Why George Packer is wrong to see the tycoons of Silicon Valley as a “libertarian geek oligarchy”. Silicon Velley succeeds because it tries hard to find progressive ways of creating wealth. Founders get to be billionaires; but tens of thousands of managers become millionaires from share options; and waged workers get better conditions, and a bigger share of profits, than in most other parts of American industry
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A recommendation for this note in particular, but also for this new website in general, which promises summaries and discussions of recent economic research. This account of a 2011 academic paper confirms that there was a general food surplus in China in the famine years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The problems were entirely in food distribution, where Maoism fostered chaos, perverse incentives, lying, waste, and hoarding
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We pretty much understand the broad outlines of the financial crisis in Europe. Banks over-borrowed and over-lent. States bailed them out. Which left governments grappling with rocketing debt ratios. The puzzle is why leaders think public spending cuts are the right response, when all they have done is to make things worse. “It’s all quite mad, but that doesn’t mean it will end anytime soon”. Short of a revolution
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“Close up, he smells of tobacco, offset with a liberal application of aftershave.” Out and about with Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, steering Britain towards an exit from the EU. “Ukip is indeed a rag tag bag — but not of fruitcakes; rather, of cussed, contrary, wilful, protesting, obstreperous, bantering Englishmen and women, the like of which have been with us all the way back to
The Canterbury Tales”
(3,699 words)
Plausible reconstruction of how the IRS came to scrutinise Tea Party groups. If tax officials are required to spot signs of political activity in groups applying for exemption, it makes sense to look for short cuts: for example, those that seem to be part of a new political movement, Tea Party. Trouble is, that’s “profiling”. Just like the TSA officer pulling over a traveller in a turban. It’s easy, logical, and wrong
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Extreme cancer blogging. No detail spared. I muted the title — check the URL — which refers more directly to colostomy. Take daily
before food. “At first, the emptying was done by the nurses, but after watching them doing it enough, I finally managed to sit down on the toilet. I wiped my new plastic anus and then folded the little pouch shut — no more unhygienic than going the normal way really”
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Thrilling piece on the math of genealogy. Every sentence an eye-opener for the non-adept. “Anyone who was alive 2,000-3,000 years ago is either the ancestor of everyone who’s now alive, or no one at all.” “Everyone of European heritage alive today is a descendant of Charlemagne.” “Past a certain number of generations back, your number of ancestors stops growing exponentially, because they start being the same people”
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On the virtues of death as against those of eternal life. “Life is short, and if death were to be a good thing, it would be a better thing much further down the road than it is for human lives now.” But immortality is another matter: Imagine the boredom. So, if, like Indiana Jones, you can save someone from death only by giving them an elixir of eternal life, it’s a harder choice the more you think about it. Neither option is a good option
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Unmoved by Saturday’s songs in Malmö? Then travel back almost 30 years to the peak of Swedish greatness. “After winning Eurovision in 1974 Abba bestrode the world like a colossus — if you can imagine any self-respecting colossus going out in public in velveteen knickerbockers, silver boots, pearl kimono and tricorn hat. And that was just the boys”. Trivia bonus: “Abba was also the name of Sweden’s largest tuna-canning company”
(2,120 words)
Dante’s 14C
Divine Comedy continues to inspire. After perhaps 100 extant translations into English, this year brings two more from poets Clive James and Mary Jo Bang. Plus a novel from Dan Brown,
Inferno, which uses Dante’s themes and imagery. “For all its absurdities, Brown’s book is a comfort, because it proves that the
Divine Comedy is still alive in our culture”. As do the new translations, which are not great, but honourable
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Intel boss retires, looks back, he did OK, but missed the deal of his lifetime: the iPhone contract. “There was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought”
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Remember when Toyota’s Prius hybrid was launched? It was “too expensive”, “elitist”, “only for greenies”. Now it’s the third best-selling car in the world. Looks like the same story for Tesla’s all-electric cars. Remember: new ideas take time to spread. Skeptics laugh, rivals get complacent. Then the idea finds its business model, breaks out of its niche, demand soars. It’s an S-curve, and Tesla has hit the first bend
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Reprint of classic column from 2008. Waiters should not pour your wine. “The vile practice of butting in and pouring wine without being asked is the very height of the second kind of bad manners. Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself, but it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle. Imagine this same tactic being applied to the food”
(925 words)
President Kennedy’s assassin was caught without locking down Dallas. Why the over-reaction in Boston? “Governor Patrick has signaled future terrorists that when they attack American targets they will likely get twice the bang for their buck. Not only will they kill and maim innocents in the immediate vicinity of the bombs; they’ll have the added satisfaction of seeing millions of free people cowering far from the scene of the crime”
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Portrait an Aboriginal village, and of its matriarch, Batumbil. “She does not like sand flies and she has no qualms about killing them. But she does believe she’s related to them.” Diet includes sea turtle, dugong, tree worms. “During the two weeks I’m in the bush, two people are eaten by crocodiles, a seven-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy. I express my grief about this to Batumbil, but she remains unperturbed. These things happen”
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“We’ve come a long way, as a species. We’re better at many things than we ever were before – not just slightly better, but unimaginably, ridiculously better. We’re better at transporting people and objects, we’re better at killing, we’re better at preventing infectious diseases, we’re better at industrial production. But in some areas, we haven’t made such dramatic improvements. And one of those areas is parenting”
(1,162 words)
Not sure what genre to assign this to. Satire? Whimsy? Anyhow, it’s a very nice piece of writing, inspired by a new Arizona state law stipulating that no weapon collected during a buyback program can be destroyed. “When does life begin for a gun? Is it first casting, first barrel boring, first test fire? Is it before the gun is formed when the metal is mined, or the carbon fiber manufactured? The Bible is mostly silent on firearms”
(747 words)
Interview. Health care in the developing world. “When you’re running a poor country health-care system, you can’t treat a year of life as being worth more than, say, $200, or else you’ll bankrupt your health system immediately. But here’s the good news: If you spend less than 2 percent of what rich countries spend, but you spend it on vaccinations and antibiotics, you get over half of all that healthcare does to extend life”
(2,884 words)
