"Keynes's General Theory identified two fundamental flaws of the capitalist system: chronic unemployment and excessive inequality. Minsky added a third: instability is a normal result of modern financial capitalism (p. 112, 315). Further, persistent stability cannot be achieved—even with apt policy—because it changes behavior in ways that make 'IT' likely…"
--Introduction to Hyman Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy
April 09, 2012 at 08:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
"[You] will learn from these pages that their refutations of false conservative claims don’t work and should not be expected to work—and that [you] should not irrationally cling to the idea that somehow they should."
--Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality
April 09, 2012 at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
I would be smarter if I read more Unfogged comment threads...
Courtesy of an unknown lurker informing the Mineshaft that "Graeber, on Twitter, sourced [his] Apple claim to his memory of a lecture by Richard Wolff", and of bjk commenting on More on Graeber, I am led to the… unusual opinions… of neo-Althusserian structuralist Richard D. Wolff:
Economic Crisis from a Socialist Perspective: Beginnings for the "reform plus" strategy: The contradictions of capitalism offer us partial yet useful examples of the democratization of enterprise advocated by this “reform plus” agenda. One of these, recurring in California for decades, can illustrate our argument.
April 06, 2012 at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (35)
George Orwell:
George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier - Chapter 2: Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only watch it for a short time, and it is not until you begin making a few calculations that you realize what a stupendous task the 'fillers' are performing. Normally each man has to clear a space four or five yards wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so that if the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut out, break up and load on to the belt something between seven and twelve cubic yards of coal.
Continue reading "Quote of the Day: April 6, 2012: George Orwell: Coal Mining in the 1930s" »
April 06, 2012 at 05:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
"The combination of these factors had arguably produced the worst of all worlds for the Obama administration: a country that took one look at the languishing economy and another at the recovery on Wall Street and concluded that its government had put big banks ahead of ordinary workers and homeowners. And so, a populist backlash that had initially targeted Wall Street increasingly took aim at Obama."
--Noam Scheiber, The Escape Artists
April 05, 2012 at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
"Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high."
--Sam Harris, Free Will
April 04, 2012 at 05:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
"The idea that there is a “realist” faction in the debate over the size of the Smurfs ought to chill you to your very core."
--Josh Fruhlinger and Conor Lastowka, [Citation Needed]: The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing
March 30, 2012 at 03:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
"There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it."
--Thomas More, Utopia
March 25, 2012 at 05:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
"We can try to calculate how much information this intensity of selection can provide about institutions. (The following calculations are very rough, but should get the right orders of magnitude; cf. Rivoire and Leibler, 2010.) Take the high estimate of a 33 percent chance of destruction over 500 years. This works out to an annual risk of polis death of about 0.2 percent. This is not nothing, but it's not very much either. If we applied selection like this to a population starting with a standard Gaussian distribution, removing the lowest 0.2 percent of the population each year, by the end of 500 years we'd have increased the mean by about a standard deviation. Said another way, the entropy rate of selection is about 0.02 bits/year, so, accumulated over the whole of the archaic and classical periods, we get about 11 bits of information on which constellation of institutions works best. This is the maximum amount of information which could be extracted from the "signal" of city destruction (and yes, that does bring to mind the one good passage in Thomas Pynchon), and it would be reduced by correlations over time, etc.
"I think that selection is actually vital to the development of institutions. It's just that the selection which matters is not the rare destruction (or duplication) of whole polities or societies, but rather the continual choice by individuals about whether to conform to institutionalized expectations about their behavior, or to do something else. Renan said that a nation is a daily plebiscite; in a real sense, this is true of every human institution. They survive if, and only if, they are continually reproduced in human practices. This is where selection gets its purchase on institutions."
--Cosma Shalizi, "Review of Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens"
March 16, 2012 at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
"After [George Romney] had won the 1962 governor's race in Michigan, I still assumed that he was just another liberal Republican with a salesman's spiel. Saul Alinsky, that cantankerous "professional radical" told me off. He said that he knew Romney well, and found in him a unique political insight. From Saul, the slum organizer, this was liberal praise indeed. In the ten years since I had first run into Alinsky's unusual work, I had never heard him call a businessman or a politician, let alone a Republican, anything but a fink. It was an article of faith for him, and Romney was the rare exception…"
--T. George Harris, Romney's Way: A Man and an Idea for a Better America
February 27, 2012 at 04:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
A lecture about the short-run, medium-run, and long-run impact of government budget deficits on the economy, with sundry observations on political economy, delivered to John Ellwood's GSPP 269 class on February 2, 2012. Edited. 11,103 words:
February 25, 2012 at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
I think any comment from me about this would be superfluous, and make it less funny:
Chris Bertram, October 16, 2011:
Violence down, claims Pinker the thinker: The Guardian has an interview with Steven Pinker about his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes.... In order to evaluate its claims properly, I’d actually have to read the book, but everything tells me that doing so would be an immense waste of valuable time.... I can, however, comment snippily on the material that surfaces in interviews and reviews… so here goes.... I’m relieved to know that the general ad hominem insults are permitted in this fight and that I’m under no obligations to be fair to “the thinking man’s Malcolm Gladwell”…
[…]
(Jack Strocchi seems to have forgotten that I permanently banned him some time ago. 2 comments deleted)…
"It is sad if people fall for Pinker’s ploy, though not as sad as if they give the remotest shred of credence to John Gray." Well yes, Gray is a troll, but rather that than the nauseating sight of Pinker providing the intellectually pretentious fraction of the ruling class with a cosy colour-supplement image of itself…
Watson, what bullshit…
Right Watson. No more comments from you on this thread for 24h please, you’ve made more than enough as a proportion of the total…
"I don’t know what Bertram’s or Gray’s problem is. They seem to want Pinker to be wrong, not only in his explanation for the trend but also in describing the trend." Well your reading comprehension is clearly defective, at least in my case. See comments upthread…
Incidentally, does anyone else see a problem with using a population-scaled metric here as a measure of decline in violence. Seems to me that absolute numbers ought to matter too. So, compare: Society A (hunter-gatherer band). Population 50, murder 7 in orgy of violence. Society B (advanced capitalist society). Population 50 million. Murder 6 million using bureaucratic apparatus and industrial chemicals. Violence up or violence down? Or indeterminate?...
I may have been imprecise… street-brawling, everyday homicide and the like (certainly down) with institutional violence and the credible threat thereof (states killing people, incarcerating people, stopping them crossing borders which were previously open etc etc)…
I think there are some good reasons to distinguish between state control of borders and territory and state enforcement of taxation and property rights…. [T]he latter is mutually beneficial (and those subject have reason to consent)…. Of course… the credible threat of violence is not itself violence. But to the degree to which the absence of actual violence is the result of a monopolist wielding such a credible threat, it seems somewhat relevant…. [T]here were physical barriers, land mines, guns triggered by tripwires and the like. Knowing they couldn’t safely cross, most people didn’t try…
https://twitter.com/#!/crookedfootball/status/125999249589665792 :: @crookedfootball Chris Bertram: @dsquareddigest I’ve been hoping for a DeLong intervention [in this thread], so I can joke that, before, the internet, I’d have punched his lights out...
February 24, 2012 at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
"The vestal Rhea, being deflowered by force, when she had brought forth twins, declares Mars to be the father of her illegitimate offspring, either because she believed it to be so, or because a god was a more creditable author of her offence."
--Titus Livius, The History of Rome
February 24, 2012 at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
"The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. It is the absence of news."
--I. F. Stone, The Best of I. F. Stone
February 23, 2012 at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Gabriel Rosser Rossman:
How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture: At Unfogged there’s a review (and a very funny comments thread) pointing out that the following sentence contains six factual claims all of which are incorrect:
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
This is not exactly stuff written in the cuneiform of Mesopotamian diplomacy, the barbarian law codes of mediaeval Ireland, or the field notes of Victorian anthropologists, but something that occurred in suburban California around the time I was born and concerns the extremely well documented origins of one of the world’s biggest firms. If Graeber gets this wrong, how can we trust him about the stuff that’s harder to check, like all that business about barbarian law codes…
[...]
Graeber addresses problem #2 head on and tries to explain this away by some convoluted argument that I can’t even reproduce but I find his argument much less plausible than the more parsimonious explanation that the Chinese are buying t-bills (a) as a store of value (b) as a medium of exchange and (c) as a tacit export subsidy that suits their domestic politics…. This deliberate obtuseness about how a reserve currency works and the paranoid understanding that it is provincial tribute is by far the worst part of the book. I’m trying to draw a fact/value distinction between my lack of sympathy for his political positions and his empirical claims as I’d like to think that when reading someone with whom I disagree I can distinguish between their empirical claims that are well-supported, debatable, and downright nuts. That is to say I don’t think these chapters upset me because they are normatively “anti-American” but because as an empirical matter they badly fail to understand how (for better or worse) American power works.
