The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine purports to be an expose of the ruthless nature of free-market capitalism and its chief recent exponent, Milton Friedman. Klein argues that capitalism goes hand in hand with dictatorship and brutality and that dictators and other unscrupulous political figures take advantage of "shocks" -- catastrophes real or manufactured -- to consolidate their power and implement unpopular market reforms. Klein cites Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, Britain under Margaret Thatcher, China during the Tiananmen Square crisis, and the ongoing war in Iraq as examples of this process. Klein's analysis is hopelessly flawed at virtually every level. Friedman's own words reveal him to be an advocate of peace, democracy, and individual rights. He argued that gradual economic reforms were often preferable to swift ones and that the public should be fully informed about them, the better to prepare themselves in advance. Further, Friedman condemned the Pinochet regime and opposed the war in Iraq. Klein's historical examples also fall apart under scrutiny. For example, Klein alleges that the Tiananmen Square crackdown was intended to crush opposition to pro-market reforms, when in fact it caused liberalization to stall for years. She also argues that Thatcher used the Falklands War as cover for her unpopular economic policies, when actually those economic policies and their results enjoyed strong public support. Klein's broader empirical claims fare no better. Surveys of political and economic freedom reveal that the less politically free regimes tend to resist market liberalization, while those states with greater political freedom tend to pursue economic freedom as well

Trading Trust - Post-Aristocratic Finance in the City of Stockholm

Purpose The article aims to answer the question if particular values make for particular forms of trust. Design/methodology/approach In the present article, interviews and conversations the author has made with twenty-one employees in Swedish brokerage firms, merchant banks and mutual funds play the foremost empirical role. The informants range from stockbrokers, traders and market makers to managing directors of brokerage firms. Findings Trust is still important in the financial market, but researchers need to account for the new condition when finance means working with information technology and increasingly abstract instruments. Financial organizations are well described as networks while being informally structured, and characterised by an inward bonding that is cultural rather than formal. The article argues that social bonding, building upon the values and ideology of employees replaces the class-based identification that has previously characterised the Stockholm financial market. With increasingly hedonist attitudes, employees in finance form a more fluent, neo-tribal sociality. Studying at a business school, and interacting socially at work forms values and constructs an elitist identity in finance. This type of sociality consists in sharing a lifestyle and having work identities that dominate their private identities. Originality/value The present piece of research views agents as driven by a plurality of motivations and rationalities.neo-tribes; stockbrokers; financial networks; trust

Co-Opting Revolution in the Post-Revolutionary Age - Revolution as Embedded Counter-Culture in Swedish Finance

From the 1980s and onwards, markets have been prime movers in an individualist, market-liberal transformation, and now take part in the every-day life of the general public. Similar to economic development, also personal identity has become fuelled by consumption. Production and work turn more peripheral vis-à-vis the self-project. Instead of the process of production, objects of consumption, in which to express one’s individuality become situated at the centre of business-life. Consumers with values of expressive individualism view seemingly non-conformist products as attractive. Swedish finance is here analysed as a formerly conservative sector of business that because of an increasingly focus on speed opens up to notions of counter-culture and even revolution.brokerage firms; co-optation; counter-cultures; ethical consumption; revolution

Partnership Status and the Human Sex Ratio at Birth

If two-parent care has different consequences for the reproductive success of sons and daughters, then natural selection may favor adjustment of the sex ratio at birth according to circumstances that forecast later family structure. In humans, this partnership status hypothesis predicts fewer sons among extra-pair conceptions, but the rival "attractiveness" hypothesis predicts more sons among extra-pair conceptions, and the "fixed phenotype" hypothesis predicts a constant probability of having a son, regardless of partnership status. In a sample of 86,436 human births pooled from five US population-based surveys, I find 51.5% male births reported by respondents who were living with a spouse or partner before the child's conception or birth, and 49.9% male births reported by respondents who were not (X2=16.77, d.f. = 1, p

”Life is a fake. All that is real are the stock prices” - Simulating Authenticity in Financial Markets

Technology has contributed to what Max Weber termed the disenchantment of the world. Re-enchantment is a broad tendency than has hitherto been described. This overlooked movement within post-industrial business stretches into financial markets. Presently, we observe magic, morality and narrative being allowed to enter business. Re-enchantment helps us to understand the evolution of post-modern markets, as it partly forms the present exit from industrial society. This piece of research takes a micro-sociological interest with the mentality and culture of financial markets. It also has a macro-sociological character in dealing with the process of rationalisation in society. The article gives a contribution to theory about the evolving entertainment economy under the heading of re-enchantment. The experience of meaning or alternatively deprivation of meaning is decisive for behaviour and interaction at work. Technology in work is vital for this. I study four important aspects of a desired re-enchantment; sense of community, expression, myth and magic, and morality.re-enchantment; financial markets; morality; meaning

