reevaluations

I've been sitting at home waiting for the plumber to finish a job that is taking longer than expected, and managed to spend a number of hours surfing the web, stumbling onto some very good articles in the process.

Here is an article on reforming Wall Street financial institutions from Sunday's New York Times. This is one of the clearest things I've read on these issues (I think he takes a lot from Gary Gorton). I think it can be done (but I may change my mind). If it cannot, I am siding with Simon Johnson at Baseline Scenario that we ought to break up the big banks.

Here is a great historical article on state's rights claims. It only increases my scepticism about such claims today. I intend to have some things to say about The Tea Party Revival later.

Here is another nice historical article regarding the politics surrounding enacting the Federal Reserve in 1913. And commparing it to the recent enaction of the Medicare Supervisory Board. I continue to hope that the new Health Care bill will be a step forward although I am in no position to judge all the various complexities and there are certainly bound to be many unintended consequences. One of my friends commented that in this country we have to build it before we can fix it. That was pretty witty. I hope she is right.

And here is an interesting little piece from Bryan Caplan questioning Tyler Cowen's (at Marginal Revolution) supposed "Rawlsian assumption" which I share that "no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments." This has a very important place in my own ethical and political beliefs and may be one of the reasons I am a liberal rather than a liberterian for the most part (although the two do share some positions). It will be interesting to see if Tyler responds. He is still my number one favorite blogger. He has his own way of looking at the world that is not easily pigeon-holed.

I guess that another bias I have is a sort of optimism. I look at all the disputes and terrible things that have happened in the past and yet here we are today. Of course, as Nassim Taleb says, the Thanksgiving turkey may believe that he has a wonderful life right up until Thanksgiving day. So let's not be pollyannas about it.

J.H. Elliott

I asked my history professor friend for some recommendations on European history and she told me to read Elliott. Imperial Spain 1469-1716 was a masterful book and a great companion on our trip to Spain. Now I have discovered Spain, Europe and the Wider World, a collection of essays that contains a lot of great material about historians thinking about thinking about history. The depth and width of knowledge and the insights are breathtaking. My own feeble attempts to understand history will be a lifelong adventure. At the moment, I am taken with his views on the emergence of the modern state and the emergent nationalism of its people. This is in contrast to the inherent instability of premodern states in the 1600's. It gives one a different perspective on federal power in the present. James Scott is good on this, too. I can see now that I am going to have to read Elliott's Empires of the Atlantic World; Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 if I am to get much farther in understanding American history.

Social Security and Medicare

My uncle and a good friend got me thinking more about entitlement programs, especially in context with the health care bill, and so here are some thoughts. I don't have a high degree of confidence in these views, but perhaps they could contribute to a meaningful discussion.

Here is a perhaps conventional conservative narrative on where we are now. During the Great Depression, politicians began pandering to the masses by passing Social Security legislation, which over time has grown exponentially, and with the addition of other welfare programs like Medicare, have led to a current situation of fiscal crisis. Some people blame all this on the democratic party, but many conservatives see Bush’s war on Iraq (imperialism?) and the propping up of the banks after deregulation gave them too much freedom as serious contributors to the current situation. I don’t see many conservatives saying that Bush’s lowering taxes contributed to the deficit, but a deficit is the result of spending exceeding revenue, so at least it should be on the table. (I understand that Glen Beck takes the problems back to Theodore Roosevelt. I can see the passage of the federal income tax in 1913 as being a hinge point, but am not sure why this is T.R.’s fault, since he was no longer even president. Maybe this is just a rhetorical response to Obama’s claim that T.R. first tried to get universal health care for citizens of the U.S.)

