David Foster

Asleep at the Throttle

by

Who is in charge of the clattering train?
The axles creak and the couplings strain,
and the pace is hot and the points are near,
and sleep hath deadened the driver’s ear,
and the signals flash through the night in vain,
for death is in charge of the clattering train

In his memoirs, Winston Churchill mentions that he thought of this poem, which he had read as a boy, during the appeasement days of the 1930s. I was reminded of it by this post.

The original poem, which appeared in Punch magazine, is here and is pretty good.

Also, here’s the whole issue of Punch in which the poem originally appeared.

Four Bad Bears

by

…sounds like the title of a children’s book.

It’s not, though.

Experimentation, Uncertainty, and the Economy

by

Some interesting thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.

The key point is that uncertainty about government policy makes private-sector decision making very difficult, and tends to inhibit rational and dynamic investment.

(via Betsy)

Politics and Education

by

According to this, voters with postgraduate educations supported Obama by 58% versus 40% for McCain.

This article suggests that the election results can be characterized as “the triumph of the creative class,” with “creative class” drawn from “Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the younger, go-go set in the financial world.”

For discussion: what, if anything, should Republicans/conservatives/libertarians do to increase their appeal to these categories of voters?

Let me get things off to a contentious start by suggesting that the “creative class” tag is more than a little presumptuous. Is a stock trader really more creative than a production control specialist in a factory, or a platoon commander in the Marines? (Indeed, I’ve seen research suggesting that the cognitive skills of a good trader and a good combat commander have a lot of similarities.) Is a computer programmer automatically more creative than a mechanical engineer? Is it really true that spreadsheet mavens on Wall Street are more creative than small businesspeople? Is a professor of electrical engineering inherently more creative than a practitioner of the same field who works for a defense contractor?

Maybe “credentialed class” would be a more realistic descriptor than “creative class.”

What say you?

Too Much Political Dog Language

by

In 2004, I wrote about dog language and political language:

When you talk to a dog, you don’t have to worry a lot about using syllogisms, complete sentences, good analogies, or crisply-argued chains of logic. What he’s looking for is keywords…particular words and short phrases…like “nice doggie” or “here” or, especially, “dinner.”

It strikes me that, increasingly, the way in which politicians address the American people is very similar. It’s enough to say the words that are supposed to elicit the conditioned responses…”jobs” or “health care” or “education.” There is increasingly litle effort to specify exactly what cause-and-effect relationship will cause these good things to come to pass, and why one approach might be better than alternative approaches. This behavior is most noticeable among Democrats, but is by no means totally absent among Republicans.

Both Obama and McCain used political dog language in this campaign. Because of his superior oratorical skills, Obama could pull it off better. I think McCain would have been better served by cutting down on the dog language a bit and making more actual arguments on behalf of his policies. With regard to energy, for example, he spoke about the need for nuclear and wind and solar and all kinds of other sources, maybe including gerbil-powered treadmill generators. Which comes across as a grab-bag of ideas and probably also makes people think, “Well, with all those options, nuclear can’t be all that important.”

It would certainly have been possible for McCain to come up with a three or four sentence explanation of why wind and solar are not a complete answer…like, “When you want to wash your dishes at 9 PM, the sun may not be shining. When you want to run your heat pump on a snowy, icy day, the wind may not be blowing.” He would still have had an uphill battle, because wind and solar have been invested with a quasi-religious significance (as long as they stay theoretical), but would have done better than with the grab-bag approach. The same in other policy areas.