Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott in the Los Angeles Times:

President Obama is right to insist on the “Buffett rule”: Millionaires should not be paying income tax at a rate lower than their secretaries'. But correcting this inequity is only a small step toward fairness.

The more serious inequality problem facing the United States involves overall wealth, not just income. While the top 1% of Americans earned 21% of the nation's income, they owned a staggering 35% of the wealth in 2006-07, the most recent year for which statistics are available. We should be taxing that wealth directly, and not merely focusing on million-dollar incomes.

We propose a 2% annual wealth tax on households owning more than $7.2 million in net assets. Such a tax would target the 0.5% of Americans at the top of the pyramid, and would yield at least $70 billion a year. This calculation is based on Federal Reserve data that we have updated to take into account the recession's impact on housing and stock prices to 2009. Because we have used very conservative assumptions, the revenue yield could well be higher.

Obama's operational proposal for a “Buffett tax” is vague, so it's hard to predict how much it would raise. But our initiative would generate at least half the $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction that Congress' super-committee is aiming to achieve over the next decade. And the burden would fall on the Americans who have suffered least from the economic downturn.

More here.

A Thousand Feet of Snow

Stars are again like a teary ballad, and at nights
dogs tune their cloven violins.
I do not let sorrow come,
I do not let it near.
A thousand feet of snow over my heart.
I mumble a lot to myself, in the street
I sing aloud.
Sometimes I see myself in passing, with a hat, perfect food
for winds, with some thought or other aslant.
I talk about death, when I mean life. I walk with my papers
in a mess, I don’t own a single theory, only a swearing dog.
When I ask for liquor, I’m offered ice-cream,
I may be a Spaniard, with my hairline
low like this, indeed:
I may not be from these parts.
I sweat, trying to talk, once and a while
I tremble.
Almost more than for my death, I mourn for my birth.
And all I ask for
is a thousand feet of snow over my heart.

by Sirkka Turkka
from Mies joka rakasti vaimoaan liikaa, © 1979
© Translation: 2001, Kirsti Simonsuuri

Read more »

“Faster.” Could any other word better capture the reigning paradox of our age? The world today—whether measured in technological or ecological terms—appears to be changing more rapidly than ever before. Our modern system for generating novelty and prosperity has stretched to encompass the entire planet, growing more complex and expansive, so that now it seems to groan and shudder beneath its own weight. In its service, some things are falling apart: Non-renewable resources are profligately consumed, ecosystems disrupted, and social traditions steadily relinquished. There seems no way to stop or slow these processes without causing immense, cascading catastrophe. The only alternative then is to quicken our pace, to innovate past these growing pains. But where is the center of this innovation, and can it hold? Science is the center, and academia, industry, and government all must work together to strengthen and stabilize it. It was science that brought us here, through careful and systematic investigation—and exploitation—of phenomena in the natural world. And it is the endeavor of science that holds the greatest promise for ensuring the continued and widespread positive growth of our civilization.

more from Seed here.

From Slate:

I’ve been collecting anonymous photographs for more than two decades now and probably own a thousand or so, in all kind of formats. Nineteenth-century tintypes and cyanotypes, cabinet cards and cartes de visite, turn-of-the-century RPPCs (Real Photo Postcards), disaster pix, police mugshots and Bertillon cards, photo-booth strips, deaccessioned newspaper photos (especially ones with white crop marks), old prom photos, not to mention a recently acquired batch of ratty, Nan Goldin–style, 1970s Polaroids. Should I be in rehab? Lately I’ve managed to put a small part of my collection into serious, made-for-collectors-type albums—the organic kind, that is, with acid-free archival sleeves and glassine pockets. You can get them in the kale and beets section at Whole Foods. But most of my pictures, alas, remain scattered about, secreted away in boxes and drawers and plastic bags, stuck into books, or else just hiding out somewhere in my house. Where, I’m not sure: domestic life becomes ever more Grey Gardens–like. No more vintage photo shows, says spouse Blakey—nor will I be going anywhere near the eBay log-in page—until I unearth all the mute, two-dimensional Missing Persons already lurking somewhere in the downstairs closet. As addictions go, collecting old photos of obscure provenance may be harmless enough.

more from Terry Castle at the Paris Review here.

