December 2011
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Hibernation
Bears do it, bats do it, even hedgehogs from Europe do it. I’m doing it too — not quitting the Internet, but scaling back, conserving resources, while waiting for warmer, brighter times to pontificate. See you all in the spring.
November 2011
8 posts
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“Clothes should have words on them like fish should have clothes on them.”
– YES.
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“Sadly this, if nothing else, is what unites us. This dreadful unease. This...”
– From a great essay in McSweeney’s on Occupy Wall Street.
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What Are College Sports For?
They’re not for child rape, I think we can all agree. But the scandal1 of Jerry Sandusky is the latest in a series of events calling into question the outsized influence of sports programs (football and basketball, mainly) in American universities. Too many schools today are basically sports franchises with a side business in education — and the players don’t even get paid! For...
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“Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it’s an...”
– n+1 personals: Dating: An Anti-Education
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“Here’s my main problem with the debate around “should people study liberal arts...”
– Pacal-Emmanuel Gobry.
October 2011
6 posts
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“Now, since I’m going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure...”
– With excerpts from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the late Steve Jobs showing him trash-talking everyone from President Obama to John Mayer, I couldn’t help but remember this famous passage from Neal Stephenson’s essay, “In the Beginning was the Command Line.”
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interfluidity » The lump of unfairness fallacy →
mwfrost:
Fairness should never be a policy afterthought. Widely adhered norms of fair play are among the most valuable public goods a society can hold. A large part of why the financial crisis has been so corrosive is that people understand that major financial institutions violated these norms and got away with it, which leaves all of us uncertain about what our own standards of behavior should...
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“While I will readily confess I find it odd as something of a Burkean that I am...”
– Greg Djerejian, the Halley’s Comet of blogging, has a (mostly) positive assessment of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Well worth your time.
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A "Debt Jubilee"? →
The idea seems to be gaining steam, though the usual caveats — i.e., total political paralysis — apply. As I’ve said, though, a higher inflation target would likely be a fairer and more efficient way to achieve the goal of debt relief than targeted measures for homeowners or whomever.
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Reducing the Trade Deficit as the Keynesian Key to...
Thomas Geoghegan has an excellent essay in the latest issue of the Nation that aims to move beyond caricatures of Keynesian thought and explain what the man actually believed about getting economies out of depressions. As it turns out, Keynes was very concerned about countries running trade deficits and, related to that, the crowding out of investment in real goods and services by the financial...
September 2011
7 posts
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“To tell the time using a sundial you’d need calculus.”
– NASA discovers a “Tatooine-like” planet orbiting a binary star system. I’m now concocting a SF story about a planet in a binary system where a Bronze Age civilization, out of necessity, discovers calculus millennia before their Earth counterparts, subsequently taking to the stars...
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A Brief Rant on Money
In a time of uncertainty like ours, money fetishism can take hold rather easily. You know — goldbugs, Bitcoiners, folks who think that a mild uptick in inflation is a sign that the President and the Fed are “debasing the currency” — those kinds of people. Why is that?
If you’ve ever taken a intro economics course, you know that money serves three functions:
As a...
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Dave Winer: RSS is supposed to be really simple →
One of the creators of RSS says that the problem of RSS overload is due to the way most RSS readers are designed, not the format itself:
If you miss five days of reading the news because you were on vacation (good for you!) the newspaper you read the first day back isn’t five times as thick as the normal day’s paper. And it doesn’t have your name on the cover saying...
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Jacqui Cheng: RSS Is Poison →
I’m an active user of Google Reader, to put it mildly; but even I can recognize that having an information firehose doesn’t necessarily lead to becoming more informed, still less productive. Fortunately, Google Reader’s own trends feature allows you to easily see which sites you actually read regularly, which makes feed-pruning a relatively simple task.
The problem of RSS...