This business about tribute is at the end so I’d like to say that I recommend the book but that you stop on page 365, right before he gets his Chomsky on, but I honestly worry whether I can trust the parts of the book I’m not as informed about. This is the 13th chime of the clock, the brown M&Ms in the Van Halen dressing room; pick your metaphor, but this business about Apple computer and especially about Chinese t-bill holdings ultimately makes me take a “trust but verify” attitude towards a book that I found both extremely enjoyable and intellectually inspirational…
Indeed:
Unfogged: The Thirteenth Chime POSTED BY LIZARDBREATH: I picked up Debt: The First 5000 Years….[H]e uses Apple Computers as an example:
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
I don't know all that much about the history of Apple or of the computer business generally, but I'm pretty sure that's as wrong as it could possibly be. Apple was founded by two guys, neither of whom (AFAIK) worked for IBM (maybe for a very short time? But certainly not extendedly). It was notoriously a rigid, top-down hierarchy, it was founded in the '70s, not the '80s, and who had a laptop until the very end of the '80s? That's a whole lot of wrong for one sentence. Has anyone read the book with enough background knowledge to say if this is a fluke, or if the whole thing is like this?
That sentence is fascinating. Not only is every single thing in it wrong, but it betrays a specific worldview so perfectly. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
The Apple stuff is so amazingly wrong. (They didn't work for IBM, by the way. Jobs worked for Atari and Wozniak worked for HP. IBM existed, but was based in New York, and in any case didn't make personal computers until 1981. (playing catch-up with Apple)). They founded Apple using their laptops! That's the one that gets me. "Look, I've drawn up a sketch of a new sort of 'personal' computer here on my ThinkPad! It'll be far smaller than today's mainframes!" Posted by: Sifu Tweety ...
Do anthropologists even need to distinguish between fact and myth, in their normal work? Posted by: CharleyCarp
"and really, that sentence is 200 kinds of wrong"; I'm genuinely impressed he managed to get so much wrong in such a small area. isn't there an area of math that covers these "packing" problems? maybe he should switch to that. Posted by: alameida...
Texaco is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Populist) petroleum engineers who broke from Standard Oil in Texas in the 1920s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people using their catalytic converters and vulcanized tires to travel from place to place and exchange ideas more efficiently. Posted by: Cryptic ned...
The sentence would be more forgivable if it was written a few hundred years in the future and the timescales for things like "Apple founded" and "laptops available" got flattened out, I guess. "They had large garages to house their zeppelins, and communicated by telegraph on those occasions when the holonet failed." Posted by: essear...
if you don't use the "p" "/p" paragraph tags for each paragraph ogged will punish you with a random distribution of font sizes and line spacing. it's sort of his version of fire and brimstone, but with less burning. and also less kerning. Posted by: alameida...
Crooked Timber is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Tory) SEO specialists who broke from Pajamas Media in the 2010s, forming a rigid organizational structure of twenty to forty bloggers with their Kindle Fires crossposting to each other's LiveJournals. Posted by: Cryptic ned...
UNC is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Baptist) basketball specialists who broke from Duke in the 1850s, forming a rigid zone defense of twenty to forty sports marketing majors with their white baseball caps going to each other's frat parties. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
The Holy Roman Empire is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Belgian) technocrats who broke from the Byzantine Empire in the 1300s, forming little anarcho-syndicalist communes that supported themselves by mechanized textile production in their huts. Posted by: Cryptic ned...
Christianity is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Gaulish) fortune tellers who broke from the Catholic Church in the 3rd century AD, forming large groups of several thousand praying to their icons of the saints in each other's temples. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
Playboy magazine is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly lesbian) women who broke from the Knights Templar in the 6th century, forming little fantasy football leagues over Twitter. Posted by: real ffeJ annaH...
Planet Earth is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly silicon-based) lifeforms who broke from the Moon six thousand years ago, forming little accretions of twenty to forty solar masses with their photosynthesis in each other's primordial soups. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
These Tardis-like garages into which a 40 person circle, complete with laptops, could fit: who built them? There appear to have been several. Forty people is a big payroll. Prior to the deluge of VC money, startups, even in Silicon Valley, couldn't have met it. One would need revenue in the high tens of millions. The problem with the sentence isn't so much that it's wrong in detail. It's that he wasn't thinking about the physical (or fiscal) reality behind his words. Posted by: jim...
I'm actually not sympathetic to authors who make serious errors of fact. Yes, of course it's possible to get the details right in a large book about a general topic. You do it by knowing what you intend to say, and having a reason to say it before you write about it. Posted by: AWB
Also, you can look shit up! It's allowed! Books don't come into being without someone actually writing those sentences, and they might as well be sentences written about something you know something about. Otherwise, they don't need to be written, right? Posted by: AWB...
The Wrongest Sentence Ever has got to be a weird fuck-up, though. It doesn't make sense as deliberate deceit, because there are millions of people who'll know it's wrong. It's like saying that George Washington was gave the Gettysburg Address -- it's just too transparently wrong to be deliberate. Posted by: Walt Someguy...
You know what the biggest problem with copyright law is? Any company can buy the rights to an original work without ever compensating the original artist at all, and then they have those rights forever, and anybody who even mentions that work in any context without paying up is subject not only to mandatory fines, but jail time. Not only that, but rights-holders get a tax writeoff if they destroy old works that are in danger of becoming public domain. Posted by: Sifu Tweety
You're a sick man, Tweety. Posted by: LizardBreath...
My favorite anecdote about copyright is when the Otis family used the rights they'd acquired in the course of advocating the bricking up of Hetch Hetchy to steal the name "Lakers" from the Minnesota Populist Party. Posted by: Sifu Tweety
... which was enough to trick Wilt Chamberlain into signing a contract with them. Posted by: Sifu Tweety
I wouldn't even know the story if Mike Davis hadn't been able to make Chinatown before Firestone dynamited the subway tunnels. A small victory, to be sure. Posted by: Sifu Tweety
The whole history of LA and copyright in this country are really intertwined, like when Cesar Chavez fought back against attempts to use the extensive copyrights on grain-based recipes to kill off LA's Mexican population by forcing them onto nutrient-poor all-meat diets. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
Remember when Inhofe held up Crichton's book on the senate floor and declaimed that it had pages and pages more footnotes than the executive summary of the IPCC's report on climate change? They tried to make a movie out of it but you can't use the term "US Senate" in a feature film without paying out the ass to the Treasury department. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
"hey, Wizard of Oz and Apple mistake, throw the whole thing out." Well, if one of the mistakes is so bad that it shows that the author isn't a good critical thinker, it could deepen the distrust. I use the breezy phrase "everyone in LA is blond, tanned and blinged out" to immediately write off an author. That is a person who doesn't see past stereotypes, so they aren't going to bring me anything new. Posted by: Megan
"everyone in LA is blond, tanned and blinged out" Oh man, though, that's totally true, at least in LA proper. Once you get to the outer burbs east of La Cienega everybody's toothless and stringy from all the meth, but in the city of LA it's definitely true. Posted by: Sifu Tweety ...
LB digs in, yo. It's what she does. Between undergrad at Princeton and her post-law school job defending Big Pharma she's gotten pretty good at it, too. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
You mean: her post-law school job defending Big Pharma in small groups of 20-40 attorneys who write their briefs using consensus-based authorship, she's gotten pretty good at it, too. Posted by: Annelid Gustator...
My favorite story about a generalist/popular writer faking information is about Mike Davis. Apparently one of the conversations with an expert in one of his books is entirely fictional. But the weird thing is that it turns out Davis actually had an interview scheduled with this expert, but showed up for the interview with the account of the interview he wanted already written. He then simply asked the expert to sign off on the account. He was just like, "this is what I need you to say, will you say it?" And the guy said "sure." I'd look up details, but I'm lazy, and I'm typing awkwardly because there is a child asleep in my lap, and I'm not sure if there is a 5 or a 10% chance that she is not actually mine. Posted by: rob helpy-chalk...
309: Ecology of Fear has some pretty scandalous errors in it, ranging from screwing around with weather statistics to make it sound like greater LA has the same incidence of twisters as tornado alley to, um, some other really bad stuff that I can't recall. That said, I think the overarching point of the book holds, and I used to teach it pretty frequently in a class on disasters. It's not as good as City of Quartz, though, which is a real masterpiece. Posted by: Von Wafer...
320: are you kidding? Emerson has been commenting here for two years, since his son was in diapers, when the site was still run by Glenn Reynolds and Jason Kottke and people called it a MUD. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
On top of which, he most likely spent big chunks of the 80s and 90s in Madagascar doing his fieldwork, so background knowledge those of us coming in age during those years take for granted may have completely passed him by. Posted by: clark diversey...
