This is really more a comment to Ken’s discussion below and comes from a non-economist as well as James’s discussion of blogger tasks. (Ok, I’m a parasite.)
The importance of a meme, of a take, essentially, of an analogy, is important. Looking at underlying analogies seems another useful task of bloggers.
This week I taught Fred Strebeigh’s essay, first published in Bicycling in 1991. Strebeigh had gone to China to see a bicycling society in action and happened upon the Beijing Spring of 1989. He captures the excitement of that time, but woven throughout is a tribute to what we have and they, for that brief time, realized as energy and power. For instance, he notes the privacy of speech that came in the midst of movement as the streets filled with bicyclists; he describes how bikes made possible the assembly in the Tiananmen Square. He leaves Beijing as it erupts to interview a grad student; she had biked a thousand hard miles across China to Tibet. He found Fang Hui, who had been no athlete before setting out on this challenging trek. He asked her if she had worried about giving up on the journey and she had replied that no, before, she had feared giving up on life. Bicycling across country, instead, “I felt as if I would become light” she said. She demonstrated how dead we can feel cocooned and how alive tested.
Then, he describes a bicycle repairman who, through initiative and work outside the state economy, could afford two more children. My students were excited as well – they understood the power of these ideas. Strebeigh quite beautifully reports what he sees, but what he sees is the strength of the vision that impelled these people–a vision that impels us. He argues that the crack-down had been represented on television by shot after shot of crumpled bicycles, destroyed as the army took over the square and that open life, that open marketplace of ideas and talk and challenge was destroyed.
Sadly, we will no longer use this book. Some argue it is too difficult, others that it isn’t argumentative enough. Now, we are choosing among rhetorics crammed with the less subtle arguments of op-eds; they consider balance countering Paul Krugman with John Leo. But they won’t include the best of these writers, but rather the quick statements of position where space is too limited for nuance. The writing will be competent but obvious rather than rich & subtle. This semester, I lead up to the contrarian approach of Rauch’s “Defense of Prejudice”; his is an argument for the marketplace of ideas they can, by then, appreciate. Underlying those narrower, more “timely” takes will be a simplification of the marketplaces – of ideas, of goods, of speech. They will be designed to be “relevant” – which essentially means not wresting our students from the sense all of us had at 18 that the world began at our birth and our issues are the big issues.
And in many will be different metaphors. And that is why we now return to Ken & James.
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