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39016 Radio Doug -- rank: 1000

William S. Lear wrote: >Doug, your latest LBO has avg. stock returns, adjusted for inflation, >returning about 6% over the last, what, 80 years? What would the >above figure be, similarly adjusted? These things are pretty sensitive to the time period covered. Real total return on stocks - dividends plus capital gains, all reinvested, no taxes or transaction fees - averaged 6.8% a year from 1871-1998. Average return since 1982 has been more than twice that, 14.7%. For bonds, counting bo ...

Document Size:	5142
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 19:01:08 PST 1999

39017 Danny Yee reviews FASHIOnABLE NONSENSE -- rank: 1000

William S. Lear wrote: >First, I doubt that Sokal relishes his place as a "star" or did what >he has done to become one --- Butler tried this swipe at Sokal in her >NLR piece and it was a totally bogus ad hominem attack. Second, >saying his satire was merely a "schoolboy prank" sounds a bit too >Puritan to me, and overlooks that it is just the sort of thing >progressives have done from time to time with the mainstream media --- >cooking up a bogus story ...

Document Size:	6648
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 14:27:04 PST 1999

39018 surplus and other stuff -- rank: 1000

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: >Are you sure that our local All-American fundamentalists are excluded from >the cybertopian world? I bet they got a bigger presence there than we do. I had in mind the kind of people I saw at the Piggly Wiggly in Glade Spring, Va., who are not residents of cybertopia. But why can't the two tendencies exist within the same person? Rootless cosmopolitan by day, Jesus-worshipping patriarch by night. Marc Cooper had a fine article in The Nation a year or two ago about ...

Document Size:	5213
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 13:52:42 PST 1999

39019 surplus and other stuff -- rank: 1000

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: >Zizek's analysis may make sense as is when it is applied to Euro contexts, >but with regard to the USA, it seems odd to say that fundamentalists are >the ruling Spinozism's inherent other. Aren't fundamentalists (esp. of >Christian, survivalist kinds) nothing but Spinozist Subjects that Zizek >describes? The logical (if extreme) extension of liberal >individualism---what may be called subindividualism, in pursuit of the >elusive It, which in America ...

Document Size:	5673
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 13:31:01 PST 1999

39020 Solow on class -- rank: 1000

Rakesh Bhandari quoted Mattick Jr: >"What drew Marx's attention to political economy as an >object of critical analysis was the combination of its theoretical >inadequacy and its dominion over professional intellectual and ordinary >thinking alike. He was thus faced with the same problem as Evans Pritchard: >the explanation of a conceptual scheme that is functionally indispensable >to the life of a culture despite its inconsistencies and absurdities." So what's the an ...

Document Size:	4862
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 12:26:53 PST 1999

39021 An Inteseting Statistical Series -- rank: 1000

Enrique Diaz-Alvarez wrote: >Paul Henry Rosenberg wrote: >> >> >> My point is that the Dow isn't an objective measure in the first, since >> it's basis changes over time more to suit promotional/ideological >> purposes than for any objective reasons. > >Yes, but any changes to it are announced well in advance, so anybody who >wants to replicate its financial performance can easily do so. The Dow >Jones represents something very real: the approximate v ...

Document Size:	5944
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 10:57:55 PST 1999

39022 surplus and other stuff -- rank: 1000

rc&am wrote: >it occurs to me to ask the question in this context of why the major >struggles of today are pitched as struggles between rational, modern >capitalism and traditional identity, including various fundamentalisms. I know I sound like a broken record, but Zizek offers a fine beginning to answering this question in the "Love your nation as yourself!" chapter of Tarrying With the Negative. An excerpt: In her article "Nuclear Sublime," Frances Ferguson&qu ...

Document Size:	18975
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 10:37:35 PST 1999

39023 Solow on class -- rank: 1000

Henry C.K. Liu wrote: >I would like to hear your reaction to the NYTime article as a professional. I'm not a professional economist. I took 5 semesters of undergraduate economics. I do read a fair amount of the economics literature, but decidedly from the outside. My impression is that the discipline is technically elegant and intellectually bankrupt, completely lost in a specific kind of largely empty theorizing, lurching between irrelevance and apologetics. It's completely divorced from the ...