I don't see what's racist about "people on Easter Island and on Iceland both ruined their islands by doing the exact same thing and stupidly cutting down all the trees." I don't get it at all, either. I'm really tempted to do enough reading to do a full-on defense of Diamond. It would be pointless, because it would take a lot of time, and the only real audience I would find is random internet people. But shit. It really seems like his critics go out of their way to misinterpret and nitpick. I'm especially bothered by the way the argument seems to rely on the idea that his narrative has the same form as classic racist narratives. We're arguing about causation here, not literature. Did chopping down all the trees on Easter Island contribute to the collapse of the society, and if so, how much? Posted by: rob helpy-chalk...
It's funny about getting into arguments. I started the thread thinking that the book was thought-provoking and worth reading, the Wizard of Oz bit gave me pause, but wasn't a real worry given that plenty of reasonable people (misguided in this respect as they clearly are) have believed it, and the Apple thing made me not want to rely on it for any facts I couldn't, or hadn't checked. But I did still find the argument that credit preceded coinage convincing. After arguing about it, I was starting to feel as if Halford was right about what I really meant, and the book was completely worthless. I had to go cool down before I remembered that I actually did want to finish it. Posted by: LizardBreath...
"Some anthropologists would like this to be a debate about whether Diamond is racist. I'd like to be talking about whether Diamond is right." Exactly. And this is important; its not just some random historical conjecture. You see libertarians arguing all the time that deforestation never caused the downfall of a civilization. Conversely, the collapse of civilizations like [Greenland] and Easter Island serve as strong parables for wise resource management. Posted by: rob helpy-chalk...
Still waiting for this to turn into a dating or food thread. Posted by: Flippanter...
"Clearly then, our project must be to encourage capitalism to touch itself." "Capitalism, I have a song by the Divinyls that I think you should hear. Listen carefully." Posted by: One of Many...
February 22, 2012 at 05:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (40)
"1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."
--Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
February 17, 2012 at 06:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
"As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger's 'Lenore': 'Denn die Todten reiten Schnell'. ('For the dead travel fast'.)"
--Bram Stoker, Dracula
February 16, 2012 at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
"James [II Stuart]'s opponents were, by and large, revolutionaries, not reactionaries. They appreciated that only a modernized English state could compete in contemporary Europe. Unlike James, however, the revolutionaries looked to the Dutch Republic rather than to the French monarchy for political inspiration."
--Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution
February 14, 2012 at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread…"
--Anatole France, The Red Lily
February 12, 2012 at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
"Every dollar raised by taxing harmful activities is one dollar less that we must raise by taxing useful ones."
--Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
February 11, 2012 at 07:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
"[I]gnoramitocracy—a country in which ignorance-driven political paralysis prevents us from grappling with even our most pressing problems."
--Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
February 10, 2012 at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
"Demagogues who were too old to enter the army if there should be a war, others who entertained so high an opinion of their own ability that they did not believe they could be spared from the direction of the affairs of state in such an event, declaimed vehemently and unceasingly against the North; against its aggressions upon the South; its interference with Southern rights, etc., etc.
"They denounced the Northerners as cowards, poltroons, negro-worshippers; claimed that one Southern man was equal to five Northern men in battle; that if the South would stand up for its rights the North would back down. Mr. Jefferson Davis said in a speech, delivered at La Grange, Mississippi, before the secession of that State, that he would agree to drink all the blood spilled south of Mason and Dixon's line if there should be a war.
"The young men who would have the fighting to do in case of war, believed all these statements, both in regard to the aggressiveness of the North and its cowardice. They, too, cried out for a separation from such people. The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation. Under the old regime they were looked down upon by those who controlled all the affairs in the interest of slave-owners, as poor white trash who were allowed the ballot so long as they cast it according to direction."
--U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (via Ta-Nehisi Coates)
February 09, 2012 at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)
Sandy Jencks vs. Charles "Cross Burner" Murray:
How Poor Are the Poor?: Systematic efforts at assessing the impact of [welfare] benefits on illegitimacy rates support my version of the Harold and Phyllis story rather than Murray’s. The level of a state’s AFDC benefits has no measurable effect on its rate of illegitimacy. In 1984, AFDC benefits for a family of four ranged from $120 a month in Mississippi to $676 a month in New York. David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane recently completed a meticulous analysis of the way such variation affects illegitimate births.17 In general, states with high benefits have less illegitimacy than states with low ones, even after we adjust for differences in race, region, education, income, urbanization, and the like. This may be because high illegitimacy rates make legislators reluctant to raise welfare benefits.
To get around this difficulty, Ellwood and Bane asked whether a change in a state’s AFDC benefits led to a change in its illegitimacy rate. They found to consistent effect. Nor did high benefits widen the disparity in illegitimate births between women with a high probability of getting AFDC—teen-agers, nonwhites, high school dropouts—and women with a low probability of getting AFDC.
What about the fact that Phyllis can now live with Harold (or at least sleep with him) without losing her benefits? Doesn’t this discourage marriage and thus increase illegitimacy? Perhaps. But Table 2 shows that illegitimacy has risen at a steadily accelerating rate since 1950. There is no special “blip” in the late 1960s, when midnight raids stopped and the “man in the house” rule passed into history. Nor is there consistent evidence that illegitimacy increased faster among probable AFDC recipients than among women in general.
Murray’s explanation of the rise in illegitimacy thus seems to have at least three flaws. First, most mothers of illegitimate children initially live with their parents, not their lovers, so AFDC rules are not very relevant. Second, the trend in illegitimacy is not well correlated with the trend in AFDC benefits or with rule changes. Third, illegitimacy rose among movie stars and college graduates as well as welfare mothers. All this suggests that both the rise of illegitimacy and the liberalization of AFDC reflect broader changes in attitudes toward sex, law, and privacy, and that they had little direct effect on each other.
But while AFDC does not seem to affect the number of unwed mothers, as Murray claims, it does affect family arrangements in other ways. Ellwood and Bane found, for example, that benefit levels had a dramatic effect on the living arrangements of single mothers. If benefits are low, single mothers have trouble maintaining a separate household and are likely to live with their relatives—usually their parents. If benefits rise, single mothers are more likely to maintain their own households.
Higher AFDC benefits also appear to increase the divorce rate. Ellwood and Bane’s work suggests, for example, that if the typical state had paid a family of four only $180 a month in 1980 instead of $350, the number of divorced women would have fallen by a tenth. This might be partly because divorced women remarry more hastily in states with very low benefits. But if AFDC pays enough for a woman to live on, she is also more likely to leave her husband. The Seattle–Denver “income maintenance” experiments, which Murray discusses at length, found the same pattern.
The fact that high benefits lead to high divorce rates is obviously embarrassing for liberals, since most people view divorce as undesirable. But it has no bearing on Murray’s basic thesis, which is that changes in social policy after 1965 made it “profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that are destructive in the long term.” If changes in the welfare system were encouraging teen-agers to quit school, have children, and not take steady jobs, as Murray contends, he would clearly be right about the long-term costs. But if changes in the welfare system have merely encouraged women who were unhappy in their marriages to divorce their husbands, or have discouraged divorced mothers from marrying lovers about whom they feel ambivalent, what makes Murray think this is “destructive in the long term”?
Are we to suppose that Phyllis is better off in the long run married to Harold if he drinks, or beats her, or molests their teen-age daughter? Surely Phyllis is a better judge of this than we are. Or are we to suppose that Phyllis’s children will be better off if she sticks with Harold? That depends on how good a father Harold is. The children may do better in a household with two parents, even if the parents are constantly at each other’s throats, but then again they may not. Certainly Murray offers no evidence that unhappy marriages are better for children that divorces, and I know of none.
Shorn of rhetoric, then, the “empirical” case against the welfare system comes to this. First, high AFDC benefits allow single mothers to set up their own households. Second, high AFDC benefits allow mothers to end bad marriages. Third, high benefits may make divorced mothers more cautious about remarrying. All these “costs” strike me as benefits.
Consider Harold and Phyllis again, but this time imagine that they married in 1960 and that it is now 1970. They have three children. Harold still has the deadend job in a laundry that Murray describes him as having taken in 1960, and he has now taken both to drinking and to beating Phyllis. Harold still has two choices. He can leave Phyllis or he can stay. If he leaves, Phyllis can try to collect child support from him, but her chances of success are low. So Harold can do as he pleases.
Phyllis is not so fortunate. She is not the sort of person who can earn much more than the minimum wage, so she cannot support herself and three children without help. If she is lucky she can go to her parents. Otherwise, if she lives in a state with low benefits, she has two choices: stick with Harold or abandon her children. Since she has been taught to stick with her children, she has to stick with Harold. If she lives in a state with high benefits she has a third choice: she can leave Harold and take her children with her. In a sense, AFDC is the price we pay for Phyllis’s commitment to her children. At 0.6 percent of total US personal income, it does not seem a high price.
