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 envious man seeks not his own gain, But the fall of another, And in his malice, loses his soul, For the gods despise such hearts.
-Euripides
Quoted by @windduststars at this thread.
As Michael Gibson of 1517 Fund says, greed may not be good, but envy is evil.
Previous worth pondering post.
A Political Theory of Relativity would dictate that what you see depends on where you sit. Where one sees Trump and his incoming cabinet as a modern-day incarnation of The Untouchables coming to take the crooked city down to the studs, others see such an endeavor as something worse than Watergate. It just depends on where you are sitting.
Kamala Harris spent more than $1 billion on her 100 day campaign and she still lost. That’s a lot of money to push out the door in such a short time, so where did all the money go? A clue lies in the revelation that the Harris campaign had donated $500,000 to Al Sharpton’s nonprofit ahead of a friendly interview.
While it is hard to imagine Sharpton ever doing an unfriendly interview with Kamala, there was a commonality of interest. She had the need to spend money that other people had given her and he liked to spend the money that other people gave him. In fact Sharpton has used his past as an inciter of antisemitic riots and racial hoaxes to good effect because he, like mobsters and politicians, understands that the difference between a donation and extortion depends on where you sit.
You’re going to need a bigger list! Seth brings it.
Worth reading as usual.
Last year, I came across an essay written by 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca, winner of a Free Press essay contest. She spoke of The taut cable of high expectations and the bad consequences that occur when that cable is slackened. The essay reminded me in a passage in Antoine de St-Exupery’s novel of ideas, Citadelle, about which I had recently been thinking.
In this book (published in English under the unfortunate title Wisdom of the Sands), the protagonist is the ruler of a fictional desert kingdom. One night, he visits the prison which holds a man who has been sentenced to death in the morning is being held. He muses that the soul of this man may well contain an inward beauty of some form–perhaps his sentence should be commuted?…but decides otherwise:
For by his death I stiffen springs which must not be permitted to relax.
The particular context in which I had been thinking of this St-Exupery passage was the situation in San Francisco. Failure to enforce laws–while endlessly searching for ‘inward beauty’ in the perpetrators of a wide range of crimes–had resulted in a relaxation of those springs of which St-Exupery wrote. And not only in San Francisco.
Our society at present suffers from both the loosening of Ruby LaRocca’s ‘taut cables’…which act to pull people upward…and St-Exupery’s ‘springs’…which reduce the incidence of disastrous falls. Over the past several years, both of these (related) failure modes have become increasingly dominant. I believe that we were on a track to a very dark time…see my post Head-Heart-Stomach…but that we now have a real chance to turn things around. There really does seem to be a new feeling among a high proportion of Americans and across several dimensions of attitudes and opinions. Not all Americans, of course…but a lot. And while there are many ways things can go wrong, there is plenty of reason for hope. We’ll discuss some of the threats and challenges later (soon), but for the moment, let’s briefly relax and breathe a sigh of relief as to what has been–at least for now–avoided.
Nothing is saved forever, as Connie Willis noted in one of her novels, but in America, something very important has been saved, at least for now. It will need to be saved many more times in the future, both the near future and the far future, but for now, thankfulness and celebration are appropriate.
(I discussed the Ruby LaRocca essay and the St-Exupery passage previously, here)
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
I saw a news clip the other day about how Thanksgiving is “America’s Favorite Holiday!” I’m not sure if that’s true, and anything produced by the media should be treated with extreme suspicion but hey, yes, Thanksgiving is up there as far as holidays.
In what seems to be part of the Thanksgiving tradition, we are inundated with stories about the difficulties involved in getting through the day without families and guests tearing each part over their political differences. This year, we are warned, everyone will be at general quarters because of the recent election.