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The mall is flat

That title is stolen from Atrios, who refers to him as Little Tommy Friedman, age 9. I couldn’t agree more. Besides being married to a billionaire mall developer, he’s also a jingoist of the first order, using his NYT column to rhetorically taunt the Serbians back in the mid-90’s: “You want 1940? We’ll give you 1940. How about 1540? or 1340?” Implying that we would bomb them back to some past age. Excellent, Tommy.

Vanity Fair now has Friedman’s Five Worst Predictions and it’s a passable list, reflective of the intellect that allows him to breeze past CNBC producers straight to the pineapple daiquiris in the green room. Though this list of brutishly simplistic conclusions based on counter-intuitive and patronizing over-extrapolations of routine activity in the developing world leaves out some doozies, the thing about Friedman that almost makes my head explode is the seemingly highest-regard in which he is held by academics, many of whom I know personally. I just don’t get it that they don’t get it. Maybe the flat world idea is just too easy and useful to let pass despite its fundamental flaw, and so they can’t. It’s truly one of the great mysteries of my proximity to academia. But I think he essentially misunderstood the cabbie or whomever it was in Bangalore that first told him that line. And now it’s everywhere. And it’s truly stupid.

At least he makes our usual question easier to answer.

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What does 6.2% mean?

I can dig it when the Grey Lady steals my construct.

On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that gross domestic product fell at an annualized rate of 6.2 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of 2008. This was bad news, but some journalists have exaggerated the finding merely by misreading the report.

That post and graph is by a UChicago economist. Another economist I read regularly is Brad DeLong at Berkeley (who hopefully will be taking academic leave to work at the Treasury department very soon). Anyway, this post reminds me of something I heard DeLong say in a NPR essay, I think yesterday. He was talking about all the bad news that’s out there, about the fixation on the stock market as an indicator, the unemployment numbers, the CPI… and he was saying that its enough to make us all worried and scared. But he pointed out that because of certain trends in the fundamentals of the economy (which have been out of whack for several years, really), the stock market should be going down. And though we’ve known about most all of these trends and statistics since last fall, the news media has been more all over them of late. So while they are sufficiently dire that we should be worried and scared, we shouldn’t be more worried and scared than we were in December just because the news media is finally rending their garments.

But… check out DeLong; he has a great running gag (except its not so funny) about the Washington Post Death Watch that should serve him well when/if he gets back to DC.

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le mensonge dans une bouteille

Bastardized phonyms using a different language that has a close but completely different meaning… draw comparisons where appropriate. Working on this week’s column, I’m seeing a route through to making the point that

Is there any doubt that most of the talking heads on cable, along with an uncomfortable ratio of the professional politicians they report and comment on, do not know what they’re talking about when it comes to the causes for and ways out of our economic recession?

And I come back to the ‘fools or liars’ construct, where your interlocutor (or presidential candidate –  candidate McCain was offering something up seemingly every other day this summer and twice on weekends) offers a point predicated on only one of two possibilities – either he’s a fool or he thinks you are.

And the trends continue, unabated. Krugman today, on the Treasury plans to make low-interest, non-recourse loans to lure private investors into buying bad assets:

And the insistence on offering the same plan over and over again, with only cosmetic changes, is itself deeply disturbing. Does Treasury not realize that all these proposals amount to the same thing? Or does it realize that, but hope that the rest of us won’t notice? That is, are they stupid, or do they think we’re stupid?

I don’t know which possibility is worse.

And this

ABC News reports on “upper-income taxpayers” who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.

According to ABC, one attorney “plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.”  According to the attorney: “We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00.”  ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.

This is stunningly wrong.

The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate.  If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.

But that isn’t actually how income tax works.

And that’s just today… this morning, actually. Please make it stop. Has anybody seen the bridge?

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Tralalitions

When is a metaphor not just a metaphor?

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

As only in the person of Hugh Person, the metaphysics of the situation keep churning in on themselves. Everything stands for something else until we have to begin literally tagging basic elements again into intelligible units of meaning.

Thanks, JL.

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The coming war of words (hopefully just that) over who is being green and who isn’t

China hits back at US criticism on human rights after the US needles China with human rights criticism, China responds with Human Rights Record of United States in 2008. From its preface: “As in previous years, the [United States’] reports are full of accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but mention nothing of the widespread human rights abuses on its own territory.”

From Metafilter.

Ongoing and, as much as it has reached a few crisis flash points in the past, we’re largely aware of it and how to use it to our advantage, as are our 700 million Chinese brothers. But how long before these kinds of international conflicts extend to greenhouse gas emissions? Shouldn’t we lay in some provisions, keep some powder dry, as the sayings go? What would any of that mean?

One reason the Kyoto Protocol was rejected by the US government after being widely ratified worldwide was that it would have forced on us measures to curtail emissions whereas other countries would be able to continue developing/polluting for a while, putting the US at a competitive disadvantage, yada yada. But… what if we began preparing for these days as if they might well come, when we have open conflict with China about carbon emissions?