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Joffre the Giant on Alcohol and Children →
Worth reading in full. I particularly liked this part:
The important thing is that, while we try to be prudent and wise about what the kids are exposed to, an atmosphere of good cheer and openness pervades our lives. Modesty without good cheer is oppression. Alcohol without good cheer is drunkenness.
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“For most people, the summer of 2011 was bullshit. Business slowed down...”
– The Reformed Broker (via pegobry)
August 2011
33 posts
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“The education of ‘nontraditional’ students has been a subject...”
– I’m not saying I didn’t love St. John’s, but the example of Western Governors University looks more like the future of education than anything involving the liberal arts — and that’s a good thing. On the other hand, I think it’d be really cool if more schools...
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“I don’t intend to dismiss the idea that we can all make somewhat better...”
– Atrios. We’re so used to thinking in terms of personal morality that the idea of a social morality, with its own rules and folkways, is alien to us.
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“Probably one of the most disastrous side-effects for the long-term unemployed is...”
– What You Don’t Know About the Job Search: Responses From the Jobless
Want to share your joblessness story? Send us a note at aboutmyjob1@gmail.com, tweet us @TheAtlantic with the tag #AboutMyJob, or submit a post.
(via theatlantic)
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A Suggestion for E-Readers
Include a “Random Page” button. I seldom read paper books, even novels, sequentially1; I like to dive into something that seems interesting and then move from there to the rest of the text. But on a Kindle or other e-reader, that’s not really possible, save for typing in a random search term or something like that. Amazon, B&N, Apple: Take a lesson from the “random...
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Variety in Text Editors, or Keep Technology Weird
Note: This post started out as a standard kvetching about text editors and word processors, but somewhere along the way veered into questions about technology, innovation, and standardization. Caveat lector.
Let’s talk text editors, shall we? It seems like writing software these days has become focused on answering two needs:
Fullness of features, as epitomized by mainstream word...
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What Is Debt? An Interview With Economic... →
A must, must-read post on the origins of money and debt; its connections to social relations, violence and the state; and what that means when thinking about the current unpleasantness. While you’re waiting for Hurricane Irene to hit, take some time to read this.
(Hat tip to Chris Hayes for the link.)
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Barry Eichengreen on the Gold Standard →
A surprisingly fair-minded piece, while still acknowledging the fundamental battiness of the gold standard:
Historically, societies attracted to using gold as legal tender have dealt with this problem by empowering their governments to fix its price in domestic-currency terms (in the U.S. case, in dollars). But the idea that government should legislate the price of a particular commodity, be...
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A Follow-Up on the Fed
What exactly is the point of having an independent central bank that won’t exercise its independence? Time was, Paul Volcker could single-handedly induce a recession in order to stamp out high inflation, and neither Jimmy Carter nor Ronald Reagan, to my knowledge, suggested that his actions were “almost treasonous”, in Rick Perry’s words. Or is it only treasonous when the...
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Why is the Fed Hesitant to Do More for the... →
Good points from Mark Thoma, especially this one:
But the clincher is the fear that if they do end up creating inflation, the Fed could lose its independence, particularly if there is little to show for it in terms of stimulating the economy. If they lose their independence, the response to every future recession would be less effective. This makes recessions more costly, and when the higher...
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“In the late 1970s and ’80s, that might have been true — but today,...”
– It’s hard to deny that Steve Jobs has been enormously influential on the development of both desktop and mobile computing, but influence isn’t everything. In other news, the Linux kernel turns 20 years old today.
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“To me, Apple exists in the spirit of the people that work there, and the sort of...”
– Steve Jobs, 1985 (via onethingwell)
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Karl Smith on Socialism →
That word does not mean what conservatives think it means:
Have you ever been pissed off at the fact that your neighborhood school doesn’t teach any of the stuff you want and it feels like you kid is just wasting her valuable time going to all of these pointless classes for no reason. THAT, is what socialism feels like. That is what the lack of value creation feels like.
Its not that you...