Document Size:	5175
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 10:14:45 PST 1999

39024 Danny Yee reviews FASHIOnABLE NONSENSE -- rank: 1000

James Farmelant quoted: >Still, Sokal and Bricmont's systematic demolition is totally convincing, >at least to someone like me with a background in physics and mathematics. Why doesn't that surprise me? >And even critics of _Intellectual Impostures_ seem unprepared to >defend the specific passages attacked, rather weakening general >counter-accusations of a failure to understand the context or the >use of metaphor and analogy. So we are forced to accept the fact that >respe ...

Document Size:	5707
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 08:32:39 PST 1999

39025 Meidner Plan -- rank: 1000

Michael Pollak wrote: >Speaking of socialism creeping in by means of the stock market, does >anyone remember Meidner Plan or what happened to it? Back in the early >80's when Sweden's economy was still humming along and unionization was >still over 80% of the workforce, the Swedish Social Democrats proposed to >invest union pension funds in the stock market at such a rate that they >would own more than half the assets of the country within 10 years. And >there wasn't much ...

Document Size:	7255
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 08:24:13 PST 1999

39026 Dick Armey -- rank: 1000

Henry C.K. Liu wrote: >I defer to your indigenous credentials. >Of course its all relative. I lived one year in Dallas, and found even the >extremt right has deep populist roots with anti big government and anti big >business sentiments based on rugged individuality. Yes they do, but they do so from a region that would hardly be populated had it not been for decades of federal education, highway, water, agricultural, and military subsidies. Most of these clowns like Armey and Gramm ...

Document Size:	5132
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 08:18:02 PST 1999

39027 Solow on class -- rank: 1000

from an article in today's New York Times on the dismal state of the dismal science <http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/heilbroner-economists.html>: <quote> [Robert] Solow, however, is a pillar of mainstream economics. His economic growth theory, in which he explained the interactions of capital, labor and technology in generating economic expansion, is a model of economics practiced as a science. He would never, he said, "advise a student to go to work on the nature of ...

Document Size:	5123
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Jan 23 07:19:53 PST 1999

39028 Radio Doug, Vatican Economists, and Nebulizers -- rank: 1000

Frances Bolton (PHI) wrote: >On Fri, 22 Jan 1999 JayHecht at aol.com wrote: > >> For those who don't get Doug's weekly WBAI radio show, Doug was (forced) to >> take callers. Oh my god!!!! The nuts came out in droves - I really wish I >> had a tape of this show - a women called up and started decrying that her >> asthma was somehow related to the decline in producrtion of some sort of >> "nebulizers" Than some guy went on about a conspiracy of &qu ...

Document Size:	5658
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Jan 22 17:21:07 PST 1999

39029 Marxism & human nature -- rank: 1000

[Martha Gimenez asked me to forward this.] Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 13:05:19 -0700 (MST) From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez at csf.colorado.edu> To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn at csf.colorado.edu> Subject: Announcing book on Marxism and Human Nature Dear PSNers, It is with great pleasure that I forward information about a new book by Sean Sayers. Sean is an insightful and original philosopher from whose work I have learned a great deal through the years. I particularly like his ...

Document Size:	8156
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Jan 22 10:50:14 PST 1999

39030 Flat Tax? -- rank: 1000

Daniel wrote: >That's pretty much what I used to think. But then I started hearing Jerry >Brown talking about a flat tax, and I began to see that there are many ways >of writing a flat tax. Just as there could be many ways of writing a VAT, >and when I set my own mind to it, I had all kinds of fun deciding what sort >of percentages to apply to minks and mercedes. Brown's plan was written by Arthur Laffer, the author of the famous curve on a cocktail napkin. It combines two differe ...

Document Size:	7692
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Jan 22 10:39:00 PST 1999