Most Ph.D. students spend their days
reading esoteric books and stressing out about the tenure-track job market.
Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just
used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the
global austerity movement. Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics
circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, "Does High Public
Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and
Rogoff," (Published April 15,2013) that
took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.
Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff's data set, then
calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it.[1]
In recent years, Reinhart and
Rogoff’s results have been highly influential as support for austerity policies
in both Europe and the United
States
Readers
might wonder whether it is possible to see this news item in the stars. To let
readers decide for themselves, I present the chart for the Crescent Moon of
April 14, just a day before the paper was published. Note Mercury on the
Ascendant square Pluto-Kronos-Hades on the meridian axis.
Hades: handling highly detailed
work; mistakes; research; investigation
into the root cause of problems.
Mercury: facts, interest in data, youth.
Kronos: leaders, experts or people
in positions of authority
Pluto: finance, debt
Hades-Mercury-Kronos-pluto: Mistakes
in calculations by finance experts [3]
As a rule
all the phases of the Moon should be referred back to the New Moon stars for
greater meaning. Writing about the New Moon of April 10, Nick Fiorenza says:
Our April 10, 2013 New Moon
prominently conjoins the star Revati in Pisces. It conjoins Eris and Mars, and
the star Baten Kaitos of Cetus within 2°, and Venus within 3.25°. All conjoin
the stars that form the outstretched arms of Princess Andromeda.
Revati, Zeta Pisces, literally means
riches, money, wealth, and financial resources. Prominent alignments with
Revati can indicate material wealth gained from participating in the dramatic
psycho-emotional world of human affairs. This zodiakal longitude is a couple of
degrees to that of Baten Kaitos, the belly of ole Cetus, where the
transformative process occurs while in the whale of human emotional experience.
Revati and Baten Kaitos also mark the exalted seat of Venus—bringing attention
to the relation of the flow of abundance, emotional clarity, and living from
the heart. Venus rules money and assets; and Venus dramatically influences
economics (especially its retrogrades), as is well known in astrological
financial forecasting.
Going
further with our analysis of the Crescent Moon chart, we notice that the Sun
(24ar36) and Mars (25ar25) are both conjunct the star Acamar (23ar27). This
star, in the celestial river Eridanus, is often seen as a dam in the river of
life – an appropriate image for a kind of stoppage in the flow of financial
abundance – the removal of which could free the ‘chained’ princess Andromeda
(symbolic of the public in distress).
[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/grad-student-who-shook-global-austerity-movement.html
[3]
Delineate v2: Martha Lang Wescott
Comments
Post a Comment