Results for “400” 1127 found
Suite Francaise
The entire village was waiting for the Germans. Faced with the idea of seeing their conquerors for the first time, some people felt desperate shame, others anguish, but many felt only apprehensive curiosity, as when some astonishing new theatrical event is announced. The civil servants, police, postmen had all been ordered to leave the day before. The mayor was staying. He was a placid old farmer with gout; nothing flustered him. With or without a leader, things in the village went on much the same…everyone agreed that the army had failed and there was nothing more to be done; they had no choice but to give up. The room was filled with chatter. It was stiflingly hot.
That is from Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky. This remarkable work is one of the important French-language novels of the twentieth century; it deserves all the raves. Yet it was just discovered and published; sadly the author died at Auschwitz in 1942. Here is the story of the book. I know of no better treatment — fiction or non-fiction — of living under a conquering army. Highly recommended.
Luxury markets in everything
Some khaki pants are now selling for as much as $1055; $400 and $500 khaki pants are becoming common.
See The Wall Street Journal, May 13-14, p.P7. Makes you want to sign up with Peter Singer, doesn’t it?
One Saks Fifth Avenue fashion director noted: "For some of these brands, that’s a lot of money."
If you know of other absurd luxury markets, please mention them in the comments.
Paul Simon’s Surprise
Yes that is the name of the album, released today. The first surprise is that Borders didn’t have it out on display. The second surprise is that Brian Eno produces and imposes his sound on it. The third surprise is no world music. The fourth surprise is its high quality, at least after the dull You’re the One, six years ago. Here is a good New York Times article on Simon and the album. Here are (mostly positive) blog reviews.
China story of the day
Farmer Yan Shihai was happily married for more than 30 years. Then late last year, seemingly out of the blue, the 57-year-old grandfather and his loving wife got a divorce.
Within months, all three of his adult children and their spouses also split up. So did almost every other married person in Yan’s village of 4,000 – an astounding 98% of Renhe’s married couples officially parted, according to the local government.
But instead of tension or tears, the couples waiting in line at the local registry to end their marriages were practically jolly. They believed they were taking advantage of a legal loophole that allowed them to get an extra apartment.
As they understood the compensation deal, each married couple would receive a small two-bedroom apartment in return for their land and farmhouse. Those divorced would get a one-bedroom apartment each. The villagers figured that would be a better deal, that they could live in one apartment and make a little extra income from selling or renting out the extra one.
The government, however, changed the rules and denied the new benefit. The final result?
…most of the former marriages are in tatters. Considering the prospect of a future without financial security, remarrying now simply seems too much of a hassle. Promises are souring. Stunned villagers are watching their life partners drift off. Some have found new love. Others are deciding to try out freedom from a marriage they never thought they wanted to leave.
Here is the full story, and thanks to Tim Sullivan for the pointer.
A tax shift not a tax cut
Several years ago in an op-ed I wrote:
I favor a much smaller government but I do not favor the Bush tax cut.
Or, to be more precise, I would support a tax cut if one had been
proposed. But so far President Bush has neither proposed nor
implemented a tax cut–only a tax shift.
Brad DeLong nicely explains the difference:
I, full professor Brad DeLong, am having lunch with lecturer Dariush Zahedi
today. After lunch, I presume Dariush will say we should split the bill–$10
each. Suppose I say: "That isn’t fair. Berkeley pays you less (a lot less: what
we do to our lecturers is shameful) than it pays me. I should lay out more cash
for this lunch. How about this: I put down $5 cash, you put down $0, and we put
the balance on your credit card. That would be fairer, wouldn’t it?"Dariush would then be an unhappy camper. He would think–correctly–that I
was mocking him.Back in 2000 the U.S. government was running a surplus of some $200 billion a
year–a broadly appropriate fiscal policy, given the state of the business cycle
and the looming health care costs dilemma. Today we’re running a deficit of
$300-$400 billion a year. Relative to what would be a sane, reality-based, and
appropriate fiscal policy, the Bushies are putting $500-$600 billion this year
on our collective national credit card. That bill will come due: somebody has to
pay it. To pretend that it won’t…well, that would be the equivalent of me telling Dariush that only cash matters:
that when we talk about who paid for lunch, we should count only cash put down
now, and we shouldn’t count the fact that his credit card bill will show an
extra $15 due next month.
Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations
[Bill] Gates…took Mike Spence’s famously difficult advanced microeconomics course — at the very dawn of the excitement about "bandwagon effects," monopolistic competition, and network economics. Enrolled in the course as well was Steve Ballmer, a fellow cardplayer with whom Gate had grown friendly. The two finished first and second in the course, but Gates didn’t wait for his grade.
