Oriental NC Town Board Meeting May 17 2013

Strange goings on today at the Oriental Town Board budget meeting, or at least according to a usually reliable source. I'm up in Apex for the weekend, so I can't verify. But keep your eyes and ears open. Will explain when I get confirmation.

Subleties Of Language

I suppose I have to make allowances for changes in meaning as time goes by. But I don't have to like it. Some usages are just lazy and imprecise language.

Some of my pet peeves:

1. Use of "less" in place of "fewer," as in "he had less choices;"

2. Use of "political" when what is really meant is "partisan;"

3. Use of "investment" to describe the purchase of stocks or bonds. This is one of those words that leads to bad policy. "Investment" is what companies do when they buy new equipment or otherwise improve their ability to make stuff or provide services. When people buy stocks or bonds on the market, their money doesn't increase the enterprise's capability one whit. What they are doing is "speculation."

4. Use of "it's" as the possessive. No! It's the contraction for "it is."

I have more such peeves.

Robotics And Economics, Take Two

A couple of years ago, I posted my thoughts about Robotics and Economics. My concern at that time was that economists, as they have historically done, were discounting the possibility that future technology might replace many human jobs with machines.

The conventional answer to that concern is that, since the Luddites, human workers have resisted being replaced by machines, but other jobs have always arisen to replace those taken by machines. But it seemed to me possible that this might not continue to be true.

Not long after my post, even Paul Krugman began to think such thoughts.

Now Kevin Drum takes the argument a step further and explains why the digital revolution won't be a replay of the industrial revolution. This is serious stuff.

I strongly believe that in the short to medium run we can put many people back to work using economic stimulus to generate aggregate demand. But this may not be enough to rebuild the hollowed out loss of jobs in the middle and even upper part of the income scale. We could try to rebuild unions, change the tax structure to correct the recent redistribution of income from workers to the wealthy. But if we hope to have jobs and income for most people and general prosperity for all, now is the time (if it is not already too late) to think through the problem.

In another article, Kevin Drum offers more detail about the coming robot revolution. The article raises Lenin's old question: "who - whom." In other words, who will be in charge - humans or robots? That question has interested science fiction writers since Czech writer Karel Capek raised it in his drama, "Rossum's Universal Robots." Similar questions were raised in his novel, "War With The Newts." It is time to take a serious look at the problem.

Economist Karl Smith, writing in Forbes Magazine, takes a look at inequality in the robotic future.

A thought that comes to mind is that while we think about robots, we might seriously examine population control. "Zero Growth" is too modest a goal.

Oriental Town Hall Records Problems

I have mentioned earlier that Oriental Town Hall has still not posted on their web site any minutes of Town Board meetings since last November. There are also problems with some of the minutes I have inspected relating to closed meetings.

And that's not all. The page on the Town's web site posting the Town's Charter and Amendments isn't complete. The site displays the 1991 Act Setting a Referendum on changes to the charter, but displays no information as to the result of the referendum. That leaves citizens in the dark as to the basis for our present Town government. Furthermore, there was an amendment to the Charter by Ordinance that changed the form of government to a Council-Manager system. That ordinance should also be displayed. It isn't.

This is not rocket science.

They Said You Can't Fight City Hall: Yes, You Can

You might not necessarily win, even if you are right. But it is possible to fight City Hall.

It would be better to persuade City Hall to do the right thing in the first place. I didn't succeed at that. This is an example of the kind of thing I've been writing for the past year and a half.

I lost at the first level of Superior Court. The Judge dismissed my complaint. But I have the right to appeal and have filed my notice of appeal. I have also filed a new complaint about the Town's action closing South Avenue.

I don't know if this qualifies as "David v. Goliath," or a lesser struggle. I suspect it is the latter.

In any event, it isn't just my struggle. I have consulted with a couple of dozen very knowledgeable citizens at each step of the way.

It will be long and expensive to try to stop the Town's sale or barter of public rights of way and to protect public access to North Carolina's Public Trust Waters. Just yesterday I spent more than $220 ordering a verbatim transcript of the hearing on the Town's motions to dismiss.

