Great blog, but please consider changing the color
I really respect your point of view. But, I also really propose you to see some little aspects outside the US system. Try, for instance, to study how many real projects studies were made in recent brazilian history, using economics aspects, costs and benefits analisys...On the other hand, how many non-economics factors were use to justify non-reasonable ones. Values, must be considered, as well the economic factors should.
Congratulations for your blog, another good way of thinking.
this is only a test
It is easy to find faults but difficult to make your own perspective. Get a life, losers!
POINTED REVELATIONS REPORTS…
“McCain’s Ties to Shadowy Security Company Confirmed”
(revised September 14, 200
John McCain makes occasional mention of his friend, Admiral Chuck Larson, whose distinguished career includes the command of nuclear submarines and the management of the Naval Academy.
Not as well known but by no means concealed is Larson’s link to Washington’s ViaGlobal Group, the successor company to ViaFinance and Galway Partners.
In 2004, ViaGlobal was serving as the “business incubator” for Rosetta Research and Consulting LLC, best known as the company involved in luring Afghan tribal chieftain and accused drug kingpin Haji Bashar Noorzai to the U.S., where he was arrested in April of 2005.
Rosetta’s Department of Defense sponsors, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, brokered an introduction to CNN military commentator General David Grange, who serves as an advisor to ViaGlobal.
Grange made the initial arrangements between Rosetta, represented by former Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman partner and ex-NSC attorney Joseph Myers, now with the International Monetary Fund, and ViaGlobal’s chairman, Frank Gren.
Another former Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman partner, Carole Van Cleefe, brokered a deal between Rosetta and Oracle. Oracle project managers Barbara Bleiweiss and Peter Bloom attempted to establish a joint venture using an existing contract vehicle with the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (FTTTF), but was unsuccessful due to Rosetta’s cost demands.
Gren and his colleagues sought to obtain additional funding for Rosetta, as millions of dollars in investment money had been spent on payments to secure the confidence of Noorzai. Myers, Gren, and others sought sources of funding such as a contract with the FBI as well as an investment from fallen tobacco lawyer Dickie Scruggs.
ViaGlobal appears to have used McCain, acting through staffer Chris Paul, to divert a 2004 FBI internal investigation into dealings between Rosetta contractors and certain FBI employees. This was the subject of a meeting held with the FBI’s Deputy Director John Pistole in late 2004. Paul convinced Pistole and others at the FBI that Rosetta and ViaGlobal were pursuing Noorzai, a "high value target" designated by Bush as part of an operation ordered by Rumsfeld and overseen by Wolfowitz.
Nonetheless, in mid 2006, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General conducted an investigation into criminal activities of the same FBI employees. Rosetta’s phone, email, and contractual records were subpoenaed. In addition, several Rosetta officials and advisors were questioned for several weeks.
Papers filed as part of the Noorzai case show that Rosetta, acting under the orders of senior U.S. officials, promised Noorzai he would not be arrested. Rosetta also paid substantial sums to various foreign government officials who then lied to Noorzai about the actual purpose of the meetings. Noorzai had been indicted as a drug kingp
"I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment, not having any formal training in economics."
I wonder then why you feel you have any business critiquing an economics blog at all? If you're curious about "non-economic factors" I don't know why you are looking to an economics blog to field these issues. Critiquing an economic analysis of an issue on the basis that it is an economic analysis only reveals your ignorance. If you're curious about psychological issues, then find a psychology blog perhaps?
Economics is a useful way to MODEL human behavior. As with other sciences and social sciences, it is a MODEL. A MODEL is useful ONLY if it allows you to reduce your observations and predictions to fewer important factors that your discipline considers important. Wouldn't an economic model necessarily ignore non-economic factors? Just as a psychological model would ignore non-psychological factors?
It takes a lot of nerve to assert that you are more capable than two of the most respected voices in the field. Maybe if you were Paul Krugman, but you are obviously not, as you are too cowardly to put forth your own names or credentials. You pretentious fools.
This is in fact a very important issue. The q. is: Can economics take into account the non-economic?
I think that critical cowboy's (post)means to me that if economics can take into account non economics factors then maybe this more expansive kind of economics would need to say just HOW it does so.
I would suggest that a better kind of economics work would understand the relation of what you might call the more strictly business or "economic" activities with the context in which those activities take place. Economics ought to be about human societies, not ONLY about the "economic" PART of human societies, because a better kind of economics study or economics theorizing is the kind that is really about human beings and how they exist in their social contexts. So, the broad scope is that of human beings and how they exist as social beings in their societies. Those societies have their institutions and so forth, and therefore economics should be about how the more narrow "business" affairs of those persons exist in that context --- context meaning, as said, the society as a whole.
What kind of literature of economics would there be if this were the case? That new kind of of economics study would be a kind of economics that says that what we call the more narrowly "market" stuff is a PART of the broader society, not either the myth of a dissociated "individual self-interest" or on the other hand the confutation of a more narrow definition of economics as being identical with the society as such.
Commenting by HaloScan