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“In the east coast, earthquakes are not nearly as common (that’s a good...”
– Here’s your explanation for why the entire Eastern seaboard felt what was, in relative terms, only a modestly powerful earthquake.
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“Slaves were the principal form of wealth in the South — indeed in the...”
– James McPherson, as quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s often forgotten just how central slavery was to the economy of the United States before the Civil War, but it shouldn’t be. Slavery was hardly tangential to the conflict.
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Brian Phillips on Corruption in FIFA →
The bizarre decision to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively, is just the tip of the iceberg:
FIFA corruption matters… not because the integrity of the [Executive Committee] makes much difference to the average American or European fan, but because FIFA isn’t a closed system. Its decisions, however farcical in themselves, open the door for better or...
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Obama to Propose Stein, Clarida for Fed Board →
Some good news for once. Econobloggers appear to be unanimous (e.g., Tyler Cowen here and here, Dylan Matthews here) that these are good choices in terms of moving the Fed in a more proactive direction. I assume, given that Clarida is a Republican, that the Obama administration has a plan to get these selections approved in the Senate. We’ll see.
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The Perils of Presidentialism, Energy Edition
From The Hill (emphasis added):
President Obama, during a speech Thursday in Holland, Mich., urged Congress to quickly pass a slew of bills on issues ranging from patent reform to trade deals. But one topic was conspicuously missing from his to-do list for lawmakers: energy legislation.
Obama instead touted steps his administration has taken without Congress, including the new...
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Josh Marshall: Is Mail Dying? →
He notes that mail volume at the Postal Sevice has fallen 20% in the last four years, one of many factors putting it in financial jeopardy:
This is a big historic, cultural shift. But it does make me wonder how viable the USPS as we now know it will be in the coming years. Big systems like a postal system can only survive with massive economies of scale. Without the bills and bulk mail and...
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“Innovations in information and communication technology starting in the 1960s...”
– Daron Acemoglu’s case for economic growth as the cure for our debt and employment problems is compelling, particularly this recommendation. His mention of “leadership” in green technology is a bit misleading, though — investment won’t in itself give the US an edge...
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The dysfunction that lies at the very heart of... →
Michael Cohen:
America is increasingly moving toward a parliamentary system in which politicians, rather than voting along regional lines or in pursuit of parochial interests, cast their ballot solely based on whether there is a D or R next to their name. Such a system might work well in the UK, but in the US, with its institutional focus on checks and balances and the many tools available for...
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Jonathan Bernstein on Liberals and the Fed →
As much as I’d like to see the White House unveil a comprehensive jobs and infrastructure plan, the Federal Reserve is now pretty much the only authority in Washington that is both willing and able to support economic recovery, making the Obama administration’s neglect in filling the two vacancies on the Board of Governors, even with recess appointments, all the more mystifying. But it...
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“This is the reality that liberals need to face: Much of the Republican...”
– Ross Douthat pretty much says it all.
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Time for Debt Cancellation?
I remarked a while back that cancelling debt as a way to spur economic recovery would be a radical solution that the financial sector, for one, wouldn’t stand for. So what does it say about the mess we’re in that conservative economist Carmen Reinhart1 (via David Frum) is now all but recommending cancellation of at least some household debt?
“Until we deal head-on with the...
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Maggie Koerth-Baker: 3 things you need to know... →
A good rundown on both the pros and cons of using biofuels. My own take is that they’re probably a wash as far as climate change impact is concerned; in fact, their main benefit will likely be in bolstering energy security — i.e., cushioning the blow of rising oil prices — more than anything else.
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Supply-side vs. demand-side recessions →
An important point from Noah Smith (no relation) — recessions accompanied by lower output and lower prices, as is currently the case, are invariably due to shortfalls in aggregate demand:
So it seems that the stories that conservatives tell about the recession - “policy uncertainty,” “recalculation,” or even a “negative shock to financial technology” -...