http://www.amazon.com/The-Unwinding-Inner-History-America/dp/0374102414
How have we come to feel that neither the government nor the private sector works as it should and that the shrinking middle class has few prospects of recovering its former glory? Through profiles of several Americans, from a factory worker to an Internet billionaire, Packer, staff writer for the New Yorker, offers a broad and compelling perspective on a nation in crisis. Packer focuses on the lives of a North Carolina evangelist, son of a tobacco farmer, pondering the new economy of the rural South; a Youngstown, Ohio, factory worker struggling to survive the decline of the manufacturing sector; a Washington lobbyist confronting the distance between his ideals and the realities of the nation’s capital; and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur pondering the role of e-commerce in a radically changing economy. Interspersed throughout are profiles of leading economic, political, and cultural figures, including Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Raymond Carver, Sam Walton, and Jay-Z. Also sprinkled throughout are alarming headlines, news bites, song lyrics, and slogans that capture the unsettling feeling that the nation and its people are adrift. Packer offers an illuminating, in-depth, sometimes frightening view of the complexities of decline and the enduring hope for recovery.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
George Orwell was Wrong
See "Modernities New World Dangers, by David Bosworth: Orwell and Nisbet were wrong. The modern challenge to pluralism and majoritarian democracy was not "Statism", but religious fundamentalism and corporate oligarchy.
Boehner, Cantor wax Orwellian on health care http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/matt-miller-boehner-cantor-wax-orwellian-on-health-care/2013/07/10/291505a6-e95c-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html?hpid=z3
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Income inequality: Conservative arguments
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/what-if-were-looking-at-inequality-the-wrong-way/?hp&_r=0
Richard V. Burkhauser, a professor of public policy at Cornell and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is fast becoming a champion of the right, challenging the conventional wisdom about income inequality.
On that score, Burkhauser’s use of “yearly accrued capital gains” fails the test of measuring what is most significant to know in policy making and in assessing the true quality of life in America.
Richard V. Burkhauser, a professor of public policy at Cornell and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is fast becoming a champion of the right, challenging the conventional wisdom about income inequality.
On that score, Burkhauser’s use of “yearly accrued capital gains” fails the test of measuring what is most significant to know in policy making and in assessing the true quality of life in America.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
"The Marketplace of Ideas" by Louis Menand
"What the humanities experienced between 1970-1990 was the intellectual and institutional equivalent of a revolution. Despite what some critics claimed, the humanities did not make themselves irrelevant by this transformation. On the contrary: the humanities helped to make the rest of the academic world alive to issues surrounding objectivity and interpretation, and to the significance of racial and gender difference." 91"
"If one part of the university is (along with its many other projects) continually enacting a "crisis of institutional legitimation," it is performing a service for the rest of the university. And it is not just asking questions about knowledge; it is creating knowledge by asking the questions." Skepticism about the forms of knowledge is itself a form of knowledge. 92
http://www.amazon.com/The-Marketplace-Ideas-Resistance-University/dp/0393339165
"If one part of the university is (along with its many other projects) continually enacting a "crisis of institutional legitimation," it is performing a service for the rest of the university. And it is not just asking questions about knowledge; it is creating knowledge by asking the questions." Skepticism about the forms of knowledge is itself a form of knowledge. 92
http://www.amazon.com/The-Marketplace-Ideas-Resistance-University/dp/0393339165
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
After the Music Stoped by Alan Blinder
lol...the "free market": By the time the panic subsided, the wreckage was everywhere. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sacks, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and others had all been rescued, in one way or another, by the Federal government. A government led, by the way, by a deeply conservative Republican president, a secretary of the Treasury who hailed from Goldman Sacks and characterized himself as "a firm believer in free markets," and a Federal Reserve chairman who called himself a libertarian." 165-166 http://www.amazon.com/
"One word come to mind after looking over this list [of bailouts]: Wow! The face of the American financial system was changed beyond recognition. The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the FDIC took actions the few people could have imagined before 2008. The U.S. taxpayer was potentially on the hook for unbelievable sums. But the system, massively assisted by the U.S. government, held together. That's the unsung part of the story." 166
"One word come to mind after looking over this list [of bailouts]: Wow! The face of the American financial system was changed beyond recognition. The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the FDIC took actions the few people could have imagined before 2008. The U.S. taxpayer was potentially on the hook for unbelievable sums. But the system, massively assisted by the U.S. government, held together. That's the unsung part of the story." 166
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)