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.
Recently I attended a rooftop charity event at the “Life Storage” building in River North. I was able to get a photo of the sunset facing west (I rarely get to shoot in that direction).
River North, the district where I live, is in the midst of a giant building boom and is among the hottest districts in Chicago. Seemingly every empty lot or older building is either being built on from scratch or redeveloped, and the Life Storage building is no exception.
Cross posted at LITGM
Way back in the day when LITGM used to do a bit more of the political type articles I wrote about Illinois representatives’ automobiles. I confused the Lincoln Navigator that Danny Davis (district one) drove vs. the Ford equivalent that Jesse Jackson Jr. drove, and a bit of web hilarity ensued.
Recently I saw another politician’s car and the first thing I did was look it up – and this Lincoln is owned by a Republican in the 6th district, which happened to be Henry Hyde’s old district. It is a matter of how jaded I’ve become that the fact that an elected official drives a Lincoln is barely worth a web peep.
While American’s think that “big money” has captured politics, it is literally nothing compared to the wealth of China’s politicians. This WSJ article describes how wealthy the top Chinese politicians are vs. the USA…
According to the Hurun Report, as cited by Bloomberg, the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress have a combined net worth of 565.8 billion yuan or $89.8 billion. That’s more than 10 times the combined net worths of all the members of Congress, the Supreme Court and the President. (Their collective riches are only $7.5 billion.)
Thus I can only imagine the rage I’d have over the same type of rich trappings if I were Chinese. Unfortunately, they can’t vote, and protests tend to go down badly with authorities. As bad as our system is, in terms of being captured by the interests of the wealthy, it is a comparatively egalitarian route compared to our largest economic competitor.
Cross posted at LITGM
I’ve reviewed two books by German writer Hans Fallada: Little Man, What Now?, and Wolf Among Wolves (the links go to the reviews), both of which were excellent. I recently finished his novel Every Man Dies Alone
I thought this book was also excellent…the present post, though, is not a book review, but rather a development of some thoughts inspired by a particular passage in the story.
Trudel, who was Ottochen’s fiancee, is a sweet and intelligent girl who is strongly anti-Nazi..and unlike Ottochen’s parents, she became an activist prior to being struck by personal tragedy: she is a member of a resistance cell at the factory where she works. But she finds that she cannot stand the unending psychological strain of underground work–made even worse by the rigid and doctrinaire man (apparently a Communist) who is leader of the cell–and she drops out. Another member of the cell, who has long been in love with her, also finds that he is not built for such work, and drops out also.
After they marry and Trudel becomes pregnant, they decide to leave the politically hysterical environment of Berlin for a small town where–they believe–life will be freer and calmer.
Like many city dwellers, they’d had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in small towns than in the big city. In a small town, everyone was fully exposed, you couldn’t ever disappear in the crowd. Personal circumstances were quickly ascertained, conversations with neighbors were practically unavoidable, and the way such conversations could be twisted was something they had already experienced in their own lives, to their chagrin.
Reading the above passage, I was struck by the thought that if we are now living in an “electronic village”…even a “global village,” as Marshall McLuhan put it several decades ago…then perhaps that also means we are facing some of the unpleasant characteristics that–as Fallada notes–can be a part of village life. And these characteristics aren’t something that appears only in eras of insane totalitarianism such as existed in Germany during the Nazi era. Peter Drucker, in Managing in the Next Society
Rural society has been romanticized for millenia, especially in the West, where rural communities have usually been portrayed as idylic. However, the community in rural society is actually both compulsory and coercive…And that explains why, for millenia, the dream of rural people was to escape into the city. Stadluft macht frei (city air frees) says an old German proverb dating back to the eleventy or twelfth century.
(Part the second, first part here.)
The redesigned and improved revolver – the Walker Colt – turned out to be a nearly five-pound brute of a weapon, and returned Sam to the arms-manufacturing business with renewed zest. He subcontracted production of them first with Eli Whitney Blake (nephew of Eli Whitney) at Blake’s Whitneyville armory. The contract specified that the machinery used would revert back into Colt’s ownership at completion of the contract – for Sam had set up shop in a former cotton mill in Hartford, Connecticut. He incorporated the company as Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company. He held most of the shares; trusted friends and relatives held the remainder.