From PhysOrg:

If tripping in public or mistaking an overweight woman for a mother-to-be leaves you red-faced, don't feel bad. A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that people who are easily embarrassed are also more trustworthy, and more generous. In short, embarrassment can be a good thing. “Embarrassment is one emotional signature of a person to whom you can entrust valuable resources. It's part of the social glue that fosters trust and cooperation in everyday life,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a coauthor of the study published in this month's online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Not only are the UC Berkeley findings useful for people seeking cooperative and reliable team members and business partners, but they also make for helpful dating advice. Subjects who were more easily embarrassed reported higher levels of monogamy, according to the study.

“Moderate levels of embarrassment are signs of virtue,” said Matthew Feinberg, a doctoral student in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper. “Our data suggests embarrassment is a good thing, not something you should fight.” The paper's third author is UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, an expert on pro-social emotions. Researchers point out that the moderate type of embarrassment they examined should not be confused with debilitating social anxiety or with “shame,” which is associated in the psychology literature with such moral transgressions as being caught cheating. While the most typical gesture of embarrassment is a downward gaze to one side while partially covering the face and either smirking or grimacing, a person who feels shame, as distinguished from embarrassment, will typically cover the whole face, Feinberg said.

More here.

Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs. Diane Sawyer, an unctuous American TV news anchor, once asked a mob assassin: ‘But haven’t you ever thought, “How can I do this? Who am I?”’ The man looked at her with incredulity, then said: ‘I’m a gangster.’ Now, it’s true that people (a.k.a. human beings) named themselves human and also defined humanity, but this tautological affair entails neuroses: do we have a natural state? To say there isn’t one doesn’t quell anxiety, and ‘just act natural’ and ‘be yourself’ remain resilient punch-lines to the shaggy-dog story called existence. There are instincts and drives, the basics from which Sigmund Freud theorized – but, oh, the complex array of acts that might satisfy these!

more from Lynne Tillman at Frieze here.

Barry Eichengreen, Eswar Prasad, and Raghuram Rajan over at Vox:

In the wake of the global financial crisis, there is an emerging consensus that the framework underpinning modern central banking – known as flexible inflation targeting – needs to be rethought.

* A monetary policy framework focusing on price stability and output growth will also affect financial stability through its impact on asset valuations, commodity prices, credit, leverage, capital flows, and exchange rates.

* One country’s monetary policy can spill over to other countries, especially when central banks follow inconsistent frameworks, with cross-border capital flows serving as the transmission channel.

All this suggests that the conventional framework for central banking is inadequate (eg Dalla Pellegrina et al 2010). It is too narrow to meet domestic and global needs, as we argue in Eichengreen et al (2011).

Consensus on dissatisfaction; disagreement on solutions

There may now be broad consensus on this general point, but there is still little agreement about the particulars of the new framework. It is time to move beyond dissatisfaction with the prevailing framework and properly flesh out an alternative. In our view and that of our colleagues (listed below), that alternative should have the following elements:

* Financial stability should be an explicit mandate of central banks.

Other micro- and macroprudential policies should be deployed first, wherever possible, in the pursuit of financial stability, but monetary policy should be regarded a legitimate part of the macroprudential supervisors’ toolkit.

* When rapid credit growth or other indicators of financial excess accompany asset price increases, the authorities should employ stress tests to measure the effects of changes in credit conditions on asset prices, economic activity, and financial stability.

Instead of seeking to identify bubbles, the authorities should simply ask whether current financing conditions are raising the likelihood of sharp reversals in asset prices that are disruptive to economic activity.

