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Ending the Creditor’s Paradise

Brown University's Eastman professor of political economy, Mark Blyth, author of 'Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea', asks:

What would you tell six hundred leading German social democrats about their party’s handling of the Eurocrisis?

for jacobinmag.com (via 3quarksdaily.com):

Austerity as economic policy simply doesn’t work. In the cases where it looked like it worked, something else was really doing the work, usually the devaluation of a sovereign currency at the same time as the expansion of a much larger trading partner gave exports a short-term boost. Budgets were cut as exports expanded, but it wasn’t the cuts that mattered, it was the expansion.

But I have stood here before and spoken about Austerity, so let’s take the few minutes we have here today to look forward rather than backwards.

All eyes are on Greece and the possibility of default or “Grexit.” Indeed, it’s an impossible position for all sides. The Greeks cannot pay back what they owe, given that the policies enacted to help them grow have resulted in the collapse of nearly a third of their economy. The young and the talented have left, leaving pensioners and the public sector behind.

But to recognize that fact and accommodate policy opens up issues in debtor countries such as Ireland and Portugal and Spain that creditor countries such as Germany do not want to deal with.

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Fundamental theories of nature aren’t allowed to hide information

Giulio Chiribella in Nautilus (via 3quarksdaily) writes:

Let’s play a game. You get a box with two compartments and one ball. The ball could be in either compartment with equal probability, and my job is to guess which one. Ok, it’s not the most exciting game, but at least it’s fair. My odds are 50/50.

But suppose I know that your box was produced in a factory where a conveyor belt brought boxes to a cannon, which shot balls into one compartment or another depending on a coin toss. The coin toss was done once a day, and all the boxes produced on the same day have the ball in the same compartment. If I managed to get a box that was produced on the same day as yours, I would be able to win the game with certainty. So much for being fair.

The lesson is clear: Whether or not our game is fair depends on whether or not the ball in your box is correlated with some other system in my possession. In order to be sure that I don’t cheat, you need to collect all the systems that are correlated with your box and keep them safely in your control. But how can you be confident that you’ve collected all of them? The strongest guarantee is that your systems are in what physicists call a “pure state,” which means that nothing else can be correlated with it, and that you have maximal knowledge of your systems. A “mixed state,” on the other hand, gives you only partial knowledge, and some essential information can hide elsewhere.

And just like that, we have come to an idea at the heart of quantum mechanics, called the Purification Principle.

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