Around 10,000 years ago, residents of large farming communities had to learn to make fair exchanges with strangers and to retaliate against selfish exploiters, researchers propose in the March 19 Science. |
Before the rise of modern agriculture and resulting trade, the researchers contend, people rarely had to behave this way with strangers. During Stone Age days, members of small hunter-gatherer groups exchanged favors only with those they knew. |
Participants who regularly have to deal with outsiders treated strangers more fairly, sharing a pool of money or valuables more equally, the team found. |
That’s not good news for traditional economic theories that regard self-interest as the engine of commerce. If those theories are right, players should take whatever someone else gives them, because that’s better than nothing. |
| modern economic development has prompted people to find new ways to be selfish within vast markets, comments economist Karla Hoff of the World Bank in Washington, D.C.Read more at www.sciencenews.org |
Big or small, financial bubbles burst alike |
Even when they inflate and collapse in milliseconds, the same rules apply |
| the same mathematical laws underlying massive economic crises are also at work in tiny fluctuations that occur on the order of milliseconds. |
| the results help describe complex financial fluctuations and reinforce the idea that governments ought to have a contingency plan in place for the calamitous collapses that his research describes as inevitable, Stanley said. |
The results are intriguing “because what is causing these big bubbles to collapse are some instabilities that start at the local level of the millisecond time scale of traders,” Stanley said in his presentation. |
| this means that the trades follow a power law. Similar power laws describe the distributions of natural events, such as the number of big and small earthquakes that occur over time on a particular fault. |
A nation that advantages the wealthy and disadvantages its poor is a nation in trouble. The gap between the rich and poor is higher in the U.S. than any other industrialized country… What Makes the Healthiest and Happiest Societies? Hint: It’s Not Wealth |
Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson explains why it’s equality, and not high income, that makes a society thrive. |
In fact, it turns out that not only disease, but a whole host of social problems ranging from mental illness to drug use are worse in unequal societies. In his latest book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, co-written with Kate Pickett, Wilkinson details the pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, encouraging excessive consumption. |
The good news is that increased equality has the opposite effect: statistics show that communities without large gaps between rich and poor are more resilient and their members live longer, happier lives. |
| life expectancy, mental illness, teen birthrates, violence, the percent of populations in prison, and drug use. |
The Data Singularity is Here |
In a nutshell, the Data Singularity is this: humans are being spliced out of the data-driven processes around us, and frequently we aren’t even at the terminal node of action. International cargo shipments, high-frequency stock trades, and genetic diagnoses are all made without us. |
Collectively, these logs reveal the pulse of the planet — flight delays, package shipments, job losses, and human sentiments. |
The result is an explosion of data thrown off from these machine-mediated pipelines, along with data about those flows (and data about that data, and so on). The machines all around us — our smart phones, smart cars, and fee-happy bank accounts — are talking, and increasingly we’re being left out of the conversation. Read more at dataspora.com |
Bi-partisan wealth concentration… | Guest Post: 15 Years Ago, the Combined Assets of the 6 Biggest Banks Totaled 17% of GDP… By 2006, 55% … Now, 63% |
The big four have half of the market for mortgages and two-thirds of the market for credit cards. Five banks have over 95 percent of the market for over-the-counter derivatives. Three U.S. banks have over 40 percent of the global market for stock underwriting.
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As I’ve previously noted, the government created the mega-giants (they are not the product of free market competition), and their very size destroys the real economy like a massive black hole destroys the matter around it. |
Bi-partisan wealth concentration… | Guest Post: 15 Years Ago, the Combined Assets of the 6 Biggest Banks Totaled 17% of GDP… By 2006, 55% … Now, 63% |
The big four have half of the market for mortgages and two-thirds of the market for credit cards. Five banks have over 95 percent of the market for over-the-counter derivatives. Three U.S. banks have over 40 percent of the global market for stock underwriting.
|
As I’ve previously noted, the government created the mega-giants (they are not the product of free market competition), and their very size destroys the real economy like a massive black hole destroys the matter around it. |
The memes dominating the political debate are perverse and distorted. They make solutions quite literally impossible. The so called Left/Right debate is a game where you lose no matter who wins. | Grading Free Market Capitalism and “The Invisible Hand” |
Free market capitalism is based on the idea that “the invisible hand” of the market will create the best possible outcome for the most people. |
| the real Adam Smith did not believe in a magically benevolent market which operates for the benefit of all without any checks and balances: |
Smith railed against monopolies and the political influence that accompanies economic power … |
| Smith was sometimes tolerant of government intervention |
| ”especially when the object is to reduce poverty.” Smith passionately argued, ”When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.” |
| He saw a tacit conspiracy on the part of employers ”always and everywhere” to keep wages as low as possible. |
| capitalism has to grow up |
| Rubin to be Grilled by Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission |
| Rubin was either the architect or the moving force behind so many of the flawed policies and practices that fed the crisis that it is difficult to come up with a complete list. For starters, he was an advocate of a finance-centric view of the economy and ultimately of US interests (notice how often trade negotiations have made opening financial markets a priority item. |
| Rubin also pioneered covert banking bailouts. |
Rubin was also famously the leader of the successful fight against Brooksley Born’s efforts to regulate credit default swaps. |
| A substantial fraction of financial services industry activity over the last couple of decades has been |
“finding legal
ways to do things that used to be illegal under the old rules.” |
The result is actually to support a framework in which enormous rewards are granted to people
who devote their lives toward freeing corporate organizations from the pain of democratic supervision.Read more at www.nakedcapitalism.com |
| RBS pays billions while Commerzbank bankers get nothing |
Over the past few days, a number of major European banks have announced earnings results. Two of the most dismal results were registered at the British company Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and at Germany’s Commerzbank. However, the similarity ends there because, while Commerzbank investment bankers received no bonus, the bankers at government-controlled RBS received billions of dollars in bonuses. In my view, this differences highlight a cultural divide on compensation between financial services-dominated countries like the U.S. and the U.K. and industry-driven economies like Germany. |
| Large losses and zero bonuses at Commerzbank |
Commerzbank AG, Germany’s second- largest bank, isn’t paying investment bankers bonuses for 2009 after the company posted a 4.5 billion-euro ($6.1 billion) loss. |
| Large losses but large bonuses at RBS |
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Indefensible Men « naked capitalism
Leads appropriately into the discussion on problems resulting from biological altruism's relationship to social/psychological proximity and its attenuating nature...
Compensation a... more
Leads appropriately into the discussion on problems resulting from biological altruism's relationship to social/psychological proximity and its attenuating nature...
Compensation and the Social Network
http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/10/compensation-social-network.html URL: www.nakedcapitalism.com