Elaine Sciolino in the NYT:

[O]ver the years, I’ve come up with my own Louvre must-see list from the museum’s permanent collection of 35,000 paintings, sculptures, furnishings and objects. And I am always on the lookout for more hidden treasures, an exercise made easier with the publication two weeks ago of “Louvre: Secret et Insolite” (Louvre: Secret and Unusual) by Louvre Editions/Parigramme. People who don’t speak French need not shy away: the 119 works of art are illustrated with color photos.

Who knew that the right hand of Winged Victory sits in a protective glass case to the left of the massive sculpture? The marble statue itself was discovered in more than 100 pieces in 1863, but the hand, which is powerful despite its three missing fingers, was dug up only in 1950. (The tip of her ring finger and her thumb turned up in a storage drawer in a museum in Vienna.)

And what about Michelangelo’s two marble nude Slaves, commissioned as part of a grand tomb for Pope Julius II, and not quite finished? The Dying Slave is beautiful, smooth-skinned and young, his elbow raised, his left wrist strapped to the back of his neck; he seems to be in a deep slumber rather than on the verge of death. The Rebellious Slave is heavier, rougher and tormented. They exude such raw eroticism, you feel as if you should turn away.

Peter Orszag in The New Republic:

In an 1814 letter to John Taylor, John Adams wrote that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” That may read today like an overstatement, but it is certainly true that our democracy finds itself facing a deep challenge: During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country’s political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. If you need confirmation of this, look no further than the recent debt-limit debacle, which clearly showed that we are becoming two nations governed by a single Congress—and that paralyzing gridlock is the result.

So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

I know that such ideas carry risks. And I have arrived at these proposals reluctantly: They come more from frustration than from inspiration. But we need to confront the fact that a polarized, gridlocked government is doing real harm to our country. And we have to find some way around it.

More here.

Robert Socolow in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Let's review the messages in our 2004 paper in Science. The paper assumes that the world wishes to act decisively and coherently to deal with climate change. It makes the case that “humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century.” This core message surprised many people, because our paper arrived at a time when the Bush administration was asserting that, unfortunately, the tools available were not suited for addressing climate change. Indeed, at a conference I attended at that time, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham insisted that a discovery akin to the discovery of electricity was required.

Our focus on “the next half century” was novel; the favored horizon at the time was a full century — and still is. We argued that “the next fifty years is a sensible horizon from several perspectives. It is the length of a career, the lifetime of a power plant, and an interval whose technology is close enough to envision.”

In a widely reproduced Figure (see below) we identified a Stabilization Triangle, bounded by two 50-year paths. Along the upper path, the world ignores climate change for 50 years and the global emissions rate for greenhouse gases doubles. Along the lower path, with extremely hard work, the rate remains constant. We reported that starting along the flat emissions path in 2004 was consistent with “beating doubling,” i.e., capping the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at below twice its “pre-industrial” concentration (the concentration a few centuries ago).

More here.

James Salter in the New York Review of Books:

Ernest Hemingway, the second oldest of six children, was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899 and lived until 1961, thus representing the first half of the twentieth century. He more than represented it, he embodied it. He was a national and international hero, and his life was mythic. Though none of his novels is set in his own country—they take place in France, Spain, Italy, or in the sea between Cuba and Key West—he is a quintessentially American writer and a fiercely moral one. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a highly principled doctor, and his mother Grace was equally high-minded. They were religious, strict—they even forbade dancing.

From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along with a third thing, writing. Almost from the first there is his distinct voice. In his journal of a camping trip he took with a friend when he was sixteen years old, he wrote of trout fishing, “Great fun fighting them in the dark in the deep swift river.” His style was later said to have been influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, journalism, and the forced economy of transatlantic cables, but he had his own poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down.

More here.

