Class

There's nothing too remarkable about this dialogue between Gail Collins and David Brooks, but I really liked this little snippet from Collins:

Racially, the country is moving up to the next step and it would be silly to imagine we’d get there without conflict. In the future, the great divide is going to be class, post-racial class. Poor people are stuck, while everybody else moves up, whether they’re black, white or Hispanic. Not sure that’s something to brag about, but there we are.

I would argue that the "great divide" that Collins' speaks of has always existed. The problem is that there is absolutely no appropriate place in Western Society to discuss "class." Public discourse on race ranges from ignorant polemics to pseudointellectual fluff, but at least people discuss it. Talk about class and you're labeled a socialist or something. Lame. Anyway, this was something that one of my favorite professors said once and I never forgot it.

United States Infrastructure Saddens Me

From the New York Times:

42: The number of high-speed rail lines recently opened or set to open by 2012 in China. By contrast, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014, an 84-mile route in Florida linking Tampa and Orlando. How fast are the Chinese bullet trains? They average speeds of up to 215 miles an hour. The train that connects Guangzhou, the southern coastal manufacturing center, to Wuhan, in the interior, takes a little more than three hours to travel 664 miles, roughly the distance between Boston and southern Virginia.

I could travel from NYC to Providence in under an hour. Right now, it takes me almost four.

North Korea

During my recent trip to Spain, a girl at our hostel told my friend that she was from North Korea. We were all shocked and incredulous. Turns out she was lying. Anyway, it got me thinking about the "land of no smiles" and some of the interesting things I've read about it.

Two Time photos essays here and here.

A look across the border from The Big Picture Blog.

An arresting little clandestine photo essay from a guy posing as a businessman.

The Wikipedia entries on Kim Jong-il and North Korea are also fascinating.

And of course, one picture that sums up the entire situation.

Parliamentary Plotting

I enjoyed this infographic of tactics that can be used by the majority and minority to stall legislation, stifle debate and frustrate colleagues. It's amazing to me that such important decisions can ultimately come down to the exploitation of protocol rather than a triumph of debate and ideas.

A Fork in the Road: Afghanistan

Although Iran and Iraq garner most of the attention, in many ways, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the most significant threats to worldwide security, peace and American prosperity. After eight years of US military intervention in Afghanistan, the Taliban is as strong as ever and continues to wage an increasingly sophisticated and destructive guerrilla campaign. In Kabul, the United States-backed president, Hamid Karzai, is widely regarded as an inept leader and complicit in a fraudulent election.

“I keep going back to Yogi Berra. You know: ‘When you reach a fork in the road, take it.’ I bet there are days when Obama wakes up and sees the fork in the road and decides he’s not going to take it. Because both choices are so bad.”

You can read this excellent article from last week's New York Times Magazine or you can scroll through The Big Picture's photo essay. Either way, you get a clear sense of how bleak this is.

Revolutionay Guard

With so much coverage of the Iran recently, why is this the first piece I've read that paints the Revolutionary Guard as potentially the chief architect of the fraudulent election?

McNamara Retrospective

Errol Morris offers a brief but poignant retrospective of the recently deceased Secretary of Defense. If you've never seen it, The Fog of War, a documentary by Morris, is a fantastic examination of America's Vietnam War policy, of which McNamara was a primary architect.

In a 1966 speech in Montreal (delivered while he was still secretary of defense), he returned to the theme of rationality:

“Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is little point in making the effort. All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand: his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious nature.”

History certainly hasn't exonerated LBJ and the rest of the folks at the helm of America's incursion in Vietnam, but it's refreshing to see McNamara, a true statesman, offer a thoughtful perspective.

I doubt Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney will ever get to this point. They probably still think that they're doing God's work. How convenient and intellectually lazy of them.

Vanity Fair Tackles Sarah Palin and AIG

I don’t read Vanity Fair regularly, but maybe I should. It’s published a few of my favorite articles in recent memory, and this month’s issue smashes two home runs with It Came from Wasilla and The Man Who Crashed the World.