In my first post on conservatism, I raised the deficit and future deficits as a legitimate problem, and referenced a post by Bruce Bartlett which detailed the magnitude of the problem. However, I am very uncomfortable with the current narratives that make up analysis in popular media because they simplify history, just get it wrong or selectively use certain facts to support a particular ideology. On both right and left, there is a nostalgia for the wisdom of the founders and a tendency to believe we have “fallen.” Just look at how often each side quotes Thomas Jefferson. But let’s be clear. The Articles of Confederation failed for very good reasons. Those believers in state’s rights ought to give some consideration to why it failed. More importantly for the current topic, we did not have a real democracy in 1787. Only white male owners of real estate could vote. Women, roughly 50% of the population, did not have the right to vote until 1920!! Until the 14th Amendment in 1868, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the state governments. Blacks did not effectively have the right to vote in the south until the 1960's. So, according to the conservatives, the downfall of the U.S. roughly coincides with the actual beginning of democracy for a majority of the people.

The Industrial Revolution led to a transformation in the urban workplace. Many jobs were reduced to simple operations that later could be performed by machines. Because of steam power, women and children could perform many factory jobs, and were hired because they could be paid less. The vast shift of power to large corporate entities in the Gilded Age led many to be ruled by a few. This led to many states passing laws to protect workers. However, the Supreme Court ruled many of these laws unconstitutional. It was not until the 1930's that they stopped reading a particular economic theory into the Constitution, about the same time many people stopped believing in the myths of laissez-faire capitalism...something which many conservatives do not understand today.

Of course, the old-time conservatives favored states rights because they supported slavery. However, I think that this is really distinct from the views of the thinkers in the more recent conservative movement. I think Andrew Sullivan got it mostly right when he said that “in the mid-twentieth century conservatism revived itself by a profound critique of liberal hubris and rationalism, of liberals' belief that they really could transform the world through better government, of the new left's critique that the personal is political, and of the stifling of human nature, individualism and freedom that socialism and communism had wrought.” There is no doubt that many in the intelligensia of the left went too far during the early part of the last century. So far that many could not recognize what a terrible place the Soviet Union was. In recognizing the differences from then to now, we should also resist the attempt by people like Thomas Sowells to group liberals across time into one mindset.

Going back to the Social Security Act, it seems that the worst mistake was a failure to recognize that there might come a time when the number of retirees vastly outnumbered the number of workers, a failure of long-term planning that is being made manifest by the baby boomer generation coming of retirement age, as well as medical improvements resulting in longer lives. In figuring out why the problem occurred, we must recognize that benefits for the old and the poor, protection from capitalist exploitation, and other measures are primarily the effects of having a real democracy. My brief history is far too simplified to be taken as a real corrective, but it is closer to the truth than many of the historical speculations floating around in popular culture.

While recognizing that the Social Security Act and Medicare may have been mistakes, there is little doubt that they are part of our institutional structure, and are not going away. It seems pretty clear that the solution to the Social Security problem is to raise taxes, increase the retirement age, decrease benefits, introduce means-testing, or some combination of measures. But I don’t think that the current generation of seniors is going to agree to reduce their own benefits, and I don’t think the majority of my generation will either. We are probably going to have to take a page from Reagan, who increased the retirement age for future retirees back in the 1980's.

Regarding Medicare, I am not so confident of a solution. How are we going to get people to agree to cut costs? I don’t have the answer, but maybe we should all have the same Medicare benefits. That way, we would not be pitting one group against another. Conservatives, now pandering to seniors, resist any change in Medicare. Conservatives resisted universal health care benefits in the 1950's. Instead, the powerful unions got benefits for themselves, which could not be sustained over time. Instead we got employer-based health care by giving tax advantages to its provision, a system that has also failed. Here I will give some conservatives credit; I can’t see that maintaining such a system over the long run is going to work.

The Wisdom of Fred

Fred the cat survived major dental surgery on Thursday and is back around here squawking his conservative values at me. Fred doesn't like change. Fred says change usually involves bad surprises. He has been around almost 17 years, so he has learned a few things.

