Writings on economy, commons, language and other things
Accounting for the Commons, from Business Ethics magazine.
It was late in the afternoon, the big hearing was the next morning, and the chief counsel of the US Senate subcommittee realized that no one had written an opening statement for the chairman.
So I, law student and intern, got the job. The hearings were on the Penn Central Railroad, which was the Enron of the late ’60s, and I really cut loose. Why not? Weren’t there wise staffers on the floors above me in the Dirksen Building who would turn my excesses into polished Senate prose?
Of all the sources of unintended consequences, war probably is the greatest. The forces set in motion rarely stop where the participants expect. The Civil War helped spawn the large industrial corporation and Jim Crow. World War I gave rise to Hitler, and World War II to the Soviet Bloc. On the positive side, the latter also helped produce the civil rights movement, as black GIs who risked their lives for their country did not take kindly to the second-class status that awaited them on their return.
An invasion of Iraq isn’t likely to be exempt from this recurring pattern. As James Baker III, secretary of state under the first President Bush, acknowledged recently, “War can create dynamics that are difficult to predict and control [and] this is particularly true in the Middle East.”
Several months ago a professor at the University of North Carolina published research that turned beliefs about the economy upside down. Health improves, he said, as the economy shrinks. And as the economy declines, deaths, smoking, obesity, heavy drinking, heart disease and some kinds of back problems all decline as well.
‘Sounds unlikely’, said a New York Times correspondent. And indeed it is, at least by standard reckonings. We all know that an expanding economy makes us better off. Or do we? Another study, from the UK, found that shopping, which is the driving force of the entire economy and which is supposed to make people feel good, can actually make us depressed. ‘For significant numbers, dissatisfaction is now part of the shopping process,’ one of the authors wrote. (As though we needed a study to tell us that.)
Ever since the recent election there has been hand-wringing and recrimination on the Democratic side. They need to move to the center. They need bold new themes. They don’t have a clear agenda. Their agenda is too cautious. It is too far left.
The Democrats were indeed a sorry sight, with their calcified issues – Social Security, prescription drugs – and tired scripts produced by battle-weary political consultants.
In the water law of the Western United States there is a strange concept of waste. The West is the most arid region of the country. Water is precious. Yet … More
Paul Kurnit is the president of KidShop, an advertising firm that specializes in marketing to children, and he has plans for our kids.
“Kid business has become big business,” Kurnit says.1 To make kid business even bigger, he preaches what he calls “surround marketing”: saturation advertising that captures kids at every possible moment.2