Titivil

the wacky economic history of david brooks

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:20:47 -0500

If you would have read David Brooks' latest vanilla stab at immortality, these are the three things you would have learned about the causes of the current state of our American economy:

One, smart people entering non-business fields has gummed up our economic engine. Specifically, he cites "less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and non-profit activism," so if we are looking for who to blame, it is the lawyers, bankers, lobbyists and, um, community organizers.

Two, the reason that our manufacturing base eroded because of the middle class and their finicky shopping habits. You see, as our middle class "tried to build lifestyles that fit their station, consumption and debt levels soared," and as you know, the last thing a robust manufacturing sector needs is soaring consumption.

Three, the American underclass is under-parented, poorly schooled, and only worth about fifty words. (This is of course the least controversial of these fictions because, well, it's just poor people we're talking about.)

I used to think that David Brooks was well-intended but just coming from a different perspective — like maybe he's got a secret but shameful crush on Ayn Rand or something. But I fear that beneath his warmed-milk-before-bedtime facade lurks an actually crazy person willing to misstate history for some political purpose.

Which, on the good side, would maybe stop everyone from talking about how lukewarm he is.

terry jones

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:49:31 -0500

Just realized that I haven't written anything about that dimestore preacher in Florida who wants to burn-Koran his way to fame and fortune. So here:

Dude's a twenty-four karat douchebag, and equally embarrassing to the faithful and the other douchebags who just want to hate Muslims in peace. And whose fault? Every scumbag who tried to score political points off the Cordoba House. It's a terrible thing that it's about to happen — i.e., people will die if it does — but in the final reckoning the law of unintended consequences holds, and the douchebags deserve each other whether they like it or not.

Remember: there can be only one.

crazy for breakfast

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:05:42 -0500

Since you've already probably read and enjoyed (who doesn't enjoy Gail other than evildoers?) this morning's Gail Collins op-ed on what she calls the "crazy 5%", let me enrich your reading experience by calling your attention to a similar concept put forward by John Rogers nearly five years ago — the Crazification Factor:

Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgment. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

Now there seems to be a discrepancy. Collins' crazy five percent is a much lower figure than the 27% Crazification Factor, but I think that the discrete difference between DSM-VI crazy and merely crazified explains the looseness in the metrics. And oddly, if I had to think about it, I think that we've gone well beyond 27% in the intervening years.

moscow! heat! swimming!

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:49:16 -0500

Deep within this otherwise sober contemplation of the possible effects of extreme weather as effectuated by climate change walks a writer with a deep sense of humor concerning the Russians:

Moscow, suffering from a once-in-a-millennium heat wave, tallied thousands of deaths, a toll that included hundreds of inebriated, overheated citizens who stumbled into rivers and lakes and didn’t come out.

Now, that's true and all (the online version has a link proving so, while the paper edition, of course, did not), but that sentence comes awful early in the piece, so you really get distracted for a second, wondering if this is going to be an op-ed on climate change or whether Russians swimming abilities are more affected by heat or vodka. And when you find out that it's the former and not the latter, you are suddenly less likely to finish the piece (unless, like me, you read to the end to see if there is more about why lakes and rivers in Russia are put in places easily walked into).

superchunk: recommend!

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:23:44 -0500

So yesterday I spent the day (while doing all the things that needed to be done) listening to the streaming preview of Superchunk's new album, "Majesty Shredding". At least six times?

And now here it is the next day and I believe that I'll spend a goodly portion of this day as well streaming that fucker. It's a nostalgic sound, but it's crisp and it hasn't changed in embarrassing ways. In fact, it's pretty unrelentingly Superchunk, a whole lot less tentative than the past two albums (from all those years ago). NPR, who is hosting the stream, describes it as "fist-pumping rock" and you cringe, in the same way that someone who is 60 years old now cringed in 1971 when their dad said something was "cool". But I'm sitting here, churning out high-quality dayjob materials, and there is actually some notional fist I am pumping.

You can pre-order the album from Merge Records.

david brooks fanfiction

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:40:05 -0500

Hey, visitor who clicked this site looking for "David Brooks fanfiction":

Ew!

