The Moral Limits of Markets

Fascinating forum at the Boston Review on Michael Sandel's new book What Money Can't Buy on the corrupting and inegalitarian effects of pervasive market-based thinking. I've been considering the intrinsic and empirical effects of market-based reform on education, although I haven't developed any firm ideas as of yet. Very much worth a read to anyone interested in the subject.

I'll Settle This Question Right Now

Via Andrew Sullivan, I read a piece evaluating the evidence on whether talking birds knew what they were saying. Well, let me clear this matter up right now. My parrot is just a Quaker parrot mind you, not one of the really smart kinds like the African Grey. Now he's heard us say "num-nums" to the cats when feeding them canned food twice a day for the last two years. Recently he began saying "num nums?" "num nums?" every time he sees us with a kind of food he likes, or whenever I approach his cage with water or food - even though I've never used the phrase to him.

So yeah, in some cases at least, birds know EXACTLY what they're saying.

It's Nice To See Someone With Intellectual Integrity For A Change

Thus I find myself becoming more Paleokeynesian by the hour, as the world keeps hitting me On the head with a brick, pausing after each blow to say: "Now do you understand?!"

Brad DeLong, admitting that his assumption that the macroeconomy tends to self-correct was mistaken.

No Surprises Here

So evidently non-religious people generally know more theology than religious people. Now this is definitely a gross generalization! I know several very well-informed religious types (although most of them are converts; hmm....). In any case, it's not much of a shock. Atheists and agnostics tend to have gone through an intellectual process to arrive at their destination. It's not a very common default. And I have to say, for much of my life I've been shocked at the very skewed information that evangelical christians get about their own sacred texts. You'd think literalists who believe that the Bible is the inspired word of god would take the time to actually read the bloody thing....

This is How the Right Destroys Democracy

None of what's happening in the U.S. or Europe is much of a surprise. The playbook for authoritarians is pretty predictable: undermine democratic politics by following the letter of the law while systematically undermining its norms and institutions, find social cleavages you can exploit to pit people against one another, and wring every advantage you can out of social and economic crises.

What infuriates me is that, just like Europeans in the 1930's, today's Western center and center-left elites are so blind and pusillanimous that they are incapable of coming to grips with either the Great Recession, the rise of Teabaggers and the National Fronts, or the consequences of their own mistakes.

What Are They Doing To My Favorite Foreign Country?!?

I've been an Hispanophile since I was a teenager, and achieved one of my life's ambitions a couple of years ago when I finally went to Spain. It was a dream come true. I loved every minute of it, and am developing a secret plan on how to get back there.

Now apparently the austerians are trying to destroy it. What is wrong with the Powers That Be in the EU that they think the solution to a weak economy is to weaken it further? Of course, the people suffering are people who work for a living (or would like to), not rentiers and their financial industry henchmen, so I suppose I already know answer.

Encyclopedia Britannica, RIP

Very sad.