The American Mind

I’m in a generous mood. For all those coming to Washington, DC later this week for CPAC, I’m offering you some books from my personal library. Some have been read and some haven’t. It’s first come, first served. If you’re interested in any of them leave a comment or send me an e-mail (sean–at–theamericanmind–dot–com).

• An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy by Roger Scruton
• Authentically Black by John McWhorter
• Modern Times by Paul Johnson
• The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth by Benjamin Friedman
• Funding Fathers by Nicole Hoplin and Ron Robinson
• Green Hell by Steve Milloy
• Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
• Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet

This riff is amazing:

To make sure something like this never happens to us again.

This morning Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley threatened to shut down his state’s highways due to the snowfall:

“The best we can do is keep one lane clear, even on the major highways,” said O’Malley, who has been traveling between two state emergency command centers. “If you don’t have a higher-riding four-wheel drive vehicle, you’re not going to be able to get over the ridges in the roads.”

Parts of Maryland report getting 30-inches of heavy, wet snow.

Midwest Airlines is waiving change fees for people flying through airports in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. They know it’s going to take a while to dig out.

As for me, I’m going through my music library finding appropriate songs:

• “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” by Rush
• “Frequency 019″ by DJ Snow
• “Hands Open” by Snow Patrol

I’ll try to get out of the house later, see how bad it is around me, and take some pictures.

“O’Malley: Highway Shutdown Possible”

[picture via Tom Bridge]

It’s rare for Washington, DC to get one big snowstorm during a winter, but we’re currently at the beginning of a second big storm. The area’s population of emigrants from all over the country combined with the semi-Southern natives means 90% of people living here can’t deal with a few inches of snow let along 12-20+.

The picture above is a prime example. Even if you wanted to be a good neighbor and make sure your sidewalk was not snow-covered and slippery, stores aren’t prepared to get you the equipment you need. When stores do have shovels they’re the kind that won’t get the job done.

People living in Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Michigan, and Iowa are laughing. Not with us but at us, and for good reason.

UPDATE: I’ll give the locals a little slack with this storm since the National Weather Service thinks there’s a good shot it could produce as much snow as the 1922 “Knickerbocker Storm.”

The Hayek vs. Keyes rap battle hit the interwebs yesterday.

If it wasn’t for Russ Roberts being behind the project I would have asked myself, “Why? Why?” Roberts has written a few novels where economics plays a role, yet they contain interesting characters that make the stories enjoyable in themselves.

Roberts is also a solid economist so I wasn’t surprised I didn’t see anything inaccurate in the economics concepts expressed in the rap lyrics.

The premise of the video stems from the big debate during the first years of the Great Depression pitting Maynard Keynes against Friedrich Hayek. What causes economic booms and busts? What should government do (if anything) about them?

Keynes saw “animal spirits” and the “paradox of thrift” driving business cycles. He then took the (then) revolutionary step of calling for large government interventions. Keynes gave the intellectual backing for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Hayek took a different view that was based on artificial interest rates causing businesses to invest in the production of goods and services where there really wasn’t a true demand. This lead to imbalances that had to be readjusted through falling asset prices and unemployment.

Keynes’ theories soon became the dominant view of the new macroeconomics. Much of orthodox economics studied in universities and employed in policy-making are rooted in Keynesism.

While Hayek didn’t become an influence in universities across the globe he ended up becoming known for writing the polemic The Road to Serfdom and inspired conservative and libertarian thinkers and politicians for decades. Hayek also won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974.

I did find a tidbit at the end of the video that got me curious as someone who has read a lot of Hayek. This quote is delivered:

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

It’s from Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, his final book, published in 1988. That’s decades after the Keynes-Hayek debates. During those years Hayek moved away from technical economics to studying society generally, the philosophy of science, to even dipping into psychology. I wonder how much of the early Hayek devoted to studying prices and the capital structure would agree with that quote from his final book?

I haven’t been able to find a good summary of the Hayek-Keynes debate that a layman can easily grasp. If you have some familiarity with micro- and macroeconomics then Sudha Shenoy’s essay could be helpful. For a debate over government intervention in the economy Roberts and Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky appeared on PBS NewsHour. And do yourself a favor and read Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” It’s the most important economics text of the 20th Century and will change forever how you look at economics.

A Twitter chat tonight with @LizMair, @ToddThurman, @CalebHowe, and others involved the supposed greatness of Nirvana. There’s no doubt they altered popular music for the better when Nevermind was unleased in 1991. But they’re also the most overrated band in modern times. Critics and supposed smart people too often speak of Nirvana in the same breath as The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. And it’s all pretty much based on Nevermind–or to be more exact “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

My biggest problems with Nevermind is the energy level isn’t consistent. You get a blistering sonic blast with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” only for tempo and electricity to drop with “In Bloom” and “Come as You Are.” It stays that way until the punk explosion of “Territorial Pissings” and continues on “Drain You.”