A further, really nasty question while I’m at it – what will be the Tiananmen Square  of the battle to wrest control of out-of-control greenhouse gas emissions? And to which nation/system will it seed political advantage? Note: (this does not automatically assume that said political advantage from 1989 democracy demonstrations in Beijing accrued in the direction of anyone other than CNN).

You’d be right to ask what we/they might do to lay a few cobblestones on the high road? Mandate and subsidize solar roofing materials for all? Incentivise train taking? Look for ways to flatten out and reduce overall demand for power and energy? Pan really way out and see this not as a conflcit but an opportunity for cooperation and collaboration? Whoa… eyes… blurry.

Inquiring minds should want to know.

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The coming war of words (hopefully just that) over who is being green and who isn’t

China hits back at US criticism on human rights after the US needles China with human rights criticism, China responds with Human Rights Record of United States in 2008. From its preface: “As in previous years, the [United States’] reports are full of accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but mention nothing of the widespread human rights abuses on its own territory.”

From Metafilter.

Ongoing and, as much as it has reached a few crisis flash points in the past, we’re largely aware of it and how to use it to our advantage, as are our 700 million Chinese brothers. But how long before these kinds of international conflicts extend to greenhouse gas emissions? Shouldn’t we lay in some provisions, keep some powder dry, as the sayings go? What would any of that mean?

One reason the Kyoto Protocol was rejected by the US government after being widely ratified worldwide was that it would have forced on us measures to curtail emissions whereas other countries would be able to continue developing/polluting for a while, putting the US at a competitive disadvantage, yada yada. But… what if we began preparing for these days as if they might well come, when we have open conflict with China about carbon emissions?

A further, really nasty question while I’m at it – what will be the Tiananmen Square  of the battle to wrest control of out-of-control greenhouse gas emissions? And to which nation/system will it seed political advantage? Note: (this does not automatically assume that said political advantage from 1989 democracy demonstrations in Beijing accrued in the direction of anyone other than CNN).

You’d be right to ask what we/they might do to lay a few cobblestones on the high road? Mandate and subsidize solar roofing materials for all? Incentivise train taking? Look for ways to flatten out and reduce overall demand for power and energy? Pan really way out and see this not as a conflcit but an opportunity for cooperation and collaboration? Whoa… eyes… blurry.

Inquiring minds should want to know.

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Sunday odds and ends

So, I notice that the print version of my current Flagpole column that’s been out for a few days has not been made available online; maybe they’ve got some kind of blockage in their intertubes. Can’t say for sure. Look for further erratic behavior on this front. Newspapers are in trouble if you haven’t heard.

So is the South, with regard to new targets for renewable energy, apparently. Why the congressman won’t include the rest of the statement, that the South doesn’t have enough renewable energy sources if demand continues to spiral upward and onward is anybody’s guess. Thanks Ben, for the heads up.

There’s more on this and other issues on Georgia Public Broadcasting this afternoon. I tend to have a way of saying things people don’t like, so I’m sure there will be a little something for everybody.

Update. The internets are nothing if not self-correcting – and at lightning speed. New Flagpole column is here.

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Sunday odds and ends

So, I notice that the print version of my current Flagpole column that’s been out for a few days has not been made available online; maybe they’ve got some kind of blockage in their intertubes. Can’t say for sure. Look for further erratic behavior on this front. Newspapers are in trouble if you haven’t heard.

So is the South, with regard to new targets for renewable energy, apparently. Why the congressman won’t include the rest of the statement, that the South doesn’t have enough renewable energy sources if demand continues to spiral upward and onward is anybody’s guess. Thanks Ben, for the heads up.

There’s more on this and other issues on Georgia Public Broadcasting this afternoon. I tend to have a way of saying things people don’t like, so I’m sure there will be a little something for everybody.

Update. The internets are nothing if not self-correcting – and at lightning speed. New Flagpole column is here.

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The college rip-off

This is exactly wrong, and the writer points out why it’s wrong in the very first graph:

One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.

I think reporters and editors sometimes conspire to concoct counter-counter-intuitive story ideas just to see if we’re paying attention (we’re mostly not). The idea that the dearth of importance given to the liberal arts and humanities didn’t have a great amount to do with the present state in which our society finds itself would be laughable on its face if it wasn’t dispicable by its implications. You can’t know what green means when you’re tangled in the artifice and complexities of business jargon and technical rationales. The extent to which the business and engineering vocations have not been more informed by the humanities defines their finite reach, their very lack of sustainability.

If you went through a four-year college, were awarded a degree and were not required to learn a foreign language, you got ripped-off.

If you went through a four-year college, were awarded a degree and were not required to take any history courses, you got ripped-off.

Same with economics, the social sciences, literature and art history. The whole fascination with value in education has been about as wrong-headed as little towns begging W*l-mart to come in and destroy their downtowns. What’s it worth? You tell me. What’s trading how little you know for all the emptiness that comes with things you can be sure about worth?