Skip to main content

December 18, 2017

From Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny:
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

From The Economist:
Buoyant financial markets meant that global wealth rose by 6.4% in the 12 months to June, the fastest pace since 2012.

From The Economist:
If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

From Harper's:
Tennis players’ grunts rise in pitch during the matches they lose.

From The TLS (Katherine Duncan-Jones on Books of the Year 2017):
Almost miraculously, but I suppose in great measure thanks to the skilful ministrations of Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, Clive James still lives. Injury Time (Picador) heads the latest/last collection of his poems, which are rightly heralded as “a major literary event”. Though the title’s sporting metaphor is characteristic, it has very little to do with “sport”. The poems are as widely ranging and inventive as ever, both in their form and their content. They range daringly from a splendidly substantial celebration of the deaf Beethoven to various self-revealing meditations on his own carcinoma. The latter can be admired at full strength in “Night-Walkers Song”, but his playful wit and imagination are as ever wonderfully varied. They include playing games with “Splinters from Shakespeare”, here performing Master Shallow: “He sucked up his great sack-butt and moved on, / And left me here alone to nurse my pride. / I, too, have lived: a small life, but not mean. / Jesu, Jesu, the days that I have seen”. Though he now dances with death, James seems still to rejoice wittily in what is left of his life: “. . . . of this be sure: I loved it here”. This exit line is almost sentimental – but not quite.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 24, 2018

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 26, 2018

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 27, 2018

From The New York Times : [Steven] Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all. Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent. There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent. Poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. “When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the...
Post a Comment
Read more