Loudon Wain­wright III has released a new album, Songs for the New Depres­sion, that fit­ting­ly fea­tures “The Krug­man Blues,” an homage to the Prince­ton, Nobel Prize-win­ning econ­o­mist, Paul Krug­man, who has doc­u­ment­ed Amer­i­ca’s eco­nom­ic spi­ral in The New York Times. You can watch the Krug­man Blues above, and get the full album at Wain­wright’s web site.

via The New York­er

Peter Singer, an Aus­tralian-born philoso­pher who teach­es at Prince­ton, cre­at­ed the ani­mal rights move­ment back in the 1970s, and, more recent­ly, launched a cam­paign to end world pover­ty. One can’t con­tem­plate pover­ty with­out also con­sid­er­ing greed, and that brings us to the clip above. Inter­viewed in 2009, Singer sug­gests that greed dri­ves us bio­log­i­cal­ly (as does social col­lab­o­ra­tion for­tu­nate­ly). Greed helps us sur­vive and inno­vate. But there is also a point where it becomes point­less and patho­log­i­cal, and that’s what we have wit­nessed in the finan­cial world. Greed brought us Bernie Mad­off. But it has also brought us (my infer­ences) bankers who cre­ate a cat­a­stro­phe one year and take record bonus­es the next. And it has brought us to the point where  our coun­try has dan­ger­ous­ly slipped off of its demo­c­ra­t­ic moor­ings. Lloyd Blank­fein, this clip is for you. Thanks Ted for send­ing this one along.

Look­ing for free phi­los­o­phy cours­es? Vis­it the Phi­los­o­phy sec­tion of our Free Course col­lec­tion.

What if peo­ple behaved like banks? Or, more pre­cise­ly, what if indi­vid­u­als hold­ing “under­wa­ter” mort­gages stopped fol­low­ing the social norms of ‘per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty’ and ‘promise-keep­ing’ and instead act­ed like cap­i­tal­ist play­ers in a free mar­ket? Most would dump their sink­ing mort­gages and walk away. That’s the find­ing of Brent White, a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, who has pub­lished a new paper called “Under­wa­ter and Not Walk­ing Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Man­age­ment of the Hous­ing Cri­sis.” (PDF) The bot­tom line is that home­own­ers and banks play by two dif­fer­ent sets of rules. Main Street accepts the “emo­tion­al con­straints … active­ly cul­ti­vat­ed by the gov­ern­ment, the finan­cial indus­try,” and they hold the bag. Wall Street acts in its own self inter­est and gets a fresh start. The only thing they have in com­mon these days are (you guessed it) guns.

Just for the record: I’m not advo­cat­ing a posi­tion here, and I don’t hold an under­wa­ter mort­gage…