The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. [ . . . ] Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need . . . . Continue Reading »
Reihan says something that gets the wheels turning: At the moment, my side, the partisans of going after downscale voters first, is losing the argument to those who recommend going after the voters Michael Petrilli has described as ” Whole Foods Republicans .” What makes these voters . . . . Continue Reading »
Via Tyler Cowen, a paper by Davide Cantoni casts some doubt on the efficacy of the Protestant Ethic: Many theories, most famously Max Weber’s essay on the ‘Protestant ethic,’ have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their . . . . Continue Reading »
The Climategate tiff continues to annoy me. I have serious concerns about the methodology that has been used in the mathematical models which purportedly “prove” that we need to spend trillions of dollars, keep the third world in poverty, and restructure the global economy in order to . . . . Continue Reading »
There I was, quietly chuckling over Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson’s back and forth (and forth ) on the reasonableness of cryonics, when somebody decided to bring Derek Parfit into things . Says Julian: In reality, our ordinary way of talking about this leads to a serious mistake that Robin . . . . Continue Reading »
Those looking for the full-Gonzo narrative account of some of the more interesting 48 hours of my life will have to look elsewhere, if I ever get around to writing it. Short version: It was fun, nobody died. What follows is more like a post-mortem that includes things that surprised me, things that . . . . Continue Reading »
So it’s official — GM’s bankrupt. Bring on the PR campaign. Actually, don’t; the agency entrusted with giving Americans “permission to believe” in GM again (as one of the Morning Joe heads just said) is the same bunch of geniuses who embarrassed GM with its . . . . Continue Reading »
David Brooks’ recent column on genius , which offered a portrait of the Mozart who excelled by logging his ten thousand hours of rote practice to get on sooner to the good stuff, seemed to gibe poorly with not only our romantic understanding of unique human excellence but our practical . . . . Continue Reading »
One thing that’s always unfashionable is pessimism about the Power of Love. I touched a bit on love yesterday, and I see today that Daniel did the same a few days before that — in the context of another go against our love-projecting cosmopolitans. Where the cosmops would seek, . . . . Continue Reading »
Via Hit & Run , I see that Gerard Magliocca of Concurring Opinions has called Huey Long “the forgotten man in The Forgotten Man ,” by which he means that, whatever you want to say about FDR, at least he wasn’t Huey Long: Among other things, [Governor Long] wanted to establish . . . . Continue Reading »
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