitalist economy only marginally regulated.
The consequence is that so-called epochal changes don’t take hold. The system of governance [...]

Morphing Journalism

The transition from a coherent to a chaotic journalism is well underway now. The modern mind naïvely expects that the new state will be permanent, but chaos theory teaches us that today’s situation will eventually produce a new coherence. Signs of an emerging, if still extremely primitive new “editorial” function may also be glimpsed here [...]

Two Cheers?

Yesterday’s comment reminded me of a book I read in the late 1970s or thereabouts entitled Two Cheers for Capitalism, the work of Irwing Kristol, father of the much more visible William Kristol. What has remained imprinted on my memory of that book was Kristol’s forcefully advanced view that capitalism, in order to deserve two [...]