Month: September 2009

There will be no attack on Iran.

Ron Brownstein has a great post on the cost-control mechanisms buried in the Baucus plan. Andrew Sprung notes the importance of "a MedPac on steroids":

Compare Obama, speaking to Washington Post editor Fred Hiatt in July:

At this point, I am confident that both the House and the Senate bills will contain what we've been calling MedPAC on steroids, the idea that you continually present new ideas to change incentives, change the delivery system, understanding that because this is such a complex system we're not always going to get it exactly right the first time, and that there have to be a series of modifications over the course of a series of years, and we have to take that out of politics and make sure that an independent board of medical experts and health economists are providing packages that are continually improving the system. So I think there's general consensus that that is one of two very powerful levers to bend the cost curve.

Note the gradualism. That's not pusillanimity; it's recognition that our current payment system is a huge battleship that can only be turned by degrees.

That's true of everything Obama faces: deleveraging the debt he inherited and deleveraging the empire he inherited and defusing the polarization he inherited. This takes time. And patience along with vigilance.

French president Sarkozy recently called on other countries to join a "revolution" in tracking economic progress – the happiness index.  As Joshua Keating notes, that concept was pioneered by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck of Bhutan four years ago. Keating continues:

Skeptics can (and will) look at this new innovation as a ploy for France to "juke the stats," since its short workweek and social benefits look a lot more impressive than its GDP growth. That aside, the transformation of Sarkozy's economic message has been pretty astounding. The president came to power promising privatization and economic modernization and was lambasted by French left-wingers for his attachment to "Anglo-Saxon" economic models. But since the economic crisis (and his own popularity crisis) he's made a habit of attacking the Anglo-Saxons for their free-market orthodoxy and consulting with market-skeptics Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz on new economic indicators. Where have you gone, Sarko l'Américain?

From a fascinating article in The Washington Monthly on the promise of online education:

[T]he day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things—vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research—will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone. There is an unstable, treacherous future ahead for institutions that have been comfortable for a long time. Like it or not, that’s the higher education world to come.

Noam Scheiber has a smart take on America's biggest stockholder:

[T]o the extent the administration has a problem with our largest creditor, it may be less with the Chinese leadership than with the Chinese people (the opposite of the dynamic that prevails on issues like human rights). The average Chinese–whether educated or not–looks at his country's swollen coffers and wonders why that $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves isn't helping to make life easier in China–which, after all, remains a country of enormous privation. More importantly, he's entitled to voice his opinion. Although the Chinese regime is famously quick to stifle political dissent, it tends to allow criticism of the country's economic policies, seeing it as a useful safety valve.

Fight dirty.

Caleb Crain reads up on depression era culture:

The Depression-era writer who thought most—and felt guiltiest—about what it meant to make art out of suffering was probably James Agee. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941), his book-length essay about three families of tenant farmers in Alabama, illustrated with photographs taken by the F.S.A.’s Walker Evans, Agee seems sickened by his freedom to write about the unhappiness of others. When, for example, in the course of his reporting, Agee inadvertently startles a young black couple by walking up behind them, he writes that “the least I could have done was to throw myself flat on my face and embrace and kiss their feet.” A sort of trespassing is involved in writing about other people, even when the writing is as gentle as one can manage, just as it’s a violation, however mild, to photograph a person, even though it’s in an artist’s nature to want to capture experience.

[Morris Dickstein author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression] writes that Agee “takes full account—too full, some would say—of the relation of the observer to the thing observed.” Agee’s prose becomes contorted by desire and guilt, as if he were trying simultaneously to trespass and to atone for trespassing. He repeatedly disavows literary ambition. “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” he writes. “It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.” But the longing to surpass words leads him, paradoxically, to a highly self-conscious style that is anything but matter-of-fact. Whereas Evans’s photographs sit calmly at the front of the book, arranged so that portraits of family members appear beside one another, Agee’s text is hectic. He complicates it with lists and facsimiles; qualifies it with footnotes whose tone of earnest overelaboration brings to mind David Foster Wallace; redescribes in first person a scene that he has already described largely in third person; and breaks a meditation on the problem of representation into pieces, which he then scatters throughout the book. With fond exasperation, Dickstein calls the baroque structure “confusing, even sophomoric,” and writes of a particularly gooey passage, “Were I not so moved by it, I’d be tempted to dismiss this as self-indulgent prose poetry.”

Further thoughts at Crain's blog.

Feel the epic force of Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra” passed through a public-school orchestra:

Russell Blackford argues that the paradox of suffering requires one to become an atheist. He writes that the "intellectually honest response, painful though it may be, is to stop believing in that God":

[M]ost of the supposed explanations of evil make sense only in a pre-scientific setting. They are now absurdly implausible even at face value. In particular, most of the suffering that there has been on this planet took place long before human beings even existed. An all-powerful God did not need any of this. It could have created the world in a desirable form without any of it just by thinking, "Let it be so!" That's what being all-powerful is about, if we take it seriously.

I have never found the theodicy argument against faith convincing. My own faith teaches me that suffering is part of a fallen creation that lives and dies – how could it not be? But it also teaches me that suffering in itself can be a means of letting go to God, of allowing Him to take over, of recognizing one's own mortality and limits. That to me is not some kind of crutch. It is simply the paradox of the cross.

Clive Thompson reports on the Stanford Study Of Writing, which found that "young people today write far more than any generation before them." Thompson:

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

(Hat tip: Text Patterns)