Peter Krupa

In The Crash of 2008 and What it Means, George Soros makes the most eloquent critique of globalization that I’ve ever read.

In a nutshell, he argues that starting in the 70s, rich countries forced Washington consensus austerity measures on poor (“periphery”) countries, while at the same time reserving for themselves the right to enact countercyclical measures to keep their own markets stable and attractive for investment.

The status of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency coupled with this globalization of financial markets allowed the more attractive markets of rich countries (in particular the United States) to suck in the savings of the less-stable “periphery” markets, generating large current account deficits – that is, we borrowed heavily to spend beyond our means and fuel our prosperity.

This finally catches up to the rich countries. A series of government bail-outs starting in the 1980s coincided with the rise of “market fundamentalism,” the result being broad deregulation of financial markets coupled with a massive, throbbing moral hazard.

Now, the super-bubble has popped, and your average American is screwed. In addition, Soros predicts a prolonged move away from the dollar as a global reserve currency, ending the unlimited line of global credit that the United States has enjoyed over the last 30 years.

The “market fundamentalism” that Soros refers to is the orthodoxy that unregulated financial markets tend toward equilibrium. He places it alongside several other fundamentalist philosophies that ultimately ended badly: communism, national socialism, and  fascism.

He might have a point. We’ll see.

A best-to-worst ranking of 200 careers is making the rounds. Number 184 on the list is Newspaper Reporter, ranking just below Seaman and Machinist but just above Stevedore and Sheet Metal Worker. Glad I went to college.

This fascinates me. From the New Yorker:

The gradual devastation of the Amazon—the felling of thousands of square miles of forest, the clear-cutting of the jungle—has produced, paradoxically, one of the greatest archeological discoveries: a vast and complex ancient civilization. In cleared-away areas of the upper Amazon basin, researchers, using satellite imagery, have recently pinpointed a vast network of monumental earthworks, including geometrically aligned roads and structures, constructed by a hitherto unknown civilization. According to a new report published in the journal Antiquity, the archeologist Martii Pärssinen and other scientists have documented more than two hundred and ten geometric structures, some of which may date as far back as the third century A.D. They are spread out over an area that spans more than two hundred and fifty kilometers, reaching all the way from northern Bolivia to the state of Amazonia in Brazil.

Probably not the best way to make such amazing discoveries. Anyway, it reminds me of the Guayabos site in Costa Rica. In general, Costa Rica doesn’t have much – no monuments, few artifacts, no large indigenous population – to suggest that any ancient civilization beyond the hunter-gatherer variety ever lived here.

But there it is, out in the middle of the jungle, a stone road 10 feet thick and wide enough for two cars, along with a system of aqueducts and a few houses. Clearly (and delightfully), there is still much we don’t know about our world.

The New Yorker’s James Surowieck interviews David Cutler, a health care economist.