Well, thirty years ago, Nixon was nearly impeached and subsequently resigned for spying on the political opposition. Today, political surveillance is just another ordinary function of “total information awareness” and the “war on terror”.

What makes this of more than theoretical interest is the Rs have only a one-seat majority. If, as seems likely, the Dems pick up a seat in November, it will be 31-31. Giving bruno a second vote seems absurd, but without some tie-breaking mechanism the legislature can’t function. In fact, it wouldn’t even be clear that Bruno still is majority leader come Jan. 1, 2009. So on top of everything else Spitzer may well have left us with a constitutional crisis…

I’ve read quite a bit of history and as far as I can tell the banking industry has always attracted its share of fraudsters, charlatans and thieves. The people in the South Sea Bubble hardly impressed me with their moral uprighteousness. You appear to be implying that there is something special about recent history. Can you please state the dates and country where the banking sector was run by honourable, upright men, immune to the temptations of corruption?

Can you also please state the dates and the country where no upholder of public morality was found to have been doing the dirty?

Through cycles of advance and retreat, building and collapse.

I do not believe that the cycles of advance were characterised by less corruption than the cycles of retreat.

It is not the same as it ever was. We are in a period of non-linear instability, facing grave risks.

Given that people have been saying things like “we are in a period of non-linear instability, facing grave risks” for all of recorded human history, I would say that it is the same as it ever was.

The rampant spread of corruption and false information magnifies the danger.

This is hard to believe, as corruption has not been spreading, rampantly or otherwise. Every society I know about has problems with corruption, right through human history, and there strikes me as nothing special about this particular time.

Look, you’re not going to convince me by making vague grand pronouncements of doom. So many people make those that I stopped caring years ago. Come up with some evidence that there’s been an increase in corruption.

I guess I don’t see it. Yellow journalism had its share in the 19th century (Remeber the Maine!). Corruption? The political machines are shadows of what they were, and anyone with a computer can now report to an audience of millions. The risk and ease of exposure of corruption is far higher. Bribery is frowned upon (at least in the US and parts of Europe) as a means of deciding public contracts, and penalties for individuals and firms that are caught can be severe.

I might agree that the end of the cold war shook up a unifying theme for many americans and let’s us sit back and debate bushs’ sins vs. clintons’ – while this has non-linear instability and is a lot of fun, you have to admit the stakes are a lot smaller than Kennedy in Cuba or Reagan in Reykjavik.

1. He settled the long-standing Campaign for Fiscal Equity Case, in which the state had stonewalled for years on a court order to provide school funding more equitably, on terms far more favorable to high-need urban districts than anyone had expected. We’re talking about billions of additional state dollars for public school in NYC, Buffalo, Yonkers, Syracuse, etc. And characteristically he did this not by comprehensively revising the school aid formula to make it more rational and transparent as well as fair.

2. He took major steps to extend insurance coverage, including raising the eleigibility threshold for Child Health plus to 400% of the poverty line—the highest such threshold in the country. And when the feds balked at paying their share, he went forward with all state funds. (In this year’s budget—we’ll see now if it goes through.)

3. He was in the early stages of a comprehenisve state health care plan that would put New York in the lead in state approaches to universal coverage.

4. He was committed to sentencing reform and was spending serious political capital on closing a number of state prisons.

5. He appointed some fantastic people to top state posts, such as Deborah Bachrach to run the state Medicaid program and Patricia Smith to run the Labor Department. Progressives really could not have asked for better picks.

6. Unlike various triangulators you could name, he was focused on building the state Democratic party and played a big role in moving the Dems toward a majority in the state Senate.

None of which is to defend his conduct in this case. Rather, it makes it all the mroe unforgivable—he didn’t just wreck his own career but a lot of real and important work.

Through cycles of advance and retreat, building and collapse. But each cycle of collapse is more destructive. World Wars I and II were vastly more destructive than prior conflicts, but nuclear winter is an extinction level event.

The tension between the most advanced achievements of modern society and its most pernicious regressive tendencies is enormous. Vast resources are now devoted to propaganda efforts that are aimed straight at genocidal bloodshed (THE WAR ON TERROR). The commercialization of news makes it profitable to get people angry, excited, and antagonistic. The nuclear weapons these people may use when they go to war can kill us all. That is why some forecasters do not think human civilization can make it through this century.

It is not the same as it ever was. We are in a period of non-linear instability, facing grave risks. The rampant spread of corruption and false information magnifies the danger.

Oh well, everyone dip in to the 401K to keep a roof overhead while Bernanke bails out the fantasy salesmen on Wall Street.

Given that corruption has been in existance in every society I can think of for the whole of human history, if corruption causes slow disintegration, how do you think any thing got built in the first place?

If anything, I think current western countries have less corruption and more trust than is the norm throughout human history.

I took a look at Henry Farrell’s trust writing, and it seems to be just an offshoot of Professor Robert Putnam’s method of documenting the historical importance of trust. This is Aristotelian observation, not engineering. For centuries, craftsmen knew the importance and value of steel. But it took a very long time to discover how to make steel in large quantities.

There is a huge void in world academia today resulting from what appears to be a sort of specialization separation anxiety preventing the exploration of a virgin territory (Trust Studies). Nobody in academia seems to have the guts to put trust studies on an empirical basis and talk about the engineering and synthesis of trust. Nobody wants to move from observation to production, and the reason is there are no departments or chairs for “Trust Studies.”

Never before have so many scholars looked so resolutely at the wrong topics as a new era of enlightenment dawned. The very geographic basis of university organization is now an open question, but it might as well be 1908 as 2008 as far as most faculties are concerned.

Academics the world over are waiting for some untenured adventurer or fool to stumble on the key to trust synthesis. Once career risk has been tamed, they will then dutifully pursue research and teach the courses of a respectable discipline.

I like Spitzer’s vigorous actions as NYS A-G but he seemed like a bull in a china-shop as governor. In many ways, he reminded me of Bill Clinton—smart, hard-working, committed but also arrogant (because his certainty of his conclusions exceeded the accuracy of his judgment) and unwilling to listen to advisors). One big difference is that Clinton was seen as too willing to compromise while Spitzer was too unwilling. But, of course, Clinton was able to become a successful governor. One wonders whether Spitzer could have reformed in the way that Clinton did between his first and second, nonconsecutive terms as governor.

I’m pretty sure that our very own Henry Farrell is working on this, or a closely related problem.