Nah, just a bunch of nice boys who were improperly rounded up by the BushCo military machine.
Month: May 2006
I Always Wanted to Visit Houston
Corbusier discusses its many admirable qualities.
The Chicagoboyz blog: better than some other places you could be.
UPDATE: Phil Fraering asks an interesting question in the comments. I didn’t know the answer but a little googling revealed that the farm is a private establishment, and apparently quite a well known one. Here’s an aerial view of the neighborhood. (The photo was made from the intersection indicated by the red mark and looks Southeast .)
Paying For Productive Adults
Glenn Reynolds links to an article by Philip Longman in Foreign Affairs that covers much of the same ground that I did in a previous series of post [Family Free-Riders, Family Free-Riders Part II, The Gratis-Giddyup Problem] that looked at how modern economies fail to support the raising of children into productive adults.
I argued that from the perspective of economics we can think of productive adults as a type of product or resource that an economic system must produce in order to maintain itself. From this perspective, a child represents the production phase of the adult. We seldom think of the problem in these terms. Indeed, the entire debate is framed as to what is good for children as if children were the end goal when in fact children are economically useless in the modern world. Any society could get a short-term economic boost from decreasing the number of children it raises. Many sub-population have done exactly that.
Longman points out that birthrates are falling in all parts of the world regardless of economic system.
When the Only Way is Through
Some suggestive juxtapositions:
A&L notes Gerard Alexander’s Baathed in Blood: Chronicling the horror, and scope, of Saddam’s tyranny”, a review of Le Livre noir de Saddam Hussein, edited by Chris Kutschera. Put beside this, the news from Iraq, mixed as it may be, seems a good deal more hopeful. Surely, it is in such a context that we should view the overall optimism of Gen Barry McCaffrey’s 2006 report; it is usefully (and as always thoughtfully) compared to his observations in 2005 by Wretchard.