Giving Phyllis more choices has obvious political drawbacks. So long as Phyllis lives with Harold, her troubles are her own. We may shake our heads when we hear about them, but we can tell ourselves that all marriages have problems, and that that is the way of the world. If Phyllis leaves Harold—or Harold leaves Phyllis—and she comes to depend on AFDC, her problems become public instead of private. Now if she cannot pay the rent or does not feed her children milk it could be because her monthly check is too small, not because she doesn’t know or care about the benefits of milk or because Harold spends the money on drink. Taking collective responsibility for Phyllis’s problems is not a trivial price to pay for liberating her from Harold. Most of her problems will, after all, remain intractable. But our impulse to drive her back into Harold’s arms so that we no longer have to think about her is the kind of impulse decent people should resist.
The idea that Phyllis will be the loser in the long run if society gives her more choices exemplifies a habit of mind that seems as common among conservatives as among liberals. First you figure out what kind of behavior is in society’s interest. Then you define such behavior as “good.” Then you argue that good behavior, while perhaps disagreeable in the short run, is in the long-run interest of those who engage in it. Every parent will recognize this ploy: my son should take out the garbage because it is in his long-run interest to learn good work habits, not because I don’t want to take it out or don’t want to live with a shirker. The conflict between individual interests and the common interest, between selfishness and unselfishness, is thus transformed into a conflict between short-run and long-run self-interest. Unfortunately, the argument is often false...
February 08, 2012 at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
"Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state."
--Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise
February 08, 2012 at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Jonathan Gruber on Public Finance:
Eve Gerber: Let’s turn to Losing Ground by Charles Murray. Please tell us about it.
Jon Gruber: Charles Murray took the economic concept of moral hazard – the concept that if you reward people for bad behaviour then they behave badly – and turned it into prose. Reading the book moved me a notch to the right. It posed a challenge to liberals – to get more rigorous in our analysis. It showed the simple facts didn’t look so good for us and that we needed to address questions like, “Is welfare causing women to become single mothers?” Murray really challenged the way I thought.
It turned out his facts were largely wrong, so it’s really more a book to read for an example of how someone can shift the debate with potent use of clear arguments.
Eve Gerber: When it was written, liberals were very resistant to the idea that social programmes discourage work or have bad side effects. Has this shifted? How much of Losing Ground actually became embodied in reforms or proposals that many liberals would now support?
Jon Gruber: Losing Ground was the intellectual basis of the push to reform welfare in the United States, not in terms of the actual ideas but just in terms of challenging the orthodoxy. And, of course, welfare was reformed in 1996.
Eve Gerber: Next, Free For All? It certainly sounds good. Please tell us about it.
Jon Gruber: Health is the single most important topic in public finance today and this is the single most important book written about health – that’s why I chose it. The book is by Joseph Newhouse, who led the group that designed the RAND Health Insurance Experiment. In the 1970s people tried to figure out how much of the cost of healthcare consumers should bear and how much insurance should pay…. Joe Newhouse and his colleagues put together this incredible social experiment… randomly assigned individuals to plans with a variety of cost-sharing provisions, to determine how health was affected when people paid more for healthcare. This was the premier use of a social experiment of this magnitude and quality.
The results were profound because, not only did the study show that people are price sensitive in their health decisions and if you charge more for healthcare they’ll use less but it also showed that, at least back then, higher deductibles didn’t matter much for health. People in the study used less healthcare but weren’t less healthy…. Subsequent studies, including a number of mine, have generally found similar conclusions, but no study has ever been as good as this one….
Eve Gerber: Have we seen other large-scale economic experiments like this in the United States or around the world? If you could design just one new experiment, what would it be?
Jon Gruber: There haven’t been that many. There’s another famous one called the Negative Income Tax Experiment – it’s also very old [from 1968 to 1979]. In that experiment they changed people’s tax rate and saw how hard they worked. That one has been influential…. There were two things about RAND that made it so influential. The first was it was truly a randomised trial – the kind that’s done in medicine – so it’s very convincing. Second, they got detailed data on individuals – not just how subjects felt but their actual blood pressure and other objective measures of health. I was fortunate enough to be part of the closest thing we’ve seen to RAND – a study we just did in the state of Oregon, with my colleague Amy Finkelstein at MIT and Katherine Baicker and Joe Newhouse at Harvard…. The Oregon study is about what happens when you’re insured vs uninsured…. The first finding, which just came out and got a lot of attention, is that people who won the lottery and got the health insurance were hugely better off. Their utilisation went up but, more importantly, their health went up, their wellbeing improved and their odds of financial distress were reduced. This was a neat initial finding and now we’re gathering data from people in household surveys on objective measures of health like their blood pressure and blood glucose and things like that. This is, in my mind, the biggest study since RAND.
Eve Gerber: You were an architect of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health programme and an instrumental adviser in the design of the Obama administration’s health reforms. So please settle the question of the year: How similar are they?
Jon Gruber: They are very, very similar. You can think of the Affordable Care Act as a more ambitious version of the Massachusetts reform. Both reforms have the same core principles: Non-discrimination in insurance markets, health insurance mandates and subsidies so insurance is affordable. In Massachusetts, we stopped there. The national bill – the Affordable Care Act – has two additional features. One is it’s paid for and two, it takes on cost controls. Romney’s reform was paid for with funding from the federal treasury. The Affordable Care Act is paid for through offsets in the federal budget. And the Affordable Care Act tackles the increase in costs in a serious way, which the Massachusetts bill didn’t do. So you can think of the Affordable Care Act as the Massachusetts bill-plus.
Eve Gerber: Where did the idea for a mandate come from?
Jon Gruber: I associate it with Stuart Butler from the Heritage Foundation and Mark Pauly, an academic at Wharton. I first heard about it as the conservative alternative to the Clinton healthcare reform of the early 1990s….
The biggest issue in dollar terms is just how to control healthcare costs. The Affordable Care Act makes a start but more must be done. I like to say there are only two problems we have to worry about in America – healthcare spending and global warming…. How we control healthcare costs is probably the number one problem public finance economists and everyone in the world has to grapple with…
February 07, 2012 at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
"The failure of the duly elected [Weimar German] government to build a new Army that would be faithful to its own democratic spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal mistake for the Republic, as time would tell. The failure to clean out the judiciary was another. The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends.'
--William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
February 07, 2012 at 06:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
"When we compare the genomes of Archaea, bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals, we find about 500 genes that exist in all domains of life…"
--Sean B. Carroll, The Making of the Fittest:
February 06, 2012 at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
"A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers.
"This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can…"
--James D. Hornfischer, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
February 05, 2012 at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
"[I]t was to head off a return of the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) that western Europe took the new path with which we are now familiar. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. Shadowed by history, its leaders implemented social reforms and built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay…"
--Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
February 04, 2012 at 05:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
"He was not a bad fellow, no worse than most and probably better than some, and not a bad ballplayer neither when they give him a chance, when they laid off him long enough.
"From here on in I rag nobody."
--Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly
February 03, 2012 at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
"'Lady.' She looked up from her loom. The sergeant of the guard, the one with red eyes, bowed to her.
"'Sergeant?'
"'Lady, we have the workmen for you. The Children of the Sun you wanted. With all their tools and gear. Himself says come and see.'
"'Thank you, Sergeant.' She rose, smiling. 'Where are they?'
"'Got ‘em in the lower courtyard.' He escorted her down through the corridors. Hideous monsters saluted shyly as she passed them. She stepped out into the courtyard and beheld red men, kneeling in a long row. They were blindfolded, their hands bound before them, and some wept and prayed to their gods. Piled in a heap to one side of them were chests and trays of tools.
"Gard stood to the other side of them, in his full black armor. When he spoke, it was not to her but to the prisoners, in a voice full of rolling thunder. 'Now, Children of the Sun, if you die tomorrow, you will still have seen the fairest sight of your lives, and you’d not see anything fairer if you lived on a thousand years. Free their eyes!' His guards stepped forward and pulled off the blindfolds, one by one.
"One by one the red men blinked, stared around, then gasped as they saw the Saint. Some of them fell prostrate before her, bound hands outstretched. 'Oh, Lady, save us!' 'Have mercy on us!' 'Don’t let him kill us!'
"She looked on them in horror and looked white rage at Gard. 'What have you done?'
"'Brought you workmen, as I promised,' he said in that same theatrical tone, meeting her eyes without flinching. She saw amusement there, and a covert purpose. 'Why, madam, are you displeased? Shall I have them hanged?'
"'No!' she cried. 'You will have them released at once!'
"The red men crowded forward on their knees, weeping, thanking her, imploring her, praising her. 'Then I will spare your lives,' said Gard to the Children of the Sun. 'But you will slave for me nonetheless, to make fair the rooms in which my lady lives.'
"'They will not slave!' said the Saint. 'If they choose to work, you will pay them in gold, and then you’ll let them go!'
"'Lady, is it fine work you want?' said one of the prisoners. 'By all the gods, I swear you’ll have rooms finer than a duchess’s!'
"'Wife, I will defer to your wishes,' said Gard. 'For I am your slave in all things. Should one of them displease you, however, his head shall look down sadly from a pike.'