I am intrigued by James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State; How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. There is some conservative wisdom in here. Many of these attempts were well-meaning. He sees as one of the greatest influences "high-modernist ideology," something that developed as a result of scientific and technological success. It is "above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws." But applying science to social issues is difficult, not the least of which is due to the fact that human beings are self-interpreting creatures. That is, in order to understand and maybe even predict their behavior one has to see the world through their eyes. This raises all sorts of difficult problems in history and the social sciences. Anyway, this seems to be a conservative insight to which maybe we all should give more consideration.

But let's not confuse the issue with current politics. Here is one of the many fascinating quotes from the Browser each day. Jane Hamsher, on party politics:
The left-right paradigm is insufficient, in that it presumes everything can be explained within the context of back-and-forth shots fired between political “tribes” that have coalesced within the two party system. But they’re firing past the larger corporate players who operate freely within both camps, whose role is rarely accounted for. And it should be clear by now that they have captivated leadership on both sides.

Scott points out that large-scale capitalism "is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay." It too crimps innovation and trial-and-error learning. While the left presupposes a false view of human knowledge in support of social engineering, the right ignores the dangers and downsides of capitalism. Or proposes it's own form of social engineering relying on one-size-fits-all religious models.

Finally, conservatives also have some insights into social justice, although they more often than not take it to extremes. Here is a good post from Tim Harford on a faulty line of typically liberal thinking. Individuals often need to be treated as individuals and not just as members of a group.

Conservatives and History

The question of what “is” conservatism is perhaps unfair, if not unanswerable. Lots of people call themselves conservatives for different reasons. One friend says that conservatives accept the fallibility of man, while progressives strive for the utopian goal of man’s perfection. For instances that actually fit this description, I join him in favoring the former. Maybe that question gets us nowhere. It certainly didn’t go anywhere useful in this discussion of liberals vs. libertarians on Arnold Kling’s blog.

My conservative friend says that we began a decline about 100 hundred years ago with the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. My progressive friend says that a severe decline began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. If various groups do not fall into easily defined camps, at least we can consider what their views of history look like. My own view of U.S. history doesn’t see a long slide of decline anywhere. I see terrible years around the Civil War and from the First World War to the end of the second, roughly 1914 to 1945. You can get a taste of my view on history by looking at my post Relentless Revolution II and the other two posts on Joyce Appleby’s book, The Relentless Revolution; a History of Capitalism. We seem to be at some sort of hinge of history now, but it is always impossible to discern this when so close to the present. In retrospect, Appleby and others see the era around 1973 as a hinge. Who thought so at the time? In 1914, most people thought the war would be over in six months. Virtually no one foresaw how serious the Great Depression would be, although you can always find some individual somewhere saying things that most people thought was crazy that, in fact, turned out to be right. The story of this history is at least as interesting as a discussion of political principles, and much closer to considerations of evidence.

I am now reading Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, all professors of history at UCLA when the book was written. It appears to be the case that it has not been until the postmodern era that the meta-narratives that have defined how history has been written have been investigated. She talks about three that have been challenged in the recent past, the view of science as the model for history (which she calls “the heroic model of science”), the idea of progress which came from adoption of a scientific world view looking for the laws of history, and the powerful national sentiments that 19th and 20th century people draw upon for a sense of identity. These meta-narratives replaced the Christian one which saw man as fallen and time as an endless cycle. The meaning of time itself changed, as did the meaning of life. Time now had a direction. The meaning of revolution changed, from a circular repeat to a thrust forward. Of course, Marxism is a rather more specific meta-narrative, too. But so is laissez-faire capitalism. Both are demonstrably false. America as the torch bearer of the enlightenment is an even more specific narrative that motivated people in the U.S. in the early years and has a residual attraction today.

I will be returning to these issues in the future. There is a good review of Gordon Wood’s new Empire of Liberty; A History of the Early Republic from 1789-1815, that is presently not available on-line. Wood is my favorite historian of the revolutionary period. I also have on order Appleby’s widely admired book on the period after 1815 called Inheriting the Revolution; The First Generation of Americans (the first generation born as Americans). The world looked very different to them than the prior generation, and the world became different, so much so that most of the Founders lamented what had become of their country in their old age. I think we can see similar sentiments from the right and the left today. Things change, sometimes for the worse, but I think this overarching pessimism is misplaced. But again, that depends on a view of history, and evidence.

