26 & 23 years old

How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture

There may have been a reason for the university’s response. According to the timeline, the tech team detected brief activity from China on the netbook — something that occurs all the time but still represents potential trouble.

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Michael Sussmann, a Washington lawyer and a former federal prosecutor of computer crime, said that M.I.T. was the victim and that, without more information, it had to assume any hackers were “the Chinese, even though it’s a 16-year-old with acne.” Once the police were called in, the university could not back away from the investigation. “After there’s a referral, victims don’t have the opportunity to change their mind.” 

China, oh noes!

A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream

In writing Mr. Sunkara can come on like a one-man insult-comedy squad, whether the target is regular whipping boys like the Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein (“a young liberal with a lust for properly punctuated policy memos”) or the capitalist vampire squid itself. 

But in person he’s more straightforwardly earnest and quick to emphasize that the magazine he founded in his dorm room has evolved into a collective endeavor. Jacobin’s success, he said, springs from the highly cohesive politics of the four co-editors he has recruited and their shared commitment to advancing a critique of liberalism that is free of obscurantist academic theory or “cheap hooks.” 

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“Seth had a title with nine words and a semicolon,” he recalled. “I crossed it out and wrote ‘Burn the Constitution.’ ” 

That article, along with “Zombie Marx,” a critique of chapter-and-verse Marxist economics by Mike Beggs, a young lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney who Mr. Sunkara met (like Mr. Ackerman) through the e-mail list of Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer, got some pickup on blogs. But it was a packed Jacobin-organized panel on the Occupy movement, held in a downtown Manhattan bookstore three weeks after the protests began in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, that really put the magazine on the map, drawing attention from Politico and Glenn Beck.

From Beggs's "Zombie Marx":

Inflation was simply not seen as an independent phenomenon worthy of analysis, as it would become in the 20th century when the gold anchor loosened and dropped away. It was enough to know that the anchor would assert itself eventually. The problem for the state or central bank was not the value of money per se, but the convertibility of particular monies. But in our world of chronic, if low-level, inflation and floating exchange rates, we need different things from our monetary theory. We have no choice but to engage with new questions Marx could not have imagined – and here the reference point should be Keynes and the post-Keynesians.

I think there is a big point in here somewhere. The Left and Marxists have been very dismissive of monetary policy. German Marxists running their government in the 1920s were into the Gold Standard. But if there was no Fed in the 19th century, there were in fact periods of inflation and deflation. William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech was given in 1896.