Marginal Revolution: Writing naked puts and how the financial sector makes so much money

Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.

via Marginal Revolution: Writing naked puts and how the financial sector makes so much money.

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Setting a Strawman on Fire?

So I hope to accomplish. I read a lot of right wing blogs, many here on WordPress. They mostly paint the most hideous picture of progressive, and what they supposedly believe. But I think they’re just setting up and knocking down strawmen. Here’s a pretty ugly version of the strawman in holiday garb:

While this may seem obnoxious, and it is, it is also common of what you’ll find on some of the right wing blogs. You’ll find some on the right margin of the post. Nice Deb in particular re-posts a lot of this kind of thing.

Main themes: “Progressives” who runs the schools, hate the military, think Muslims are always benign, dislike traditional Christianity on display, suggest Homosexuality is OK, and over all love diversity. Over the all last point may be true, but do all these ideas represent what real Progressive think? I don’t think its fair. Let’s look at that bland statement attributed to Progressive “Islam=Good”.

On the philospher’s blog, that is I think mildly progressive, a whole discussion was hosted on if profiling should be part of airport security and if so how. Admittedly the tone was a cautious willingness to discuss the topic, not angery dismissal of any one is reluctant like on most conservative outlets. But in any case the stereotype is hardly upheld.

In another Progressive outlet the New Republic, you can read this month about the ambiguous feeling in attending a film dealing with the stoning of women in a Islamic nation.