Economics of Halloween

2013 ASET Conference

This year the annual ASET (economics) conference will be held in conjunction with the ACSS conference.

Keynote Address:

Mark SchugDr. Mark C. Schug, Professor Emeritus University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"Common Core in the Social Studies: Who Desegregated Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson or Adam Smith?"

2013 ACSS Fall Conference

Saturday, Nov. 2nd

Grand Canyon University

"Common Core: Staking a Claim in the 21st Century"

A New Addition This Year - Pre-Conference Workshops!

Economics - Common Core - Geography and many more...

Friday, November 1, 2013 http://azecon.org/aset.html

Your sweet tooth is displacing impoverished Brazilians, Cambodians and Africans

http://qz.com/133477

By 2020, the world will consume 25% more sugar than it does now. Where will it come from? At the moment, the biggest exporters of sugar are Brazil, Thailand, Australia and Guatemala. But that’s changing. Sugar cane uses more land than almost any other major agricultural commodity, which is fueling demand for more land. Of the 31 million hectares—about the size of Italy—currently used to produce sugar, around 15% (pdf, p.4) involves land purchased in 100 major deals inked since 2000, says Oxfam, a non-governmental organization. Often, these land sales are to foreign investors:

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

By Ira Katznelson. Liveright, 2013, 720 pp. $29.95.

Today, Americans tend to understand the New Deal in a few standard ways. The consensus view is triumphalist: the New Deal was the first step in the United States’ muscular emergence from the Great Depression and the beginning of the country’s rise to become the undisputed “leader of the free world.” Then there are the more ideological interpretations. Liberals see the New Deal as a vindication of Keynesian economics, strong labor unions, and a secure social welfare state. In the liberal view, Roosevelt confronted the fear spawned by the cruel and crushing hardships of unfettered capitalism during the 1920s. Conservatives hold, meanwhile, that the New Deal left a legacy of unrestrained government intrusion into the private sector and quasi-authoritarian limits on liberty and the free market. In the conservative view, Roosevelt is himself the source of fear, standing in for the menace of unbridled executive power.

The New Deal era portrayed in Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself contrasts sharply with all those conventional accounts.

Many histories of the New Deal cast Roosevelt as a hero, quashing fear and winning the day for democratic principles, remaking the nation’s social contract, and committing his country to the cause of global peace. Katznelson eschews this formula, focusing instead on the southern Democrats in Congress who emerged as the pivotal characters in the New Deal’s transformation of the American state. Katznelson painstakingly details how Roosevelt’s agenda would not have been possible without the endorsement by southern representatives of a massive expansion of federal power at home. “Without the South,” Katznelson asserts, “there could have been no New Deal.”

The South in the 1930s was defined by what the historian C. Vann Woodward has called “the paradoxical combination of white supremacy and progressivism.” The progressivism had its roots in a southern economy that depended on agriculture and, as a result, suffered an unusual degree of penury during the Depression. Those dire circumstances fueled an appetite for generous social welfare policies and large infrastructure projects. Hard times also pushed southerners to accept the sweeping regulation of capitalist industries, especially those associated mostly with the North, such as banking, railroads, and utilities.

But an even more powerful factor in southern politics was the strict racial hierarchy that placed whites above African Americans and that imbued the South with what Katznelson calls “powerful authoritarian tendencies.” Indeed, when it came to white supremacy and Jim Crow, the South’s congressional representatives displayed an unusually fervid and disciplined unanimity. By dint of their sheer numbers and their seniority in Congress, they wielded an effective veto over every major legislative effort of the Roosevelt presidency. Katznelson terms the result a “southern cage,” which resounded with an “obbligato -- the deep and mournful sound of southern political power determined to hold on to a distinctive way of life.”

At each point, Katznelson masterfully documents the extent to which southern Democrats decreed as a nonnegotiable precondition to any legislative action the prevention of African Americans in the South from benefiting from the New Deal in any way. The segregationists supported the Tennessee Valley Authority, but only so long as the cheap electricity it produced flowed only to communities that were strictly segregated. Likewise, African Americans were specifically excluded from New Deal legislation that set minimum wages and secured benefits for farm laborers and domestic servants.

Katznelson plunges much deeper than most historians of the era into the lives and careers of the South’s Jim Crow New Dealers. He profiles well-known figures such as Louisiana’s Senator Huey Long but also reveals the instrumental roles played by others, including Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, and Hugo Black, who served as a senator from Alabama for ten years before Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1937. Katznelson does not spare the reader the vivid, revolting details of the unreconstructed bigotry of many southern Democrats toward African Americans. (Bilbo, an ardent New Dealer, was also an enthusiastic member of the Ku Klux Klan; while filibustering an anti-lynching bill in the Senate in 1938, Bilbo warned that “one drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and strikes palsied his creative faculty.”)

But Katznelson also chronicles the acquiescence of well-meaning liberals in the North who were complicit in denying black southerners both the benefits of the New Deal and the prosperity generated by the U.S. victory in World War II. The Roosevelt administration and its northern liberal allies often looked the other way while southern Democrats excised any elements of New Deal legislation that might have benefited southern blacks and thereby threatened the existing racial order. Katznelson calls this Roosevelt’s “strategy of pragmatic forgetfulness.”

Better than free

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

I agree with this review - another reason to follow Five books

http://fivebooks.com/recommended/sex-lives-cannibals-adrift-equatorial-pacific-by-j-maarten-troost

In an interview on Foreign Memoirs

Interview Extract:

So what’s your last book?

The Sex Lives of Cannibals. I’m not sure the book legitimises the title and, in any case, it’s such a funny, engaging book that it doesn’t need a title like that. It’s the funniest of all the books I read. It’s about this guy, the author J Maarten Troost, who’s in his early 20s, hasn’t developed a career yet, hasn’t launched into a job after university, and how his girlfriend gets a job with an NGO in this tiny Pacific island nation called Kiribati, on a tiny strip of land called the Tarawa atoll. It’s the middle absolutely nowhere, zillions of miles from civilisation, and it’s this flat, baking strip of land that’s overpopulated, full of trash, people defecating on the sea shore: the worst detritus of modern society. All there is to eat is tuna. And while his girlfriend’s working there, he’s trying to write the great American novel.

Any luck?

Not much, so he writes this book instead. And it’s so great. He writes about the infinite number of uncomfortable things about Kiribati: the baking heat, the shark-infested waters, the people pooping in these shark-infested waters. There’s the hard drinkers and the fights and the tuna…

It’s just a very, very funny read

The Dynamics of Economic Dynamism

http://macroblog.typepad.com/macroblog/2013/09/the-dynamics-of-economic-dynamism.html

Earlier today, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart gave a speech at the Creative Leadership Summit of the Louise Blouin Foundation. He posed the questions: Is the economic dynamism of the United States declining? Is America losing its economic mojo? He observed:

“... we see a picture in which fewer firms are expanding, and each expanding firm is adding fewer new jobs on average than in the past. Fewer firms are shrinking, and each is downsizing by less on average. Fewer people are being laid off or are quitting their job, and firms are hiring fewer people. In other words, the employment dynamics of the U.S. economy are slower.

The decline in job creation and destruction was also the theme of this recent macroblog post by Mark Curtis, which featured some pretty nifty dynamic charts of trends in job creation and destruction by industry and geography.