Memes on Memes

Universal Basic Income—Consumer robots—The Matrix—Work—Marx—Fetishism of money—End of capitalism—The Terminator—Synthetic (mimetic) need, or desire—Blade Runner—Duchamp—Data—Something out of nothing?

This may be obvious to many.  But it looks elusive to some who seem to find a perplexing conundrum at the heart of what we may call the ethics in René Girard. It is his thesis of the radical innocence of the victims of scapegoating, the claim he appears to espouse that “the victim is always innocent”.  At first sight, this does not even look as a productive paradox, but outright empirically wrong. In what sense can one arrive to claim that a scapegoat is always innocent, even if the person is objectively, empirically responsible of an uncontroversial wrongdoing (say, a murder)?  It seems to me that the crucial subtlety of Girard's claim is that in scapegoating the victim is always innocent. In other words, the point here is that even if the victim is objectively responsible of the deeds which cannot but be deemed wrong (say, a murder), he or she is innocent relative to the scapegoating: the wrong the mob is committing is to use that person to deflect and appease rivalrie...

In his perceptive reading of James Cameron’s 1997 film “Titanic”, Slavoj Žižek neatly illustrates how a catastrophe can save a fantasy, or an ideal. There is a scene in the film, where Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) make each other a promise of eternal love:  “When this ship docks, I'm getting off with you“ , Rose says. That , and not the Titanic going down, Žižek claims, would have been the true catastrophe. Indeed, we can easily imagine how, once in New York, maybe after a few weeks of good sex, this fantasy of pure untainted love would have faded away, crumbling perhaps under the pressure of social expectations, of their objective cultural and social status differences, combined with the dullness after the inevitable loss of novelty and euphoria of falling in love. This then was the true function of the iceberg sinking the Titanic in the film: a momentous real catastrophe has to happen, so that the fantasy (or the ideal) can live on. (...

Listen carefully. It helps to understand why Donald Trump is antifragile, and how he's knowingly going to run an antifragile campaign: almost anything that could happen in the USA and in the world, from now to November, can in general only benefit him, and only damage Hillary Clinton. This is not a prophecy, but a simple positive observation (with a disturbing premonition, though): it doesn't yet mean that Trump will win, but it does mean that he's positioning himself on the "right" side of the bet on uncertainty.

Nassim Taleb asks for applications of the skin-in-the-game principle across domains. So, here's my take on an issue, in few coarse notes. I've been thinking about skin-in-the-game as a justification for conscription/draft military service vs. voluntary/mercenary army. I'll go there in a moment, but first an aside note. Sometimes it seems to me hearing Taleb striking some libertarian-ish notes. It's sort of a consequentialist libertarianism (arriving at libertarian attitude by evaluating the consequences of actions and policies, like the fragilising effects of centralisation and all that), which is different from categorical libertarians (starting from some fundamental moral prior, say the principle of self-possession, and constructing from there a libertarian theory, no matter the consequences). So it's kind of funny to see how skin-in-the-game may actually support something – conscription/draft military service – which sounds so un-libertarian. But let...

A slogan circulates on social networks about the protests in Istanbul: "This is not about a park, this is about democracy". I understand why it may appear important to whoever invented the slogan to show their demands fit into a greater scheme of things. Their intuition is right on one point: it certainly works better for drawing the attention of the world's public if you characterise your struggle as that for democracy other than just for "some stupid park". These other things – being heard, condemnation of the abuse of state power, freedom of expression and of the press, respect of minorities' rights – are of course all valuable, and don't misunderstand me, I am all for it: fully, unconditionally, with no cynicism, and for those who are genuinely advancing this more general democratic agenda. However, there is nothing wrong had it all been only about a park. It's perfectly ok, even more than that. Let me explain why. Cases like this are a ...

There has rightly been much ado about the Reinhart-Rogoff affaire , an academic and intellectual debacle of two prominent economists who provided gunpowder to austerians' claim that terrible things happen when a country's debt-to-GDP ratio rises above the imaginary tipping point of 90%. The notorious R&R's paper where this was suggested, it turns out , was based on fuzzy math, buggy Excel coding and data cherry picking. This was a huge thing, possibly a tipping point, because the debate that followed helped to unveil the simple truth that behind the austerian claims there were class interests, for actually  austerity is good for the 1% . Dean Bakers nicely spelled out why in few broad strokes: "High unemployment weakens workers' bargaining power allowing employers to get the vast majority of the gains from productivity growth over the last 5 years. While the rise in profit shares may not always offset the loss in profits due to weaker growth, this is lik...

19 years after Pulp Fiction , in Italy McRoyal becomes Quarter Pounder. Progress? 

I've  tried to recreate an embryonic monetary economy in an Excel, inspired by Steve Keen's basic model of endogenous-money economy. The guy does it with all the bells and whistles, differential equations and system dynamics modelling, so if you're after that sorts of stuff, go and read  his paper . But I thought the whole thing may be simplified in an Excel spreadsheet without lost of the essential. Heck, isn't Excel an economist's best friend these days? This is a minimalistic approach, even sort of a suprematism of economic modelling, but it nonetheless hints at answers to few questions which seem to puzzle so many people, such as:  If the firms have to repay loans with interests, where is that extra money supposed to come from on aggregate?  How are profits possible, if the loans have to be repaid with interests and there is only that much money in the economy? Are further loans the only possible source of money to repay the interests on the existing l...