MUSSOLINI, THE INFLUENTIAL–GOVERNMENT. When I wrote yesterday about the pervasiveness of unofficial government by gangs, there was an echo in my mind of a passage from the great Murray Kempton. (Kids, Murray Kempton was a proud journalist and a brilliant writer. It is hard to use short quotes to convey his cynical, ironic, affectionate stance toward events, but I will try.) The echo in my mind was of Kempton claiming that Mussolini was the most influential political figure of the twentieth century and that one could confirm this by going down a list of countries at the United Nations. When I read that, I thought: Of course! So many governments combine thuggery and grandiosity. I have happily spent time just now in the archives of The New York Review of Books looking for the quote (The archives are a wonderful bargain, especially if you are a subscriber). I was unable to find the quote, but in “A Genius of Journalism”, from the October, 1982 issue, I found: “Our century has come up with too few improvements in the way it manages to govern, but it has marvelously advanced, while coarsening, the techniques for controlling the governed; and Mussolini is to this dreadful science what the Wright Brothers were to aviation and Colonel Tom Parker to rock-and-roll.” As an aside, I also found this quote about Mussolini’s influence in architecture: “Any day’s passage through Rockefeller Center suffices to convince us that Mussolini’s aesthetic taste is our century’s dominant one.”
Archive for October, 2007
MUSSOLINI, THE INFLUENTIAL–GOVERNMENT.
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007GOVERNMENT BY GANGSTERS: STALIN.
Monday, October 22nd, 2007GOVERNMENT BY GANGSTERS: STALIN. Orlando Figes, in a review of YOUNG STALIN by Simon Sebag Montefiore, in the current New York Review of Books, says that “we have come to see the young Stalin as a mediocrity” because of the writings of his enemies, especially Trotsky. Instead, Figes says, Montefiore’s books show Stalin as a leader of a gang of ruffians in his teens and, by his early twenties (in 1901), the leader of a gang that “ran protection rackets and controlled the streets in the workers’ districts of Tiflis.” That is, putting ideology aside, Stalin is an example consistent with the proposition that much of the government in the world can be illuminated by Mafia models. Extralegal gangs govern, collecting taxes in the form of protection, large areas of the world today, including even small pockets of the United States (consider Los Angeles and Chicago).
HOW PRESIDENT SARKOZY MET HIS WIFE.
Sunday, October 21st, 2007HOW PRESIDENT SARKOZY MET HIS WIFE. My brother Elmer and I will often make conversation by asking spouses how they met. The answer is usually romantic and sometimes surprising (a lady told Elmer that she met her husband when he came for a meal at the soup kitchen at which she volunteered). Based on the Wall Street Journal article on Friday about the divorce of President Sarkozy and his wife, their meeting was unusual: “Mr. Sarkozy fell in love with Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz while, as mayor of a Paris suburb, he celebrated her civil wedding to a French television-show host in 1984.” He pursued her and married her after divorcing his first wife.
THE SPIKE.
Saturday, October 20th, 2007THE SPIKE. Benefit-cost studies show the enormous value of getting people to wear seat belts by mitigating the consequences of accidents.. Economists will point out, however, that wearing a seat belt will tend to make a driver less careful because he is at less risk of injury if there is an accident. Professor Armen Alchian is usually credited with the suggestion that a good way to make drivers more careful and thereby reduce accidents would be to mount a large sharp spike in the middle of each steering wheel.
“ALL ECONOMISTS ARE RAPT, FANCIFUL CREATURES.”
Saturday, October 20th, 2007“ALL ECONOMISTS ARE RAPT, FANCIFUL CREATURES.” From the story “The Charlottetown Banquet” by Robertson Davies: “[A]ll economists are rapt, fanciful creatures; it is necessary to their profession.”
THE STANDUP ECONOMIST.
Friday, October 19th, 2007THE STANDUP ECONOMIST. My son, Nick Schaefer, has done standup several times at Caroline’s on Broadway. Here is a link to the “standup economist”, Yoram Bauman, appearing at Caroline’s on Broadway. To give you an idea, one of his jokes is a take off on Jeff Foxworthy (“you might be a redneck if…”). You might be an economist if when you open your fortune cookie at the Chinese restaurant, you add, “at the margin.”
DOING WELL BY DOING DIRTY WORK.
Thursday, October 18th, 2007DOING WELL BY DOING DIRTY WORK. Here is the abstract of an article in USA Today which describes how a business that collects dog poop from yards can make its franchisees millionaires. The full article also described how a business dealing with septic systems pays well. I had previously posted on the argument that (other things being equal), a person does the most good for society by taking the job that pays the most because that is what society values the most. There is a trade off among money, status, interesting work and a feeling that one is doing good. We should be grateful that our society offers that tradeoff in contrast with a society where low status or low income people (untouchables) are assigned this kind of job.
LOSING ONE HUNDRED THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS IN ONE DAY—UPDATE.
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007LOSING ONE HUNDRED THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS IN ONE DAY—UPDATE. Almost one month ago I posted on how the brilliant speculator Victor Niederhoffer had once lost one hundred thirty million dollars—all he had to invest and lose—in one day. In that post I linked to Malcolm Gladwell’s article on the long-running debate between Niederhoffer and Nassim Taleb (he, of the Black Swans) on the nature of risk and financial markets. Taleb describes Niederhoffer as “part chevalier, part scholar”, yet he disagrees with him profoundly. Niederhoffer has been one of the pioneers in using past data to predict price movements in financial markets. The current financial crisis seems to support Taleb’s claims that this can’t be done. How has Niederhoffer fared in this crisis? John Cassidy in the current New Yorker has an update. (Pages 10 to 12 tell what’s happened in the last three months).
ALICE BRADLEY AND GENDER.
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007ALICE BRADLEY AND GENDER. Just as with the Brontes, a mystery developed as to whether James Tiptree was a man or a woman. Alice relished the opportunity that Tiptree gave her to write from what she considered to be a masculine point of view. Tiptree’s stories return again and again to issues of gender. Phillips says that Tiptree wrote of “women’s alienation in a world of men.” (p. 3) and uses as a chapter title this quote from Alice’s journals: “I live in my body as in an alien artifact.” (p. 364). Alice herself wrote in a telling passage (p. 363): “I am not a man. I am not the do-er, the penetrator. And Tiptree was ‘magical’ manhood, his pen my prick. I had through him all the power and prestige of masculinity. I was—though an aging intellectual—of those who own the world. How I loathe being a woman…..Tiptree’s ‘death’ has made me face my self-hate as a woman.”
ALICE BRADLEY—THE LIFE AND THE STORIES.
Monday, October 15th, 2007ALICE BRADLEY—THE LIFE AND THE STORIES. Julie Phillips finds convincing connections between Alice Bradley’s life and her stories, beginning with the connection between the horrors that Alice encountered as a child in Africa and the horrors of Alice’s dark science fiction. She points out that Alice and her parents were often the first white people that the natives had seen, “and they experienced what for most science fiction writers is only a story or a metaphor: ‘first contact’ with the alien.” (p. 32). In World War II, Alice was one of the first women members of the Womens Army Auxiliary Corps, and marveled at reporting to a camp where women were in charge. In Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t See,” UFO’s arrive, and the woman protagonist decides to go away with the aliens, leaving the male figure to wonder why a woman would do that. Alice wrote once that “having a woman’s body is like being the owner of a large and only partly tamed animal, day and night the damn thing is being itself, with its own semi-inscrutable operations.” (p. 155). In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” an ugly girl trapped in a closet is wired to and controls a beautiful female body.