Although I’ve yet to see sandwich-board men on the steps of the nation’s capitol declaring that the end of the world is nigh, I expect that it won’t be long before the Department of Homeland Security advises the country’s Chinese restaurants to embed the alert in the fortune cookies. President Obama appears before the congregations of the Democratic faithful as a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, cherishing the wounds of the American body politic as if they were the stigmata of the murdered Christ. The daily newscasts update the approaches of weird storms, bring reports of missing forests and lost polar bears, number the dead and dying in Africa and the Middle East, gauge the level of America’s fast-disappearing wealth. Hollywood stages nostalgic remakes of the Book of Revelation; video games mount the battle of Armageddon on the bosom of the iPad. Nor does any week pass by without a word of warning from the oracles at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fox News, and the New York Times. Their peerings into the abyss of what to the Washington politicians are known as “the out years” never fail to discover a soon forthcoming catastrophe (default on the national debt, double-dip recession, global warming, nuclear proliferation, war in Iran) deserving the close attention of their fellow travelers aboard the bus to Kingdom Come. If the fear of the future is the story line that for the last ten years has made it easy to confuse the instruments of the American media with the trumpets of doom, the cloud of evil omens is not without a silver lining.

more from Lewis Lapham at Lapham’s Quarterly here.

Retelling a great myth is like performing a famous piece of music: between faithfulness to the familiar score and personal interpretation of it lie many risks and choices. Between the worldview of a Norse skald, or poet, and that of a writer ten or fifteen centuries later, the scope for risks and choices is immense. Ragnarök, A S Byatt’s contribution to the Canongate Myths series, is a brilliant, highly intelligent, fiercely personal rendition of the Scandinavian mythology. Its personal element has particular resonance for me because, like A S Byatt, I was a child during the Second World War. I, too, read the Norse myths, and like her I found they made sense of the strange world we were growing up in. But California was a long way from the north of England, and the versions of the story I knew were very different from hers. She read the translation of Wägner’s scholarly edition; I read Padraic Colum’s, written principally for younger readers. Colum gave the often incoherent material narrative shape, humanised its brutality to some extent, brought out its harsh humour, and told it in fine, clear prose. Byatt was dealing with something nearer the raw material. But we were both reading a story that moved inexorably through war towards doom.

more from Ursula K Le Guin at Literary Review here.

The reason this crisis keeps grinding ever deeper is because the euro itself is a machine for perpetual destruction. The currency is fundamentally warped and misaligned. It spans a 30pc gap in competitiveness between North and South. Intra-EMU current account deficits have become vast, chronic, and corrosive. Monetary Union is inherently poisonous. The countries in trouble no longer have the policy tools — interest rates, QE, liquidity, and exchange rates — to lift themselves out of debt-deflation. Just as they had few tools to prevent a catastrophic credit bubble during the boom. Their travails were caused in great part by negative real interest rates set by the ECB (irresponsibly) for German needs. Their fiscal deficits (and remember, Spain and Ireland ran big surpluses in the boom) have exploded because of the Great Recession itself — as they have in the UK, US, and Japan. Draconian fiscal tightening might be manageable for these countries if the Teutonic bloc is willing to offset the contraction in demand by cranking up their own stimulus, allowing the intra-EMU imbalances to close from both ends. But the Teutons instead cling to their pieties, and their morality tale. The result is the downward spiral that we can all see.

more from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at The Telegraph here.

From The Boston Globe:

Somewhere in the world, every second of every day, people are being beaten, shot, and stabbed. The news is a litany of bombings and political assassinations, deadly riots and gang warfare. The lucky among us merely hear about it. Some days, when the body count is particularly high, it can be hard to stave off the sense that our species is more brutal and more bloodthirsty than at any other point in history.

Steven Pinker used to wince at the carnage like everybody else, and wonder how the human race had managed to lose its way so horribly. Then, in 1989, he stumbled upon something remarkable: a graph in a history book, compiled by a political scientist named Ted Robert Gurr, showing that the homicide rate in England had declined sharply since the 13th century. Pinker was astonished. The rate had fallen in some areas by as much as one hundredfold. Could it be true, he wondered, that humans had actually become less violent with time, as opposed to more? And if so, how had we done it? Pinker, now a psychology professor at Harvard, was then a rising star at MIT known primarily for his work on how the mind processes language and vision. In the years after his eye-opening encounter with the Gurr graph, his interest in broader questions about human nature and the brain would lead him to write a series of bestselling books, including “How the Mind Works” and “The Blank Slate,” which helped establish him as one of the most recognizable public intellectuals of the past 20 years.

