Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The current issue of National Review features an article by my future co-author Jim Bennett:
For decades, America had been on a course toward a more centralized society. But 1980 — with the arrival of Reagan and the departure of Carter — marked the point at which the nation reversed course. Thenceforth it would be headed in the opposite direction, toward a new vision of individualism and decentralism.
I have read Jim’s piece in draft, and I strongly suggest you read it.
In the last weeks, the big school across town achieved a high rank in two enviable, practical areas – the amount of actual education (required core courses) and as a place to recruit for the work place. These are, I suspect, not unrelated. And partially we help – a good chunk of those core courses are taught and taken with us; our tuition is cheaper, class sizes smaller, and teachers of those basics more mature and often more degreed. Everything isn’t bad across town – nor here.
Yeah…Come to think of it, what was Melville really trying to say?
Might be a thesis in this somewhere.
“Were the 1980s really the Decade of Greed? There were stories of some people making lots of money, but did that make them or all of us a lot more greedy? Is resenting the success of others a reaction that people of goodwill should have? As Des would say, isn’t prosperity – even if it’s other people’s – a good, not a bad thing? Certainly during the eighties there were cases of behavior that looked “grasping” to an antisocial degree, but was this so widespread – was it in all our hearts – that the whole decade deserved that obloquy?
Perhaps the notable feature of the decade was not that some people made money but that so many others were so bent out of shape by that. If some yuppie got a bonus, what was that to us? Rather than the Decade of Greed, wasn’t it really the Decade of Envy? Or the Decade of Envy, Jealousy, and other resentments there was no reason for those afflicted to sound so proud about?
Subjectively, far from being a Decade of Greed, the early 1980s were years of hard work and maximum productivity, better in my opinion than any period that has come since. For me and a lot of other people, the eighties were the young-adult Wonder Years, when autonomy came to the fore and we could finally do the things we were in uncomfortable preparation for all the years before that.”
– Whit Stillman, The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards
Shakespeare wrote to please the Tudors. Hawthorne saw a great metaphor for the rule of law & of the mind over the heart in the Puritans. The Romantic depiction of a world two centuries gone is accurate in many ways, but The Scarlet Letter also obscures the extraordinary revolutions in thought that would lead from the Puritans to the Enlightenment. We cut his fiction slack. It describes some truths – the folly of pride and passion, the power of love. We welcome this understanding and in that it rings true. It is fiction.
Few see Shakespeare as gatekeeper of British history nor Hawthorne as definer of Puritan theology. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a different role. It reports, offers opinion, includes want ads. As newspaper to the academy, it bridges disciplines. A few years ago, Arts & Letters Daily became sponsored by the Chronicle. I daily reckon A&L a great service. The editor is one of the most able and generative of evolutionary scholars, Denis Dutton. He makes the net accessible; I gratefully & often link to him here. Recently A&L noted a Chronicle essay in its pithy, aggregator, fashion:
Michael Bellesiles, who teaches military history, knows his job is easier in peace time. When the brother of one of his students was killed in Iraq,