Protein acetylation in archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes

Proteins can be acetylated at the alpha-amino group of the N-terminal amino acid (methionine or the penultimate amino acid after methionine removal) or at the epsilon-amino group of internal lysines. In eukaryotes the majority of proteins are N-terminally acetylated, while this is extremely rare in bacteria. A variety of studies about N-terminal acetylation in archaea have been reported recently, and it was revealed that a considerable fraction of proteins is N-terminally acetylated in haloarchaea and Sulfolobus, while this does not seem to apply for methanogenic archaea. Many eukaryotic proteins are modified by differential internal acetylation, which is important for a variety of processes. Until very recently, only two bacterial proteins were known to be acetylation targets, but now 125 acetylation sites are known for E. coli. Knowledge about internal acetylation in archaea is extremely limited; only two target proteins are known, only one of which--Alba--was used to study differential acetylation. However, indications accumulate that the degree of internal acetylation of archaeal proteins might be underestimated, and differential acetylation has been shown to be essential for the viability of haloarchaea. Focused proteomic approaches are needed to get an overview of the extent of internal protein acetylation in archaea

Children’s School Achievement and Parental Work: an analysis for Sweden

In this paper, data from Statistics Sweden about students entering upper secondary school (10th grade) in 1994 and graduating in 1996 or 1997, along with socioeconomic characteristics from the 1990 census, are used to explore the relationship between the market work by mothers and fathers in Sweden and their children’s educational achievement, measured as Grade Point Average. The results show, in line with previous research, that there is a positive relationship between parental income and child GPA. When it comes to the number of hours of work that the parents perform in the labour market, the results differ between mothers and fathers. If the mother works less then full time, preferably even less then halftime, it has positive effects on the child’s grades. There are no significant effects of the father’s hours of work, as long as he works a positive amount of time. The lack of effects from the father’s hours of work may, however, be due to lack of variation in data.Time allocation; labour-force participation; educational achievements; child GPA

Trade Impact Assessment of an EU-India Free Trade Agreement

We analyze the effects of potential measures to liberalize trade between the European Union and India using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of world trade. Overall, our analysis shows that there are potential gains to be reaped from signing a bilateral FTA between the EU and India. For all scenarios, the FTA is expected to yield positive real income effects for both economies, both in the short- and long-run. The effects are, however, quite small due to the low levels of bilateral trade. In the short run, the real income gains in the EU are expected to range between Û3 and Û4,4 billion (higher for more ambitious liberalization scenarios), which amount to less than 0.1 percent of GDP. In the long run, the effects of an FTA in the EU are much smaller. For the Indian economy, the short-term income effects in absolute measure are similar to those in the EU, but due to differences in the size of economies, the relative effect is bigger in India (ranging from 0.1 to 0.3 percent of GDP). In the long-run, the effects on the Indian economy are expected to be larger.CGE, EU-India Free Trade Area, GTAP

Anti-depressants and Suicide

Does drug treatment for depression with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) increase or decrease the risk of completed suicide? The question is important in part because of recent government warnings that question the safety of SSRIs, one of the most widely prescribed medications in the world. While there are plausible clinical and behavioral arguments that SSRIs could have either positive or negative effects on suicide, randomized clinical trials have not been very informative because of small samples and other problems. In this paper we use data from 26 countries for up to 25 years to estimate the effect of SSRI sales on suicide mortality using just the variation in SSRI sales that can be explained by cross-country variation in the growth of drug sales more generally. We find that an increase in SSRI sales of 1 pill per capita (about a 12 percent increase over 2000 sales levels) is associated with a decline in suicide mortality of around 5 percent. These estimates imply a cost per statistical life far below most other government interventions to improve health outcomes.

Who enrols and graduates from web-based pharmacy education - Experiences from Northern Sweden

Introduction: As a response to the shortage of prescriptionists in Northern Sweden, a web-based Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy program was introduced at Umeå University in 2003. This study explored who is likely to enrol and graduate from the web-based bachelor program and whether the program has addressed the shortage of prescriptionists in rural Northern Sweden. Methods: Data from three different sources were included in this study; the initial cohort including students admitted to the program in 2003 (survey), the entire cohort including all people admitted to the program between 2003 and 2014 (university\u27s admissions data) and the alumni cohort including graduates who participated in an alumni survey in 2015. Results: A typical student of the web-based pharmacy program is female, over 30 years of age, married or in a de-facto relationship and has children. Furthermore, the students graduating before 2009 were more likely to live in Northern Sweden compared to those graduating later. Discussion and conclusion: The results indicate that the introduction of a web-based bachelor of pharmacy program at Umeå University was to some extent able to address the shortage of prescriptionists in Northern Sweden. Web-based education may potentially help address the maldistribution of health professionals by providing flexible education opportunities