1. Famous economists ranked by Google Trends
2. Fabio Rojas’s most popular post
3. "Rent-an-American," German style
5. Assessment of cap-and-trade proposals
6. Review of Discover Your Inner Economist, from The Washington Post; the reviewer calls it "the most useful of the lot," though he is skeptical about the whole "Freakonomics trend."
That “Rent-an-American” article was dripping with a lot of vitriol and bias itself, in essentially saying that declaiming against America while it’s “clutched in the crooked talons of the foul Dark Wizards Cheney and Bush” is the only POSSIBLE and NOBLE thing for those poor bereaved exchange students to do.
I’m no grand lover of the current _administration_ but I have a problem when an article takes a tone like that. There’s more to distancing yourself from a government than saying “they’re just completely dumb, we all hate them, secretly, but they won’t let us talk about it on TV.”
It galled me a lot to read those sorts of things from other students… as someone studying abroad currently, it especially bothered me… maybe in Germany there’s no need to defend the democratic or capitalist system as much, it’s been there for a significantly long time, but I know that in China and other Asian countries, if they hear “oh, in America our leaders are all as corrupt as yours and our governments are terrible” then what incentive does that give them to want to free up their own societies and economies?
Perhaps I’m overreacting, but was I really the only one bothered by a lot of the article’s content?
Neal – you’re probably not even checking the comments at this late stage, but the tone you noticed in that article is the norm in all German media. The media over here is very biased and selective (think the editorial page writers at the New York Times, times ten, on two pots of coffee a day) and most Germans will swallow any ridiculous claim about Americans.
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