Daily Archives: February 17, 2018

Want to end gun violence? End violent inequality

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of The Media on by

Greg Palast has the article Florida = Honduras: Inequality kills. Want to end the American shooting epidemic?.

The result of my scatter plot came as quite the surprise to me: there was just about no correlation between number of guns and number of gun homicides.”

In fact, “the correlation coefficient was -0.105871699.” That is, by a small amount, more guns meant fewer homicides.

So what DID prove a strong correlation? Homicides versus the “GINI” coefficient. GINI is the measure of income inequality in a nation.

The graph he presents makes little sense as an explanation of the excerpt above. I have yet to figure out exactly how the horizontal axis of the graph should be labeled to make sense of it. We must also remember that correlation does not prove causation. However, at least in this case the premise does make sense to me. Given this hint of what these measures might be indicating, I’d like to see someone publish a real study of the possibilities.

Reluctantly, I have to file this story in the category of Greenberg’s Law Of The Media – If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.

The Free Market Threat to Democracy

This entry was posted in SteveG's Posts on by

Naked Capitalism has published The Real News Network video The Free Market Threat to Democracy.

From Naked Capitalism we have the introduction:

This Real News Network interview with professor emeritus John Weeks discussed how economic ideology has weakened or eliminated public accountability of institutions like the Fed and promote neoliberal policies that undermine democracy.

There are many good points here in the interview, but at one point I think it goes seriously off the rails.

Second of all, probably most of your viewers will not remember the days when we had fixed exchange rates. We had a world of fixed exchange rates in those days that represented the policy, which government could use to affect its trade and also affect its domestic policy. There have been deregulation of that. We now have floating exchange rates. That takes away a tool, an instrument of economic policy. And in fiscal policy, there the, here it’s more ideology than laws, though there are also laws. There’s a law requiring that the government balance its budget, but more important than that, the introduction into the public consciousness, I’d say grinding into the public consciousness, the idea that deficits are a bad thing, government debt is a bad thing, and that’s a completely neoliberal ideology.

This makes absolutely no sense, and seems to have the case exactly backward. Our federal government has no rule that the budget must be balanced. Fixed exchange rates were not a tool that could be used to affect trade and domestic policy in a good way.