Hilson touted over Geithner

[koganbot]

While everyone's talking about the Keri Hilson album having leaked, it's worth noting that the administration's plan for fixing the financial system has also leaked. Early responses are less favorable to Geithner than to Hilson. I didn't understand the plan as reported by the NY Times, hence I don't have an informed opinion. Paul Krugman's reaction is despair (and more detailed despair). Yves Smith calls the plan an abortion and she also uses the words "crappy" (in regard to what will be bought under the terms of the plan) and "idiots" (the administration's perception or misperception of who constitutes the public). And this guy, who may not actually be an economist, puts concerns to music.

(The Hilson, by the way, is yet another interesting album (see Vanessa Hudgens', Ryan Leslie's, and The-Dream's) by someone with no presence or charisma as a singer. So far the bits of beauty and the mere gestures towards passion seem sufficient, somehow, or fairly likable half the time, anyway. Better than I'd expected, though my expectations were lower than some people's. See my reappraisal of "Turnin' Me On" here.)

EDIT: DeLong, on the other hand, seems fairly happy with it, unless I'm misreading his tone, which I may well be. Not that I understand his analysis either, obviously, but my guess is that some of you will, since he's laying things out pretty simply.

Comments

[koganbot]

The discussion is at "Complexity that truly is unpredictable," and it wasn't about "total amount of money" but "value in general" (money being a tool for tossing value back and forth by facilitating the interchange of goods and services). What I said was:

I see absolutely no reason why there must be "an ultimate good that society produces," any more than there must be an ultimate set of values that everybody agrees on or ultimate congruence on what people designate as good and bad. In fact, my ideas about Superwords etc. are that partial disagreement is built into the functioning of words like "good" and "bad" and "value."

This isn't saying at all that it doesn't matter what value/money relates to, any more than it's saying that it doesn't matter what people value: it's saying that there isn't and there doesn't need to be a single, ultimate thing that sets value for everything else and on which all value rests. And my saying this is just repeating a standard line from late 19th century philosophy onward, but also I don't think it's relevant to a discussion of value or money. It's more like: Newberry interrupted the discussion to ask, "What does God think?" and I'd continued the interruption with, "There is no God."

So I didn't see why you of all people thought it was worth following through on Newberry's question about "the ultimate good that society produces." It is a change of subject (i.e., a filibuster), a change from economics to philosophy.

Also don't see where the DeLong piece brings up anything like it. Saying that "money supply" is more than just money isn't the same as asking what ultimate good or service value rests on. DeLong says: "In economic reality, 'money supply' means not just cash money but also credit entries the Federal Reserve has made in commercial banks' accounts at the Fed; plus all the credit entries commercial banks have made in households' and businesses' checking accounts; plus savings account balances; plus (usually) money market mutual-fund balances; plus (sometimes) trade credit and the ceilings between credit card limits and consumers' current balances." And we could add, "which all relate to a whole bunch of other stuff." But this doesn't touch Newberry's question, since his question is the wrong one.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i'm fairly sure -- but i'll have to look it up properly -- that i (of all people) took him to mean something completely different by that phrase: i ran out abt 40 million pages of the internet to reread to explore this and then (as usual) got distracted by something trivial

keep reminding me -- bearing in mind i do actually plan to use my extension to write the bsf piece and i am from tomorrow plumb in the middle of of a typically frantic press fortnight (designer going on holiday in the middle of it yikes)

[koganbot]

If it helps, this is the Newberry piece you'd originally linked.

I basically don't follow how Newberry - or you, if you're with him - can square the idea that value is political and social and situational with the idea that apocalypses tell us what we ultimately value. If value is situational then apocalypses don't tell us what we "ultimately" value, they merely tell us what we value during apocalypses, which may well not be what we value during nonapocalypses - since, given that apocalypses are relatively infrequent, they may provide a particularly bad model for thinking about what we value or how "value" generally works.

If I'm misinterpreting Newberry, then just what do "ultimate" and "apocalypse" mean? But also, if I'm misinterpreting Newberry, and he isn't privileging the apocalyptic situation over all others (in which case why did he bring it up?), then I'm not sure I've raised a question that particularly needs answering; we can just continue to agree on the platitude that "value" is political and social and situational (I'd add that it's "variable" too, not just because situations vary but because people do as well, different people valuing different things, and when they value the same things they can differ in how much they value this versus that).

But on rereading the old thread from October, I do see that there is a second, different question I'd asked, and that's actually the one that's concerning you. (Which means I myself inadvertently filibustered the discussion yesterday.) Back on that October thread I wrote:

Don't see where putting some other commodity in place of oil and electricity necessarily changes the ballgame. But we'll see. The buzzwords of the day are "information" and "environmental technology." In any event, the piece ends up as the usual fakeout, since the obvious next step is to say what the new assets are, and Newberry doesn't, not at all.

This may be a question that you have to answer, since at least in this piece we're not getting guidance from Newberry.