The first piece, about Sarah Palin of course, is as damning to John McCain and his impetuous nature as it is to the (soon to be) former governor of Alaska. I think we all knew that Sarah Palin was a bit insane and certainly not qualified to be vice president, but good God, this piece exposes her as a bona fide whacko.

I particularly enjoyed the following tidbit about Alaska and I can say with some certainty that we won’t be seeing a national political figure from that state again in my lifetime.

The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe,unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.

So, of all the puzzling things that Sarah Palin told the American public last fall, perhaps the most puzzling was this: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

Believe me, it is not.

The Palin piece came out just a few days before she inexplicably decided to resign as governor, which makes this article seem even more bizarre. It’s well worth the read if you’re at all interested in the previous election. There are also quite a few head-scratchers and chuckles in there.

Bill Simmons recently described Michael Lewis as “the Albert Pujols of writers.” If you’re not familiar with contemporary journalism or baseball, this means that Lewis is unbelievably prolific and a threat to hit it out of the park at any moment. I think I’ve read half a dozen exemplary pieces by him in the last six months (his overview of the financial crisis in Portfolio magazine was terrific).

In The Man Who Crashed the World, Lewis focuses on a man named Joseph Cassano, the head of A.I.G. Financial Products. While it’s impossible to blame a single person or organization for the mess we’re in, Michael Lewis makes a compelling case, albeit with a bit of journalistic sensationalism, that Joe Cassano is the reason why seven of your friends got laid off this year.

As recently as August 2007, A.I.G. F.P. traders were feeling almost smug: all these loans made in 2006 and 2007 were going bad, but the relatively more responsible 2005 vintage that they had insureddidn’t look as if it would suffer any credit losses. They were, they thought, the smart guys at the poker table. Joe Cassano even went on an investor conference call and said, famously, “It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 on any of thosetransactions.”

And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem is that they knew him. And they believe that his crime was not mere legal fraudulence but the deeper kind: a need forsubservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses. “When he said that he could not envision losses, that we wouldn’t lose a dime, I am positive that he believed that,” says one of the traders. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn’t that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right. More than anything, Joe Cassano wanted to be one of Wall Street’s big shots. He wound up being its perfect customer.

Oddly enough, I think there’s a common theme in these two seemingly unrelated pieces: the fundamental personality flaws that lead to bad decision making exist at all levels of society.

John McCain couldn't field a staff that was capable of properly vetting a vice presidential candidate; that is, the person who would stand a fairly good chance of rising to the most powerful elected office in the entire world. McCain himself failed to properly weigh his options, and while it's impossible to know how much of an effect the Palin pick had on the election, I think most people would agree that it didn't help the Republican cause (thanks Sarah!).

The architects of the global financial system have created a machine that processes unfathomable amounts of money each day, yet a lone despotic sociopath in an obscure unit of a single investment bank managed to slow the world's economy to a screeching halt. (There's that sensationalism again).

The lesson: Never assume that people know what they're doing, and the more they act like they know what's happening, the more dubious you should be.

The Breaks of the Game

Why did I just read 450 pages about the 1979 Portland Trailblazers? Because David Halberstam is one of the most magnificent writers of the 20th century and he beautifully tells the tale of a young team and a tumultuous season that transcends American sport. This is the story of a Trailblazers organization that is just two years removed from a magical championship season, and is now being torn apart due to trades, injuries, contractual strife and racial acrimony.

My favorite contemporary sports writer, Bill Simmons, often raves about The Breaks of the Game as being the finest sports book ever written. I agree. We'll probably never again see such a comprehensive study of a professional American sports team. Players can't be bothered with extended interviews and organizations are far too guarded to grant even a legendary journalist the kind of access that Halberstam had - the stakes are just too high now.

