Tyler Cowen on inter-governmental debt.#
My take: OK, it seems fair enough to cancel out inter-governmental debt: "they owe it to themselves." But why stop there? Remember the old Keynesian line?: "We owe it to ourselves". Why not cancel out debt altogether? The most important statistic is not the final debt level, rather the estimate of how big a tax increase will be needed to restore fiscal order. Note that Western Europe "gets away" with its current levels of taxation only because the rest of the world does not follow suit. So the worst case scenario is nothing to be complacent about.
I had a similar thought reading "that Keynesian line" for the first time in my Macroeconomics textbook.
Hyatt on Dashboard -- Cool.#
I think this is a brilliant critique of weird new interfaces.#
Chip Gibbons points out why Bill Cosby is a cool guy.#
Duane D. Freese on Fahrenheit 9/11. Aaron Swartz writes about some "stupid criticisms" of the movie.#
Aaron: "Michael Moore loves America. He's spent much of his adult life trying to make this country better. You might disagree with his methods or beliefs, but I do not think his motives can reasonably be impugned. To attack him this way is simply childish."
Question: Do you think the Aaron quote could be said if we changed "Michael Moore" to "George Bush"?
Alex Tabarrok on the Abortion-Missing-Voters article.#
I feel sad for people who care so little about ideas that their response to every issue is, will it help us win? Washington is full of people like that. It's been said that politics degrades all debate into an anti-intellectual counting of noses. Now we are counting missing noses.
In addition to being pathetic the article is wrong. Responding may dignify it more than it deserves but the article does at least get the numbers wrong in an interesting way so here goes.
The reduction in population from abortion is far smaller than the number of abortions. How can this be? The relationship between abortion and birth is not mechanical but depends on the choices that women (and men) make among sexual frequency, contraceptive use, fertility, child spacing and other variables. An unmarried, poor teenager who has an abortion may give birth to a child when she is older, married and financially more secure, that she would not have had if she had not had the abortion. The abortion changes the timing of birth but not the total number of births.
Jason Kottke's redesign is hot.#
Mark Bernstein links to Louis Menand taking on Eats, Shoots and Leaves in The New Yorker.#
A better basis than speaking for the metaphor of voice in writing is singing. You can't tell if someone can sing or not from the way she talks, and although "natural phrasing" and "from the heart" are prized attributes of song, singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of musical sound. Truss is right (despite what she preaches) when she implies, by her own practice, that the rules really don't have that much to do with it. Before Luciano Pavarotti walked onstage at the opera house, he was in the habit of taking a bite of an apple. That's how he helped his voice to sound spontaneous and natural.
What writers hear when they are trying to write is something more like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you're yakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that voice down on paper is a depressing experience. When you write, you're trying to transpose what you're thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music. This writing voice is the voice that people are surprised not to encounter when they "meet the writer." The writer is not so surprised. Writers labor constantly under the anxiety that this voice, though they have found it a hundred times before, has disappeared forever, and that they will never hear it again. Some writers, when they begin a new piece, spend hours rereading their old stuff, trying to remember how they did it, what it's supposed to sound like. This rarely works; nothing works reliably. Sooner or later, usually later than everyone involved would have preferred, the voice shows up, takes a bite of the apple, and walks onstage.