I came upon Nevermind after listening to heavy metal: Metalica; Def Leppard; Skid Row; King’s X. The music was about big guitars, heavy riffs, and pounding drums. So when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” dropped on MTV I was excited. While I enjoy listening to all of Nevermind you get a sense of a bait-and-switch. Like I mentioned above the power returns later in the album, but such inconsistency doesn’t make for a “legendary” album.

Nevermind would be a stronger album if it were almost cut in half. I’d keep “Smells,” “Breed,” “Polly” (for its quirkiness), “Territorial Pissings,” “Drain You,” “Stay Away,” and “On a Plain.” It would become a tighter album with consistent punch.

[picture via WigglyMan]

At yesterday’s Green Bay Packers-Arizona Cardinals game Fox showed one of the best signs I’ve seen in some time at a football game:

3/4 of the earth is covered by water, the rest is covered by Charles Woodson.

Woodson’s MVP-caliber season justifies that statement.

Yes, Pittsburgh Steelers fans have been saying something similar about Troy Polamalu, but he’s suffering from the Madden Curse this season.

[Picture via Packers.com.]

Merry Christmas!

I’m in agreement with Barry Ritholz. Gift cards aren’t a good Christmas gift. I admit when I’ve been desperate I’ve resorted to them. But as Ritholz writes it shows “you couldn’t be bothered actually picking out a present.”

He offers some suggestions that giving your everyday, average gift card. A gift card does make sense when you’re giving an experience. You can’t package a skydiving package or a dinner at a very good restaurant. So a gift card seems appropriate.

“Yes Virginia, Gift Cards Do Suck . . .” [via Marginal Revoluion]

The snow stopped falling in the Washington, DC area. Now, it’s about digging out. I’m stuck watching Senate proceedings on C-SPAN2 because the Metro is still only running underground trains, and there’s no bus service to my part of Northern Virginia. I have no way of getting into work. When the National Weather Service reports snowfall totals likes this you can understand: 20.5″ in Vienna; 19″ in Alexandria; 20.5″ in Arlington; 16″ in DC. This storm impressed this Wisconsin native.

I posted some pictures of the storm on Facebook. Take a look.

Historian Paul Johnson took on the challenge of a brief biography of Winston Churchill. He talked about it with the Wall Street Journal:

He gives credit to his success as a historian to his simultaneous and successful career in journalism. “You learn all sorts of tools as a journalist that come in extremely useful when you’re writing history,” he tells me as we sit in the drawing room of the West London house he shares with his wife, Marigold, “and one is the ability to condense quite complicated events into a few short sentences without being either inaccurate or boring. And of course a lot of the best historians were also journalists.” He cites Thomas Babington Macaulay, the French historians François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, and Churchill himself, “a very good journalist and in his own way a superb historian. . . . One of the things I hope this little book will do is persuade people to read Churchill’s own books. ‘My Early Life’ is one of the best volumes of autobiography ever written—it’s an enchanting book, full of fun and humor.”

“Winston Churchill, Distilled”

May 13, 2003: I met Iris Change, author of The Rape of Nanking. A few years later she committed suicide:

I asked her how the reasearch for her latest book differed from Rape. She told me that the research and writing about Nanking made her physicially ill, and she had to recuperate after finishing the book. If a writing project made me sick, that would be a sign to stop, but she perservered.

June 28, 2003: Two days after my cousin died in a car accident.

July 30, 2003: The ten worst songs ever.

July 3, 2003: I started calling Howard Dean, M.D., “Howard the Duck” because he is “all wet when he thinks he can get away with supporting troops in Liberia but not in Iraq.”

January 30, 2003: Displaying my frustration in moving from a Blogger.com-power weblog to Movable Type:

Now, I have this really nice design all ready and waiting (thanks, Joni). You’d love it, and I’d love to show you. All that’s left is to import my old posts. Based on the manual, it appears to be a simple thing to do–WRONG! After following the instructions to the letter (including using the MT import template laid out in glorious code), you’d think all the old entries would be installed into MT nicely–WRONG! I had two years of posts, but each of them contained nothing. That took up two days of screaming at MT through my monitor. Thanks to Joni (again), I have an import file I can use. What she did, I have no idea.

The “Power Editing” feature is powerless. There’s no way I can find to quickly select 1800+ entries and switch them to “publish” status. Clicking a little check box 1800 times is not something I’m going to do.

And heaven forbid MT provide an error message so I know something went wrong when I tried to import a 1.2 mb file.

March 30, 2003: A post and pictures of one of the original “portable” computers.

February 18, 2005: Before Al Franken was a U.S. Senator he was at CPAC.