The Atlantic: How Money Became the Measure of Everything

Until the 1850s, in fact, by far the most popular and dominant form of social measurement in 19th-century America (as in Europe) were a collection of social indicators known then as “moral statistics,” which quantified such phenomena as prostitution, incarceration, literacy, crime, education, insanity, pauperism, life expectancy, and disease. While these moral statistics were laden with paternalism, they nevertheless focused squarely on the physical, social, spiritual, and mental condition of the American people. For better or for worse, they placed human beings at the center of their calculating vision. Their unit of measure was bodies and minds, never dollars and cents. [...]

By the late 1850s, however, most Northern and Southern politicians and businessmen had abandoned such moral statistics in favor of economic metrics. In the opening chapter of his best-selling 1857 book against slavery, the author Hinton Helper measured the “progress and prosperity” of the North and the South by tabulating the cash value of agricultural produce that both regions had extracted from the earth. In so doing, he calculated that in 1850 the North was clearly the more advanced society, for it had produced $351,709,703 of goods and the South only $306,927,067. Speaking the language of productivity, Helper’s book became a hit with Northern businessmen, turning many men of capital to the antislavery cause. [...]

As corporate consolidation and factories’ technological capabilities ramped up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, additional techniques of capitalist quantification seeped from the business world into other facets of American society. By the Progressive Era, the logic of money could be found everywhere. “An eight-pound baby is worth, at birth, $362 a pound,” declared The New York Times on January 30th, 1910. “That is a child’s value as a potential wealth-producer. If he lives out the normal term of years, he can produce $2900 more wealth than it costs to rear him and maintain him as an adult.” The title of this article was “What the Baby Is Worth as a National Asset: Last Year’s Crop Reached a Value Estimated at $6,960,000,000.” During this era, an array of Progressive reformers priced not only babies but the annual social cost of everything from intemperance ($2 billion), the common cold ($21 a month per employee), typhoid ($271 million), and housewife labor ($7.5 billion), as well as the annual social benefit of skunks ($3 million), Niagara Falls ($122.5 million), and government health insurance ($3 billion).   

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The Atlantic: China vs. America in a Financial Game of 'Risk'

For China, Hambantota offered an important port that would bring raw material, such as minerals and metals from Africa and oil from the Middle East, via the Indian Ocean to China’s own ports. For Sri Lanka, whose economy is still struggling to recover from a devastating decades-long civil war, not to mention the impact of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Chinese money offered an important financial lifeline—until it didn’t. The port didn’t get the traffic it had hoped for, didn’t get the cargo that was expected, and didn’t create the jobs that were promised. Sri Lanka still had to repay its loans, though—and not just to China. Almost all of the revenue that Sri Lanka's government generates goes toward servicing its massive debt. The only solution that Sri Lanka could come up with was to lease the port back to China for 99 years and repay China with money from the lease. [...]

China views its actions through its own national-security prism. It goes to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that have a hard time securing international financing; offers them easy terms; builds desperately needed roads, railways, and ports; and uses the newly built facilities to transport raw material to feed its growing economy and population. There are advantages from the perspectives of both China and the countries receiving the loans. For one thing, Brad Parks, executive director of AidData, said in an email that factors that make China an attractive investor include its “policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of its partner countries.” [...]

But the U.S. and its allies in the region, primarily India and Japan, worry that projects like Hambantota in Sri Lanka and the seemingly easy terms of China’s loans put regional economies at a distinct disadvantage—not to mention putting the U.S. and its allies at a strategic disadvantage. Speaking Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Rex Tillerson, the U.S. secretary of state, warned that the Indo-Pacific region could fall victim to China’s “predatory economics.” He said China’s actions “result in saddling them [the countries in the region] with enormous amounts of debt.”

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Are So Many Monsters Hybrids?