"'May I speak with you alone a moment?' said the Saint to Gard.
"He bowed her to the door, and she pulled him within the hall after her. 'Now they will do anything you ask them,' said Gard smugly.
"'How dare you!' The Saint looked him full in the eyes with all the force of her anger, and he rocked back a little on his heels but did not look away.
"'Wife, this is the way a Dark Lord accomplishes his affairs. And I had to bring them up here blindfolded, you know, that’s elementary security. They haven’t been hurt. They haven’t been robbed. If they do a good job for you, by all means pay them what you will. They’ll have to be taken down the mountain blindfolded too, but you have my word they’ll be released alive and unharmed. That’s fair, isn’t it?'
"'That isn’t the point! Why couldn’t you have asked them to come?'
"'Because they wouldn’t have. What with me being a Dark Lord and all, as they’d say. But look now: we’ll get your rooms redecorated. They’ll go back home and spread tales about the terrible Master of the Mountain and his beautiful and saintly Lady who saved their lives. It’ll do both our reputations a world of good.'
"'But this is all absurd!'
"'Isn’t it? I lie to survive, because people fear and respect a black mask more than an honest face. Life became much simpler once I understood that.'
"'We have not done with this conversation,' she said."
--Kage Baker, The House of the Stag
February 02, 2012 at 04:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
"In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species…"
--Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection
January 30, 2012 at 05:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
"The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns—was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degress, and every one of them was always just twenty-four hours away from a funding crisis. The key to day-to-day survival was the skill with which Wall Street executives managed their firms' ongoing reputation in the marketplace…"
--William D. Cohan, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
January 29, 2012 at 05:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
"Given enough weed and explosives, even a creature of most sophisticated and ancient dark power can be undone by a few stoners."
--Christopher Moore, Bite Me: A Love Story
January 28, 2012 at 06:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
"The most obvious damage is to his prose. Whenever Hobsbawm enters a politically sensitive zone, he retreats into hooded, wooden language, redolent of Party-speak. “The possibility of dictatorship,” he writes in The Age of Extremes, “is implicit in any regime based in a single, irremovable party.” The “possibility”? “Implicit”? As Rosa Luxemburg could have told him, a single irremovable party is a dictatorship. Describing the Comintern’s requirement in 1932 that German Communists fight the Socialists and ignore the Nazis, Hobsbawm in his memoirs writes that “it is now generally accepted that the policy . . . was one of suicidal idiocy.” Now? Everyone thought it criminally stupid at the time and has thought so ever since—everyone, that is, except the Communists."
--Tony Judt: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
January 27, 2012 at 06:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
"A 25-ton container of coffeemakers can leave a factory in Malaysia, be loaded aboard a ship, and cover the 9,000 miles to Los Angeles in 16 days. A day later, the container is on a unit train to Chicago, where it is transferred immediately to a truck headed for Cincinnati. The 11,000-mile trip from the factory gate to the Ohio warehouse can take as little as 22 days, a rate of 500 miles per day, at a cost lower than that of a single first-class air ticket. More than likely, no one has touched the contents, or even opened the container, along the way."
--Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World…
January 26, 2012 at 05:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
"The history of enterprise in antiquity therefore falls naturally into two periods. First is the development of economic practices in Mesopotamia circa 3500-1200 BC. By the end of antiquity we find gain-seeking shifting away from productive enterprise to land acquisition, usury, profiteering from political office, and extraction of foreign tribute by force…"
--David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, The Invention of Enterprise
January 25, 2012 at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
"'I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to a point of responsibility', John Wayne said. And: 'I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.'"
--Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
January 24, 2012 at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
"Nixonland: it is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans."
--Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
January 23, 2012 at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
"Early agriculturalists" means Fertile Crescent ca. 5000 BC; "advanced agriculturalists" means northwest Europe ca. 1400; "industrial" means northwest Europe ca. 1860; "technological" means North Atlantic ca. 1970.
January 22, 2012 at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)
The book, he says--or, rather, the column of print.
Kieran Healy:
Apple for the Teacher: Instapaper and the Persistence of the Textbook: In his presentation, Apple’s Phil Schiller heavily criticized the static, text-heavy format of the traditional texbook. Far better to present information dynamically with graphics, supporting illustrations, movies, interactive components and all the rest of it.
Sure, why not? But—-consider how many of the most sophisticated computer users consume "content" online, perhaps especially the ones who use iPads. Do they seek out material that looks like this? Do they want multi-modal, multimedia formats? Do they love jazzy Infographics? No. They use Instapaper or some equivalent tool to create reading lists for themselves, and to read those articles in a format that deliberately strips out a lot of the original presentation and replaces it with simple, clean, easy-to-read, blocks of text that look a lot like a well-designed piece of outmoded 1950s technology.
Why do people like Instapaper so much? It’s because they’ve chosen to read what they save, and the app lets them keep it and read it in a straightforward, uncluttered way. Finding the good stuff is the hard part, along with the ability, motivation, and opportunity to read things: once you’re there, you don’t need the dynamic illustrations or zooming or supporting illustrations. You’ll read it because you’re already interested in it, and you’ll even seek out and pay for a way to make the reading and learning experience static and simple, because you don’t want to be distracted.
A similar point applies in education. Technology by itself—-let alone Keynote transitions, animations, or what have you—-will not by themselves engage students. The promise of "technology in the classroom" has always been that it will magically "engage" students in what they have to learn. But it never does: you still need a good teacher, the opportunity to learn, and some motivation of your own. More dynamic textbooks aren’t the solution to the problem of education—-they’re not even the solution to the problem of textbooks.
It’s strange to see Apple going down this well-worn road. When the iPad was launched, a stock criticism of it was that it was a device made for consuming rather than making or doing things. Very quickly, people found ways to use it that showed it was capable of a lot more than that. Apps like GarageBand or Star Walk or Leafsnap—-there are loads more—-take advantage of the iPad’s computing power and portability in ways that put it in a different class of activity from reading textbooks or sitting working at a computer. It’s these sort of use-cases where a device like the iPad really shines. So it’s a pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the books.
Where Kieran may be wrong--not is wrong, but may be wrong--is that he may miss the fact that humanity is divided into two groups: we for whom the column of print is the best virtual reality tool ever, and the rest of the human race for whom it is not.
We need Instapaper, a quiet room, and the Lynx browser. The rest of the human race may need the productions of iBooks Author.
January 22, 2012 at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
"The gorilla study illustrates, perhaps more dramatically than any other, the powerful and pervasive influence of the illusion of attention: We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do…"
--Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
January 22, 2012 at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
"The history of Athenian popular government shows that making good use of dispersed knowledge is the original source of democracy's strength."
--Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens
January 21, 2012 at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
William Hazlitt's Political Essay: "The Character of Mr Burke":
It is not without reluctance that we speak of the vices and infirmities of such a mind as Burke's: but the poison of high example has by far the widest range of destruction: and, for the sake of public honour and individual integrity, we think it right to say, that however it may be defended upon other grounds, the political career of that eminent individual has no title to the praise of consistency. Mr Burke, the opponent of the American war, and Mr Burke, the opponent of the French Revolution, are not the same person, but opposite persons -- not opposite persons only, but deadly enemies.
In the latter period, he abandoned not only all his practical conclusions, but all the principles on which they were founded. He proscribed all his former sentiments, denounced all his former friends, rejected and reviled all the maxims to which he had formerly appealed as incontestable. In the American war, he constantly spoke of the right of the people as inherent, and inalienable: after the French Revolution, he began by treating them with the chicanery of a sophist, and ended by raving at them with the fury of a maniac. In the former case, he held out the duty of resistance to oppression, as the palladium and only ultimate resource of natural liberty; in the latter, he scouted, prejudged, vilified and nicknamed, all resistance in the abstract, as a foul and unnatural union of rebellion and sacrilege. In the one case, to answer the purposes of faction he made it out, that the people are always in the right; in the other, to answer different ends, he made it out that they are always in the wrong -- lunatics in the hands of the royal keepers, patients in the sick-wards of a hospital, or felons in the condemned cells of a prison.
In the one, he considered that there was a constant tendency on the part of the prerogative to encroach on the rights of the people, which ought always to be the object of the most watchful jealousy, and of resistance, when necessary: in the other, he pretended to regard it as the sole occupation and ruling passion of those in power, to watch over the liberties and happiness of their subjects. The burthen of all his speeches on the American war, was conciliation, concession, timely reform, as the only practicable or desirable alternative of rebellion: the object of all his writings on the French Revolution was, to deprecate and explode all concession and all reform, as encouraging rebellion, and as in irretrievable step to revolution and anarchy.
In the one, he insulted kings personally, as among the lowest and worst of mankind; in the other, he held them up to the imagination of his readers, as scared abstractions. In the one case, he was a partisan of the people, to court popularity; in the other, to gain the favour of the Court, he became the apologist of all courtly abuses. In the one case, he took part with those who were actually rebels against his Sovereign: in the other, he denounced as rebels and traitors, all those of his own countrymen who did not yield sympathetic allegiance to a foreign Sovereign, whom we had always been in the habit of treating as an arbitrary tyrant.