But I hope you enjoyed your probably brief stay.

fdr's timely but old words

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:18:39 -0500

Have some Labor Day! As is bouncing around Tumblr, sizeable portions of the Labor Day Address of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1936, well worth five minutes of your time in between the BBQ and the packing away of your summer whites:

There are those who fail to read both the signs of the times and American history. They would try to refuse the worker any effective power to bargain collectively, to earn a decent livelihood and to acquire security. It is those short-sighted ones, not labor, who threaten this country with that class dissension which in other countries has led to dictatorship and the establishment of fear and hatred as the dominant emotions in human life.
All American workers, brain workers and manual workers alike, and all the rest of us whose well-being depends on theirs, know that our needs are one in building an orderly economic democracy in which all can profit and in which all can be secure from the kind of faulty economic direction which brought us to the brink of common ruin seven years ago.

Delete "seven" and insert "two" and it's like something the ghost of FDR wrote for right freakin' now and not something from the archives.

bill spaceman lee back in the saddle

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:37:00 -0500

Need a hero? I nominate Bill "Spaceman" Lee, 63 year old ex-Big League pitcher who just got the win in an independent league game yesterday, with a respectable two runs over five and a third frames.

If you're a baseball fan you're familiar with the Spaceman, and if you're not, look him up. He was a genuine "character" over his decade and change in the Bigs, and has remained so since, making bats in Vermont and barnstorming as an ambassador for the game (as opposed to for MLB). He was an early and vocal proponent for both free agency and marijuana, which he said protected him from traffic exhaust as he would jog to Olympic Stadium in Montreal before games. And he has given a thought or two to philosophy:

I think about the cosmic snowball theory. A few million years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won’t matter if I get this guy out.

It would not be so bad a thing to be Bill Lee.

stieg larsson did not like big finance

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 10:46:42 -0500

So I did finish that book about the Swedish Girl Polymath and Her Tattoos, and I have to say that I was very impressed with how not-bad it is. I'm still seeing three of four copies being read on the subway everyday, so the Stieg-Larrson genre is alive and well, if not already ubiquitous. It is a little surprising, though — it is not a page-turner in the classic American sense. The plot is not so much propelled as it is tugged gently along, and the novel itself is much more clinical than it is cinematic. It is an odd duck, but I liked it.

And not to spoil anything, but the protagonist (or one of the protagonists, I guess), is a financial reporter, which is an unlikely archetype for a hero to anyone but me, who for some reason keeps getting strangely drawn to financial reporters. There is a lot of dry prose concerning financial issues — how the sausage gets made, as it were — which culminates with a nice bit of a speech from the financial reporter concerning the difference between the stock market and the economy and how the interests of the markets and finance in general are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the good people of Sweden. Well, it's set in Sweden, so let's say the the interests of all the friends and neighbors.

So basically it's anti-21st century free market capitalism. Please read more Stieg Larsson, America.

philip stricker: you have imminetized the idiocracy

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:23:08 -0500

Congratulations, son, you are now officially a US voter:

Philip Stricker, 21, a biology major who voted for Mr. Obama but says he has not been paying much attention to politics lately, uses a nontechnical term to describe the phenomenon.
“There’s a vibe,” he said on a recent afternoon, while pumping weights at the gym. “Right now it seems like Republicans just care a lot more than Democrats.”

All you need to become an official member of the US electorate the laziness required to use "vibes" as the basis of making big decisions and a terminal lack of curiosity.

To become a seasoned US voter, you need to add a stiff defensiveness to anyone pointing out the obvious fact that you are a by-definition know-nothing and perhaps should not be qualified to drive an automobile let alone participate in an electoral democracy.

We'll give young Master Stricker a few years and see if he develops this bitter sense of ignorance-self-entitlement. Or maybe he's a fast learner?

tom scocca on sharks, predictability

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:53:10 -0500

Tom Scocca pretty much captures all that is wrong about the Internet in a comments thread to an unremarkable news story in the Washington Post. It's a story about a shark. The comments go just like you'd expect. I don't have to even excerpt them! You in fact don't even have to click and read them, because you know exactly how those comment threads about nothing go Hitler in fifteen minutes or less.

Also Tom Scocca sums it up:

The Internet is an instinctive killing machine, and if it stops swimming and attacking, it dies.

I would add that all that is wrong about the Internet is also all that is wrong about a whole lot of other things.

yup, we're talking about boobs

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:17:31 -0500

Why is it that the ironing board is the go-to simile for flatness? Of all the interesting features of ironing boards, flatness falls pretty far down the list, with weight/sturdieness ratio and collapsing-leg-function both being far more fascinating. I'd be much more compelled by "as hard to wrestle out of a closet as an ironing board" or "as ubiquitous but archaic as an ironing board".

And flatness is not really that distinctive of a feature. Within reach from where I sit, flat things include my desk, the floor, the walls, the door, the mousepad and the CRT. Obviously, a durable simile is more concerned with color than it is accuracy, otherwise you could skip the simile entire and just say "planar". But if you're sticking with the simile construction, how about "as flat as a marble counter" or "as flat as Kansas" or (and this is a remembered one from childhood) "as flat as a flitter".

Further: note that the piece linked avoided use of any phrase referencing "a handful". Maybe victory, probably defeat.

william gibson on google

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:38:03 -0500

William Gibson is smarter than you:

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

The excerpt is from an NYT op-ed Gibson contributed, on just what Google is now. It's good stuff.

At the risk of hero worship, I've been impulsively re-reading the entire Gibson canon for the past eighteen months, in the hopes that cool insight is something I can pound into my own head.

beer thrown at optimism

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:15:45 -0500

Visiting the Yahoo! mainpage for nostalgia's sake, this is the first headline I noticed:

Private sector unexpectedly cuts 10,000 jobs in August

I even read the story to make sure that there was no inaccuracy or bait-and-switch in the headline. There's not. It's a financial story, concerning projected figures being revised to actual figures. It's a little bit jargony.

But if there is a person living who can be ambushed by the private sector cutting jobs, then this is a person that should not be gainfully employed in the economics field. Plastics. Plastics is the future, my easily-surprised-by-the-obvious friend.

uppity hedge funders

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:02:02 -0500

Aaron Ross Sorkin (who only writes in SCOOPS!) today has the story of how high finance wizards who supported our president as a candidate are not so supportive now that he is president. Or at least one or two. The primary wizard cited is hedge fund manager and former Obama-supporter Daniel S. Loeb:

“As every student of American history knows, this country’s core founding principles included nonpunitive taxation, constitutionally guaranteed protections against persecution of the minority and an inexorable right of self-determination,” [Loeb] wrote. “Washington has taken actions over the past months, like the Goldman suit that seem designed to fracture the populace by pulling capital and power from the hands of some and putting it in the hands of others.”

It may be a story that Wall Street is deserting the White House, as Wall Street likes to buy candidacies, and they have a lot of money. But the bigger story is that Loeb is a terrible history student, as the core founding principles he brings up are one-for-three. Non-punitive taxation? Let's go to the source — it's not in there. Article 1, Section 8 grants Congress the right to lay and collect taxes, but does not mention how punitive they are allowed to be. Persecution of minorities? Considering that it was nearly a century until the 13th Amendment was passed, that's laughable on the face of it. I'll give self-determination, just because an act of self-determination happened, though you could argue that our Western Expansion was a pretty historic example of the denial of self-determination to a whole lot of indigenous people.

So Loeb is mostly wrong. So there.

And to me these rich people yakking about free market capitalism and the creeping Nazi menace of government regulation are not so much whining as they are overtly trying to bribe. "If you dare to protect consumers, if you dare suggest that our billions in hedge fund profits should be taxed like income, then we'll just buy a president more pliable." I'm happy to argue the dogma behind this, but they are more concerned with the quid pro quo than they are with the conversation.

To which I say: "Inside Job" is coming this fall. Let's all go see it.