The Price of Inequality - Stiglitz

As I mentioned in This Blog is Reanimated  I am currently reading "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future" by Joseph Stiglitz. Well I have finally just reached the last chapter "The Way Forward: Another World is Possible" so it seems time to post my initial impressions.

For those that don't know Stiglitz's work he is a Nobel prizewinning (2001) economist.  He was a member of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers (1993-97) from 1995 he became Chairman of the Council and consequently a member of the Clinton cabinet.  In 1997 he moved on to become  senior vice-president and chief economist of the World Bank later being effectively fired in 2000 because of pressure from the US treasury after his critique of the policies of the IMF and the damage they had caused.

Stiglitz returned to academia with a professorship at Columbia,  and he has  been active over the past decade in international organizations including chairing  the Socialist International Commission on Global Financial Issues and the UN Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System.  He has also published a number of popular books on economic topics and I have read a most of those published since  "Making Globalization Work,".  

Stiglitz's most important contribution to economic theory relates to information asymmetry and the the effect of this on markets. His work with mathematical rigour completely demolishes neo-classical economic theory and also the monetarist theory of the freshwater school of economics of Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" which he derides as mere "ideology"

"The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future" is his most recent popular book.  It may be the most important book published so far this century, it is also justly a very angry book. We will look at the book and its arguments in more detail in following posts.

Einstein's God Part I

Over at Pharyngula PZ reports that a letter from Einstein containing this quote :

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text." - 1947

is going up for auction.

Other quotations in which Einstein expresses his absence of belief in a personal God include this:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it" - 1954

So Einstein did not believe in a personal God and therefore was not a theist, he was therefore an atheist.   However Einstein in a number of places claims not to be an atheist but rather an agnostic.   

"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being". - 1949

This is a position similar to Darwin's which I intend to more fully explore in a later post and like Darwin he tries to escape the only meaningful definition of an atheist  as a person who does not believe in a personal God.  The consequence of which is that agnosticism or even deism are both subsets of atheism.  And talking about sets Einstein puts up a vigorous defence of the outspoken and campaigning atheist Bertrand Russell.

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly." - 1940

At times he has no alternative but to admit his atheism, for example in refuting the claim of a Jesuit priest that he had converted to Christianity:

"I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist." - 1945

Enough for now, I am sure I will post more on it later.

Champagne Cava Comparison

As I mentioned in my last post:

"We have just finished a bottle of Cattier champagne (Champagne Cattier Brut Premier Cru) for our anniversary and are opening a bottle of Cava Reyes de Aragon Brut Reserva."

This seems like a good moment to have a Champagne to Cava  comparison.  The Cattier was released by the the LCBO last year here in Ontario and it has been sitting for about a year in our cellar (well cupboard with a wine rack in it).  We had been hoping to find a champagne with the distinct toasty note we remembered from twenty years ago and haven't really noticed in the cheaper champagne we have been buying here.  We didn't really get the toast note we hoped for, but it was a fine champagne full of depth and complexity with a noticeable  straw colour.  It was one of the best champagnes we have had here and excellent value at $39.95 but then again we are not trying Dom Perignon at >$200, we are not even running to Bolly.

The Cava Reyes de Aragon Brut we had only bought a couple of weeks ago, but it is a 2009 vintage which is anyway the about of maturing time a "champagne method" sparkler (I guess according to the champagne producers I am not allowed to use that term) needs before release.  This is an outstandingly  good cava, like the Cattier it had a (not so strong) straw colour with a depth and complexity that matched the champagne.  In fact it was difficult to tell it from the champagne.  It was almost as good as the champagne only on  a few notes did it not quite equal the Cattier.  Incredible value for $13.95

This Blog is Reanimated

It is Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada and I think I should use the time to start regular posts on this neglected blog.  So I think I should outline the main areas and topics I plan to cover and why.  One obvious area is politics and political economy both Canadian and global.  Also I intend to comment on the books I am currently reading or recently read.  Currently I am reading "The Price of Inequality" by  Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel prizewinning economist), in many ways it is central to my current political concerns, the growth of oligarchic hegemonism  and its use of neo-liberalism to redistribute wealth upward from ordinary working people to the ultra-rich (nowadays often referred to as the 1%).

The other main area I intend to comment on is science.  Having spent all my working life in research laboratories both in industry and universities, science should be an obvious area of interest. My area of expertise is instrumental analytical chemistry, not the most interesting topic to blog on, though I intend to touch on it at times if something interesting turns up.  However having been educated at the tri-junction of  chemistry, biology and physics it is not surprising that I have developed a passing interest evolutionary theory, quantum chemistry and ever since my teens, cosmology. So I definitely intend to cover these topics.

With regard to evolution I am also currently reading  Rebecca Stott's "Darwin's Ghosts, The Secret History of Evolution" this has an unfortunate subtitle given to the North American edition its' more accurate subtitle in the original British edition was "In Search of the First Evolutionists" which is one of the things I will discuss here when I finish the volume.  One important topic in current biology is the ENCODE debacle and its supposed obituary of Junk DNA.  I have to get a post together on this to try and analyse the controversy.

In the area of cosmology I plan that in addition to discussing recent popular books on cosmology, to post links to interesting recent articles on arXiv to draw them to the attention of non specialists like myself.

Finally my wife has suggested I comment on our wine choices.  We have just finished a bottle of Cattier champagne (Champagne Cattier Brut Premier Cru) for our anniversary and are opening a bottle of Cava Reyes de Aragon Brut Reserva.  So you see our tastes tend towards sparkling wine.

Chance and Necessity

What drives Evolution? -  Quantum Mechanics:

"on the microscopic level there exists a further source of still more radical uncertainty, embedded in the quantum structure of matter. A mutation is in itself a microscopic event, a quantum event, to which the principle of uncertainty consequently applies. An event which is hence and by its very nature essentially unpredictable."

Jacques Monod - Chance and Necessity (1970)

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