1. Al Roth on the Iran kidney exchange program.
2. Gaming insurance mandates, further evidence.
3. David Henderson reviews Thomas Sowell.
4. Marketing to the bottom of the pyramid.
5. The most important buildings since 1980? Photos of the winners are here.
One final example: Sowell claims that those of us who favor free markets are more empirically inclined and have less ego invested in our views than those who advocate central planning and heavy government intervention generally.
If Sowell had even a hint of psychological insight he would understand that every person who has ever held any position on any issue believes themselves to be more empirically inclined and have less ego invested than those who disagree. It’s a depressing (but not surprising) bit of self-deception we see here.
With a few exceptions those are some very ugly buildings.
4. Fill your stuff with sugar, and the poor will gobble it up, as they have more of a sweet tooth. That’s what those drinkable yoghurts do — real yoghurt only has a small amount of lactose, while those things have more sugar than a candy bar or two. Starbucks could only make coffee mainstream by sending espresso and cappuccino to the side and making the sugar-bombs (especially the Dairy Queen-esque frappuiccinos) front and center.
5. Only two of those look OK, the Neue Staatsgalerie (the inside anyway, not the outside) and the Nelson-Atkins addition. The HSBC building looks like the inside of the Borg.
One of the greatest things about living in Barcelona was that the buildings were mostly from 1880 to 1940, before builders made everything ugly and silly.
I totally agree with William about Sowell and Henderson, and I probably believe nearly exactly what they do about free markets. It looks like the genre of intellectuals denouncing intellectuals is going to remain as lazy, boring and shallow as it always has been.
Agnostic – Starbucks made coffee mainstream? What do you mean? Starbucks, although founded in the 70s, did not start its current model of “very large chain of places” until roundabout the early 90s. Regardless, coffee drinking has been declining since WWII. See http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/June07/Findings/Coffee2.htm
I’ll agree that there’s too much sugar in the dietary world…
Ugly, ugly buildings.
The Nelson Atkins museum addition looks ok in the photograph, but the photograph also leaves the genuinely good looking original Nelson out of the picture. When the two are seen next to each other, the addition suffers by comparison.
” A better headline would be, “Beyond the Guggenheim Museum, Experts Can’t Agree” ”
It’s not quite that bad. If everyone agreed completely, there would be 5 buildings — everyone would have the same list. If everyone had completely unique tastes, no building would show up on more than one person’s list, so there would be 52*5 = 260 buildings.
The observed list has 132 buildings, which is about halfway between completely conformity and complete uniqueness of tastes.
The HSBC and Lloyd’s buildings look like they’re from either Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Though perhaps Gilliam was inspired by them, as they’re contemporary.
Casa de Musica looks like a rejected scene from Star Wars, where the Jawas come into town. The BMW building looks inspired by more recent versions of the starship Enterprise. The Le Corbusier looks like it might have inspired some Star Trek gadgetry.
An architect friend sent me this blog comment, with which he is sympathetic: http://www.architectmagazine.com/blogs/postdetails.aspx?BlogId=opecoblog&PostId=96110
He also notes that many of the buildings on the list are substandard by any measure but exterior looks. For example, he claims the Seattle Library is falling apart. How about efficiency, practicality, durability, etc. as other useful measures? Surely a building needs to um, actually do a good job of being a building to be one of the greatest, know? Form of function to a ridiculous degree.
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