Nobody will accuse the principles of his present Majesty, or the general measures of his reign, of inconsistency. If they had no other merit, they have, at least, that of having been all along actuated by one uniform and constant spirit: yet Mr Burke at one time vehemently opposed, and afterwards most intemperately extolled them: and it was for his recanting his opposition, not for his persevering in it, that he received his pension. He does not himself mention his flaming speeches in the American war, as among the public services which had entitled him to this remuneration.
The truth is, that Burke was a man of fine fancy subtle reflection; but not of sound and practical judgment, nor of high or rigid principles. -- As to his understanding, he certainly was not a great philosopher; for his works of mere abstract reasoning are shallow and inefficient: -- nor was he a man of sense and business; for, both in counsel and in conduct, he alarmed his friends as much at least as his opponents: -- but he was an acute and accomplished man of letters -- an ingenious political essayist. He applied the habit of reflection, which he had borrowed from his metaphysical studies, but which was not competent to the discovery of any elementary truth in that department, with great facility and success, to the mixed mass of human affairs.
He knew more of the political machine than a recluse philosopher; and he speculated more profoundly on its principles and general results than a mere politician. He saw a number of fine distinctions and changeable aspects of things, the good mixed with the ill, and the ill mixed with the good; and with a sceptical indifference, in which the exercise of his own ingenuity was obviously the governing principle, suggested various topics to qualify or assist the judgment of others.
But for this very reason, he was little calculated to become a leader or a partizan in any important practical measure. For the habit of his mind would lead him to find out a reason for or against any thing: and it is not on speculative refinements, (which belong to every side of a question), but on a just estimate of the aggregate mass and extended combinations of objections and advantages, that we ought to decide or act. Burke had the power of throwing true or false weights into the scales of political casuistry, but not firmness of mind (or, shall we say, honesty enough) to hold the balance. When he took a side, his vanity or his spleen more frequently gave the casting vote than his judgment; and the fieriness of his zeal was in exact proportion to the levity of his understanding, and the want of conscious sincerity.
He was fitted by nature and habit for the studies and labours of the closet; and was generally mischievous when he came out; because the very subtlety of his reasoning, which, left to itself, would have counteracted its own activity, or found its level in the common sense of mankind, became a dangerous engine in the hands of power, which is always eager to make use of the most plausible pretext to cover the most fatal designs. That which, if applied as a general observation on human affairs, is a valuable truth suggested to the mind, may, when forced into the interested defence of a particular measure or system, become the grosses and basest sophistry.
Facts or consequences never stood in the way of this speculative politician. He fitted them to his preconceived theories, instead of conforming his theories to them. They were the playthings of his style, the sport of his fancy. They were the straws of which his imagination made a blaze, and were consumed, like straws, in the blaze they had served to kindle. The fine things he said about Liberty and Humanity, his speech on the Begum's affairs, told equally well, whether Warren Hastings was a a tyrant or not: nor did he care one jot who caused the famine he described, so that he described it in a way that no one else could. On the same principle, he represented the French priests and nobles under the old regime as excellent moral people, very charitable, and very religious, in the teeth of notorious facts, -- to answer to the handsome things he had to say in favour of priesthood and nobility in general; and with similar views he falsifies the record of our English Revolution, and puts an interpretation of the word abdication, of which a schoolboy would be ashamed.
He constructed his whole theory of government, in short, not on rational, but on picturesque and fanciful principles; as if the king's crowns were a painted gewgaw, to be looked at on gala-days; titles an empty sound to please the ear; and the whole order of society a theatrical procession.
His lamentations over the age of chivalry, and his projected crusade to restore it, are about as wise as if any one from reading the Beggar's Opera, should take to picking of pockets: or, from admiring the landscapes of Salvator Rosa, should wish to convert the abodes of civilized life into the haunts of wild beasts and banditti. On this principle of false refinement, there is not abuse, nor system of abuses, that does not admit of an easy and triumphant defence; for there is something which a merely speculative enquirer may always find out, good as well as bad, in every possible system, the best or the worst; and if we can once get rid of the restraints of common sense and honesty, we may easily prove, by plausible words, that liberty and slavery, peace and war, plenty and famine, are matters of perfect indifference. This is the school of politics, of which Mr Burke was at the head; and it is perhaps to his example, in this respect, that we owe the prevailing tone of many of those newspaper paragraphs, which Mr Coleridge thinks so invaluable an accession to our political philosophy.
Burke's literary talents were, after all, his chief excellence. His style has all the familiarity of conversation, and all the research of the most elaborate composition. He says what he wants to say, by any means, nearer to more remote, within his reach. He makes use of the most common or scientific terms, or the longest or shortest sentences, of the plainest and most downright, or of the most figurative modes of speech. He gives for the most part loose reins to his imagination, and follows it as far as the language will carry him. As long as the one or the other has any resources in store to make the reader feel and see the thing as he has conceived it, in its nicest shades of difference, in its utmost degree of force and splendour, he never disdains, and never fails to employ them.
Yet, in the extremes of his mixed style, there is not much affectation, and but little either of pedantry or coarseness. He everywhere gives the image he wishes to give, in its true and appropriate colouring: and it is the very crowd and variety of these images that have given to his language its peculiar tone of animation, and even of passion. It is his impatience to transfer his conceptions entire, living, in all their rapidity, strength, and glancing variety, to the minds of others, that constantly pushes him to the verge of extravagance, and yet supports him there in dignified security --
Never so sure our rapture to create,
As when he treads the brink of all we hate.He is the most poetical of our prose writers, and at the same time his prose never degenerates into the mere effeminacy of poetry; for he always aims at over powering rather than at pleasing; and consequently sacrifices beauty and delicacy to force and vividness. He has invariable a task to perform, a positive purpose to execute, an effect to produce. His only object is therefore to strike hard, and in the right place; if he misses his mark, he repeats his blow; and does not care how ungraceful the action, or how clumsy the instrument, provided it brings down his antagonist.
January 20, 2012 at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
"Parents of other friends were Revisionists, so named by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s, when he invented his own brand of right-wing Zionism. The Revisionists’ slogan, which I heard often, was “A Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan,” a view that seemed pointless and funny to me in the 1950s and early 1960s, but became much less so after the Six Day War of 1967. The Revisionists were affiliated with the right-wing Herut (Freedom) Party in Israel, led by Menachem Begin, who, before Israeli independence, had led Jewish terrorists against the British colonizers of Palestine. According to my mother, Begin had dated her sister, one of my Israeli aunts, back in Poland when they were both young."
--Emanuel Derman, Models Behaving Badly
January 20, 2012 at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
"Magicians understand at a deeply intuitive level that you alone create your experience of reality, and, like Johnny, they exploit the fact that your brain does a staggering amount of outright confabulation in order to construct the mental simulation of reality known as 'consciousness'.”
--Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Sandra Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Consciousness
January 18, 2012 at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
My Obituary for Milton Friedman:
"Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," prayed nineteenth-century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill in his "Essay on Coleridge" http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/Texts/MillJS0172/Works/Vol10/PDFs/Mill_1277.pdf. "Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."
For every left-of-center American economist in the second half of the twentieth century, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was the incarnate answer to John Stuart Mill's prayer. His wits were smart, his perceptions acute, his arguments strong, his reasoning powers clear, coherent, and terrifyingly quick. You tangled with him at your peril. And you left not necessarily convinced, but well aware of the weak points in your own argument.
General William Westmoreland, testifying before President Nixon's Commission on an All-Volunteer [Military] Force, denounced the idea, saying that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. Milton Friedman interrupted him:
General, would you rather command an army of slaves?
Westmoreland got angry:
I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.
And Friedman got rolling:
I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries. If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general.
And he did not stop:
We are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher http://www.davidrhenderson.com/articles/0199_thankyou.html.
As George Shultz likes to say:
Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn't there.
Thinking as hard as he could until he got to the root of the issues was his most powerful skill. "Even at 94," Chicago economist and Freakonomics http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006073132x/ author Steve Levitt wrote on his website yesterday, "he would teach me something about economics whenever we talked" http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2006/11/16/sad-news-milton-friedman-has-died/. In this morning's New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/business/17milton.html, Chicago economist Austen Goolsbee quotes from Milton Friedman's Nobel autobiography:
Friedman said that when he arrived [at the University of Chicago] in the 1930s, he encountered a "vibrant intellectual atmosphere of a kind that I had never dreamed existed."
"I have never recovered."