Anyway, if a 450 book by Halberstam seems like a bit too much, I'd recommend reading one of the last articles he wrote before he passed away in 2007. It's a Vanity Fair piece called The History Boys, and it's one of my all time favorites. Enjoy.

Conspicuous Conservation

I've heard this phrase a few times recently and I love it.

It's a contemporary twist on "conspicuous consumption", a concept introduced by a somewhat obscure, but very interesting economist by the name of Thorstein Veblen.

Conspicuous consumption is a term used to describe the lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth. In the mind of a conspicuous consumer, such display serves as a means of attaining or maintaining social status.

Veblen articulated this concept in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Although the concept was invented to describe the exuberance of his day, it could just as easily apply to the decadence of the 1990's tech boom,and might be the key factor in the subprime mortgage crisis.

Wall Street ruled the 90's and most of the 2000's. People who provided very little tangible value to society were heralded as geniuses and envied by nearly everyone. The modern day robber barons spent lavishly, partied hard and projected an image of infallibility. They created an entire new market for over-the-top goods and services, which inexplicably created public fascination, rather than a public outcry. Not only were these people purchasing obscenely unnecessary luxuries, but the average citizen was watching them do it on countless reality TV shows, magazine features, and internet sites. Americans of limited means emulated these folks and soon became mired in debt. The appearance of wealth and status could be purchased via credit card loan.

That was then. Now the market is in relative shambles, millions of Americans are out of work and it's no longer chic to display one's grotesque wealth. Now, "conspicuous conservation" is the name of the game. Considerations of thrift and environmentalism are now lauded as "recession chic". Is this a good or a bad thing?

Well, from a personal responsibility and environmental standpoint, it's great (although many people are being driven to these practices not out of altruism but by trendsetting). However, from a national economic perspective it might be bad in the short term. Much of the waste that was created over the past decades of irrational exuberance funded development and created millions of jobs. It's an interesting way to think about our cyclical economy.

How does the economy get better? Hopefully not with a return to conspicuous consumption, because that model is simply unsustainable and ultimately destructive. Our current era of conspicuous conservation is not the solution either, but it might well be the first step towards one. If this economic malaise lasts for a while, and trendy frugality evolves into a legitimate practice, then perhaps we can move our economy where it needs to go, that is, shift the workforce and prioritize new and sustainable sectors.

RI Pros

O hey, it looks like prostitution is finally going to be outlawed in Rhode Island. One of the best kept secrets about my home state is that it's the only place in the US, aside from a few counties in Nevada, where prostitution is legal.

Most importantly, this new law will make it easier to prosecute the horrendous number of human trafficking crimes that occur within Rhode Island's borders.

French on US

The feature length content in Harper's Magazine has been hit or miss the last couple of years, but I consistently enjoy the short stuff at the front - the Index and Readings. This month, I was struck by a snippet by French essayist Charles Dantzig entitled “Liste des Américains," from his Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien, published in France last winter by Grasset &
Fasquelle. The encyclopedia explains the world in a series of 800 lists."

They are a people without balconies. Yet they cannot help interfering in other people’s business, according to the Protestant custom. And on courthouse steps one sees people brandishing signs that say, as if they knew, GOD HATES ABORTIONISTS. It is a country fascinated by lust.

Americans spend less time arguing over things than over the right to speak about those things.

It is the only country in the world where no one remains a foreigner. A person can go by the name of Zgrabenalidongsteinloff and no one will raise an eyebrow. “In New York there are no impossible names,” as I was told by a novelist whose name
raised the eyebrows of elegant racists in Paris. This is what makes everything possible. They walked on the moon because they are the moon. One admires their courtesy.

Anecdotal generalizations like this are usually specious and almost always obnoxious, but I found Dantzig's observations both insightful and charming.

His entire list is well worth reading, but unfortunately I can't link to it because it's behind a subscribers-only wall.

