Tag: The Business End
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When Money Itself Comes to Represent Nothing: Baudrillard or Austrian Economist?
(This post is especially for my friends who are reading William Gaddis’s The Recognitions right now.) Post-structuralist trickster or stuffy monetarist? You guess: If modernity is characterized by loss of the sense of the real, this fact is connected to what has happened to money in the twentieth century. Everything threatens to become unreal once…
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What crowded out philosophy at Middlesex?
Bureaucracy.
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How to get a philosophical education for free
A regularly updated version of this guide can be found here. I teach at the third-most expensive school in the country, where I regularly persuade students that they should major or minor in philosophy. For many students, this is a value question, and as I like to put it, there’s a difference here between the value…
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Visualizing Bureaucracy
The New York Times has this infographic: In the University of California system, there’s a similar trend:
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Elizabeth Warren on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency
I’ve linked to Warren before, but my favorite public policy theorist/practioner has a new lecture on regulating consumer financial markets, which is only ten minutes long and very persuasive: Elizabeth Warren on Consumer Protection (MMBM) from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo. Also, from this recent interview: The consumer credit market is broken. While the average credit…
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Walmart: A sufficiently advanced capitalism is indistinguishable from socialism
I came across a blog a while back that argued that Walmart’s size and distribution has put them in a state-like position vis-a-vis their workers, the communities in which their stores are based, and the regulation of their distributors. When you think about it, there’s a strong congruity between communist architecture and Sam’s Club chic.…
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A day late and a dollar short… (Iraqi currency cliches continue)
Steve at Cows and Graveyards correctly connects the upcoming oil extraction agreements in Iraq to peak oil. Yes, Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and as the global demand (mostly due to 40% increase in yearly consumption caused by the burgeoning Chinese economy) outstrips supply, prices will skyrocket unless the US…