I come to Britain, a new singing sensation emerges on “Britain’s Got Talent.” In 2007, it was Paul Potts.
Now, it’s Susan Boyle. I like her story even better than Potts (though though he’s a more polished singer). What a great story — at 47 that voice appears from that woman. She was cheeky, though, so she had the attitude to do the song.
Heck, maybe in two years I’ll go on the show and wow the judges. Oh wait, I’m not British.
I just finished Mary Midgely’s Evolution as a Religion and found her interesting. I’m sorry I missed this when it first came out, though I probably wouldn’t have understood it. Where she says, “I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I’m jolly glad because I didn’t know what I thought before then,” I feel like it’s just as well that I didn’t read this until I was 45, because otherwise I would’ve forgotten it by now.
I’m not going to review it right now. I will say the book feels current in much of its discussion of the public view of science, at least the educated public’s, and also in its wisdom about the dismissiveness of many scientists towards fields that aren’t scientific.
William Dean Singleton’s recent rant about online aggregators wasn’t just old (it’s been done before) but wrongheaded. Adam Penenberg points out why in this piece on misdirected outrage on Marketwatch.
Debt is either devil or savior. Neither suggests that it is just about the numbers. In a concise but wide-ranging review essay, John Gray notes the truth about markets:
Market economies are not underpinned chiefly by economic theories. They rely for their legitimacy and continued functioning on ideas about right and wrong, fairness in society, and orderliness in the world. In the boom years many of these ideas were discarded as erroneous or redundant. Now that the boom has been followed by bust it may be useful to reexamine ideas about debt, and consider how they may fare as governments use all the instruments at their disposal to avert a slide into depression.
His piece The Way of All Debt discusses “Payback,”, a book of essays on debt by the novelist Margaret Atwood, published as the downturn was happening last October.
What does a humanist have to say about the hard and cruel world of numbers? Plenty, Gray says. By drawing on debt’s role in religion, literature and society, “Atwood has combined rigorous analysis, wide-ranging erudition, and a beguilingly playful imagination to produce the most probing and thought-stirring commentary on the financial crisis to date.”
Gray notes the obvious ojections, that her views are simply weak analogies, by saying
In fact she is advancing the contrary and more interesting claim that economic activities involving borrowing and lending are metaphorical extensions of an underlying human sense of indebtedness. Beliefs about debt are not shadows cast by processes of market exchange. They are presupposed throughout much of human activity. Economic life invokes a sense of order in human affairs, widely dispersed throughout society.
Atwood argues that debt is shifting from being fashionable to being sinful.
If so, it will happen to the angst of many governments, including the U.S. government. Gray notes that many governments want us to borrow our way out of debt. If we do go back to happily borrowing, inflation is almost inevitable, which will punish those who saved instead of borrowing.
But Atwood, and Gray, note that debts must eventually be repaid. Ultimately, the planet itself will play the heavy, Atwood argues. I don’t know about her conclusion — it sounds a bit contrived, with an updated version of Scrooge as its vehicle. But in general the book sounds like a rich and rewarding read.
A funny and contrarian look at Shai Agassi’s plan to make the world a Better Place(s) through applying the cell phone model to electric cars. In 7 reasons why Better Place will fail and 4 it won’t, Michael Kanellos zings the concept. My two favorites: Battery Swaps Are Inane and Persistent Charging Kills Batteries.
Edward Hadas, a writer for BreakingViews.com, wonders why the protests at this week’s G20 meetings in London are so lame. He writes (paid subscription required)
The global mismanagement of the financial system has led to a deep recession. Intellectual paralysis has gripped the authorities and their policy response has been risky. After such failure, the political leaders gathered in London for the G20 conference deserve a serious challenge.
True.
Hadas’s challenge to world leaders is to compare them to the very protesters he disdains. His message is that the G20, particularly Barack Obama, are just the same kind of sloganeers and sign-wavers, with no real ability to develop a solution to the world’s problems.
Indeed, Hadas dings the world’s leaders for their spectacular failure to develop a coherent framework for political economy in the wake of the collapse of Communism. That idea seems wrong. Much of the world’s leaders adopted a framework favoring self-regulation and pushed it to its limit. It broke. He may not like the framework they had, but it was clearly powerful, seductive even. In fact, Hadas’s 2008 book, Human Goods, Economic Evils, suggests he thinks it doesn’t matter what they come up with (to be fair, I haven’t read the book, just its promotional copy).
Despite that, Hadas writes that “any protester who can articulate a coherent alternative to the establishment’s tattered notions really could change the world.” Maybe there’s room for a smart columnist to do so, too. Tom Friedman in the New York Times is pounding on the G20 to create a Market to Mother Nature approach, for instance. Paul Krugman is inspiring YouTube videos favoring him over Tim Geithner.
It is obvious that world leaders are banking on this crisis not being unresolvable, just as previous crises have seen banks recover from their insolvencies (the Latin American crisis of the 1980s, for one).
Personally, I’m glad the protests haven’t reached Weimar proportions. Maybe it means things aren’t as bad as all that.
“Doubt is usually portrayed as the enemy of faith, and it often is, especially when it is only an expression of spiritual sloth,” says the journalist Edward Hadas. In his own interesting twist on doubt, doubt of his own atheism leads him to faith.