Monday 8 September 2008

Random round-up

My old comrades at the TUC have put out another interesting pamphlet in the Touchstone series. This one (PDF) is about the super-rich and is really punchy, polemical number. Well worth a read over lunchtime.

Still on the union stuff, I came across an interesting point about the impact of sleep deprivation on negotiations in the paper 'Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior' by George Lowenstein. Very simply, sleep deprivation is likely to make people more willing to reach an agreement, just for the sake of some shut eye. This paper, along with a stack of other interesting ones, is available in the book Exotic Preferences which is generally ace.

Snowflake has a great post on Obama vs Palin.

And Shuggy (belated addition to my blogroll) has a great post on political beliefs that I think ties in neatly with what I posted t'other day on clustering of beliefs.

Finally, as usual, reading Stumbling And Mumbling makes me question why I am blogging when someone else is doing it so much better. I reckon the title says it all. As I've blogged before, I like Robert Shiller's emphasis on the psychological/cultural impact of rising asset values. But I don't think a lot of people have yet thought through what impact a sustained reverse will have on popular ideas about society. I suspect one of the first casualties will be the argument that we should just leave the financial sector to itself as we all benefit from increased tax revenues, trickle down etc. But it could go deeeper than that.

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