Tag Archives: The United States

Our society does not make it easy to control what you can control. One of the aphorisms to live by here at Of Two Minds is control what you can.We don’t control the erosion of our money from inflation, the state’s vast criminalization machinery, the nation’s foreign policies or the central bank’s free money for financiers policies. So what do we control? Amazingly enough, we still control a few things. We control what...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Now that the U.S. is a neoliberal selfie society, we have the worst of all possible worlds in terms of a failed, doomed democracy. Each individual's liberty to do whatever you want, be whatever you want, go wherever you want, etc. (within the legal boundaries set by the state) is the core of the American Dream. The individual's civil liberties and right to the unlimited pursuit of happiness is sacrosanct.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]If asked what's intrinsic to human happiness, most people in consumer societies will offer up answers such as money, status, a nice house, etc. But as Sebastian Junger observes in his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, what's actually intrinsic to human happiness is: meaningful relationships within a community (i.e. a tribe); opportunities to contribute to the group and to be appreciated; being competent at useful tasks and opportunities for...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]On Tuesday, I noted the end of summer and the entrance into one of the weakest months of the year statistically speaking. “We can confirm BofAML’s point by looking at the analysis of each month of September going back to 1960 as shown in the chart below."

[unable to retrieve full-text content]One of my reading projects over the past year is to learn more about empires:how they are established, why they endure and why they crumble. To this end, I've recently read seven books on a wide variety of empires. The literature on empires is vast, so this is only a tiny slice of the available books. Nonetheless I think these 7 titles offer a fairly comprehensive spectrum:

It’s tough to pay for an Olympics when 95% of your supposed “wealth” has vanished. In the modern era (1896-present), the Olympics have only been cancelled in wartime: 1916 (World War I), 1940 and 1944 (World War II). But world war is not the only circumstance that could derail the Olympics; a global crisis in energy, finance or geopolitics could send the risks and costs of the Olympics beyond the reach of most...

The Fed has not only failed to fix what’s broken in the U.S. economy–it has actively mad those problems worse. The Federal Reserve claims its monetary interventions saved America from economic ruin in 2009, and have bolstered growth ever since. Don’t hurt yourself patting your own backs, Fed governors past and present: it’s bad enough that the Fed can’t fix the economy’s real problems–its policies actively make them...

Addiction and drug use are medical/mental health issues, not criminalization/ imprisonment issues. It’s difficult to pick the most destructive of America’s many senseless, futile and tragically needless wars, but the “War on Drugs” is near the top of the list.Prohibition of mind-altering substances has not just failed–it has failed spectacularly, and generated extremely destructive and counterproductive consequences....

Annual population and labour force growth in Japan Which country, the United States or Japan, have had the fastest GDP growth rate since the financial crisis? Due to Japan’s bad reputation as a stagnant, debt ridden, central bank dependent, demographic basket case the question appears superfluous. The answer seemed so obvious to us that we haven’t really bothered looking into it until one day we started thinking...

The only way to reverse declines in labor participation and stagnation in wages and demand is to make it easier to start enterprises and hire people. Mainstream economists are mystified why wages/salaries are still stagnant after 7+ years of growth / “recovery.” The conventional view is that wages should be rising as the labor market tightens (i.e. the unemployment rate is low) and demand for workers increases in an...