Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

I arrived at North Station a few minutes ago for the 5:00 Amtrak Downeaster train to Exeter, only to find a huge crowd at one of the doors — probably 200 or 300 people. This provides another valuable object lesson in how Boston works. To understand what was happening, I had to ask someone in the throng. It turned out that because of the Red Sox World Series victory parade, people were locked out of North Station. No idea why. There was one solitary MBTA staff member blocking the door, who periodically would yell out that if we were going to Fitchburg, we needed to stay in line. Note that he didn’t explain what the rest of us were supposed to do. I asked what Amtrak customers had to do. He opened a door for us, let us through, and closed it behind us.

Now here I am on the train, and I still have no idea what the parade had to do with the blocked doors. So what if the parade made everything crowded? Shouldn’t they let people in to wait inside? One puzzles over what would happen if there were some huge event on a zero-degree day.

I finally migrated this site from Blosxom to WordPress. I’ve meant to do this for forever and a day. Some stuff is broken — e.g., none of the posts have categories attached — but most everything else is working. I was just too frustrated with my own slowness at making the move, so I decided to do it even if it broke some stuff.

Hopefully I’ll get the rest fixed presently.

If you’re curious, I used Jason Clark’s Blosxom-to-Wordpress instructions, and those on the Graceful Exits blog. After all the various edits that all the pages suggested, I used import-blosxom.php. All the flavour files (Blosxom’s spelling of “flavour,” by the way, not mine) I used are in a separate directory. The import also requires that you install the Blosxom interpolate_fancy plugin, which I’ve set aside for you.

Once you have all the plugins and flavours installed on the Blosxom side, you need to set up a parallel copy of Blosxom that displays every single one of your blog posts in one view; I did this by copying the Blosxom CGI file into blosxom_new. Edit blosxom_new and find the line defining the variable $num_entries. Set that to some number that’s greater than or equal to the total number of posts that you have in your blog; in my case, 4000 was plenty.

Now that the parallel Blosxom will load all my posts, I need to dump all of those posts out. wget will do the trick:

wget -O ~/all_posts.txt http://example.com/path/to/parallel/blosxom/index.rss20

Now all your posts will be in ~/all_posts.txt. That should be all you need to do on the Blosxom end.

Now, as for the WordPress end, create a blank MySQL database and give all permissions on it to a database-specific user:

create database mywordpress;
grant all privileges on mywordpress.*
    to 'mywordpressuser'@'localhost'
    identified by 'password';
flush privileges;

Then run the import-blosxom.php script from above and follow the link. That should do it.

Important note: This import doesn’t work right with WordPress 2.3, which is why you don’t see any categories on my posts. WP uses tags rather than categories, and this importer is based around WP 2.2. I’ll figure this out in the next few days. I’m sure it’s not difficult, but like I said: I wanted to get something out there.

As Krugman wrote in Development, Geography, and Economic Theory, a fundamental principle in economics is that opportunities for free money don’t tend to stick around; someone will move in and act in a way that eliminates the opportunity. This is called “arbitrage”.

But in my limited exposure to economics thus far, I don’t see much explicit modeling of the time dimension. How long does it take for arbitrage opportunities to disappear? And how much money is there to be made before they disappear?

I periodically forget that that’s the title of a book I want to read (via Cosma), so I’ve marked it here and in my to-read list.

Quoth TPM Muckraker:

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the “strictest confidence.”

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.

That’s bad enough. But then

the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the “to:” field, according to a recipient of the emails.

Has recalling an email ever worked? I guess it works if all your recipients are on the same mail system, like Exchange or Notes. But I assume some fraction of the whistleblowers sent from Gmail or Hotmail accounts.

In general, I think it’s fair to say that use of the “recall” feature is a sign of technological ineptitude. It shouldn’t be surprising that a leak of this sort happened.

Summarizing this book as “The Self-Organizing Economy, only a bit more technical, filled with more citations to other economists, more navel-gazey, slightly more philosophical and with less of a focus on complex systems” gets you at least 95% of what you need when deciding whether to read this book. As the next step after The Self-Organizing Economy, it leaves something to be desired: it overlaps too much to be really satisfying. In fact I think Krugman cut and pasted a lot from Development, Geography, and Economic Theory into The Self-Organizing Economy, including particular graphs and particular lines (e.g., one about his love of Micromotives and Macrobehavior, and Gertrude Stein’s quote about L.A. that “there’s no there there”). Which is fine: these are good ideas, and they deserve to be reinforced.

In The Self-Organizing Economy, Krugman explained why he thought that economic geography had died out sometime in the 1960’s. Partly, he said, it was that the discipline lacked “microfoundations”: it didn’t explain high-level behaviors (in this case the existence of cities) from the unguided actions of individual economic actors. Instead it took the existence of cities as given, then derived conclusions about where people and businesses would locate. The Self-Organizing Economy painted some cute little models to try to build these microfoundations. Widely dispersed populations turned out in that book to be an unstable equilibrium: we get the microfoundations by assuming a “state of nature” in which everyone is spread out, then show that the state doesn’t last. Krugman actually comes to a stronger conclusion from his toy model: cities end up being evenly spaced around the circular landscape. Any closer together and they start eating into each other’s markets. Any further apart and they lose the benefits of closeness to customers and suppliers. This unifies a number of traditions in economics that have tried, over the years, to explain why cities exist in the shapes and sizes they do.

Development assumes more economic knowledge than did The Self-Organized Economy, though I could fumble along and get most of what he was saying. Understanding why cities concentrate at all, says Krugman, inevitably means understanding increasing returns to scale. My intuition is ill-formed here at the moment, but I think the idea is that with constant returns to scale, doubling the number of employees in a given factory only doubles your output — so there’s no reason to prefer one large factory to two small ones at two different locations.

Hence understanding cities at all means understanding increasing returns to scale. But, says Krugman, increasing returns to scale is precisely what neoclassical economics doesn’t know how to handle. My intuition here is even hazier. Krugman refers a few times to “unexploited economies of scale” causing problems for neoclassical economists, which suggests to me that there’s some kind of arbitrage principle at work: in a perfectly competitive economy, the theory probably says somehow that factories would eventually scale up to the point that they’re working in a constant-returns regime. Again, my intuition on this is hazy, but that’s what the context of Krugman’s writing suggests.

So if you’re going to model city development, you need to model increasing returns. And if you’re going to model increasing returns, you can’t be talking about a perfectly competitive market. Apparently you’re forced into a monopolistic competition model. These are just the sort of models that economics has always had a hard time understanding, says Krugman.

Krugman spends a good fraction of the book explaining this economic issue, so in a lot of ways Development turns into meta-economics: a study of why economics as a discipline behaves the way it does. Economics, says Krugman, ignored city development for so long because it didn’t know how to model it; a certain standard of rigor has prevailed in economics since the 1960’s, such that anyone who had nice ideas in prose but couldn’t express them in mathematics was the proud owner of a dead letter.

Models are a good way to get your brain straight and depose emperors that, in the bright light of mathematics, turn out to have no clothes. Krugman touches on the one issue that, to me, makes model-building in the social sciences a sketchy enterprise: their misuse by charlatans. Make models to your heart’s content, says Krugman, but beware that they’re just models. Or maybe another way to put it, which Krugman doesn’t, is that you should be very careful not to infer anything about reality from your model until the data give you license to do so. Very often the data do no such thing. The economics books I’ve read up to now are normally satisfied to capture various qualitative aspects of reality in their models, but normally miss other qualitative aspects and are never right in detail. The authors of those books are all aware of their failings, and Krugman is readier than even most of them to admit the comical crudity of his models. The trouble is that the users of these models are not nearly so humble. That’s the only thing that worries me about economic modeling.

So Development, Geography and Economic Theory is three things: a collection of toy models, a unification and deepening of some earlier work in economic geography, and a meditation on the value of those very models.

Grumble grumble grumble goddamned New York grumble.

The Amazon reviews of The Self-Organizing Economy prove that at least three people in the world did not read the book. These three people happen to be the ones who wrote reviews of it.

I include those three reviews below. The top one, in particular, apparently written by a well-reputed complex-systems theorist, has strategically reversed everything about the Krugman book. This includes its subject matter, its orientation to economics, its general political view of the world, and its author. Otherwise it is spot on.

(more…)

This is a delightful little read, bringing bits of complex-systems analysis to economics. It requires little in the way of mathematics. Because it’s Paul Krugman, it’s effortlessly charming, self-deprecating, and eloquent.

Those who are only familiar with Krugman’s excellent New York Times op-ed pieces may not know that he was (and still is?) a world-renowed economist whose work centered on “economic geography” — i.e., understanding why it is that economic activity on so many scales is localized rather than dispersed. Why do cities exist? Why do they exist where they do? Why is economic activity so concentrated in the West? Why does Africa have such a hard time becoming part of the “developed world”? Clearly there are connections between economic geography and international development. A complete theory of economic geography would explain not only why activity concentrates where it does, but what policymakers can do to bring activity to inactive areas. Hence one book in my queue is Krugman’s Development, Geography, and Economic Theory.

The Self-Organizing Economy starts with some simple models of geographic concentration. Suppose that there’s a certain benefit to moving your business near an economic center like a city; the benefit may be something as clear-cut as reduced transportation costs. But being further away from a city has its benefits as well, in decreased rent. Tune your parameters accordingly, to qualitatively match observed behavior. Start with a hypothetical land area where businesses are located at random, then use a computer to simulate how the distribution of businesses will change over time. You’ll find — Krugman did — that concentration is inevitable over a wide range of parameters.

He starts with the segregation model from Thomas Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehavior (a book which I’ve seen cited quite a few times, but never actually read; Krugman’s love for it suggests that it ought to go on the queue). You don’t even need to assume that people are explicitly racist, in the sense that they’d prefer a neighborhood where everyone looks like them. You just need to make the weaker assumption that people would prefer not to be the lone white person in a black neighborhood. Under that assumption, a perfectly integrated neighborhood is not a stable equilibrium as the process evolves in time: a slight perturbation (which in this case would mean something like “a few more black people move in”) throws the system quickly away from that equilibrium and on to another one.

He moves on to macroeconomics, namely trying to understand why business cycles happen at all. Why doesn’t the economy grow consistently with population? Why does it instead go through periods of boom and bust? There’s an interesting hypothesis in here that inventories always lie near an unstable equilibrium, and that an external (in the jargon: exogenous) shock is sufficient to knock us away from that equilibrium.

Connected with which, there’s an even more interesting story (Krugman doesn’t bother calling it a “model”) to make explicit exactly what “globalization” means. In terms of actual economic value, Krugman has persuasively argued elsewhere that we are not a “global economy,” and in any case that the economy was more global before World War I. He hits the same theme in The Self-Organizing Economy, just long enough to tie globalization in with ideas from complex systems. Other nations’ economies are also stuck near an unstable equilibrium, for the same reason that ours is. A shock that knocks us into a recession knocks them into one, too; our business cycle is “phase-locked” with theirs.

The first 2/3 of the book is all prose: the best intuitive presentation imaginable for the topics Krugman covers. Integrals are included here and there in the last third, but they’re not vital to understanding the material.

In fact, I think it tries too hard to avoid explicit mathematics. Sometimes math really is the clearest way to express ideas. Krugman decided that he’d convert all statements about Fourier series into overly-cute talk of “wobbles”; likewise, Simon’s paper “On a Class of Skew Distribution Functions” becomes something about “hunks” attaching to “chunks”. Or maybe chunks attaching to hunks; I forget. Simon’s presentation is “impenetrable,” says Krugman, but I don’t think Krugman helps matters much by getting all cutesy with his terminology.

Finally, it’s valuable to read this book to de-romanticize complex systems. There’s a post-Gleick tendency to over-complexify complexity. In a phrase, I think the Gleickian approach to “chaos theory” is “Fuuuuck, dude, complex systems are hard, but they do make pretty pictures.” Whereas the actual practice of this stuff is actually about figuring shit out. Yes, nonlinear PDEs have all kinds of weird behaviors. But the point is to map those weird behaviors onto actual observations. Just as general relativity doesn’t say that “it’s all relative, man,” neither are complex systems inherently ungraspable. Krugman’s book is good for removing BS from a much-abused term.

My sense, incidentally, is that the next mathematical step after reading The Self-Organizing Economy would be to move on to something like Hofbauer and Sigmund’s Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics.

Thank you to Dahlia Lithwick and Phillip Carter:

[W]hen those sick, unspeakable practices endanger our own soldiers, horrify our allies, and embolden our enemies, we don’t look like badasses anymore. We just look like sadists. And when those practices don’t even work, we look like stupid sadists to boot. There’s an easy fix here. Renounce torture. It was once an unremarkable proposition that the Unites States doesn’t stand for senseless sadism. What a tragedy that defending it has suddenly become a point of principle.

Via Marty Lederman, and included below.

(more…)

The Sox won last night.

They are going to the World Series.

That is very excellent.

We may well be the new Evil Empire, but I don’t care.

I got a text message from my man Adam Rosi-Kessel at 8:21 a.m. this morning announcing simply “baby born.” I don’t know anything else about the birth, but: congratulations to Adam and Rachele! This is their second child after their wonderful daughter Esther. I hope mother, father, first daughter and second child are all doing well. Much love to all the Rosi-Kessels.

P.S. (22 October 2007): I got an update from him a couple hours later: Sara Havah Rosi-Kessel was 9 lbs. 4 oz. and 20 inches long at birth. He also wrote a very fun text about Apgar scores:

Apgar: 8, 9. But we hear Princeton actually rejects more 10s than it accepts, and what really matters is how quickly you suckle.

In the past few days I’ve told several people that I’m reading a biography of John Maynard Keynes, and the response has been overwhelmingly one of “Huh.” Apparently he’s not nearly as well known as I expected. So here’s a little sentence or two on why he’s famous, and why everyone should know about him.

My understanding of his economic ideas (which won’t be really cemented until I finish the other two volumes of his biography and read The Economic Consequences of the Peace) is as follows: before the Depression, economists believed that supply would always equal demand, and that the same was true of labor: “all markets clear,” in the jargon. So if you’re trying to get employed, and you find that you can’t, it’s just because you’re asking for too much money. If you ask for $10 an hour, and you’re really worth $5 an hour, you just need to lower your sights a little bit.

Keynes’s realization, spurred by the Depression, was that sometimes labor cannot find a buyer at any price. Why specifically this would happen, I don’t know, but I believe it’s connected with the market’s irrationality during times of economic panic. That, in turn, is derived from individual humans’ irrationality during times of panic. This is all explained, I understand, in Keynes’s most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, And Money, which is on its way to my library and may well be, for all I know, over my head. I’ve read elsewhere (can’t remember where just now) that the Keynesian program was to bring a more-realistic psychology to economics, in order to predict these macroeconomic panics and work our way out of them. The General Theory was literally a general theory: Keynes believed that a model of Man As He Actually Is would contain Rational Man as a special case.

In response to these panics, Keynes said that government should step in and spur the economy on with public works. This helps the market regain its confidence, and that little burst of government spending does wonders for the economy. This is what Keynes is most famous for. Every time the U.S. government spends during recessions, it’s acting out a Keynesian policy. Raising and lowering interest rates, I believe, is also Keynesian. I believe the U.S. government mostly uses interest-rate changes to control inflation, but lower inflation tends to go along with higher unemployment. (Hence the apparently-famous Phillips Curve.)

Such, at least, is my less-than-junior-varsity understanding of what Keynes’s economics is (are?) about; I suspect I’ll be smarter about such things in a few months, after I’ve read more.

Speaking of labor contracts, I’ve not thought through the implications of what I’ve read elsewhere about such things: namely that whatever an employment contract might be, it is not the same thing as, say, a contract for wheat. A commodity like wheat can be completely contracted: you say you’ll sell me thus-and-so many bushels of thus-and-such a quality, and I can verify that you’re telling the truth before I give you the money; we don’t need to trust one another to make sure that the contract is satisfied. Employment contracts cannot be completely contracted, as Herbert Simon realized back in 1951: you may well say that you’ll do 40 hours of work for me every week, but unless I stand behind you for every minute of those 40 hours (or encourage your coworkers to do so, or install surveillance cameras in your office and pay people to watch over them), there’s no way to see whether you’re actually playing Freecell. As Samuel Bowles argues, incomplete employment contracting means that employers will pay systematically more for labor than its productive value; that is, employment contracts will entail positive economic rent. I believe Bowles concludes that any system requiring trust (my trust that you’ll work, your trust that Bob The Used-Car Salesman will sell you a quality automobile) will entail incomplete contracts. Incomplete contracts, in turn, will often force economic rents.

This may connect with the inability of labor markets to clear during depressions, but I’ve not really fleshed out the reasons why just yet.

And while we’re on the topic of employment contracts, one other thought: when people go to work for startups, do they tend to require higher pay in the expectation that the company may go bankrupt within a short time? That is, is there a risk-reward tradeoff in employment, just as there is in investment? It would seem sensible if there were, though it’s somewhat complicated: if the startup goes bust, I may believe that I could always get another job without much difficulty. That is, the startup may not even offer that much subjective risk. How much subjective risk it offers will be correlated with the general state of the economy: in times of high unemployment, I may trade some income for a lower-risk job. The startup would then need to offer me more money just to overcome the additional risk I’m taking on. All of this seems reasonably straightforward.