I have also ordered the book a commentator recommend, The Tea Party Revival, as it was not available locally. We will see what insights it provides. I expect that I will find the concerns about federal fiscal policy very relevant and attempts at religious social engineering misplaced. The questions about the power of the federal government is a complicated and interesting one, too. To that extent, we must acknowledge the fact that the power of the federal government was greatly increased by the sixteenth amendment authorizing the income tax, which was ratified February 3, 1913. But we must also recognize the facts of the massive increases in corporate power in the Gilded Age I talked about in my posts about the history of capitalism. Something else which seems clearly true to me is that the world has become more complicated over time. This has led law to become more complicated to deal with more complicated social and economic issues. The conservative criticism of the power of the federal government must acknowledge such facts to be persuasive.

What is conservatism?

Andrew Sullivan (link here) writes in the Atlantic: "People accuse me of pedantry or semantics in insisting that all of this - on the right and the left - is in fact a sign of the death of conservatism as a temperament or a politics, rather than its revival.... Conservatism, if it means anything, is a resistance to ideology and the world of ideas ideology represents, whether that ideology is a function of the left or the right.
In the mid-twentieth century conservatism revived itself by a profound critique of liberal hubris and rationalism, of liberals' belief that they really could transform the world through better government, of the new left's critique that the personal is political, and of the stifling of human nature, individualism and freedom that socialism and communism had wrought."

I have been trying to get my conservative friends to tell me why they believe in certain things, like state’s rights or term limits, with little success. But here is what one recently wrote about conservatism in general:
"Conservative –– he who believes in The Constitution as written, SLOW change (I like 60 in the Senate) and all change (laws & regulations) reviewed in context with our time tested values (family, hard work, honesty, lawfulness, integrity, equal opportunity for all, meritocracy, and yes, even a belief in a Higher Power). I could go on and on, such as promoting/requiring assimilation of all legal immigrants (multi-ethnic good, multi-cultural bad) and no illegal immigrants..."

The New York Review of Books has an entertaining article (link here) about the Tea Party convention in Nashville. It seems that a great number of people at the convention did not believe in many of the Tea Party concerns. They were concerned about budget deficits and government spending.

And here is an excerpt from republican Bruce Bartlett’s blog on the deficit (link here):
"At the end of 2009 the gross debt was $11.9 trillion, $4.3 trillion more than the debt held by the public. Although many people get excited about this figure, it is in fact economically meaningless. The Treasury securities held in government accounts really amount to nothing more than budget authority permitting the Treasury to in effect use general revenues to pay Social Security benefits once current Social Security tax revenues are insufficient to pay current benefits, something that will happen in the year 2015, according to Social Security's actuaries.
Another confusion is that the Federal Reserve is treated as part of the "public" when debt held by the public is calculated. This is awkward because the Fed is part of the government and holds vast quantities of Treasury securities, with which it conducts monetary policy. (When the Fed buys them it increases the money supply; when it sells them it reduces the money supply.) At the end of fiscal year 2009, the Fed owned about $900 billion in Treasury securities. (The Treasury pays interest to the Fed on these holdings, but the Fed then gives almost all of it back to the Treasury.)
As big as these numbers are, they really only touch the surface of the federal government's indebtedness. The full scope of that appears annually in something called the Financial Report of the United States Government. The latest report was issued Feb. 26. According to it, in addition to the national debt, the federal government owes $5.3 trillion to veterans and federal employees. But the really big debts are those owed by Social Security and Medicare: Over the next 75 years, the federal government has promised benefits for these two programs in excess of anticipated payroll tax revenues equal to $7.7 trillion and $38 trillion, respectively.
The Treasury Department estimates Social Security's deficit at 1% of GDP over the next 75 years and Medicare's deficit at 4.8%. With federal revenues estimated to be about 19% of GDP in the long run under current law, taxes would have to rise by about one-third to pay all the promises that have been made for just these two programs.
The Office of Management and Budget estimates that in the absence of massive cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other programs, or an equally massive tax increase, the national debt will rise to 77% of GDP in 2020, 100% of GDP in 2030 and more than twice GDP by 2050."

