links for 2009-07-17

• Matthew Yglesias: Healthtopia: Brad DeLong’s Unrealistic, Impractical, Utopian Plan
• Scott Eric Kaufman: The telos of the back cover
  I can imagine no more frustrating a reading experience than the one I just had with Iain M. Banks' Excession.  Is it a great novel?  I don't know. Is it a good novel? I don't know.  Why don't I know? Because I didn't—because I couldn't—read the novel on its own terms.  I spent the entire time awaiting the arrival of a plot that never materialized.  Why did I do that?  Because of the back cover...
• Richard McGregor: China's Larger Stimulus Program Appears to Be Working
• Top 25 Economics Blogs
• Robert Waldmann: The Critique of the Golgotha Program
  The [German socialists' 19th century] Gotha Program is extreme, but... Marx is deliberately conflating it with a much much more egalitarian and extreme program as a rhetorical trick.... [T]he man was trying to insult the united Social Democrats and Eisenachers by conflating them with... Christians. The phrase... "to each according to his need"... comes neither from "The Critique of the Gotha Program" nor from "The Gotha Program"... but from... "The Acts of the Apostles" which, quite frankly, makes "The Communist Manifesto" look like the McCain platform.... OK so history is a prankster and karma is a bitch. Driven by envy and ambition, Marx decided to claim that, when it came to wages, Ferdinande Lassale was an impractical impossibilist extremist just like Simon Peter. As a result, many people have decided that Karl Marx was an impractical impossibilist extremist egalitarian just like Simon Peter...
• Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » The NYT will stay free | Blogs |
• Matthew Yglesias: Contradictory Objections from the Blue Dogs
• Obsidian Wings: Blogger Ethics
• Jobless Claims | The Big Picture
• History of Bubbles | The Big Picture
• Economist's View: "Ideas and Rules for the World in the Aftermath of the Storm"