If questions and anxieties about the current state of the economy are something you know a thing or two about, might I suggest that you read a new bit on the Economist?
Tyler Cowen, a well-known economist and co-author of one of my favorite blogs, marginal revolution, was asked a number of questions about the state of the economy. One of the questions asked:
"What has most surprised you about the current economic downturn?"
To which TC said:
"That it happened with such severity. As an economist I grew up reading and thinking about two formative events. The first was the crash of the real estate bubble in the late 1980s, preceded by the stock market crash in 1987. The second was the Third World debt crisis of the early and mid-1980s. Both were bad, but for the United States neither were like the last two years. I’ve never been a believer in any of the extreme forms of the efficient markets hypothesis, but those events made me overly complacent about how badly crashes and excess leverage can turn out. In the early 1980s I expected widespread insolvency for major U.S. banks and when they muddled through I ended up overrating their ability to do the same again."
Read the rest of it here.
Monday, July 6, 2009
New Books I Recommend
Welcome to the Urban Revolution by Jeb Brugmann is a detailed and careful exploration of the huge urban shift that has been occurring and how it translates to daily life and reality.
The city has become so much more than it used to be. The city itself, per Brugmann, may be used as a resource to address and solve such problems as how to respond to poverty, how to read globalism, how to react to environmental changes and so forth.
I recommend this highly as Brugmann's research seems to be vast and the form of his argument is easily decodable.
2) Alistair Horne's Kissinger 1973, the Crucial Year. I've always been fascinated by the Nixon era and the text that Nixon stood for. Another character from the time period I've always had an interest to know more about is Henry Kissinger. Something about the voice, I don't know.
In Kissinger 1973, the Crucial Year, Horne details the year most impressively thus providing a fascinating behind-the-scenes of that very important year. The arguments are well-historicized and the story-telling flows well.
Sarah Barracuda Leaves Alaska for the Big Time
When John McCain announced last August in Ohio that Sarah Palin would be his running mate for '08, I remember thinking, 'Wow. The cameras love her.'
I still maintain that the reason why Palin gets so much media attention is largely due to her aesthetics and how it is captured and translated via the lens. And yet she keeps bashing the media for being unfair to her not seemingly realizing that her refusal to engage them (the media) in a substantial way might perhaps be the main reason for the occasional, ok, not-so-occasional ridicule.
While Palin is seriously uninformed about a lot of issues, she oozes a kind of stamina and tenacity that is rare to see. Now that she's announced that she is resigning as Alaska's governor, she's signaled her actual interest in entering national politics. Vanity Fair has a gripping peace on her. A paragraph of note says:
"In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”
Read it all here.
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