Gregory Clark has written a fascinating new book about social mobility called The Son Also Rises. The evidence from the history of surnames, Clark says, “confirms a permanent selection in pre-industrial England for the genes of the economically successful, and against the genes of the poor and criminal”. Clark finds that, more than in China, for centuries literate, entrepreneurial Europeans had been out-breeding poorer ones, their genes cascading down into the working class through downward mobility.
"The idea that innovation happens because you put science in one end of the pipe and technology comes out the other end goes back to Francis Bacon, and it is largely wrong. History shows that (public) science is the daughter of (private) technology at least much as it is the mother. Good universities recognise this and adjust their research programmes to what interests industry. The steam engine led to the insights of thermodynamics, not vice versa. The dye industry drove chemistry. The centrifuge and X-ray crystallography, developed for the textile industry, led to the structure of DNA."
"Already before 1990 billions of dollars in roubles already were being siphoned off via Latvia (Grigory Loutchansky and Nordex played a major role), while co-op leaders KGB and army leaders already were creating proto-predatory financial structures."
http://michael-hudson.com/2014/05/the-n
Latvia’s Neoliberal War Against Labor and Industry
"Now running more than twenty years, it is a test for how long voters can be distracted by non-economic factors (e.g., in Latvia, ethnic strains with its Russian-speaking population reflecting resentment against the Soviet occupation) rather focusing on labor, industry, agriculture, or in short, the national interest itself. Eurozone nations for their part defended their own interests, treating the Baltics as a field for exploitation, much as Third World countries were treated a generation earlier. Latvia’s free trade policy left its trade to be shaped by other nations’ protectionist policies, and its economy increasingly dependent on foreign banks (at interest)."
http://michael-hudson.com/2014/05/stock
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