We’ve been taking a
little flak from an academic economist or two who have become offended by the
recent debunking of the Keynesian money multiplier posted on this blog. Unfortunately, their declarations consist
exclusively of unproved assertion (we’re wrong because they’re right) and the
appeal to authority (they’re right because they are credentialed academics with
decades of experience denigrating students and anyone else who dares to
disagree with them). Alas — it is
impossible to respond to someone who refuses to say what your alleged mistake
might be, and who confines him- or herself to declaring that we are wrong
without proof. So here is this week’s
News from the Network, not giving any proofs, just reporting the news:
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| What matters with everything is not form, but substance. |
• Internships. CESJ is
currently in the process of selecting interns for the late Spring, early Summer
session. We hope to have the process
completed by the end of March.
• Monetary Reform. Since the
advent of the “Bitcoin,” there has been a spate of “crypto currencies,” giving
many people the hope that a true reform of the global monetary system could be
on the horizon. Unfortunately, all we
have seen so far is not the substantial reform essential to having a monetary
and credit system that serves people instead of making people serve the system,
but an endless rehashing of the same substance in different forms. The “blockchain” could very well be a
valuable tool in monetary reform, but if it is used to continue a failed system
in which money and credit are viewed as a commodity instead of a tool with
which to carry out transactions, the global financial system will continue to
deteriorate. What is not needed is
different forms of money or currency, but money and currency that does the job
money and currency were intended to do.
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| No, academics have made history boring. History is exciting. |
• Ten Battles Every Catholic Should Know. Despite the title (or maybe because of it)
and the fact that it is not specifically a “Just Third Way” book (although that
is the general orientation underlying the book), Ten
Battles Every Catholic Should Know has been doing surprisingly well for
a first-book-from-a-major-publisher from CESJ’s Director of Research. Perhaps one reason for this is that TAN
Books, the publisher, went all-out and put together a deluxe package with a
hardcover edition and a dust jacket with two color foil embossing and a cover
illustration that a number of people have said is alone worth the price of the
book — and the text itself is even better.
Some people have wondered if there will be movies made from the chapters
(there already are, actually), asked about sequels (already in process), and
other flattering comments, although no one has yet posted their comments on
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or the TAN webpages for the book. Remarkably, there have been only two negative
comments, both of them clearly from individuals who had not read it, and
complained that the book allegedly glorifies war (no, relating history, or even
making it interesting and exciting, is not glorifying it). We urge people to buy the book AND (of
course) post reviews on the internet.
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| G.K. Chesterton and Fulton J. Sheen |
• Chesterton and Sheen? It may
not be too much of a coincidence that the repostings on FaceBook of last year’s
series of blogs on the situation against which G.K. Chesterton and Fulton Sheen
struggled have caused a “quantum leap” in pageviews every time one of them goes
up. This bodes well for the success of
the book based in part on these blogs, which is currently in editing.
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 31 different
countries and 46 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, Canada,
Peru, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were, “Lord of the World,
VII: Democracy’s Las Gasp,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “The
Multiplier Fallacy,” “Philosophies at War, VII: Chesterton Versus the New
Christianity,” and “Freedom of Association.”
Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.
If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.” If you have a short
(250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the
blog — do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#