The BBC News Magazine asks if the nation state is under threat from the rise of the super-city? The author seems to hope against this decentralization as he clings to his nationalist sentiment. But, at least he is willing to ask the question.
Sociology Professor Richard Sennett at the London School of Economics is one academic that has recognized the changing relationship between cities and the countries they are in.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist, said the rich are different from us. His contemporary (and rival) Ernest Hemingway countered with, “Yeah, they’re richer”.
It’s really something how much growing opposition there seems to be to intellectual property, particularly patent and copyright. I suspect one thing that is happening is as technology ever-more-rapidly changes and becomes part of our world, and with the digitization of information and media, and the Internet, the costs and injustices that have been caused all along by patent and copyright are becoming more visible and perhaps more extensive.
Maybe some tax expert can set me straight on the following assumptions, but from what I can tell, federal income tax law technically should make it virtually impossible to have a space program and to have anyone but a billionaire as president. Bear with me.
I’ve been reading Nassim Taleb’s bestselling Fooled by Randomness. I think Austrians would really like this book. (Elsewhere Taleb has favorable things to say of Hayek.) Here’s his take on (mainstream) economics:
On occasion I’ll see someone try to smooth over the Mises-Hayek “dehomogenization” debate which argued whether and to what extent Mises’s and Hayek’s approaches to the impossibility of socialism differed. One side--what I’ll call the Rothbardian or praxeological-Misesian view--sees Mises’s insight as having to do with the use of money prices to serve as a cardinal unit for purposes of economic calculation. This approach is championed by Rothbard, Hoppe, Herbener, Salerno, Huelsmann, and others, and arguably Mises.
Economist Brad Setser (Director of Research, Roubini Global Economics) has authored a paper The Chinese Conundrum: External financial strength, Domestic financial weakness(link with free registration required alt link) describing the current state of the Chinese banking system.
