Month: July 2010

(Hat tip: Ash Garcia)

Andy Grove prescribes a manufacturing revival. Tyler Cowen has a lot of questions, Adam Ozimek is damning, and Reihan piles on:

Governments have historically done a very poor job of anticipating future job growth. Just as manufacturing employment has decreased, one can easily imagine the number of lawyers decreasing as new technologies emerge. At the same time, plumbers and nurses and other workers with skills that machines can't easily replicate might find their wages, and their public esteem, on the upswing, as Paul Krugman anticipated in an ingenious essay first published in 1996.

The U.S. badly needs job and income growth. But it won't come from the manufacturing sector. Rather, it will come from a wrenching series of labor market and entitlement and tax reforms designed to improve work incentives, most of which will prove far less popular than simply bashing China

A reader writes:

Steinglass does make a shrewd point, but it's not entirely new, and there are some interesting nuances to consider. The first is that the Western European countries with higher proportions of working women (Finland, Norway, Denmark) also tend to have higher birthrates. Although the high-birthrate countries may be less repressive and more egalitarian, another more basic consideration is that they provide much better services to parents, thus reducing the cost – emotional, economic, and otherwise – of parenthood. The second is that the seemingly high birthrate in the U.S. is probably due to our large population of new immigrants, not to any special pleasure of being an American mom.

Another writes:

I'm pretty sure Steinglass' observations are correct, but his cause and effect is off. The US birthrate is higher than most/all of Europe and other industrialized countries because of higher immigration and the fact that immigrants have more children. The same goes for minorities, (though I can't tell you how much overlap there is between the two groups). I couldn't find a nice study in the five minutes I looked, but I did come across this article:

"Latinos have saved our country," [Ken Gronbach, author of "The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Growing Demographic Trend"] said. "They represent 14% of the population but 25% of the live births. The United States is the only western industrialized nation with a fertility rate above the 2.2% replacement rate." Growth of other minority groups is also outpacing that of the majority population. Asians, the second-fastest growing group, increased 2.7% year-over-year to 15.5 million. The African-American population rose 1.3% to 41.1 million.

A newly published piece by Mark Twain:

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy.

I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor.

Tate City, Georgia, 11 am

In the best review I've read so far of Hitch-22 – which I found very hard to put down – is this appreciation by Michael Weiss. Weiss sees consistencies where others less intelligent see contradictions. This passage on Larkin is spot-on:

So far from being ‘quintessentially English,’ Larkin was a wry and melancholy observer of postwar English anxieties and insecurities. Resentful of how his generation had been made to foot a historic bill that in low moments could seem unworthy of the cost (though he didn’t fight in World War II), wary of the entitlement and decadence that had come to define that generation’s offspring (not that he had any kids himself), Larkin was at least disciplined in his resentment and wariness where it mattered most. His poems were ironic and wistful and in places surprisingly heartfelt.

Larkin was the eulogist for a bygone England, one that had paved over and abandoned to ‘bleak high-risers’, M1 cafes, parking lots and ‘concrete and tyres’. How curmudgeonly could a man be who apostrophized the native rabbit population, which had been cruelly reduced by means of a manmade virus called Myxomatosis: ‘I'm glad I can't explain / Just in what jaws you were to suppurate.’

Larkin was possessed of an uncommon self-awareness that preempted even the harshest animadversions leveled against him by a smug literary commissariat after he was long gone. To uncover his supposed nastiness–the mental barks and growls–they had to rummage through his correspondence, his diary. Christopher’s plaint was that the poet demanded was a proper historical study, not self-righteous condemnation. It fell to the lot of the Left to see Larkin as emblematic of a little-investigated substratum of English sociology. E.P. Thompson gave us the The Making of the English Working Class; The Making of the English Petty Bourgeoisie was still forthcoming. The failure to comprehend the fundamental seriousness behind the Larkinesque generational posture is what ultimately caused that Left to experience cataclysmic shifts — the Falklands War and the rise of Thatcher — as bewildering shocks. A true student of Orwell, Christopher was never so cosmopolitan as to miss the idiosyncrasies and discreet charms of his own native land.

The “and that will be England gone” Tory provincial is perfectly caught in an anecdote Christopher relays about his father, who was once asked by a superior to co-host a party for naval officers that hadn’t been invited to the livelier dos because they were all bores. The Commander’s withering and self-abnegating reply, which nearly brought Christopher to tears, was: “I believe I have already received my invitation, sir.” Something toad-like squatted in him, too.

Not as large as you might think.

“It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs,” – Aristotle.