Category Archives: Social policy

Wolf Richter: Taking Bosses Hostage – A Labor Negotiating Tactic In France

At 2 p.m on Thursday, the final day of the annually required wage negotiations that were going nowhere, Bruno Ferrec, the man in charge of the nine Fnac stores in Paris, and his HR Director were “retained” by 120 of his employees at a conference room at the Hotel Ibis in Paris. “For now, we do not know when we will let him go,” said the representative of the CGT, one of the unions involved in the negotiations. And the police did nothing.

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Dying for Satisfaction: Being Happy with Your Doctor is Bad for Your Health

There is an important study in the Archives for Internal Medicine last month, which escalates an ongoing row as to whether patient satisfaction is in any way correlated with positive medical outcomes. The answer is yes, and the correlation is negative.

This finding is of critical importance, not just in understanding why American medicine is a hopeless, costly mess, but also as a window into how easy it is for buyers of complex services to be hoodwinked by their servicer provider, whether via the provider being incorrectly confident about his ability to do a good job or having nefarious intent.

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World Bank Nominee Kim Under Fire for “Dying for Growth” Book

The US nominee to lead the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, has come under attack for editing a book called “Dying for Growth.” It apparently performs the cardinal sins of questioning whether a relentless pursuit of growth produces necessarily produces good outcomes and taking issue with neoliberalism. From the Financial Times:

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On the Meaningless of Contracts and the New Optionality

An old saying is that contracts are only as good as the parties that enter into them. And the evidence is growing that when there is a meaningful power disparity between two parties to an agreement, the odds are high that the bigger player will elect to behave badly. This blog is rife with examples: pervasive contractual and regulatory violations in securitizations and foreclosures, banks exploiting not just ordinary consumers with “tricks and traps” but even billionaire clients; debt collection abuses; routine raiding of employee pensions while CEO pay and perquisites remain sacrosanct; and, of course, the pilfering of customer accounts at MF Global.

And conditions on the ground are even worse. Hoisted from comments:

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Mark Ames: The One Percent’s Plan for the Rest of Us – Livestock to be Milked for “Rent”

Yves here. Mark Ames’ post discusses the institutionalization of a regressive policy, that of trying to eke more corporate growth out of extracting more and more out of workers rather than sharing the benefits of productivity gains with them.

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David Apgar: The Trouble With Jeff Sachs

Yves here. This post echoes some of the messages of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s article The Fourth Quadrant and our piece Management’s Great Addiction

By David Apgar, the co-founder of GoalScreen LLC, which has a free cell phone app in testing at www.goalscreen.com that helps you test what you think drives results in your job, fitness program, love life, investments, and upcoming sports events in order to determine which assumptions are helping you succeed and which ones are undermining you

Jeff Sachs has always been the most outspoken advocate of development aid so it would be out of character if he were not outspoken about becoming the head of the World Bank. But there has always been a lingering concern about his projects and his approach to development. And it sheds a lot of light on where development, economics, and politics are heading even if it’s the wrong concern.

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Bill Black: (Re) Occupy Greece

Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.

While the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement set its sights on occupying a financial center, Germany has accomplished the vastly more impressive feat of occupying an entire nation – Greece. Germany has experience at occupying Greece having done so during World War II. The art of occupying another nation is to recruit a local puppet to do the dirty work required to repress the citizens. Germany used several puppets, most notoriously the murderous Ioannis Rallis, to (nominally) rule Greece and terrify the Greek people during World War II. (After Germany’s defeat, Rallis was executed for his treason.)

This time around, Germany has been far more successful in recruiting and using a puppet to (nominally) rule Greece and terrify the Greek people before the German occupation.

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Philip Pilkington: Falling for Behaviourism – The Neoclassicals Join a New Cult

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He is an isolated definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another.

– Thorstein Veblen

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Philip Pilkington: Student Debt in the US Continues to Blow Up

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

Perhaps the most obvious indicator that the US has become a society of debtors is the ever-expanding market for student loans.

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Video Demonstrates How to Circumvent TSA Body Scanners

This is a bit O/T for this blog, except I hate the body scanners, since they are security theater and looting all rolled into one. The few times I’ve had to deal with them, I’ve made the gate agents pat me down.

Jonathan Corbett, who filed a suit against the TSA, has just released this video to annoy them further and with any luck, get the ineffective, intrusive scanners shut down.

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On the Continuing Oxymoron of Ethics at Harvard

There is so much crookedeness among our elites that it’s hard to know, absent more systematic study, whether Harvard is playing a leading role in this decline.

However, the glaring gap between Harvard president Drew Faust’s talk on ethics and her recent actions has stuck with me and I’ve concluded it merits discussion.

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Is Obama Still on the Austerity Train?

This Real News Network interview with William Crotty provides a useful overview of the current Obama stance on the Federal budget. Crotty does an adept job of delineating the gap between the President’s rhetoric and his policy stance.

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The New Priesthood: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis Part I

Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist who currently heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens. From 2004 to 2007 he served as an economic advisor to former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. Yanis writes a popular blog which can be found here. His treatise on economic theory ‘Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World’, co written with Nicholas Theocrakis and Joseph Haveli is available from Amazon.

Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.

Philip Pilkington: Without getting into too much technical detail what is it that you refer to in your book Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World the ‘inherent error’ in all economic theories and models?

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Adam Davidson Praises Economic Exploitation

There has been so much news on the mortgage beat the last few weeks that I managed to neglect one of my missions, which is my personal Ben Stein watch on Adam Davidson, who operates as the Lord Haw Haw for the 1% in his column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

His latest piece, “Why Are Harvard Graduates in the Mailroom?” is more accurately titled “In Praise of Exploitation.”

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