That is from David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. Maybe this is the book of the year so far (I can no longer remember how much I liked Stumbling on Happiness).
While it pretends to focus on a single article — Paul Romer’s 1990 piece on endogenous growth — the book is a tour de force through growth theory, the economics profession, the world of public intellectuals, and how science works. Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Bob Solow, and Bob Lucas play prominent roles, in addition of course to Romer. If you want to read one book on how the economics profession works, this is it.
I’ve never seen anyone write as well as Warsh about the social world of economic research, a world of brilliant, often eccentric people who bear no resemblance to the dreary suits you see discussing the economy of CNBC. It’s a world of informal manners yet intense status competition…
The book will please both specialists and neophytes. Warsh’s coverage is so thorough that even yours truly makes a few cameo appearances. I thank David for the coverage, and I recommend his book highly.
Where does talent come from?
Here is Dubner and Levitt, from the Sunday New York Times:
[Anders] Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert
performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf,
surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design,
stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just
performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of
their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.Their
work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert
Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next
month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call
talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers –
whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming – are
nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect.
These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to
their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.
Here is the link. Here is The Economist on Ericsson. Here is Ericsson’s home page. Here is more from Dubner and Levitt, including further links to papers.
Addendum: Here is an archive link to the Sunday article.
Stumbling on Happiness, II: Are Asians less happy?
Asian culture does not emphasize the importance of personal happiness as much as European culture does, and thus Asian Americans believe that they are generally less happy than their European American counterparts. In one study, volunteers carried handheld computers everywhere they went for a week and recorded how they were feeling when the computer beeped at random intervals throughout the day. These reports showed that the Asian American volunteers were slightly happier than the European American volunteers. But when the volunteers were asked to remember how they had felt that week, the Asian American volunteers reported that they had felt less happy and not more.
The above passage is from Daniel Gilbert’s excellent Stumbling on Happiness. Here is my earlier post on the book. Hispanics, by the way, remembered feeling happier than they had been in the moment. One implication is that you cannot completely trust happiness studies based on self-reported data.
By the way: Have you figured out what is the secret but unpalatable way of making better life decisions?
Stumbling on Happiness
Finally, in Part VI, "Corrigibility," I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers. I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.
That is from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, so far the best book this year.
He takes Proust and turns it into social science. Your brain distorts both your anticipations and your memories; we do not know how happy we were or how happy we will be. Here is a short article on Gilbert. Here is a long article on Gilbert. Here is a short piece on why dreading pain can be as bad as pain itself. Or is it…? Was it…?
Austan Goolsbee on iTunes
Austan Goolsbee is now writing monthly economics columns for The New York Times. Here is his first piece on French competition policy and iTunes. Here is commentary from Henry Farrell.
What I’ve been reading
1. The People’s Act of Love, by James Meek. You wouldn’t think a Brit could imitate a 19th century Russian novel, but he pulls it off. Excellent mid-brow fiction, give it a few chapters to grab you.
2. The Singing Neanderthals, by Stephen Mithen. The author starts with sexual selection theories of the arts, and then asks why we sing in large groups rather than exclusively one-to-one. The Neanderthals are portrayed as a static culture, dependent on music for their communication, and thus unable to come up with new ideas. Recommended for those who like just-so stories and yes that includes me.
3. Capital and Collusion: The Political Logic of Global Economic Development, by Hilton Root. Here is the book’s web page. Hilton will be moving full time to George Mason, School of Public Policy.
4. Polio: An American Story, by David Oskhinski. There are few Pulitzer Prize-winning works you can gulp down and enjoy in a single brief sitting, but this is one of them.
5. You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir, by Wole Soyinka. Wonderfully written, sadly he doesn’t seem to see why capitalist enterprise is important for Africa.
6. The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Never Will Read, by Stuart Kelly. Aeschylus, Dante, Kafka, and many others wrote works that were lost, destroyed, or never finished. (Hey, what about the missing second volume of Hayek’s Pure Theory of Capital? You know, the one where he integrates the theory of money and capital?) Here is the history of those works, in bit-sized, ready-to-consume form. Here is one good review. If you are tired of popular literary treatments which simply recycle material you already know, this book is for you. A gem.
How will the web affect TV shows?
Shortly you will be able to see Lost episodes for free on the web, albeit with commercials (btw, my theory is that they have entered a parallel universe and are being tested by a non-omnipotent God). I’ve bought Battlestar Galactica episodes through iTunes.