Anyone wanting to contribute to the protection of streets leading to the water can contribute to: ONC Protect Streets, P.O. Box 236, Oriental, NC 28571.

We could easily be at it for another year or more.

To The Fed: Go For Employment!

Economist Gavyn Davis has some good advice for the Fed: don't look at unemployment; look at employment! Maximize that.

From economist Mark Thoma's blog:

"Gavyn Davies argues the Fed is targeting the wrong thing (unemployment instead of employment):

...the Fed has a headache. Its forward guidance on unemployment is in danger of giving misleading signals about the need for tightening, and it probably needs to be changed. ...

The difficulty is that unemployment is declining towards the announced threshold in part because large numbers of people have left the labour force altogether as the recession has dragged on, and this probably means that the official unemployment rate is no longer acting as a consistent measuring rod for the amount of slack in the labour market.

The upshot is that the Fed will probably want to keep short rates at zero until unemployment has dropped a long way below 6.5 per cent...

[I]t is a distortion which the Fed cannot afford to ignore. Its mandate requires that it should aim for “maximum employment”, not “minimum unemployment on the official statistics”, which is what it risks doing under its current forward guidance. ...

If the Fed is going to make a mistake -- ease too long or tighten too soon -- you can probably guess which mistake I think is worse."

Nikolai Leskov: New Collection

One of nineteenth century Russia's most interesting and idiosyncratic writers, Nikolai Leskov, is newly available in an English language translation of seventeen or so of his stories. A review of the book is in today's Sunday Book Review Section of the New York Times.

I was pleased to learn that the collection includes a translation of Leskov's most famous story, "Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District."

The story, a somewhat lurid love story that turns out badly, is best known from its adaptation to opera form by the composer Dmitri Shostakovitch and first performed in Leningrad in 1934. It played to rave critical reviews until Stalin attended in early 1936, whereupon the opera became loudly condemned by the Communist Party and denounced in the party's newspaper Pravda.

Not only was the opera withdrawn, not to be performed again for some three decades, Shostakovitch's Fourth Symphony, then in final rehearsals, was also withdrawn. This controversy nearly destroyed Shostakovitch's career.

I have a copy of Leskov's collected works in Russian, and once attempted a translation of Lady Macbeth.

I put it in the "too hard" file.

I look forward to reading it in someone else's translation.

Why Did The Soviet Union Fall Apart?

Over the past two decades, several inaccurate narratives have dominated public discourse about the former Soviet Union's demise.

The first narrative is that President Reagan ordered Mikhail Gorbachov to "tear down this wall" and the Berlin Wall came down. Kind of like Joshua's trumpet.

The second narrative is that the Soviet Union fell apart because of the failure of Central Planning, also known as the "Command Economy."

Both narratives appeal to widespread prejudices rather than objective evaluation of both the accomplishments and the failures of the Soviet system. Contributing to both successes and failures was the complexity of the "nationality question" during both the Soviet period and during the preexisting Russian Empire.

Following the Russian Civil War and the Polish invasion of Russia, Lenin introduced his "New Economic Policy" (NEP). NEP allowed a considerable amount of free enterprise, including farming. It apparently worked pretty well. But the leadership became rightfully concerned about increasing turmoil in Europe and began the collectivization campaign at least in part to support the Soviet Union's ability to mobilize its natural resources for war. Any examination of Soviet economic policy during that period has to address such questions as whether NEP could plausibly have prepared for war with Germany.

As for the larger issue of the Command Economy, economic historian Brad DeLong recently posted an essay of his from seventeen years ago, examining the corporation as a command economy. This is a good corrective to analyses that draw large distinctions between Western industry and Soviet Central Planning.

Many years ago, I attended a lecture by Alexander Kerensky, the second Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, which was overthrown by the Bolshevik Revolution of October. Kerensky contended that the Soviet Union's economy was not a Socialist one, but an example of what he called "State Capitalism." He autographed a copy of his book, which is still in my library. It may be worth rereading.

It is time to take another look at the issues presented by seventy-five years of Soviet history.