Think Or Sink

Economy is the management of the house (oikos in Greek), ecology is the study, or logic, of the house. They are closely related. We are presently engaged in the sixth large mass extinction event since animal life appeared on Earth. It is, potentially the most dangerous, because hypoxia (so far undocumented in previous mass extinctions, but likely) threatens (my trademark worry).

Yet, this extinction event is driven by the behavior of Homo Sapiens, thus, it could be prevented (as long as the extinction does not develop too much inertia). Thus we should use more logic to manage the house.

Worst Extinction Coming? Lest We Intervene Creatively

Horizontally: million of years before present. Both the P-T (Permian-Trias) and K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinctions coincide with Earth core eruptions (according to me, they acidified the seas). Vertically: percentage of fossilized marine genera that went extinct.

Thus the nature of economic policy, not just economic performance, is in question. Here is Krugman in “Cheese-eating Job Creators”

People are pretty down on European economic performance these days, with good reason. But mainly what we’re looking at is bad macroeconomic policy…That’s a very different story from the old version of Eurotrashing, which focused on Eurosclerosis — persistent low employment allegedly caused by excessive welfare states.

…John Schmitt and Dean Baker began pointing out a long time ago that this story was out of date. If you looked at Europe in general and France in particular, you saw that yes, people retired earlier than in America, and also that fewer young people worked — in part because they didn’t have to work their way through college…

Well, I hadn’t looked at this data for a while; and where we are now is quite stunning:

France & USA EMPLOYMENT Rate [NOT Unemployment U2]

Many of the French would be indignant about that graph, as they are focused on the Unemployment Rate known as U2 (which is above 10% in France).

And Krugman to conclude: “Since the late 1990s we have completely traded places: prime-age French adults are now much more likely than their US counterparts to have jobs.

Strange how amid the incessant bad-mouthing of French performance this fact never gets mentioned.”

Krugman knows well that this is not strange. Wall Street centered plutocracy has control of American propaganda, and admitting any sort of French superiority in economics would be equivalent to anathema.Financiers hate France most, as she is full of counterexamples to the plutocratic paradigm, so they use the biggest, ugliest lies against her.

Employing people of prime employment age is a deliberate policy of the state in France. Early (and sufficient!) retirement is part of it. So is free university education (as Krugman hints at above).

And yet, comparing an enormous country-continent such as the USA and a European country, is always fraught. European countries are automatically small, and crowded. Most have long exhausted natural resources.

Besides, God is American (just listen to Barack Obama if you doubt it). So, when American companies (Chevron, etc.) tried fracking in Poland, it did not work, as God had not blessed Poland (or not been blessed by Obama, whatever). The geology was uncooperative.

Or maybe Poland cannot be as thoroughly destructed as Texas (largest state of the USA), Wyoming (very large, and less populated USA state), or the Dakotas (what’s that?).

Much of the wealth of the USA comes from recently conquering a gigantic, wealthy continent, after having disposed of the preceding occupants (thus acquiring title and attending riches).

In a way, the USA is an ode to the exploitative paradigm: We Came, We Saw, We Destroyed, We Thrive.

No wonder well paid economists and other propagandists from the world’s richest universities prefer to change conversation, and explain to use why slavery is so superior to economy, the French way. (Americans get two weeks vacations; the French, who invented mandatory paid vacations in 1936, get 5; a reform all of Europe has copied. )

All this sudden American wealth was not because of a mysterious American genius in matters economic, but for the one found at the end of a saber. Proof? The USA was mostly created by Europeans. What those Europeans could do in the New World, they could never have done in the Old One.

Parts of Europe are still suffering from Roman ecological devastation.

The European Union (four million square kilometers) is less than half the area of the USA (ten million square kilometers). Europe (even without Putin’s Grosse Reich) has twice the population of the USA.

France exploited coal for 73,000 years, but, surprise, surprise, has run out of it. France had insignificant gas, now exhausted, and only a few barrels of oil.

This general paucity of resources forces Europeans to exchange high added value products (aerospace, cars, machine tools) against the natural resources they need (even Spain is selling trains to Saudi Arabia).

In other words, Europeans have to be more brainy, but for countries such as Norway (oil, gas) or Britain (oil, gas, Russian money).

In a sense the archetype  European country is wealthy Switzerland. First source of Swiss income? Pharmaceuticals.  Where does the better Swiss economic management come from? Direct democracy.

The strategies used in France and Germany are slightly different, with more emphasis on university education in France (which is free) and thus more of a scientific axis, and more on apprenticeship in Germany (thus a more active high tech Mittelstand). They are both trying to adopt the other’s advantage (Germany is doing a huge teaching-scientific effort, and has just adopted a French like minimum wage… while France is talking about how great Germany is).

The advantage of the Silicon Valley seems, and is, incontrovertible. Yet, it has to a great extent to do with the size of the market of the USA, & the discrete fact that the most important actor in the economy is the state. Silicon Valley was basically founded by the defense establishment of the USA (the basic tech was often invented in… France. But the smaller French market, and the lack of an empire of awe and conspiracies, put the French at a disadvantage.)

In any case, the better French success with employment (especially its quality, that the graph above does not exhibit) demonstrates, to some extent, the superiority of governmentalism.

See:  https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/synthesis-found-governmentalism/

Not to say that government policies in France are, and have been perfect (France has a new Prime Minister, the young, Catalan-Swiss-French Emanuel Wals). Far from it. They are actually often laughable, while gritting one’s teeth. To quit laughing, though, one has to just consider the USA, where, in spite of obvious natural riches, much of the plundering by the higher ups negatively impact economic performance.

The social inequality in San Francisco is on a par with Rwanda (that makes more sense than it looks, as both depends upon Coltan, plundered in Congo).

We are going to need lots of correct governmentalism, if we are going to be spared a sixth, and most terrible, mass extinction.

Speaking of extinction, in apparently unrelated news, the thirty billion dollar woman, Helene Pastor, just died from her wounds from an (unknown commando) attack. Flags have been lowered all over the Principality of Monaco. When people die, the pain of the state is apparently proportional to wealth.

Cap Wealth, Decapitate Critter Power

There are warning flags fluttering in the air.

Patrice Aymé

Tags: Employment, Extinction, France, Governmentalism, Krugman, USA