linkage for 11-11-2008

Krugman on Roosevelt, the New Deal and Obama.

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Disturbing, haunting photos from the war in Congo.

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Great op-ed piece by Al Gore on climate change and what the Obama administration can do. I like the ending:

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama’s campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.

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Pre-election profiles of Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel.

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Long piece in the New Yorker on the psychopath. Who is he? Does he even exist? What are the diagnostic criteria? What is happening in their twisted little brains, etc.

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Best article I've seen so far on the financial crash of Iceland.

Overnight, people lost their savings. Prices are soaring. Once-crowded restaurants are almost empty. Banks are rationing foreign currency, and companies are finding it dauntingly difficult to do business abroad. Inflation is at 16 percent and rising. People have stopped traveling overseas. The local currency, the krona, was 65 to the dollar a year ago; now it is 130. Companies are slashing salaries, reducing workers’ hours and, in some instances, embarking on mass layoffs.

“No country has ever crashed as quickly and as badly in peacetime,” said Jon Danielsson, an economist with the London School of Economics.

It contains the mandatory-in-all-articles-about-Nordic-countries mention of Vikings. 

Så nettopp Al Gores Nobelforedrag Det er et herlig øyeblikk ca. 4 minutter inne i talen der kamera går ned i publikum, og man ser Carl I. Hagen sitter og ser pottesur ut, og rett bak ham sitter Erik Solheim og gliser.

"These days what I do is say that 2+2=4"

Paul Krugman is a brilliant economist and writer. His columns in the NY Times are must-reads: always informative, educational and merciless. He is one of those rare pundits who also happens to be (gasp!) well-informed. His last column is on Gore and the Nobel peace prize.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Which is not exactly news, but the more well-informed, rhetorically skilled people say this, the better.

Many economists mention Krugman as a possible winner for the Nobel Prize in economics himself, incidentally.

Anyway, I think I might have mentioned that he also has a wonderful blog where he shares little bits and pieces of interesting information which lead into his columns, or in which he answers questions that arise after his columns have been published. A sort of way of continuing the debate in the backstage area.

Also, there's this video interview of Krugman. At one point he says that he worries about the state of democracy in the US: "What I worry about is that we'll keep the forms, but the reality will just erode. Like the Roman senate kept meeting for a long time after the country had become, in effect, a monarchy." He also talks about how there is no longer non-political truth. He says that most of what he does these days is saying that 2+2 = 4 and getting called an extreme leftist for saying so. Special bonus in the interview: he reveals that he is a science-fiction fan and that a fascination for Isaac Asimov's Foundation series led him into economics.

in which yr. correspondent digs the Nobel people

Al Gore! Excellent. I think when we think back to the tipping point of the whole climate change thing in popular opinion, more than we would like to think is going to come down to Al Gore and the movie.

But really, the Alanis-Morisette-ironic thing about Gore winning is the fact that he's actually winning it in quantum physics. As much as his work to stop climate change, Gore is winning the Nobel prize for that more peaceful, safer, happier parallell universe in which he not only won the 2000 elections but actually got to take office. The universe in which he was president on September 11th 2001, in which he didn’t invade Iraq, didn’t make his entire term about throwing out civil liberties, about making the world unsafe and unstable, about scorched-earth capitalism and ruining international relations and widening the gap between poor people and rich people and mostly not giving a damn.

I think I would have liked to live in that universe. No doubt some version of me does. Lucky bastard.