Ignorance, Humility and Vice

LaFollette argues that the greatest vice is not cruelty, immorality, or selfishness. Rather, it is a failure on our part to ‘engage in frequent, honest and rigorous self-reflection’. It is that failure which, on his view, explains the lion’s share of the wrongdoings we commit towards one another. In this short reply, I raise (in a sympathetic spirit) some questions about the task of identifying the greatest vice, and draw out some of the implications of LaFollette’s account of moral ignorance

The Twilight of “Chimerica”? China and the collapse of the American model

“Chimerica” illustrates the interactions between a Chinese model of high savings, overinvestment and export-led growth and the American model of leverage investment, credit consumption and finance-led growth. The collapse of the U.S model, linked with the unregulated derivatives market, drives China to redirect its growth toward domestic consumption, despite the strengthening of regionalisation in East Asia. The new stimulus plan, based on investment, is limited by both income disparities and the under-development of social protection. Land reform, or the collective redistribution of the remaining state assets, could stimulate domestic consumption. But the first solution deprives the local state of financial resources, and the second solution collides with the interests of the state-party system. However, stronger social movements could lead to a better income distribution. Like two faces of the same coin, credit consumption or high savings rate reflect the crisis of a global accumulation regime, tailored for a financial oligarchy in the U.S, or for a party-state oligarchy in China.World Financial crisis, World Economic crisis, China, Usa

Vibrational excitation of diatomic molecular ions in strong-field ionization of diatomic molecules

A model based on the strong-field and Born-Oppenheimer approximations qualitatively describes the distribution over vibrational states formed in a diatomic molecular ion following ionization of the neutral molecule by intense laser pulses. Good agreement is found with a recent experiment [X. Urbain et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 163004 (2004)]. In particular, the observed deviation from a Franck-Condon-like distribution is reproduced. Additionally, we demonstrate control of the vibrational distribution by a variation of the peak intensity or a change of frequency of the laser pulse.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure