"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

My Favourite Periodical:

Due to limited resources, I will essentially be retiring this category for the forseeable future


January 3rd:

"In desperation, before the onslaught, Mr Barak had mounted a campaign on billboards and on the internet, declaring himself "not nice", "not cuddly" and "not trendy"."

"Equally certain is that the downturn will lead to the emergence of financial scandals, along the lines of Enron and WorldCom in 2002. Recessions uncover what auditors do not, as the old saying goes."

""FAIL fast, fail early" is a management mantra in many industries. Identify the projects that will not pay off quickly, and the costs of failure are capped. Banks have developed their own version of this rule—"fail completely, fail catastrophically""

"In 1978 Alfred Kahn, one of Jimmy Carter's economic advisers, was chided by the president for scaring people by warning of a looming depression. Mr Kahn, in his next speech, simply replaced the offending word, saying "We're in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years.""

"Georg Cantor, a German mathematician, had developed a "transfinite arithmetic" to calculate with the infinitely many infinities he had discovered, each infinitely larger than the previous one. Leopold Kronecker, a prominent German mathematician (and one of Cantor's teachers) described his student as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth"; his work was a "disease" from which mathematics would surely be cured some day, thought French mathematician Henri Poincaré."


"At just 29, Mr Shapiro can already boast a collection of eye-catching findings worthy of a sequel to "Freakonomics". He has shown that some judgments are best made without too much information: people are better at predicting the winner of American gubernatorial elections when they watch the candidates with the sound turned off. Harsher jail conditions do nothing to deter prisoners from reoffending. If anything they encourage recidivism. Preschoolers who watch television do better academically than children who don't, especially if their parents have little education or poor English.

Mr Fryer's ambition is to unravel the causes of black underachievement in America, especially in education. His search for explanations extends beyond racism and poverty to contemplate the role of a self-defeating culture. He calculates that a black student who earns straight A grades will have 1.5 fewer friends from his ethnic group than an equally swotty white student...

[Raj Chetty] wanted to know whether policymakers should raise unemployment benefits... He gleans all the information he needs by looking at the time it takes unemployed people to find a new job. Unsurprisingly, they take longer when their benefits are more generous. This is usually attributed to "moral hazard"—people take less care to escape a danger, such as joblessness, if they are insured against it. But Mr Chetty shows that skewed incentives account for only 40% of the delay...

Mr Gabaix made a splash in 2006 when he concluded that the "excessive" pay of chief executives was not necessarily excessive. Compensation may have grown sixfold from 1980 to 2003 not because managers were six times greedier, but because the firms they ran were six times bigger.

If the size of firms obeys a power law, economies will comprise some very big firms and a long tail of small ones. The fortunes of the biggest companies might then stir the whole economy, Mr Gabaix conjectures. The $24 billion dividend paid by Microsoft in December 2004, for example, added 3% to America's personal income that month."


January 10th:

"SIR – You chided Tintin for his impotence or unwillingness to address broader political issues and suggest that "Anglo-Saxon audiences" want their fictional heroes to be "imbued with the power to change events and inflict total defeat on the wicked". I would rather stick with gentle, modest and pragmatic Tintin than the testosterone-laden, crusading, musclemen heroes so dear to Anglo-Saxon culture. Tintin may not be able to solve the problems of the world, but he would also never have started the invasion of Iraq.

Louis de Jonghe Manila"

"The difficulty for Mr Sarkozy is that he cannot afford to let any of his minority ministers fail. Long before his election as president he argued the case for a Condoleezza Rice à la française. Barack Obama’s election has added urgency to the efforts to find one. Even if Mr Sarkozy were to move Ms Dati, say, he would probably have to offer her another job. Any hint at incompetence would be seized on, however absurdly, as racism."

"Business jets are now regarded as evil, “right up there with Saddam Hussein”."

"Corporate lawyers have now learnt to fear the approach of her handbag, perfect tailoring and heavily accented English."

"The most original solution was that of President Franklin Roosevelt, soon after his inauguration in 1933. Mr Ahamed resurrects a 59-year-old agricultural economist from Cornell University by the name of George Warren, whose study of long-term trends in commodity prices led him to believe that, since falling prices were associated with depression, recovery ought to be encouraged by rising prices. The president liked the idea and decided to devalue the dollar—despite vigorous opposition from the gold bugs—simply by increasing the gold price. One of his own economic advisers lamented: “This is the end of Western civilisation.” For a number of weeks, the president would consult his advisers over boiled eggs at breakfast and randomly drive up the gold price, beginning at $31.36 an ounce until it settled at $35."

"“The honourable member does not like me,” he observed once in Parliament. “Like you? I can’t stand you,” came the spitting reply. Verwoerd, an earlier prime minister, a man she admitted she was “scared stiff” of, fared no better. “I have written you off,” he told her. “The whole world has written you off,” she retorted. "


January 17th:

"Some of the hypocrisy in the Arab world is unspeakable. Syria, for example, is one country to accuse Israel of “genocide”. But in 1982, when Syria’s own Muslim Brotherhood rebelled in the Syrian city of Hama, the regime responded by shelling the city indiscriminately for three weeks, killing about 20,000 or 30,000 civilians. In Gaza Israel has killed 1,000 people. It is not playing by Hama rules, let alone committing genocide. Russia’s onslaught on the Chechen city of Grozny in the mid-1990s is reckoned to have killed some 20,000 civilians. As for Hamas itself, it deliberately murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants in the intifada of 2001-03... it has been immensely sad, and grotesquely unfair, to watch protesters in London and Paris accusing Israel of behaving as the Nazis did. Just as Israel deserves no special favours when it comes to the prosecution of war crimes, so it should not be singled out while others go unpunished. That will only deepen the misplaced conviction of too many Israelis that a nation in a sea of enemies must in the end survive mainly by the sword."