More here.

Adam Rubin in Science:

I'm not good at meeting celebrities. I don't just mean the time I narrowly missed shaking hands with Judd Hirsch because my girlfriend had to use the bathroom, which still makes me a little angry every time I think about it. I mostly mean that the few times I've met famous people, my brain has locked up and I couldn't make normal conversation. Case in point: The summer before college, I met then-President Bill Clinton. He said, “Nice to meet you,” and I replied with the same. Then he asked where I was going to go to college, and instead of saying “Princeton,” I said, “Uh … I forget.” I think I even gave him a look that said, “Come on, help me think of the name of this place. Surely you've at least got a good guess — you're the president!” And that was the whole encounter. Which is why, when I learned that I would meet Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn (physiology or medicine, 2009), I had nightmares that she'd ask, “How are you?” and I'd reply, “Balloons.”

So I familiarized myself with the work that earned her the Nobel Prize: her co-discovery of telomerase, the enzyme that elongates telomeres within cells. But when we finally met, Dr. Blackburn threw me a curveball. Before I could say any of the intelligent scientific things I'd rehearsed, she told me that she'd read my book, which immediately filled me with shame, because my book is a comical guide to stealing free food in graduate school. I wondered whether I had negatively influenced the future of science by stealing time from a brilliant researcher, time she could have otherwise used to cure cancer. I imagined having to apologize to the world's cancer patients: “Sorry, guys. I know you were hoping for a cure, but I distracted the scientist who was your best hope with jokes about muffins.” Dr. Blackburn enjoyed the book, or at least she was nice enough to lie about it. “You're a very good writer,” she said, and that's exactly when my brain locked up. Knowing, at a primal level, that I ought to answer a compliment with a compliment, I said, “Thanks. You're … very good … at, uh, learning about … telomeres.” Then, following an awkward silence during which I realized I'd possibly just made the stupidest comment Dr. Blackburn had ever heard, someone else called her away to another part of the room.

More here.

Somewhat on the wonk side but very, very interesting: Ashwin Parameswaran over at macroresilience (portrait of Knut Wicksell from Wikimedia Commons):

The conventional cure for insufficient aggregate demand and the one that has been preferred throughout the Great Moderation is monetary easing. The argument goes that lower real rates, higher inflation and higher asset prices will increase investment via Tobin’s Q and increase consumption via the wealth effect and reduction in rewards to savings, all bound together in the virtuous cycle of the multiplier. As I discussed in a previous post, QE2 and now Operation Twist are not as unconventional as they seem. They simply apply the logic of interest rate cuts to the entire yield curve rather than restricting central bank interventions to the short-end of the curve as was the norm during the Great Moderation.

But despite asset prices and corporate profits having rebounded significantly from their crisis lows and real rates now negative till the 10y tenor in the United States, a rebound in investment or consumption has not been forthcoming in the current recovery. This lack of responsiveness of aggregate demand to monetary policy is not as surprising as it first seems:

* The responsiveness of consumption to monetary policy is diminished when the consumer is as over-levered as he currently is. The “success” of monetary policy during the Great Moderation was primarily due to consumers’ ability to lever up to maintain consumption growth in the absence of any tangible real wage growth.

* The empirical support for the impact of real rates and asset prices on investment is inconclusive. Drawing on Keynes’ emphasis on the uncertain nature of investment decisions, Shackle was skeptical about the impact of lower interest rates in stimulating business investment. He noted that businessmen when asked rarely noted at the level of interest rates as a critical determinant. In an uncertain environment, estimated profits “must greatly exceed the cost of borrowing if the investment in question is to be made”.

If the problem with reduced real rates was simply that they were likely to be ineffective, there could still be a case for pursuing monetary policy initiatives aimed at reducing real rates. One could argue that even a small positive effect is better than not trying anything. But this unfortunately is not the case.