The Presidential Hand

«VISITORS to Astana, Kazakhstan’s glitzy new capital, can zoom 97 metres (318 feet) up a purpose-built tower and, inside a giant golden egg at its apex, place a hand in the palm print of the president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. When they do, the national anthem plays.
The presidential hand has been heavy of late, leaving a firm mark on Kazakhstan’s opposition and its independent media. The crackdown began a year ago. On December 16th 2011, the country’s independence day, police fired on protesters in the western oil town of Zhanaozen, killing at least 15. In the year since then, secret police have rounded up activists, including some with only tenuous links to the strike protests.»

The Economist – December 2012

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

«…the German sociologist Robert Michels called it the iron law of oligarchy. The internal logic of oligarchies, and in fact of all hierarchical organizations, is that, argued Michels, they will reproduce themselves not only when the same group is in power, but even when an entirely new group takes control. What Michels did not anticipate perhaps was an echo of Karl Marx’s remark that history repeats itself—the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.(…). The essence of the iron law of oligarchy, this particular facet of the vicious circle, is that new leaders overthrowing old ones with promises of radical change bring nothing but more of the same. At some level, the iron law of oligarchy is harder to understand than other forms of the vicious circle»

D. Acemoglu: «Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty»

Τι δεν διάβασε ο κ. Τσίπρας

«One of the great modern promoters of the myth of development was Walter Rostow, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1960, he fascinated all the technocracies with his famous book on the stages of economic growth. According to Rostow, countries evolve from a traditional society, through stages of accumulation and take-off, to reach the final stage of mass consumption, which he says is nothing less than development. The natural environment has no importance in this process. It is just another raw material to consume on the march to progress and happiness. After Rostow, all the technocrats were convinced that they could achieve development. They only needed to know how to apply the correct theories and policies, create value-added, accumulate, take off and indulge in mass consumption. The idea was to reproduce in the shortest possible historical time the development processes of Europe and the United States. Since the 1960s, we have witnessed many ‘take-offs’, but few cases of national development. Twenty years ago, it was said that Brazil was taking off, that it was one of the future world powers. Then, some years ago, Mexico was in fashion, then India. This was followed by the vogue of the ’emerging countries’ of Asia. Today the only take-off in fashion is that of China, a country with 1.3 billion inhabitants, where only 300 million have a standard of living that would permit them to be consumers in the global economy.
The fact is that in the past forty years only two small countries, South Korea and Taiwan, have managed to progress from agricultural societies to technologically advanced industrialized societies. They have conquered their generalized poverty and raised living standards to create a predominant middle class. However, this was done with democratic, cultural, scientific and social levels far below those of Europe and the United States.
Two other territories, termed by the development gurus newly industrialized countries (NICs), Hong Kong and Singapore, which have also approached the living standards of the developed capitalist democracies, are not nation-states but small city-states».

Από το βιβλίο ‘The Myth of Development» του περουβιανού διπλωμάτη Oswaldo de Rivero που έπρεπε να διαβάσει ο πρόεδρος Τσίπρας πριν ταλαιπωρηθεί με το ταξίδι στη Νότια Αμερική

Remus Reid

«Folklore has it that two separate newspaper accounts surfaced regarding the death of cowboy Remus Reid — one from the sheriff’s office and one from a close relative who lived in Remus’ hometown:

From the sheriff’s office:

“Remus Reid, horse thief, sent to prison in 1885, escaped in 1887, robbed the local train six times. Caught by local detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889.”

From Remus’ dotting relative:

“Remus Reid was a famous cowboy whose business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the regional railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to government service, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital legal investigation. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.»

«The Little Blue Reasoning Book: 50 Powerful Principles for Clear and Effective Thinking.»

Plutocrats and the House of Want

«Henry George, the nineteenth-century American economist and politician, was an ardent free trader and such a firm believer in free enterprise that he opposed income tax. For him, the emergence of his era’s plutocrats, the robber barons, was “the Great Sphinx.” “This association of poverty with progress,” he wrote, “is the great enigma of our times. . . . So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
A century and a half later, that Great Sphinx has returned.»

Chrystia Freeland: «Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.»

Barrels of Lard Provide Relief

"8/12/1788: Death of the great French admiral Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez, who saw to the amatory needs of his sailors by providing them with three lard-filled barrels, each with a hole of a different diameter, labelled, respectively, ‘Grandmère’, ‘Fille’ and ‘Nymphette’."

"History Without the Boring Bits: A Curious Chronology of the World"

The Mirror

«But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth’s surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. Marcel Proust: «Within a Budding Grove»
From: Christopher Hitchens. «Why Orwell Matters.»

Δε μπορεί, κάτι θα σας θυμίζει

«In a country* full of privileges based on birth, the Left, instead of fighting for equality of starting points, fought to eliminate all selection mechanisms, viewing them as discriminatory against the have-nots. One consequence of this was that universities were not selective in admissions. Regardless of your grades, you could get into any college you wanted, forcing all colleges toward lower standards. The unintended consequence of this egalitarianism was that it produced an undifferentiated mass of mostly ignorant graduates. Companies seeking workers resorted to hiring on the basis of the only system that works in the absence of credible sorting: personal connections.»

* Italy

Luigi Zingales: «A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity.»

Circumstances

«There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men’s lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances»

Bertrand Russell: «A History of Western Philosophy»

Treasure Islands

«Over half of world trade passes, at least on paper, through tax havens. Over half of all bank assets, and a third of foreign direct investment by multinational corporations, are routed offshore. Some 85 percent of international banking and bond issuance takes place in the so-called Euromarkets, a stateless offshore zone that we shall soon explore. Nearly every multinational corporation uses tax havens, and their largest users—by far—are on Wall Street.»

Nicholas Shaxson: «Treasure Islands»