This is a serious problem. And I applaud anyone who takes it seriously. But how are we going to deal with it? And what does this have to do with other items that fly under the banner of conservatism today? I see no logical connection. I believe in "The Constitution as written, SLOW change and all change (laws & regulations) reviewed in context with our time tested values (family, hard work, honesty, lawfulness, integrity, equal opportunity for all, meritocracy." Sixty in the Senate I am not sure about. While personally I don’t believe in a Higher Power, I have nothing against those who do. Many who do perform a lot of work on behalf of the poor and have values with which I agree. And I understand that their beliefs are important to them and should not be silenced. But I don’t think views on metaphysics have any place in our government. I also have nothing against deporting people who are illegally here or requiring people who are here legally as immigrants to learn to speak English and helping them to assimilate. So my conservative friends, help me out. What ideas hold conservatism together today? Is Andrew Sullivan correct in asserting that current conservatism has betrayed it’s original values?

Broken Guvmint

I saw a recent poll which found that most people trust their state and local governments more than the federal government. I don't know if people were thinking of different states than the ones they live in. This article from the Tribune today is only a minor indication of how bad the Utah state government is. Yeh, let's repeal the 17th amendment to give them more power. I don't know much about other states but I hear that New York is not functioning and we all know what a mess California is in (I agree with Fareed Zakaria that it is pertly due to citizen amendments...too much democracy). What state government functions well? Let's have the nominations.

And we know how local governments function. They are great if you are a developer.

And here is an article from the NY Times on how public pension funds are taking bigger risks to make up for "lost time." How stupid can you be? Many of our public pension funds are grossly underfunded. Roger Lowenstein had a good book about this called While America Aged. These funds are mostly underfunded because of promises made to public employees that pushed difficulties into the future. Public employees should have the same pension most of us do...a 401(k).

David Brooks has a good column on the health care bill today. The democrats are admirable in supporting health care reform, but I have to now say that this bill should probably just go away. Previously, I gave most of the blame to the Senate, but the House bill was worse. I liked the Wyden-Bennett approach because if favored creating incentives in the marketplace for cost reduction and it would have given us all choices of what coverage we wanted instead relying on our employer's choice...if we have an employer and don't have pre-existing conditions, etc. But single payer would also be a tremendous improvement over what we have now.

And here is a wonderful article on improving education, another government program. It embraces the novel idea of how to help teachers become better at teaching. Hello. Unfortunely, it seems to me that teachers' unions are the biggest impediment to change. Why do K-12 teachers get tenure anyway? More bad promises to public employees.

Ezra Klein has a couple good articles on the filibuster today. Apparently, it stems from changes in the Senate rules proposed by Aaron Burr in his farewell address after he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. They didn't realize what they had done. It became much more important after the Civil War. Southern legislators used it to prohibit progress for blacks. Excuse me, but who wants to justify slavery today? The worst compromise made in getting a Constitution, although there were many others. Please note that the majority of people in 1787 did not want a federal constitution.

And here is a link to a conference called Make Markets Be Markets. I have not reviewed this but it looks like the presentations are short. It has some good people, such as Simon Johnson and Joseph Stiglitz.

It is very fashionable to criticize the federal government today. And maybe that is a good thing. The democrats didn't seem to realize that citizens didn't want business as usual anymore. It's true that republicans have used the reconciliation process many times and that many legislators, including Orrin Hatch, are lying through their teeth when they talk about the history of reconciliation. But citizens don't like the process that produces 1000 page bills. If you have ever tried to read an Omnibus Budget bill, you will notice that everything but the kitchen sink is in there, i.e. particular favors for certain legislators to benefit certain interests.

