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.
Some of them who are complaining sound like conservatives, it’s sort of surprising. They’re complaining about some of the things conservatives, tea-party people, are complaining about.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) , referring to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
It is not surprising. Or, it should not be.
It is the sound of people trying to break through the accumulated crud of a lifetime of ideological programming.
Hope and change.
Kevin Williamson in National Review:
I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.
The low quality of our government-run system of primary and secondary education is the biggest problem in our society. With the right tax and regulatory incentives, squandered investment capital and ruined plant and equipment can be replaced quickly if necessary, albeit at often high cost. However, damaged human capital in the form of inadequately educated and miseducated people can never be replaced. At best, lost human capital can be supplanted only with many years of effort by improving the education of succeeding generations. The long-term compounded aggregate costs in lost productivity for poorly educated individuals, not to mention disastrous unintended consequences at the societal level from the adoption of bad ideas by a voting population largely ignorant of basic economics and history, are staggering.
Now there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it’s all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.
Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can live anywhere. …
Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built will be torn down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all they have learned and written will be scattered to the wind. In the old days it was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of border defense. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten.
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
(Previously quoted by me here)
The Diamond Age one of my all time favorite books. Among many other brilliant things in it, he invented the word “Anglosphere”:
After a simple dinner of beer and pasties in a pub on the fringes of the City, they rode south across the Tower Bridge, pierced a shallow layer of posh development along the right bank of the river, and entered into Southwark. As in other Atlantan districts of London, Feed lines had been worked into the sinews of the place, coursing through utility tunnels, clinging to the clammy undersides of bridges, and sneaking into buildings through small holes bored in the foundations. The tiny old houses and flats of this once impoverished quarter had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere, poor in equity but rich in expectations, who had come to the great city to incubate their careers.
I just re-read it for the third time. It is the only book I have read three times since I was in high school.
Here is a selection of quotes from The Diamond Age.
Stephenson is speaking tonight in Oak Park about his new book, Reamde. I will be there. And I will get my copy of The Diamond Age autographed, and I will buy the new one and get it autographed too.
UPDATE: It was pretty good. Stephenson read some passages from his new book and answered some questions. He said the science fiction writer who influenced him the most was Robert A. Heinlein. This not surprising, I see a lot of Heinlein in his writing. He also said that in terms of style, the “holy trinity of English prose” is “Gibbon, Dickens and Churchill.” (I need to read Gibbon. I need to read more Dickens. Churchill: Yes, absolutely. Churchill himself claimed the two writers who influenced him were Gibbon and Macaulay. But who now reads Macaualy?) It was a large and appreciative audience. A dweeby crowd, not surprising, given the author. I fit right in. My kind of people. The wife and I got ice cream afterwards. For us, that’s a big date.
UPDATE II: Interview with Neal Stephenson in the local paper.
And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They’ve got a war, they got a war with us and there’s only going to be one winner. It’s going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We’re going to win that war… President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march… Everybody here’s got a vote… Let’s take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.
Is it sexist that he left out the daughters of bitches? Maybe he is afraid to make the girls mad.
But, have no worries. The foregoing quotation was meant in the nicest possible way.
It would be paranoid and provocative to suggest that an “army” “marching” to “fight” and “win” a “war” by “taking out” the “sons of bitches” so that “Mr. Obama’s army” is the “only winner” was anything more than strictly metaphorical.
Leo Linbeck III, from a comment he left in response to this post at Belmont Club:
The good news is that we can fix our nation’s problems. How? Well, the first step is to reverse this trend toward centralization and scale. We have to stop concentrating power, and start dispersing it. Corruption and regulatory overreach are political pollution, and the solution to pollution is dilution.
And, believe it or not, voters in both parties support the idea of moving decision-making closer to the people. Republicans call this “federalism,” and Democrats call this “local control.”
The media tries to divide us, but we’re really together on the need to move money and decision-making closer to the people. The Ruling Elite don’t want this to happen, of course, so they try to convince us that we are enemies of each other. Don’t believe it.
Yes, we disagree on policy. But we agree on governance, we believe in self-governance, and it is the current governance system that is broken.
There is lots of room for disagreement and political fights. But those fights must be engaged at the local level, because they’re the only level at which we can come to consensus. The problems are literally unsolvable at the federal level.
The genius of the Tea Party lies in its emergent ability to concentrate voter attention on a common political denominator of core public-finance issues.
