I found this to be the best introduction because it shows how every function of the money markets is a direct patch for a previous catastrophe. It balances the Wall Street view with the Ivy League view, and shows what happens when they butt heads. His book “The New Lombard Street” is more or less this course as a book, but covers more of the historical developments.
I find it to be the best introduction because it draws on material from economists of different major schools of thought without requiring the student to subscribe to any school in particular. He can do that because he focuses on the structure of the modern financial system, which is neglected or abstracted away in most mainstream and even heterodox economics literature. It makes it easy to recommend this course to anybody, because they can't say "I'm sorry, this is from the toilet-water school of economics, and I only listen to the bilge-water school."
> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book.
My understanding of the author's point is that the book does not show up in a "you may also be interested in these books" kind of list, not the result of an explicit search.
As I understand it, conversion requires renouncing your previous faith. If you are referring to the practice of baptizing newborn babies, I don't think it can considered a conversion (much less a forced one) at all.
Not really: “Religious conversion is the adoption of a set of beliefs identified with one particular religious denomination to the exclusion of others.” It would seem rather pointless to have a separate terms for “conversion” and “conversion from effectively atheism”.
And it’s definitely a forced conversion: the whole purpose is to explicitly ignore one’s will, and is used to “trap” children into religion, generally followed by indoctrination about alleged “obligations” and “duties”.
In the case all schools are conversion factories and all children are converted, religious or secular(as far as I know no children are born believing in rational empiricism). Words have set meanings for a reason.
Even so is it isn't forceful-- you'll find children in fact want to be like their parents, and even go out of their way to imitate their behavior and beliefs.
Religious conversion is by definition a conversion to a religion. In civilised countries schools don't spread religion. Teaching basic rationality and logic isn't conversion.
Catholic child conversion is forceful in that it ignores the will of the subject. You'll find that even though children tend to follow their parents, many/most of children of Catholic parents don't want to have anything to do with that religion once they grow up. You'll also find that the chance of someone becoming a Catholic is close to zero unless they have been indoctrinated from very early age. You'll find a lot of statistics showing both.
>Teaching basic rationality and logic isn't conversion.
Except you are defining what logic is, while many would disagree so it's still enforcing your own world view on others. The only difference is instead of enforcing a creator, it enforces lack of a creator.
>Catholic child conversion is forceful in that it ignores the will of the subject.
I was talking about religion, and now you're talking about the sect of one religion. Are jainists subject to this problem? Buddhists? Is shinto? Your making big sweeping statements and giving granular defenses.
>You'll find that even though children tend to follow their parents, many/most of children of Catholic parents don't want to have anything to do with that religion once they grow up. You'll also find that the chance of someone becoming a Catholic is close to zero unless they have been indoctrinated from very early age
[Citation needed]. Your adding a lot of qualifiers, sure there are statistics that reflect a fraction of what you're saying but you're creating a huge narrative around it that's unfounded.
>Religious conversion is by definition a conversion to a religion
Okay and conversion just means "a change in character, form or function". Sounds like exactly what school is designed to do. What difference religion makes is up for debate-- brainwashing political or social values is just as dangerous for example but you took no issue with that.
I am also confused by the idea of a theorem that can be refuted. As far as I know, if something can be refuted by experimental evidence then it cannot be a theorem.
"The results published by the IPCC and the official US National Climate Assessment suggest even that global warming will only have only minor effects on the world economy."
As the financial crisis has shown, I would be very careful before letting the future of the planet depend on the predictions of neoclassical economists. Professor Steve Keen, for example, has written[1] about the absurdity of some assumptions in which these predictions are based.
The future of the planet cannot depend on anyone's predictions -- that's a category error.
What you are referring to is "consensus", e.g. gatekeeping. This is similar to the deplatforming crisis. For some reason a lot of people are convinced that things like opinions or predictions are going to destroy their lives, or the planet, etc, who knows, perhaps even justice and gravity are at risk. It would help everyone to gain some more perspective and lay off the world-ending rhetoric, which has taken on a life of its own in a small, yet highly unstable proportion of the population.
I think a new Constitution is the only solution. It could be possible to reform the Spanish State to make it federal or confederal and hopefully this would be accepted by all the political forces involved. However, this new Constitution would have to be voted by all of Spanish citizens in a referendum, not only the Catalans.
The current Spanish constitution was drafted by a process heavily dominated by members of the former Francoist regime. The Spanish people were never formally asked "What sort of constitution would you like?" They were asked "Would you like a democratic constitution or not?" And I think a lot of people voted 'yes', whether or not they liked the constitution on offer, but simply because they wanted to ensure the return to democracy and the end to dictatorship was solidified. A fairer process of drafting a constitution would have produced a very different document.
If a dictatorship offers people democracy on its terms, people will accept it. But, was their choice really free? Would they have agreed to the same terms if the threat of dictatorship wasn't there? (1978 was only three years after Franco died, Spanish democracy was very young, and it was entirely believable in 1978 that it might not have lasted.)
The committee of 7 people that drafted the constitution included people from very different ideologies, for example a former member of the Franco government, a Catalan member of UCD, a Catalan nationalist, a socialist or a Catalan member of the communist party and they all agreed on the text that was voted. Were they all dominated by the Francoist regime? By that time Spain had already had democratic elections so, if that text were rejected the result would be to restart the constitutive process, not to go back to the dictatorship.
Ultimately we need to answer one question: is the current Spanish Constitution democratic or not? if it is, it does not matter how it came to be. Any changes could be done by a democratic process. If it is not, then all the Spanish citizens are affected and a whole new constitutive process is needed where all the citizens vote, not only Catalans.
If that's what you took from his paper, you didn't understand it. He is specifically arguing against DSGE models, a popular methodology for studying business cycles, but one that has been unsuccessful. That is not the same as arguing that all of macro is useless. It's not different from saying that criticism of imperative programming means all of computer programming is useless.
You're not going to take funding away from DSGE models because it's mostly individual researchers writing programs for themselves.
Ricardo Reis argues that macro has largely moved beyond real business cycles with frictions[1]. I'm not as optimistic as him, but DSGE is no longer as prestigious as it once was.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking