Weekend Update: An Excellent Feature

Matthew Yglesias's "Weekend Update" is always well worth reading--and very short, too. Today it tells us that the competition for the "Stupidest Man Alive" crown is indeed fierce:

TAPPED: August 2005 Archives: WEEKEND UPDATE. Running scared from a copy of Who's Who in America? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

Nicholas Kristof. Municipal WiFi is so great that I won't even mention the giant corportions trying desperately to kill it.

John Tierney. Who cares about global warming -- tens of millions of drowning Bangladeshis can just relocate to Canada's empty arctic regions!

David Brooks. If all this is true, does it mean conservatives should stop whining all the time?

Jim Hoagland. Now that we've lost our base in Uzbekistan, it's a good time to pretend we were strong advocates for human rights there.

David Broder. It's good to be out of D.C. in August.

George Will. Why not pretend I'm a car salesman?

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

Baruch Fischhoff on responding to disaster.

John Tierney's piece is the nadir--with its closing line about how after global warming is well underway "the [polar] bears would be still around, and their charisma would be making more money for the locals, not just for the WWF fund-raisers down south." Gotta keep those WWF guys from getting as rich as hedge-fund managers off of polar-bear pictures: that's a real high priority...

George F. Will manages to say with a straight face that "Worldwide, Ford is... gaining market share. But outside America, the company is not functioning as a welfare state, paying the high costs of medical and pension benefits," without it ever crossing his toadlike mind that the reason Ford doesn't pay for health insurance for its workers in Europe is that European governments do.

Brooks, Kristof, and Hoagland are embarrassing as well.

Comments

[kharris]

If I agree to to accept pension and health care benefits rather than wage increases, how is that "welfare"? Will is way to willing to substitute bile for analysis. Always has been.

[Maestro]

DeLong: "his toadlike mind"
kharris: "Will is way to willing to substitute bile for analysis"

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/international/europe/08glacier.html

Melting Mountain Majesties: Warming in Austrian Alps
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

KAISER-FRANZ-JOSEFS-HÖHE, Austria - The jagged peak of the 11,361-foot mountain known as the Johannisberg looms against the sky at the end of a stunningly beautiful valley here in the Austrian Alps, and the Pasterze, Austria's biggest glacier, extends slowly downward and away from it for five miles.

The glacier is broad and grand, like the river of ice it is, and yet something about it is visibly not right, and you can tell right away what it is from the steep cable car that was built a bit more than 40 years ago to take tourists from the heights above down to the glacier itself.

"When it was built, it went right down to the glacier," recalled Erhard Trojer, owner of the Hotel Lärchenhof in the nearby ski resort village of Heiligenblut.

But now, if you stand at the bottom of the cable car line and look down at the tourists disporting themselves on the glacier, it is as though you are looking at them from an airplane.

"It's going down from four to eight meters a year," or about 13 to 26 feet, said Mr. Trojer, who grew up in this valley. "In the early 1960's, they used to have a ski race every spring from the top of the Grossglockner to the bottom of the glacier." The Grossglockner, which looms above the Pasterze, is, at 12,460 feet, Austria's highest mountain.

"They can't do it anymore," Mr. Trojer said a bit sadly. "It's warmed up, and there isn't enough snow."

Austria's glaciers - there are 925 of them - are shrinking fast, and as they shrink, this part of the world is slowly losing one of its many attractions, those rivers of ice that, figuratively and almost literally, reflect the grandeur of the mountains around them.

This is not happening only in Austria, of course. It's a worldwide phenomenon....

[crooney]

What really irks me about columns like Will's, which equate auto industry health and pension benefits with welfare, is that there is never any recognition that they are obliged to pay these benefits because they negotiated contracts for lower wages. They made a _business_ decision to mortgage their future for short term gain. It was a bad decision, and now it comes back to haunt them, but it was their decision, not something the evil unions foisted on them.

When Will talks about "the trimming of some benefits", does he also want to pay back, with interest, the wage concessions that were "won" by the industry when the UAW "won" those benefits. And the stated rationale for the "trimming"--the drop in market share--isn't the fault of the unionized worker, except insofar as he used his smaller wage to buy an imported, cheap, and efficient car in the late 70s or early 80s, rather than the expensive gas guzzlers his employers paid him to produce.

[howard]

to go one step further than crooney, are any of the CEOs and their retinue who agreed to these deals and who probably saw themselves hit targets and receive bonuses being asked to pay them back?

[Julian Elson]

The bears need to modernize and adapt to the modern world. In a globalized economy, they need to learn that skills like killing seals, salmon, and hibernating aren't suited for todays world. Maybe they could even keep little rag-dolls with them to pretend that they have dæmons like us humans.

Come to think of it, I don't have an externally visible dæmon either. Am I a zombie? Or a bear?

[BroD]

Gee, Brad don't you think you're being a bit harsh?
I don't.
Thanks

[Tad Brennan]

Prof. DeLong--

On the subject of Yglesias: you *are* doing something to get him into a PhD program in Econ, aren't you?

I mean, he's a great pundit, a real wit and all. But if this kid doesn't really become an *expert* on a policy-related field before he's 30, it will be a sad waste of talent.

With the relevant training in Econ (or International Studies, or Law, or several other things), he could be the next J.M. Keynes.

If he just sticks with the pundit game, he could be the next--oh god, I don't know, the Buckley of the left? George Will with a human face? You know, smart enough, well read, but not actually in *command* of any discipline. That'd be a shame.

So: how bout if you just send him a letter of acceptance to Berkeley's Econ program, with a subpoena attached, i.e. this is not an offer it's a command.

I'd try to get him into a philosophy PhD program, only I think the Kallipolis needs his services elsewhere.

I hope you take this to heart, or I'm going to start ending all my comments "Yglesias educandus est!"

[Unstable Isotope]

Tierney's column was so stupid that I think my IQ dropped 10 points when I read it. Is the conservative thinking that they're not denying global warming anymore, they're just saying it's a good thing?

[dilbert dogbert]

I don't know how you guys can read this stuff and not have your heads explode, a la Mars Attacks.
However, thanks, as I don't have to have my head explode.
Shi.t work has to be done by someone.

[K]

thanks for calling attention to that bit by Yglesias. I always look forward to it.

[James Wimberley]

I hate to niggle about a good post, but it isn't that European governments pay for healthcare for Ford's Europaen workers. The workers themselves do; in France and Germany, by large earmarked payroll taxes, in Britain and the Nordic countries by general taxation. But because there's no choice, there are no free riders. Long live the iron rice bowl of the welfare state!

[user]

Ok, maybe I am missing something. Kristof talked about how nice it would be to turn all these wirelesss zones into municipal projects. Granted it is not an obvious situation for gov't intervention (free rider, commons problem, etc.) but I am not clear why his saying it would be nice is such a stupid thing.

Even if wireless companies are trying to kill it, is Nick "stupid" for saying how nice it would bee?

This is the problem with economists: They are unable to say "I disagree with you." It always becomes telling everyone that that person is "stupid".

By the way, the others actually are stupid, I have no qualms about applying the label to them.

Please tell me what I was missing.