His world-view began with a bedrock faith in people, in their ability to make judgments for themselves, and thus an imperative to maximize individual freedom. On top of that was layered a deep faith and conviction that free markets were almost always the best and most magical way of coordinating every conceivable task. On top of that was layered a powerful conviction that a look at the empirical facts--a marking-to-market of your beliefs to reality--would generate the right conclusions. And on top of that was layered a fear and suspicion of government as an easily-captured tool for the enrichment of cynical and selfish interests that sought to grab whatever they could. Suffusing all was a faith in the power of argument and the utility of reason. He was an optimist: people could be taught the truths of economics, and if they were properly taught then institutions could be built to protect all against the corruption and overreach of the government.
And he did fear the government. He hated government's and society's sticking their nose into people's private business. And he interpreted "people's private business" extremely widely. He hated the War on Drugs, which he saw as a cruel and destructive breeder of crime and violence. He scorned government licensing of professions--especially doctors, who heard over and over again about how their incomes were boosted by restrictions on the number of doctors that made Americans sicker. He feared deficit spending: cynical politicians could pretend that the costs of government were less than they were by pushing the raising of taxes to pay for spending off into the future. He sought to innoculate citizens against such political games of three-card-monte: "Remember," he would say, "to spend is to tax."
This did not mean that government had no role to play. Enforcement of property rights, adjudication of contract disputes--the standard powerful rule-of-law underpinnings of the market--plus a host of other government interventions when empirical circumstances made them appropriate: Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion tax on cars in central London is Milton Friedman's. Friedman's negative income tax is one of the parents of what is now America's largest anti-poverty program: the Earned Income Tax Credit. And, most important, government had a very powerful and necessary role to play in keeping the monetary system working smoothly through proper control of the money stock. If there was always sufficient liquidity in the economy--enough but not too much--then you could trust the market system to do its job. If not, you got the Great Depression, or hyperinflation.
In his belief that the government was required to undertake relatively narrow but crucially important strategic interventions in order to stabilize the macroeconomy--keep production, employment, and prices on an even keel--Milton Friedman was in the same chapter if not on the same page as John Maynard Keynes, the economic giant of the previous generation whose doctrines and influence Friedman worked tirelessly to supplant and minimize. The Great Depression had convinced Keynes that central bankers alone could not rescue and stabilize the market economy. In Keynes's view, stronger and more drastic strategic interventions were needed to boost or curb demand directly.
Friedman and his coauthor Anna J. Schwartz argued in their Monetary History of the United States that this was a misreading of the lessons of the Great Depression, which in Friedman's view was caused by monetary mismanagement--or perhaps could have been rapidly alleviated by skillful monetary management--alone.
Over the course of forty years, Friedman's position carried the day. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke right now holds Milton Friedman's view, not John Maynard Keynes's, of what kind of strategic interventions in the economy are necessary to provide for maximum production, employment, and purchasing power, and stable prices.
Milton Friedman's thought is, I believe, best seen as the fusion of two strongly American currents: libertarianism and pragmatism. Friedman was a pragmatic libertarian. He believed that--as an empirical matter--giving individuals freedom and letting them coordinate their actions by buying and selling on markets would produce the best results. It was not that he thought this was natural law--that markets always worked best. It was, rather, that he believed that places where markets failed were atypical; that where markets did fail there were almost always enormous profit opportunities from entrepreneurial redesign of institutions; that the market system would create now opportunities for trade that would route around market failures; and that government failure was pervasive--that any expansion of government beyond the classical liberal state would be highly likely to cause more trouble than it could solve.
For right-of-center American libertarian economists, Milton Friedman was a powerful leader. For left-of-center American liberal economists, Milton Friedman was an enlightened adversary. We are all the stronger for his work. We will miss him.
January 16, 2012 at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)
Declan Trott:
‘The extent of the market’ is limited not just by transport but by trust: [T]here is also a feeling that some of the [recent] best-sellers have trivialised economics, titillating the reader with sex and drugs while neglecting the more important insights of the discipline. Nobody could accuse Partha Dasgupta of deepening this rut. In this Very Short Introduction, he has taken as his theme the original mystery of economics: the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. And he motivates the study not with unadorned GDP statistics but by comparing the lives of two young girls: Becky, who lives in an affluent American suburb, and Desta, the daughter of Ethiopian farmers. Why do two children, born so much alike, live such different lives?
The question is compelling, and presents an opportunity to explore many branches of economics, in a concrete and relevant way. Unfortunately… [w]hile there are many references to ‘Desta’s world’ and ‘Becky’s world’, these are too often brief appendages to abstract discussions of agents A, B and C and factors X, Y and Z. At times one could be reading a textbook, except there are no problem sets, fewer graphs, and the pictures are in black and white.
This is a great pity, because there is a deep, coherent and insightful argument at the core of the book.
One might begin with the proposition: wealth depends on the division of labour, and the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market. But the extent of the market is not limited only by transport and taxes. It is limited also by trust: by the rules and expectations that allow cooperation for mutual gain between people who do not know each other. And these rules and expectations, particularly the expectations, are hard to build but easy to destroy. In the worst case, not just the extent of the market but its very existence is threatened.
The logic for this argument is provided by game theory. Economic life, and indeed social life more generally, depends on trust… that most people will keep their word most of the time. But even this modest level of trust cannot be gained just by wishing for it. People must believe that the long-run benefits from successful cooperation outweigh the short-term gains from cheating. And they must believe that other people think the same….
If prospects for the future become less bright, or if confidence in the other party is reduced, even for trivial or fallacious reasons, the balance may tip from cooperation to conflict very quickly. This has become a cliché in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Iraq: political uncertainty resurrects dormant divisions and peaceful neighbours become killers.
Less dramatically, such calculations may just restrict the number of people any individual can trust…. The ‘community’ is a natural boundary: any group which people are born into (and with no easy, voluntary exit) and must deal with repeatedly for their whole lives makes the penalties for cheating higher and more certain. The family is the ultimate example….
Yet… families… are small… limit the division of labour…. Markets… overcome these problems by allowing much larger numbers of people to cooperate. But these large numbers cannot rely on personal ties, so establishing the necessary trust is much more difficult….
While consideration of trust, and its implications for communities, markets, households and firms, is the key content of the book, other subjects are considered. It begins with a brief consideration of the history of economic growth, contains an interlude on the contrasting incentives and institutions in science and technology, and concludes with chapters on sustainability and democratic decision-making….
The Very Short Introduction series is advertised as being for ‘anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way into a new subject’. Stimulating, yes. Accessible? I am not so sure. Popular economics is supposedly aimed at the whole literate population, or at least the university-educated, newspaper-reading part of it. Partha Dasgupta seems to equate them with his fellow Cambridge professors and their brightest students. And it is a shame, because the intellectual content of the book, combined with the Becky/Desta device, had the potential for a truly great and accessible introduction to economics.
Me:
This is a game theorist's short introduction to economics. It focus on on: individual goals, individual opportunities and constraints, individual incentives, strategies, exchange, trust, and equilibrium outcomes. It is, of course, greatly concerned with wealth and poverty--that is, after all, the point of the discipline of economics: it is an inquiry into nature and causes of the wealth of nations. You won't find lots of practice figuring out how price and quantity change in response to demand shocks or calculating multipliers. What you will find is the logic and rationale for why figuring out how price and quantity change in response to demand shocks or calculating multipliers is a worthwhile thing to do.
Definitely five stars.
T. Williams:
This is probably not the best intro to economics book (i.e. it is a little too concise in places), but I liked it nevertheless. Overall, the author did do a great job explaining ideas…. The main drawback is that there's little to no iteration i.e. I usually learn by being exposed to a concept or term several times but in this short book there's no room for that - you're told about a concept once…
manuelfisica:
If you want a textbook, get something else...
The strengths of this book are: it avoids the trap of doing a developed-world only description, it really allows you to appreciate how economists think, it ties economic concepts to concepts from other disciplines. It can get technical sometimes for the least mathematical readership, but still a must read.
Chapter 5 alone justifies buying the book (Science and technology as institutions).
January 16, 2012 at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
"A key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs."
--Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
January 16, 2012 at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Or, is there any relationship that humans do not think ought to be turned into a reciprocal gift-exchange relationship? "Natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange" indeed!
Book XXIV:
Iris, fleet as the wind, sped forth…. "Take heart," she said….
The lord of Olympus bids you go and ransom noble Hektor, and take with you such gifts as shall give satisfaction to Akhilleus…. Akhilleus will not kill you nor let another do so, for he will take heed to his ways and sin not, and he will entreat a suppliant with all honourable courtesy.…
[H]e lifted the lids of his chests, and took out twelve goodly vestments. He took also twelve cloaks of single fold, twelve rugs, twelve fair mantles, and an equal number of shirts. He weighed out ten talents of gold, and brought moreover two burnished tripods, four cauldrons, and a very beautiful cup which the Thracians had given him… to ransom the body of his son….
