Thursday 21 June 2012

SUPERKALAFRAJIFUKA-NOMICS


If you stack Chicago School (fascist) economists at the bottom of Lake Michigan, would the resulting methane cause global warming to increase rapidly? No, but it would worth trying. I don’t have the right data now, but I could extrapolate from the dead body of their boy Augusto Pinochet whose bones could still be required to do time in a Spanish jail.

IshitUnot: Naked capitalism
Steve Levitt: Like a True Chicago Boy, Likes People to Go to Jail so Markets Can Be Free

Yves here. Readers reacted positively to the inaugural report by the S.H.A.M.E Project on Malcolm Gladwell. S.H.A.M.E. , stands for “Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics.” Its approach is to provide information about the background and funding sources of well-recognized journalists and pundits so that the public will be in a better position to recognize bias and hidden agendas in their reporting and analysis.
This second report, on the widely-read economist Steve Levitt, overlaps strongly with NC’s beat. Note that this dossier format is the one S.H.A.M.E. plans to use for future releases.
By S.H.A.M.E Project
Steven D. Levitt
Co-author of #1 Bestseller Freakonomics; Economics Professor at the University of Chicago
Named one of Time magazine’s “100 People Who Shape Our World,” Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, is generally assumed to be a harmless, quirky pop economist for trivia nerds. However, Levitt has a history of attacking teachers’ unions, advocating for the privatization of prison labor, defending online gambling and occasionally crossing over the fringe-right line by promoting climate change denialism and, some have argued, racial eugenics. A dyed-in-the-wool Milton Friedman neoliberal from the same “Chicago Boys” network that brought you the “shock doctrine,” Levitt’s idea of economics Utopia is a world in which “the market” solves all our problems and government is restricted to protecting property rights.