But maybe I am making the mistake of being nostalgic for a time that never was, something that people do all the time. This appears to be a very old failing, dating at least back to the Bible and the story of the fall of Adam and Eve.

On the other hand, many problems seem to have obvious solutions. The way to keep the Social Security trust fund solvent is to raise taxes or increase the full retirement age. Or both. The way to reduce the federal deficit is to raise taxes or cut spending. Or both. The way to improve education is to make teaching better.

On the other other hand, the way to cut medical costs is difficult to determine. Halting global warming seems an impossible task for governments. We shouldn't really pretend that we have great knowledge about climate change...but it seems pretty clear the human activities are causing warming...which will be harmful to many. And the experts still disagree on what caused the financial crisis. Capitalism involves relentless innovation. Something our species has managed to do over and above evolution. There isn't an obvious government solution to these problems. It doesn't mean than nothing can be done, but what does get done may be worse than doing nothing.

Hasn't democratic government always been this way? Involving messy disagreements between competing views? Obviously, many people disagree with my characterizations. As Winston Churchill said, "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others." I am assuming he means representative democracy. Can you imagine what would happen if government policy was made based on the daily whims of we citizens? That is a truly scary thought.

Doubt

I came across the following in the buddhist magazine The Tricycle, which sends me a thought for the day.

Zen ethics is grounded in the realization that one does not know what’s right. This “not-knowing” is the refuge from which all moral action originates. It’s a refuge that can’t be relegated to the role of moral abstraction and remains a free and alive expression of the moment. What’s offered us in the place of moral certainty is doubt and love, which are nearly synonymous. Doubt wears the hard edges off our best ideas and exposes us to the world as it is.

And here is an article from Robert Shiller in today's New York Times. Shiller questions the wisdom of taxpayers promoting so much home ownership, a conservative view, while not falling in the trap of believing in laissez-faire capitalism. If conservatives and liberals could talk a little more constructively, I think you would see more areas of potential agreement. Unfortunately, Republicans now act on the premise that preventing anything from getting done will get them the most votes in the next election. And Democrats decided to do things the same old way in the Senate, by having the old bulls control the agenda.

A different kind of example: there was recently a really dumb article in the Wall Street Journal crediting the ideas of Milton Friedman for turning Chile's economy around. Paul Krugman rightly criticized it, although he dumbed the issue down for political purposes. For anybody that has read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, you know this is a call to action (see here). However, she just seems to be playing into the old socialist vs. capitalist pointless argument. Reality is more complicated. See here (and don't forget to link from this post to Tyler's earlier one, which is much more detailed).

So boys and girls of the right and left, you can continue yelling at each other, picking up something really stupid from one side and criticizing it like it represented the view of reasonable people on the other (also called demonizing the other side). What you end up doing is attacking which for the purpose of reality is a "straw man." It may feel good but it doesn't help arrive at the truth and what needs to be done.

Here is a level-headed view of the financial crisis. We are far from understanding what happened; their are various plausible causal stories, some of which you can find in the FCIC articles. I was particularly enlighted by both Gorton and Brunnermeier. Here is a link to the FCIC site.

Reality is a story we tell ourselves, a particular narrative. As is memory. As is identity. I finished Strangers to Ourselves yesterday, a very compelling book. It was the inspiration for Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and Robert Burton's On Being Certain is along the same lines in current cognitive psychology. However, the doubt perhaps engendered by these views does not have to be disabling. As my friend Patrick says, there is work on the ground to be done. So what that discovering truth is not as simple as many suppose? That can make the search more interesting.

I need to think more about the insights of this cognitive psychology, which are also incorporated into behavioral economics. But for now I am on to a new topic. Brian Fagan has a new book out called Cro-Magnon, which is about what life was like for humans 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. Also on a book note, Nassim Taleb is issuing a new edition of The Black Swan in May. He has some new chapters and you can see drafts of some of it by linking to his website below.

