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.
Trust but verify!
What does this mean in business?
Full payment up front!
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For some legal tasks
You should motivate lawyers
By contingency.
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You sold your old car,
Forgot to cancel toll fob.
Damn, that cost a bunch.
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iHop, two people:
Breakfast now costs forty bucks.
What the hell happened?
Ads are being run against de Santis; he voted, they claim, to increase the retirement age amidst other possible solutions. He, like Ryan, are youngsters pushing their elders off cliffs; of course, some might see politicians manfully taking on a long term problem.
These ads may be effective but with them mere discussions become toxic – the opposite of a statesman’s approach Bush began with a high-powered, sensible committee; 9/11 intervened. Maybe they would have come up with nothing but it remains the problem it was well over twenty years ago. How many policy debates follow the same pattern?
The problem is the context as well. Trump is pursued by truly demonic (and unconstitutional) opponents. Ones who have sold us out for a few gold pieces to the environmentalists, the communists, the totalitarians, the. . . While they take pleasure in making our futures carless, gasless, air conditionless, they embrace nihilism. Indeed, half the country seems in an intense sado/masochistic relation with their overlords.
In a petty way, this ad poses a dilemma. Our positions imply to the simple minded that either
a) we buy into the least statesman-like and most perilous of positions about our future in that policy area,
or
b) we buy into the most aggressive, constitution-be-damned, politically motivated of our opponents clown shows.
Neither has our long-run interests in mind; both personalize and trivialize policy in an increasingly serious world.
I had hoped de Santis would run and Trump wouldn’t: I’d assumed Trump wouldn’t naturally take a statesman’s approach, more likely a pugilist’s, during the fallow period. There was hope: once elected he sometimes made good choices not traditionally considered winners. But this toxic perspective that will affect him as well as de Santis, making a good solution less likely. Surely no solution leaves the system untouched. Well, probably the Democrats have one – print more money.
All the risks you didn’t take come and take their revenge.
–Anna Gát, @TheAnnaGat, at Twitter
I’m reminded of a passage in Walter Miller’s great novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz:
To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
(I had a Worth Pondering series that ran for several years, but didn’t keep it up for some reason. Think I’ll restart it, using new items as well as posts from the archives.)
… but fools will learn in no other, as the old saying has it and ‘dear’ in this sense means ‘expensive’. From all reports concerning the marketing debacle over Bud Light beer, the marketing executive responsible, one Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid is about to learn one of those very dear lessons. When someone sits down to write a history of bad marketing decisions in modern times, this is going to be one of the more spectacular chapters. Amazing that someone so expensively educated in the marketing trade could fall so spectacularly flat-footed. Somewhere back in the mists of time, someone must have imparted the wisdom that alienating the old core market for your product before appealing to the new core market was a bad move. A very bad move.
