Keynes alive and well.

"Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- China announced a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus plan to spur expansion in the world's fourth-largest economy, helping sustain global growth as the U.S., Europe and Japan teeter on the brink of recession.
The funds, equivalent to almost a fifth of China's $3.3 trillion gross domestic product last year, will be used by the end of 2010, the Beijing-based State Council said today on its Web site. China will adopt a ``pro-active fiscal policy'' and pursue a ``moderately loose'' monetary policy, it said."

"(NY Times) The Bush administration was overhauling its rescue of the American International Group on Sunday night, according to people involved in the deal, amid signs that the interest on its current credit line of more than $100 billion was putting too much strain on the ailing insurer."

...MARKETS AND GOVERNMENTS ARE COMPLEMENTARY INSTITUTIONS. WRITE THAT ON THE BOARD ONE HUNDRED TIMES...

A Foucauldian NIghtmare

The biopolitics of the information age: Data Mining

This excerpt from NPR (talking about a new book by data mining expert, Stephen Baker) discusses the way in which different entities (from Amazon.com to political campaigns to insurance companies) order you in categories ("tribes") depending on your consumptive choices (ranging from the goods you buy to the sites your surf) and attempt to mold and direct your day-to-day choices based upon the information that they receive.

Here is a portion of the article...also check out the 20 minute interview:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95166854

"When it comes to producing data, we're prolific. Those of us wielding cell phones, laptops, and credit cards fatten our digital dossiers every day, simply by living. Take me. As I write on this spring morning, Verizon, my cell phone company, can pin me down within several yards of this café in New Jersey. Visa can testify that I'm well caffeinated, probably to overcome the effects of the Portuguese wine I bought last night at 8:19. This was just in time for watching a college basketball game, which, as TiVo might know, I turned off after the first half. Security cameras capture time-stamped images of me near every bank and convenience store. And don't get me started on my Web wanderings. Those are already a matter of record for dozens of Internet publishers and advertisers around the world....

...The Numerati also want to alter our behavior. If we're shopping, they want us to buy more. At the workplace, they're out to boost our productivity. When we're patients, they want us healthier and cheaper. As companies like IBM and Amazon roll out early models of us, they can predict our behavior and experiment with us. They can simulate changes in a store or an office and see how we would likely react. And they can attempt to calculate mathematically how to boost our performance. How would shoppers like me respond to a $100 rebate on top-of-the-line Nikon cameras? How much more productive would you be at the office if you had a $600 course on spreadsheets? How would our colleagues cope if the company eliminated our positions, or folded them into operations in Bangalore? We don't have to participate, or even know that our mathematical ghosts are laboring night and day as lab rats. We'll receive the results of these studies—the optimum course—as helpful suggestions, prescriptions, or marching orders."

The scary part about this is that data mining opens up a wealth of knowledge about personal behavior that the statistics of twenty years ago did not. This provides new potential for entities to intervene in the management of day-to-day life...Political campaigns engaging in micro-targeting, for example, have the means to render us transparent as a very deep level.

Althusser - Foucault connection...

According to Wikipedia: "The prominent Guevarist Régis Debray studied under Althusser, as did the Derrida, noted philosopher Michel Foucault, and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller."

Amy Poelher's silence kills the McCain campaign.

The road to the Whitehouse runs through Letterman and Saturday Night Live...

Formalism: Rationality & Self Interest

Formalism (in economic anthropology, economics, and political science, etc.) assumes agents are self interested maximizers subject to the constraint of scarcity.

But self interest can be rightly expanded to include sentiments and motivations and preferences such as altruism, and can be amended to contain the interests of the collective.

People are SUBSTANTIVELY RATIONAL. But that is not a very risky claim. I'm an economist and assuming this works for a lot of stuff.

This is not to say that proceeding with formalist methods and deductive reasoning is appropriate for every situation. Assuming self-interest is a reasonable methodology in many instances, particularly in Western, capitalist countries.

This could proceed into a discussion of Polanyi and the imbeddedness or disembeddedness of an economy...

The Gonzo Social Scientist

Go.