Addendum: Klein titles her article "Socialist Rebar." This is in response to the WSJ person's view that progress is due to free market fundamentalism. She says that it is due to the socialism of Allende. Her book is often referred to as arguing against capitalistic opportunists taking advantage of disasters. But it is much more. The events she links together are not all tied together by this theme. And her characterization of hope for Latin America at the end of the book is very much in favor of nationalization of industries.

Where Goes Blog?

To my many fans who have been asking where I have been, my only response is that I've been a bit distracted and disorganized. I was going to do a piece on the FCIC papers, but it is pretty complicated and I got interested in other things. My two favorite articles were by presenter number 9, Gary Gorton, and presenter number 7, whose name I don't recall. There was also a good paper on why too much government, especially Fannie and Freddie, did not cause the crisis, although they did exacerbate the effects. This has been a contention by those on the right from the beginning. It seems preposterous to me. If anything, there was too little regulation.

While playing golf with my buddies for a few days, I had some interesting discussions on issues. I wish I remembered more of what I learned. One good objection to government financing of elections that was raised was that you would have to include every nutball who registered as a candidate. Is this practical? The answer is no, in my opinion. With deficits going through the roof, I would prefer not to take on another taxpayer expense. I am afraid that the only realistic solution is a constitutional amendment to limit spending. I would limit corporations to zero.

Nobody could provide a good reason why the taxpayers paid 100 cents on the dollar on AIG credit default swaps. Lets hope the FCIC gets to the bottom of this.

I read a pretty funny article in the Atlantic by Chris Hitchens, but I am not in a religion-bashing mood, and won't be for the foreseeable future, so I am not providing a link. There was a couple good articles in the NY Review of Books, one on how children think and an adequate review of Margaret MacMillan's excellent book Dangerous Games; The Uses and Abuses of History. Micheal Lewis has an excerpt from his upcoming book in Vanity Fair. In the blogosphere, I definitely rate Marginal Revolution number 1 for day to day stuff, with Economist's View second. Some others are more specialty blogs and great in their own ways, like Daniel Little and Jonah Lehrer. (My blog links are at the bottom of the page.)

I tried to get started reading Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, which attempts to show how modern identity arose, but it seems too difficult for me at the moment. I had done some reading in a Philosophy of Social Science textbook and am interested in the idea of humans as self-interpreting creatures, with implications for both the conduct of social science and the writing of history. But thinking about that has also stalled.

I did discover J.H. Elliott's Spain, Europe and the Wider World; 1500-1800, which is very good history so far, and have been dabbling in Tim Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory; The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe 1648-1815. Also read some good stuff in Lawrence Friedman's History of American Law (two books). But what has taken over my interest now is Strangers to Ourselves; Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy B. Wilson. Perhaps I will write something about it at some point.

In addition to rising cholesterol and other physical impediments, getting older often makes it diffucult for me to concentrate on hard books for longer periods of time. But I gave up long ago on figuring out the world in any definitive sense, so I'm going with what I find interesting at the moment. It is also almost time for golf season, something else that I will never figure out. We are planning our spring trip to London, Florence and then driving around northern Italy, leaving for home from Venice. That will get me interested in history again.

This morning I had a court hearing for a fellow who got badly screwed by a workers comp insurance company and then later, the Social Security Administration. We won, so one good thing was accomplished today. Later, Tita and I will enjoy the new snow with a hike up Neff's Canyon and then I will check out the Blackhawks hockey game. We also have District 9 from Netflix, so we'll see how this best picture nominee fares. So far, my vote is for A Serious Man or Up In The Air. Yes, I've seen Avatar and The Hurt Locker and both were good in their own ways.

Addendum: I just read a really interesting article on Paul Krugman. Link here. It confirms why I think his op-ed pieces in the Times are not as good as his books or his blog; in the former he is dumbing down to influence politics. Personally, I prefer truth. But he is a great writer when he wants to be, and to the extent I have the ability to judge, a great economist. It is also an example of why the New Yorker is the best magazine; they have the best writers. My kudos especially to Malcolm Gladwell, John Cassidy and Steve Coll.