#david brookes

[cumbriacrack]

Statues discovered at house clearance near Ulverston spark Spanish Inquisition Local auctioneers 1818 have launched their own inquisition after two life size carvings of Spanish soldiers, or Conquistadors, were discovered at a house clearance Full story: http://www.cumbriacrack.com/2017/06/02/statues-discovered-house-clearance-near-ulverston-spark-spanish-inquisition/

[waurenbeatty]

The Moral Bucket List

The Moral Bucket List by David Brookes at the New York Times

“It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?“

Link here or above: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=mostShared®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Shared%20on%20Facebook&pgtype=article

An interesting read on the self and the other and morals - less self-improvement-change-the-world and more how-to-be-a-nice-person.

[auspolfornormalpeople]

Act I in this history would be set in the era of economic scientism: the period when economists based their work on a crude vision of human nature (the perfectly rational, utility-maximizing autonomous individual) and then built elaborate models based on that creature. Act II would occur over the past few decades, as a few brave economists tried to move beyond this stick-figure view of humanity. Herbert Simon pointed out that people aren’t perfectly rational. Gary Becker analyzed behaviors that don’t seem to be the product of narrow self-interest, like having children and behaving altruistically. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pointed out that people seem to have common biases when they try to make objective decisions. This part of the history would be the story of gradually growing sophistication and of splintering. Then the story would come to Act III, the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009. This act is a climax of sorts because it exposed the shortcomings of the whole field. Economists and financiers spent decades building ever more sophisticated models to anticipate market behavior, yet these models did not predict the financial crisis as it approached. In fact, cutting-edge financial models contributed to it by getting behavior so wrong — helping to wipe out $50 trillion in global wealth and causing untold human suffering. This would bring the historian to Act IV, the period of soul-searching that we are living through now. More than a year after the event, there is no consensus on what caused the crisis. Economists are fundamentally re-evaluating their field. ...In The Wall Street Journal, Russ Roberts of George Mason University wondered why economics is even considered a science. Real sciences make progress. But in economics, old thinkers cycle in and out of fashion. In real sciences, evidence solves problems. Roberts asked his colleagues if they could think of any econometric study so well done that it had definitively settled a dispute. Nobody could think of one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=0

i keep posting about economics because the fact that nobody understands it is the reason economists keep getting away with so much bullshit and they have a lot of influence in politics too