Priam and Idaeus as they showed out upon the plain did not escape the ken of all-seeing Jove, who looked down upon the old man and pitied him; then he spoke to his son Mercury and said, "Mercury, for it is you who are the most disposed to escort men on their way, and to hear those whom you will hear, go, and so conduct Priam to the ships of the Akhaeans that no other of the Danaans shall see him nor take note of him until he reach the son of Peleus." Thus he spoke and Mercury, guide and guardian, slayer of Argus, did as he was told….
[…]
Then answered Priam, "If you are indeed the squire of Akhilleus son of Peleus, tell me now the Whole truth. Is my son still at the ships, or has Akhilleus hewn him limb from limb, and given him to his hounds?"
"Sir," replied the slayer of Argus, guide and guardian, "neither hounds nor vultures have yet devoured him; he is still just lying at the tents by the ship of Achilles, and though it is now twelve days that he has lain there, his flesh is not wasted nor have the worms eaten him although they feed on warriors….
Ere long they came to the lofty dwelling of the son of Peleus for which the Myrmidons had cut pine and which they had built for their king; when they had built it they thatched it with coarse tussock-grass which they had mown out on the plain, and all round it they made a large courtyard, which was fenced with stakes set close together…. Mercury opened the gate for the old man, and brought in the treasure that he was taking with him for the son of Peleus…. Mercury went back to high Olympus. Priam… went straight into the house where Akhilleus, loved of the gods, was sitting. There he found him with his men seated at a distance from him: only two, the hero Automedon, and Alkimus of the race of Mars, were busy in attendance about his person, for he had but just done eating and drinking….
Priam besought Akhilleus saying:
Think of your father, O Akhilleus like unto the gods, who is such even as I am, on the sad threshold of old age. It may be that those who dwell near him harass him, and there is none to keep war and ruin from him. Yet when he hears of you being still alive, he is glad, and his days are full of hope that he shall see his dear son come home to him from Troy; but I, wretched man that I am, had the bravest in all Troy for my sons, and there is not one of them left. I had fifty sons when the Akhaeans came here; nineteen of them were from a single womb, and the others were borne to me by the women of my household. The greater part of them has fierce Mars laid low, and Hektor, him who was alone left, him who was the guardian of the city and ourselves, him have you lately slain; therefore I am now come to the ships of the Akhaeans to ransom his body from you with a great ransom. Fear, O Akhilleus, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable, for I have steeled myself as no man yet has ever steeled himself before me, and have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son."
Thus spoke Priam, and the heart of Akhilleus yearned as he bethought him of his father. He took the old man's hand and moved him gently away. The two wept bitterly- Priam, as he lay at Achilles' feet, weeping for Hektor, and Achilles now for his father and now for Patroklus, till the house was filled with their lamentation. But when Akhilleus was now sated with grief and had unburthened the bitterness of his sorrow, he left his seat and raised the old man by the hand, in pity for his white hair and beard; then he said:
Unhappy man, you have indeed been greatly daring; how could you venture to come alone to the ships of the Achaeans, and enter the presence of him who has slain so many of your brave sons? You must have iron courage: sit now upon this seat, and for all our grief we will hide our sorrows in our hearts, for weeping will not avail us. The immortals know no care, yet the lot they spin for man is full of sorrow; on the floor of Jove's palace there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones. He for whom Jove the lord of thunder mixes the gifts he sends, will meet now with good and now with evil fortune; but he to whom Jove sends none but evil gifts will be pointed at by the finger of scorn, the hand of famine will pursue him to the ends of the world, and he will go up and down the face of the earth, respected neither by gods nor men. Even so did it befall Peleus; the gods endowed him with all good things from his birth upwards, for he reigned over the Myrmidons excelling all men in prosperity and wealth, and mortal though he was they gave him a goddess for his bride. But even on him too did heaven send misfortune, for there is no race of royal children born to him in his house, save one son who is doomed to die all untimely; nor may I take care of him now that he is growing old, for I must stay here at Troy to be the bane of you and your children. And you too, O Priam, I have heard that you were aforetime happy. They say that in wealth and plenitude of offspring you surpassed all that is in Lesbos, the realm of Makar to the northward, Phrygia that is more inland, and those that dwell upon the great Hellespont; but from the day when the dwellers in heaven sent this evil upon you, war and slaughter have been about your city continually. Bear up against it, and let there be some intervals in your sorrow. Mourn as you may for your brave son, you will take nothing by it. You cannot raise him from the dead, ere you do so yet another sorrow shall befall you.
And Priam answered:
O king, bid me not be seated, while Hector is still lying uncared for in your tents, but accept the great ransom which I have brought you, and give him to me at once that I may look upon him. May you prosper with the ransom and reach your own land in safety, seeing that you have suffered me to live and to look upon the light of the sun."
Akhilleus looked at him sternly and said:
Vex me, sir, no longer; I am of myself minded to give up the body of Hector. My mother, daughter of the old man of the sea, came to me from Jove to bid me deliver it to you. Moreover I know well, O Priam, and you cannot hide it, that some god has brought you to the ships of the Achaeans, for else, no man however strong and in his prime would dare to come to our host; he could neither pass our guard unseen, nor draw the bolt of my gates thus easily; therefore, provoke me no further, lest I sin against the word of Jove, and suffer you not, suppliant though you are, within my tents….
They lifted the ransom for Hector's body from the waggon. but they left two mantles and a goodly shirt, that Akhilleus might wrap the body in them when he gave it to be taken home…. Akhilleus himself lifted it on to a bier, and he and his men then laid it on the wagon. He cried aloud as he did so and called on the name of his dear comrade:
Be not angry with me, Patroklus," he said, "if you hear even in the house of Hades that I have given Hektor to his father for a ransom. It has been no unworthy one, and I will share it equitably with you.
Akhilleus then went back into the tent and took his place on the richly inlaid seat from which he had risen, by the wall that was at right angles to the one against which Priam was sitting. "Sir," he said:
your son is now laid upon his bier and is ransomed according to desire; you shall look upon him when you him away at daybreak; for the present let us prepare our supper. Even lovely Niobe had to think about eating, though her twelve children- six daughters and six lusty sons- had been all slain in her house. Apollo killed the sons with arrows from his silver bow, to punish Niobe, and Diana slew the daughters, because Niobe had vaunted herself against Leto; she said Leto had borne two children only, whereas she had herself borne many- whereon the two killed the many. Nine days did they lie weltering, and there was none to bury them, for the son of Saturn turned the people into stone; but on the tenth day the gods in heaven themselves buried them, and Niobe then took food, being worn out with weeping. They say that somewhere among the rocks on the mountain pastures of Sipylus, where the nymphs live that haunt the river Akhelous, there, they say, she lives in stone and still nurses the sorrows sent upon her by the hand of heaven. Therefore, noble sir, let us two now take food; you can weep for your dear son hereafter as you are bearing him back to Ilius- and many a tear will he cost you.
With this Akhilleus sprang from his seat and killed a sheep of silvery whiteness, which his followers skinned and made ready all in due order. They cut the meat carefully up into smaller pieces, spitted them, and drew them off again when they were well roasted. Automedon brought bread in fair baskets and served it round the table, while Achilles dealt out the meat, and they laid their hands on the good things that were before them. As soon as they had had enough to eat and drink, Priam, descendant of Dardanus, marvelled at the strength and beauty of Akhilleus for he was as a god to see, and Akhilleus marvelled at Priam as he listened to him and looked upon his noble presence. When they had gazed their fill Priam spoke first. "And now, O king," he said:
take me to my couch that we may lie down and enjoy the blessed boon of sleep. Never once have my eyes been closed from the day your hands took the life of my son; I have grovelled without ceasing in the mire of my stable-yard, making moan and brooding over my countless sorrows. Now, moreover, I have eaten bread and drunk wine; hitherto I have tasted nothing.
As he spoke Achilles told his men and the women-servants to set beds in the room that was in the gatehouse, and make them with good red rugs, and spread coverlets on the top of them…. Then Achilles said laughingly to Priam:
Dear sir, you shall lie outside, lest some counsellor of those who in due course keep coming to advise with me should see you here in the darkness of the flying night, and tell it to Agamemnon. This might cause delay in the delivery of the body. And now tell me and tell me true, for how many days would you celebrate the funeral rites of noble Hector? Tell me, that I may hold aloof from war and restrain the host.
And Priam answered:
Since, then, you suffer me to bury my noble son with all due rites, do thus, Achilles, and I shall be grateful. You know how we are pent up within our city; it is far for us to fetch wood from the mountain, and the people live in fear. Nine days, therefore, will we mourn Hector in my house; on the tenth day we will bury him and there shall be a public feast in his honour; on the eleventh we will build a mound over his ashes, and on the twelfth, if there be need, we will fight.
And Achilles answered, "All, King Priam, shall be as you have said. I will stay our fighting for as long a time as you have named."
As he spoke he laid his hand on the old man's right wrist, in token that he should have no fear; thus then did Priam and his attendant sleep there in the forecourt, full of thought, while Achilles lay in an inner room of the house, with fair Briseis by his side…
January 15, 2012 at 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