North Korea

Kim Jong Il reigns over an isolationist wonder. These photos are chilling:

Renowned documentary photographer Tomas van Houtryve entered North Korea by posing as a businessman looking to open a chocolate factory. Despite 24-hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people—images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West. They show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world’s last gulag.

Also, North Korea has the fourth largest standing army in the world?

Fair and Balanced

This screenshot collage sums up everything you need to know about Fox News.

Grim RI

Good God this article is depressing. The New York Times refers to RI as "arguably the most economically hobbled state after Michigan."

Perhaps the most disheartening part is that nobody is exactly sure why.

Education?

...Rhode Islanders are less educated than much of the country. The state has the lowest high school graduation rate in the Northeast and ranks 38th nationally.

Low pay?

Its average private-sector salary in 2007 was $39,827, compared with $55,819 in Massachusetts and $59,174 in Connecticut.

Taxes?

...a study last fall by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan group in Washington, ranked Rhode Island’s business climate the fifth-worst in the nation.

Corruption and parochialism? Remember, this is the state that recently saw a former governor, mayor of the capital city and State Supreme Court Justice all serve federal prison terms simultaneously.

“The whole political system is based on back scratching and getting things for your friends,” said Robert Whitcomb, editorial page editor of The Providence Journal. “That’s true for every place, but more so here because of the intimacy — you keep bumping into people you know.”

These are massive problems for a state that's facing a $7 billion unfunded pension liability, $357 million budget shortfall and 10% unemployment.

There is no panacea, and the next few years are going to be hard. Home prices are going to painfully reset and many of the blue collar jobs that are being lost are never going to come back.

However, The Ocean State still has a smart, energetic and creative population that will rebound from these hard times. They just need to figure out a way to keep all of those people from leaving, and to get them civically engaged.

Money Supply

No commentary necessary.

Freedom of Movement

Now that you know the minimum drinking ages around the world, how easy would it be to hop on a plane and head to another country to grab a pint?

International Visa Restrictions by Country is more interesting than it sounds. Take a look at the list and try to figure out what it says about the countries that appear in the top, middle and bottom tiers.

From what I can tell, the countries at the top (150+) are either "polite" (Denmark, Portugal) or powerful (US, UK). The counties at the bottom are either war-ravaged (Bosnia and Herzegowina, Iraq, Afghanistan) or non-democratic (China, North Korea).

One shouldn't read too much into these rankings, but it provides a somewhat useful view of each country's relative clout in the world. Also, protectionism usually rises during tough economic times, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a very different list in 2009 and 2010. I expect the number of visa-less destinations per country to decrease by 10% over the next 3 years.

[via Marginal Revolution]

Drinking Around the World

An interesting map of drinking ages around the world. Only a handful of countries appear to enforce a 21+ drinking age. The other notable states in that category are India, Indonesia and Pakistan. I've always known that the United States' minimum drinking age was high by world standards, but it seems even more odd when you consider that we're in the company of such culturally different nations.

[via Economix]

Obey

The Shepard Fairey exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is not to be missed. This was one of the most fun, engaging and accessible collections I have ever seen. There were hundreds of pieces and the subject matter ran the gamut from Chairman Mao to Joe Strummer to Iraqi civilians to President Obama. Truly something for everybody and overall just a really cool show.

You've most likely seen some of Shepard Fairey's work whether you realize it or not. Check out his website to learn more about the most important pop/urban/street artist of our generation.

Cheer up

Perhaps this will help you get through this cold and windy Monday (in New York at least).

Daylight Savings Time begins on Sunday, March 8th - sunset will be at 6:57pm that day on the East Coast. Sure you "lose" out on an hour of sleep, but it's light out when you get out of work, so please shut up and enjoy the sun.

In what is perhaps the greatest legislative legacy of George W. Bush's presidency, The Uniform Time Act of 1966 was amended in 2005 to extend Daylight Savings Time by several weeks. So if we just overlook the crippling war, economic cataclysm and loss of American international goodwill, I think the past 8 years have been relatively successful.