Every culture, it seems, has monstrous mash-ups in their folklore and religion. Composite creatures appear in our earliest literature and turn up in Upper Paleolithic cave paintings. The sphinx in Giza, half-human and half-lion, is at least 4,500 years old. In the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 B.C.), heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu battle a hybrid monster named Humbaba, described as having a lion’s head and hands, but a scaly body. Vishnu, in India, manifests as a fierce lion-man monster, Narasimha, in several Hindu texts. Ganesha, son of Shiva, is humanoid with an elephant head. The many Greek hybrid creatures—centaurs, satyrs, mermaids, Pegasus, Hydra, griffins, chimeras—are constantly resurrected in Hollywood. Literature over the last two millennia, from Beowulf to Tolkien to Rowling, has added countless composite creatures and shape-shifters. More recently we have regular hybridizing of humans and computers.  

So why all the taxonomic mashing and mixing? Humans have an innate or an early developmental folk taxonomy of the world, according to psychologist Dan Sperber and anthropologist Pascal Boyer. We have a way of organizing the world into predictable categories for easy understanding, cognition, and manipulation. Even as small children, we seem capable of grouping people, birds, bugs, trees, and fish together into kinds—similar within their category but dissimilar across categories. Not only do kids tend to see whales as “fish,” but early natural history made this error too. Our folk taxonomy concerning whales reveals the unsophisticated quality of our natural classifications; if it swims in the water and looks like a fish, it’s a fish. To give our brains credit, however, our pre-scientific ancestors didn’t need a more nuanced understanding of whales, and we had as much knowledge about them as was probably necessary for survival. [...]

Category violations strongly arouse the human mind. When our expectations about the world—“humans have two arms,” “snakes don’t fly”—are disrupted by Vishnu, with dozens of arms, or flying snakes in the form of dragons, the images grab our attention and become cognitively “sticky.” They stick in our memories, recall very easily, and spread throughout the social group. Hybrid monsters, in other words, make excellent memes. Richard Dawkins first argued that while memes were cultural fragments or cognitive units, they were analogical to genes in the sense that they spread through populations without conscious design or purpose. Unnatural ideas or images survive and spread well because they surprise us, making them harder to forget or ignore.  [...]

Emotional associations are built into our folk taxonomy. While category mismatches arouse our curiosity and improve memory retention, hybrids that carry strong emotional associations (like arachnophobia) will be especially sticky. Effective horror (and religion) has figured out symbols and stories that unconsciously trigger our primitive emotions. As cultural theorist Mathias Clasen argues in his book Why Horror Seduces, similar monsters and horror stories work well on people of very different cultural backgrounds. Horror has universal power. In part, this is because human cognition is universally governed by those folk taxonomy categories, so violations will arouse anyone from Manhattan to Morocco. But more important are the universal emotional systems that link natural predator fear and dread with cultural images.

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openDemocracy: Catalunya and beyond: what’s after the nation-state?

On the one hand, European nations are increasingly unable to address the global challenges brought about by technological innovation, migration, climate change, or financial flows. Even more, the perseverance of national divisions and reciprocal vetoes leads to a worsening of policy choices and a narrowing of democratic spaces for all. This is dramatically evident in the European Union: where the inability to construct a transnational democracy leads to dysfunctional economic policies, lack of any credible policy on migration, tax competition between states and a race to the bottom on workers’ rights.

On the other hand, the nation state is being challenged from below. From Barcelona to Naples, citizens increasingly demand the right to greater participation in the decisions that affect their lives. The new municipalist experiences of Spain, placing citizen participation at their centre, testify to this demand. The European Union calls this ‘subsidiarity’. One of the most celebrated theorists behind Barcelona en Comu, Joan Subirats, calls it the sovereignty of proximity.  [...]

And equally at European level: for if the European Council serves to represent national governments and the European Parliament is meant to represent the common interests of citizens, then the time is surely ripe for a European Chamber of Cities and Regions, representing the territories and cities of Europe and acting as a democratic guarantor of, among other things, fiscal solidarity. We should take up Benjamin Barber’s idea of a global parliament of mayors and bring this to the heart of the debate on reforming the EU, as recently advocated also by Ulrike Guerot.

Part of the reason for the crisis of democracy in Europe is our collective inability to imagine and implement new political and democratic models. We live in extraordinary times, when everything is shifting under our very eyes. In times like these we need to have the courage and the ambition to relinquish our old convictions and our old institutions and begin preparing the world of tomorrow.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever?