The revenge of the SS (Social Sciences)

The Guardian runs an interesting interview with Gillian Tett, an anthropologist working for the Financial Times who had taken notice of the stench coming out of the City:

Firstly, you're trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don't do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

A truly great man passed away

RIP Studs Terkel.

One time, ... I was doing 'Studs Place,' my early TV show, and I'm supposed to be quitting cigars and I'm yearning for a smoke and I quote from the 'Odyssey.' I say, I am Ulysses passing the Isle of Circe. Meaning I got these temptations. Truck drivers called in and said they liked the classical reference.

The Economist endorses Obama

Here we are then, the acerbic and consistently right-of-centre "newspaper" endorses a man with a a consistently left-of-center voting record in the Senate.

The only counter-argument to their own endorsement they offer and one worth considering is the following:

Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.

However, it seems to me that trade and protectionism are not the biggest issues of the day. Financial re-regulation, balancing the budget after a fiscal stimulus and giving China a say in IMF and other international institutions will be much more prominent issues. As for trade, Obama has been rather clear lately that he wants to create new, competitive jobs for the middle class rather than protect old, inefficient ones.

For anyone looking for a clear analysis of Obama's economic policies here is a good one from the NYT.

“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate, concludes that a fiscal stimulus is necessary now that consumers are super-conservative and the Fed cannot do much to help.

That means building American roads, bridges, dams a new energy industry and many more things that will make the great capitalist nation much more, well, socialist?

We found someone who will miss George W.

He is, of course, a cartoonist.

Disenfranchised by illiteracy

This article is deeply moving. In case someone had not grasped the historical significance for all the underprivileged anywhere of electing a black man as President of the United States.

Is this a battle for the 10%?

Michael Tomasky thinks so:

Republicans and conservatives must be asking themselves - we're throwing everything against the wall, all the old tried and true stuff that has worked many times before, and yet this time, it isn't sticking. We're calling him a socialist and soft on America's enemies, we're hitting the taxes thing as hard as ever, we're dropping subtle but not too obvious racial hints in certain parts of the country. None of it is really taking. Why?

Of course the economy is the main answer. But I think there's a lot more to it than that. Those attacks have often worked in the past because they persuaded swing voters. In other words, when thinking about questions like this, you always have to divide the country into threes, because there are three main and easily distinguishable groups of voters. Loyal Republicans, who are around 45%. Loyal Democrats, also around 45%. And the 10% in the middle who go either way.

I have to disagree on this one. In this election we might witness a broad coalition in the making. The reason is this:


Update: Harold Myerson of the Washington Post makes the same argument today.

I-Boooks

Google and the publishing industry have finally reached an agreement over Google Books. My first reaction is that this is great, revolutionary, will change the way people read forever etc. However, I do wonder how Google will determine the prices for each book they scan and if this will make financial sense for authors. A reader of the Information Weekly voices his concerns:

In the end, the Author's Guild capitulated. The result sets up a meager $35m dollar fund for compensating authors victim of continuing Google copyright infringement practices. And now copyright violations are winked at, putting the onus officially on the Authors/Publishers to have their works removed from Google Books.

This is not how copyright protection is supposed to work, and it's not how legislation is supposed to work. I don't like big business forcing change down people's throats by blatantly breaking laws, forcing a judicial ruling, instead of legislation by congress. If Google wanted to do this project, the proper way is to ask congress to legislate modification to the copyright laws. Then the congress could properly weigh the merits and legislate for the benefit of all parties.

Instead Google forces the judicial hand and we get legal precedent, and essentially copyright legislation, from the negotiated settlement between a David and Goliath.
So now Google gets a pass on systematic widespread illegal copyright infringement because the Author's Guild were forced to capitulate? It's still illegal!!! Why is the US Attorneys Office sitting on their hands? Private parties cannot be allowed to negotiate between themselves how they will obey law. Google should be roundly punished, Google Books should be suspended, and the matter should be turned over to congress to decide if and what modification to copyright law is needed.

What if Will Jones oversleeps?

Why should conservatives vote for Obama?

The Dish, as is often the case, offers the most compelling answer. E-mail the list to conservative friends accordingly!

An unlikely scenario

Why McCain will win the election.

What happened to Iceland?

BBC News runs a short but comprehensive analysis of why a small and wealthy country like Iceland has gone bankrupt. The argument about overexposure to foreign borrowers and speculators is familiar; what strikes me in this analysis is the realization that it is the big fish (call me big countries) which will survive the crisis and the small fish that will go bust:

In a crisis, such as the one we are experiencing now, the strength of a bank's balance sheet is of little consequence.
What matters is the explicit or implicit guarantee provided by the state to the banks to back up their assets and provide liquidity.
Therefore, the size of the state relative to the size of the banks becomes the crucial factor.

In case you didn't get it, the photo shows an agitated Icelandic volcano;) I confess I know nothing about the country to post a more appropriate photo-cum-metaphor.

Cataclysmic Christopher Hitchens!

Enjoy.

Sicko...

Here is a comparison of the two health care plans competing for the American vote. Obama's plan seems to be more comprehensive, but really not enough:

Some experts estimate that the McCain plan would reduce the number of uninsured only modestly because millions of people would drop or lose employer coverage, and not many more than that would buy policies outside of work. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that the McCain plan would lower the number of uninsured by a mere two million in 2018, out of a projected 67 million uninsured in that year. The Obama plan would cut the number by 34 million, the center says, but still leave nearly 33 million uninsured.

I have wondered many times why Americans can't see the obvious: health care is not a consumer good like all others. There is just too much imperfect information and the stakes are too high to apply conventional utility curves to the consumption of health care (as McCain tries to do). Three years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay on this aspect of American exceptionalism that sheds some light on the politics and ideology involved.

My favorite essays from the campaign

For those who are interested in in-depth essays and have the patience to go through them. The selection is, naturally, biased:

1. Andrew Sullivan's defining piece on Obama, long before other pundits caught up with him.

2. Tim Dickinson tears apart the myth John McCain carefully crafted for himself after Vietnam and that propelled him into national politics.

3. For those interested in the challenges of mass-scale campaigning, here is a good and a bad example.

4. The best-grounded endorsement I have read, from The New Yorker board of editors.

5. This article explains how Sarah Palin was eventually selected as a VP candidate and casts light on the workings of a rotten party.

The Tory boys

This picture was taken 20 or so years ago; it shows the then members of the Bullingdon Club, an infamous drinking society at Oxford. Anyone following British politics should recognize two of the "toffs". As two other members of the society, shadow Chancellor George Osborne and financier Nat Rothschild have been involved in a fundraising scandal in the past few days, one wonders if the old boy networks still dominate British politics.