So I wonder if there’s an incomplete-contracting dimension on the seller’s (employee’s) side as well: the more I can trust my employer, the less I’ll ask for in salary. This may not be incomplete contracting at all — it may just be trust. Seems connected, though.

What the fuck is the point of this party?

P.S.: If Dodd does what he says, I’d vote for him. I’m prepared to be a single-issue voter in this election. Here the single issue is “restoring all the civil liberties we’ve lost under Bush.”

I thought I should just note for the record that Skidelsky’s bio of Keynes is not a technical biography: if you wanted to learn in detail about his ideas in economics or probability, Skidelsky’s bio is not the place to go. It is to Keynes what Peter Brown’s book was to Augustine.

So far in the life of John Maynard Keynes, he’s won more or less every prize that he could at Eton and Cambridge, done decently well at mathematics, worked nonstop, charmed Strachey and Russell, and engaged in an awful lot of sodomy.

I wouldn’t put it that way if Keynes himself weren’t doing so. His letters to Strachey (who was for a time his lover, it seems) contain repeated uses of the word “sodomy,” which I guess is what people called it back then. It was a little off-putting to read something like this in Keynes’s letters to Strachey:

Scott is dreadfully Oxford — a sort of aesthetic person; and of course his point of view always seems to me a trifle shocking; but we are quite happy together. Even in his sodomy, which he takes more solidly than anything else, he seems to want to worship an idealised vision in which he has clothed some good-looking absurdity rather than to come to close quarters.  . . . 

We have here a vast bedroom, a little room and a large balcony looking out over the city — also meals and wine for 5 francs a day.

Strachey, for his part, seems to be the quintessential drama queen, and if this were a novel I would be praying for his character to die.

I think a lot of the drama in Keynes’s circle is similar to the drama among college students anywhere. Keynes, Strachey and others were part of an élite clique at Cambridge called the Apostles, consisting of the most promising intellectual youth of their day; Apostles, it seemed, only talked to other Apostles, and looked down with an ironic arched eyebrow on the rest of the world. The Apostles could live lives of leisure, engaging in continuous college bull sessions for years and years. When they weren’t studying feverishly and philosophizing, they were taking months-long trips to the Mediterranean. Oddly enough, I can see this leading to more drama-queeniness than a life of toil: when you have nothing taxing to distract you, why not spend your time complaining?

Robert Skidelsky is so skillful at presenting Keynes’s life that it’s taken me 200 pages to realize just how tiresome that life is (so far). It’s like The Talented Mr. Ripley without Matt Damon or any suspense. Yet the book is compulsively readable. Skidelsky steps out of the way most of the time, and lets Keynes tell his own life story through his letters. And what marvelous, mellifluous letters they are. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Apostles all wished and expected that the story of their homosexuality would make it into the historical record eventually.) Only occasionally does the author pop in to explain the context to Keynes’s life that Keynes himself wouldn’t have needed to articulate — namely its Victorian philosophical background.

Notable in that background is the project of trying to understand what’s left of morals when religion is gone. Those places in world history where people are uncomfortably transitioning from one belief system to another are fascinating; the end of Christianity as a guiding principle for intellectuals from at least Darwin onward is one such transition.

Keynes and his peers took the transition so seriously. I envy them in at least one detail: they really did believe that the philosophy you held mattered, whereas I’m inclined to say that belief is gone for most people nowadays. It helps their philosophical seriousness that the Apostles didn’t have much else to worry about: being the rather socially stunted band of monks that they were, it was less important that you act properly than that you think and feel properly. They were living a life of claret and contemplative ease, each expecting his own university or government sinecure, so the urge to convert thought into action wasn’t so strong. It’s surprising that out of this came Russell and Keynes, two Apostles whose actions and thoughts spread far beyond the Cambridge monastery.

Owing to my recent debates with a Randian, I’ve meant to pick up a certain historical thread that Skidelsky touches on — namely, that the moral foundations of economics have been bled out of it, leaving it with the reputation for selfishness that it has today. My sense is that from the early Utilitarians to at least Keynes, economists believed that the Invisible Hand only went so far: you also needed a moral education to help you choose the right goods. Not all desires are equal. That moral foundation seems to have disappeared: the modern ideology says that all we need are selfish actors duking it out in the marketplace. Maybe that will lead to a fine economic optimum, but not a moral one.

When I get the time, I’ll quote a passage from early in Skidelsky’s book about the state of economics in Marshall’s day. It’s dominated by a priori reasoning and a nonsense psychology, and hence could be carried over without change to economics in the 1960’s. Keynes’s program, as I read somewhere recently (not in Skidelsky), was to understand how actual, sometimes-irrational, historically-situated human beings acted, and to derive macrobehavior from these micromotives.

If I’m reading things right, backsliding has been part of economics since the late 1800’s. Which is depressing.

Thus far in Skidelsky’s book there’s not very much economics, because Keynes isn’t much of an economist yet: he’s a philosopher and a probabilist. The index tells me that within a couple hundred pages we’ll have arrived at Keynes’s post-World War I book The Economic Consequences of the Peace; his transition to a policymaker and economist will be more or less complete. If the first half is any indication, it will be a gripping story throughout. I can’t wait.

Little tossoff thought that just occurred to me: I remember reading something in the New York Times Magazine a while back that may or may not have been a defense of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, said the article, wasn’t as much of a dolt as everyone made him out to be. When he put James G. Watt in charge of the Interior Department, this was deliberate, said the article: the best way to destroy an agency is to staff it with people who will quite obviously dismantle it. The best proof of governmental incompetence, in other words, is to staff it with incompetents.

I wish I could find that article right now. I’d like to know whether the author intended it ironically. It seems to me that if you wanted to prove the utter impossibility of government success, you’d put absolutely the best people in positions of responsibility, then watch them fail.

The thing is, I don’t really believe Republicans think that. I’m pretty sure most Americans, when asked whether they believe that there exist talented men who could inspire the federal government to majestic ends, would agree wholeheartedly. The federal government is not inherently a failure. It may well be failing more over time, because the country is growing cynical about its ablity to do right. That cynicism, in turn, may well be propelling more people away from government jobs, whereas in generations past I understand that the aristocracy viewed government service as an honor.

If you actually did believe in the inherent lousiness of the government, you wouldn’t need to resort to trickery to prove it. Unfortunately we’ve placed at least two presidents (Reagan and Bush 43) in office whose candidacies were based on an avowed hatred of government. We know exactly the kind of government that we can expect from such men.

P.S. (23 October 2007): Paul Krugman, in his talk last night at Harvard (as part of his tour to promote The Conscience of a Liberal), gave a great example of what I was getting at here. He said that Bill Kristol emphasized the importance of killing national health care back when Hillary Clinton was fighting for it the first time. Allowing such a thing to go through, he said, would prove to Americans that government can work — and would thereby deal a huge blow to the Republicans. In other words, Republicans can only prove that government doesn’t work by forcing it not to work.

The Kristol quote is available in an Atlantic article entitled “The Way It Wasn’t”, whose full contents are only available in the Google Cache. The quote is as follows:

Bill Kristol, Dan Quayle’s late brain, says ‘health care that’s always there’ will moor the middle class in the Democratic Party. ‘It will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates  . . .  as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.’

Last time I turned on the radio, Cleveland’s Jhonny Peralta had just hit a three-run homer against the Sox. Tonight they’re kicking our butts, and last night they owned us.

Looks like I spoke too soon.

My roommate happened to grab The Moor’s Last Sigh off my shelf, so now’s as good a time as any to remind those who’ve not read Rushdie of what they’re missing. Please start with Last Sigh. Read Midnight’s Children next, though it will feel undisciplined by contrast. In my view you can skip over The Satanic Verses; it’s always seemed to me a shame that Rushdie would get sentenced to death for a book that’s just not very good.

The New Yorker gave a very academic review of Exit Ghost. Everything they say about it is true  . . .  and yet I still actually found myself not really enjoying the book. It’s fine, and has some great stylistic touches (like the “He and She” play that the review mentions). But it’s just not especially great. I think Roth gets a lot of credit just for being Roth. If you want to read Roth, go pick up Operation Shylock or the American Pastoral/I Married A Communist/Human Stain trilogy. Unless you’ve been faithfully following Nathan Zuckerman since the 70’s, it’s probably okay to sit this one out.