"SIR – According to you, “singing is auditory masturbation” and playing a musical instrument is “pornography”. Then I must assume that since I’ve been playing a musical instrument while accompanying opera singers onstage for 46 years, I am not only a pornographer but perhaps the most notorious voyeur in the history of music.

Les Dreyer
Retired violinist of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra
New York"

"SIR – You advised “Generation Y” workers, who were born in the 1980s and 1990s, to “take the world as it is, not as they would like it to be” (“Managing the Facebookers”, January 3rd). When I was planning my career every article I read about the future of employment said that I would have to become a multilingual renaissance man, happy to fly anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, with no job security or employee loyalty. Unless I focused my energies on “brand me” I would be obsolete in a world of technophile jet-setters.

Perhaps instead of revelling in our hubris, today’s managers could apologise for the destruction of the job market for which we so eagerly prepared. I’m on sabbatical for two months, so please could you post any apologies on my Facebook wall.

Peter Main
London"

"The petition accuses CCTV of playing down reports about protests and other negative news. It mentions a CCTV report broadcast in September last year praising the quality controls on milk-powder production by Sanlu, a leading dairy company. Sanlu was revealed just a few days later to have been selling tainted baby formula that caused thousands of infants to fall sick."

"Their papers have assiduously uncovered official corruption, most notably with a joint exposé in 2006 about a crooked transport-ministry road-building unit. The journalists behind that story were punished by a Hanoi court last October for “abusing democratic freedoms”."

"AMERICANS are still chuckling about the “pants suit”. A man—a judge, no less—sued his dry cleaners for $54m for allegedly losing his trousers. A sign at the shop promised “Satisfaction Guaranteed”. The plaintiff was not satisfied, so he cried fraud... Some judges think even the nuttiest plaintiffs deserve their day in court. As the judge who let a woman sue McDonald’s for serving her the coffee with which she scalded herself put it: “Who am I to judge?”...

In New York City, where more than 60 bureaucratic steps are required to suspend a pupil for more than five days, teachers are so frightened of violating pupils’ rights that they cannot keep order... When rule-makers seek to eliminate small risks, perverse consequences proliferate. Bureaucrats rip up climbing frames for fear that children may fall off and break a leg. So children stay indoors and get fat.

The direct costs of lawsuits are only one of the drawbacks of an over-legalistic society. Too many rules squeeze the joy out of life. Doctors who inflict dozens of unnecessary tests on patients to fend off lawsuits take less pride in their work. And although the legal system is supposed to be neutral, the scales are tilted in favour of whoever is in the wrong. Because the process is so expensive and juries are so unpredictable, blameless people often settle baseless claims to make them go away. The law is supposed to protect individuals from the state, but it often allows selfish individuals to harness the state’s power to settle private scores."

"A town or city called Buffalo can be found in 18 American states, though the most famous of these, Buffalo, New York, is the only one that has never had a population of wild buffalo living in its vicinity. Twice as many visitors to Yellowstone National Park are injured by the park’s buffalo than by its black and grizzly bears."


January 24th:

"It has not been to east Africa since the celebrated mariner Zheng He reached Somalia with a massive fleet in the 15th century (on a friendly visit, says China)."

"Though a member of the Iraqi National Accord, a secular party led by Iyad Allawi, Iraq’s first prime minister after the fall of Saddam Hussein, she expresses a rather religious view of politics, calling on divine intervention to fix such problems as patchy electricity and water supplies, high unemployment and war-damaged buildings. “Everything will become easy if God helps.”"

"Financial markets are plagued not by “black swans”—seemingly inconceivable events that come up very occasionally—but by vicious snow-white swans that come along a lot more often than expected."

"James Tobin, a Nobel laureate (and Mr Buiter’s former teacher), puts the case. His conclusion is worth quoting: I [suspect] we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this ‘paper economy’, not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges…I fear that, as Keynes saw even in his day, the advantages of the liquidity and negotiability of financial instruments come at the cost of facilitating nth-degree speculation which is short-sighted and inefficient."

"Even in an off year, Burns suppers require much whisky-quaffing. Also compulsory is the eating of haggis, a concoction of minced offal, fat and oatmeal stuffed into a sheep’s stomach (a BBC recipe’s final instruction is “eat and then belch loudly or throw up”). Haggis-makers report record sales this year."

"Ms Del Ponte became the most loathed woman in south-eastern Europe. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this memoir, which was published in Italy last year and is now coming out in English, is to see that loathing so heartily reciprocated. There are no diplomatic niceties here.

After one Bosnian Croat was acquitted of a massacre, Ms Del Ponte’s colleagues discovered that crucial evidence had been doctored. The Croats set up a whole team specifically to thwart the tribunal’s work. Croatian leaders, she notes, always made bountiful promises before resorting to “stealth and deception and attack from behind”. Citing a colleague, she concludes: “The Serbs are bastards…But the Croats are sneaky bastards.”