But how will this affect the content of TV programs? I see a few possibilities:
1. Individual episodes are more complex and less likely to be self-contained. To watch only one show of Lost or BSG leaves you baffled. But who can make sure he catches every episode? What if you want to leave the country for a while? Now if you have missed a show, you can use the Web to keep in touch with the longer and more integrated story. You will do this even if you, like I, find web viewing distasteful and inconvenient. Not everyone can afford TiVo, and some of us still need Yana to operate the remote and indeed the service itself.
This mechanism will raise the intellectual quality of TV.
2. Perhaps the time lengths of programs will vary more. Has The Sopranos gone on a nearly two-year hiatus? How about a fifteen-minute web shortie to keep us interested?
3. (Some) webcasts will be reproducible on iPods. You will show the highlights of episodes to your friends. Perhaps many producers will make episodes to stress "the best two minute stretch or skit" rather than the show as a whole. Just as the song is outliving the album, perhaps the skit will outlive the show.
4. Might it, as Mark Cuban suggests, support soap operas in real time? What better to watch on your work computer, during work hours? In the longer run, the more entertaining your computer becomes, the more people will be paid by commission; blame blogs for that too.
5. TV on the web, in essence, shortens the release window for ancillary products. How big a deal is the DVD in six months’ time if a web version exists now? And what does shortening the release window do? It will be harder to figure out what is a hit. It will lower movie budgets. It will increase the relative advantage that low-cost drama has over special effects spectaculars. Surely you can think of more effects on this count.
Comments are open…
How to save commercials
Mark Cuban says make them live performances, for a new kind of reality TV:
…those are commercials that would keep peoples attention. You would never know exactly what would
happen. 30 seconds of fun. Bring back the 50s to TV.
Mac to PC Prize
Apple’s switch to Intel based machines makes it possible to actually run Windows (rather than emulate Windows) on a Mac. Who made this possible? Was it Apple? Microsoft? Intel? No, it was Jesus, Jesus Lopez. David Pogue writes about the patch and the innovative prize that motivated the programming.
Colin Nederkoorn created "a contest Web site, OnMac.net.
The challenge: to figure out how to install Windows on an Intel-based
Mac. The prize: a pot donated by interested parties all over the
Internet, seeded by $100 from Mr. Nederkoorn.The doubters:
plentiful. "You do realize that it’s not technologically possible
without rewriting the bootloader?" wrote one respondent. "Take your 100
bucks and save it."The winner: Jesus Lopez, a San Francisco-area programmer who collected a pot that had grown to $13,854.
…It runs most Windows software beautifully, but the rough edges are a
reminder that these are the earliest days in the Age of FrankenMac….
Thanks to Daniel Akst for the pointer.
Addendum: Chris Rasch points out that Apple is now also getting on the bandwagon. (I like this warning, "Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means
it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world….")
My favorite things Louisiana
Ah, to be on the road again… Most of my reporting from Louisiana will likely appear in another venue (links in due time); for now you must be content with these notes:
1. Favorite song: King Porter Stomp, by Jelly Roll Morton. I didn’t think about this one much, though many Louis Armstrong songs are fair contenders. To sort through music more generally would take hours. In addition to jazz, Cajun music, zydeco, and "swamp pop," there is Jerry Lee Lewis, Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson, Little Walter, Buddy Guy, Lucinda Williams, and yes Britney Spears.
2. Movie, set in: Southern Comfort remains underrated. Interview with the Vampire was better than expected. Water Boy has a few funny jokes. There is also Streetcar Named Desire (not my thing), Big Easy, The Drowning Pool, The Apostle, and last but not least The Blob was filmed in Abbeville.
3. Writer: I don’t much like Truman Capote, though I can see he was important at the time. John Kennedy Toole is a good pick, don’t forget Kate Chopin, plus I will confess a weakness for the best of Anne Rice; Witching Hour and Lasher are my favorites. Elmore Leonard rounds out a strong category, and I am likely forgetting some notables.
4. Artist: John James Audobon did some of his work in Louisiana, plus he was born in Haiti. Does that count? Clementine Hunter is one pick from the Naives. Here is another picture by her.
5. Dish: Boudin blanc or peppered, boiled crayfish. Overall I prefer the simple rural food to the New Orleans Creole style and its heavier roux-based sauces.
6. Architecture: There are many wonders, try this typical and not even extraordinary house from the Garden District.
The bottom line: Riches await you here.