P.S. HuffThursday, August 27, 2009
The news is more than a month old, but until now I was unaware of it (HT: Jeffrey Tucker). It seems that as of early-to-mid July, a mere 30 percent of American adults thought the Federal Reserve was doing a "good" (26 percent) or "excellent" (4 percent) job. This is in stark contrast to six years ago, when that number was 53 percent (10 percent "excellent" and 43 percent "good").
Meanwhile, 35 percent said the Fed's performance was "only fair," while 22 percent rated it as "poor." Both of these numbers are up from six years ago, but only the latter changed significantly.
It's an interesting development. I honestly wonder, though: What percentage of Americans really know anything about monetary policy or the decisions of the Federal Reserve Board?
P.S. HuffMonday, August 24, 2009
From the New York Times:
President Obama on Tuesday will nominate Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, administration officials said.
. . . .
"The president thinks that Ben's done a great job as Fed chairman, that he has helped the economy through one of the worst experiences since the Great Depression and that he has essentially been pulling the economy back from the brink of what would have been the second Great Depression," the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said Monday night.
A lamentable
decision, though scarcely a surprising one.
P.S. HuffSaturday, August 22, 2009
I was interested to learn yesterday that Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, first published in 1899, has been released in paperback as part of the "Oxford World's Classics" series.
My familiarity with Veblen's thought is, I admit at the outset, almost entirely second-hand. I haven't read any of his works from start to finish, and I've looked at only a few of them. The Theory of the Leisure Class itself, I've only glanced through.
But one thing about Veblen's work is unmistakable, even on a quick scanning: the man's horrendous writing style. At best, it was shabby; at worst, appalling—perhaps spectacularly so.
I can't resist quoting from H.L. Mencken's witty rant against what he called the professor's "peculiar dialect":
What was genuinely remarkable about [Veblen's ideas] was not their novelty, or their complexity, nor even the fact that a professor should harbor them; it was the astoundingly grandiose and rococo manner of their statement, the almost unbelievable tediousness and flatulence of the gifted headmaster's prose, his unprecedented talent for saying nothing in an august and heroic manner. There are tales of an actress of the last generation, probably Sarah Bernhardt, who could put pathos and even terror into a recitation of the multiplication table. Something of the same talent, raised to a high power, was in this Prof. Veblen. . . . [W]hat one found in his discourse was chiefly a mass of platitudes—the self-evident made horrifying, the obvious in terms of the staggering.
Marx, I daresay, had said a good deal of it long before him, and what Marx overlooked had been said over and over again by his heirs and assigns. But Marx, at this business, labored under a technical handicap; he wrote in German, a language he actually understood. Prof. Veblen submitted himself to no such disadvantage. Though born, I believe, in These States, and resident here all his life, he achieved the effect, perhaps without employing the means, of thinking in some unearthly foreign language—say Swahili, Sumerian or Old Bulgarian—and then painfully clawing his thoughts into a copious but uncertain and book-learned English. [H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)]
Regardless of what you think of Veblen's ideas and his (frankly preposterous, in my view) writing style,* there's no doubt that the human mind has an ugly habit of interpreting dense and jumbled writing as the surest mark of genius. If you ever have to say "1 + 1 = 2," you're probably best off writing something like this: "A duality of quantitative entities, each being in absolute equivalence to the integer denoting singularity, will by their integration give rise to a distinct quantitative entity, this one amounting to that integer which denotes duality."
To some readers, obscurity is not a vice but a fine art.
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[*] — For a surprisingly interesting discussion of Veblen's writing style, see Stephen S. Conroy,
Thorstein Veblen's Prose,
20 Am. Q. 605 (1968).
P.S. HuffMonday, August 10, 2009
Debating what the "real" definition of a word is can be tedious and frustrating, particularly since nothing substantive turns on it. Why, for example, argue about whether the United States is an "empire" by wrangling over the "genuine" meaning of that word? Surely what's really at issue is whether American foreign policy is moral or not.
But there's another side to this problem, which the logic above misses. When a term is diluted to the point of losing its original significance, what other word can serve as a substitute? Sometimes, there will be a ready alternative; but not always.
P.S. HuffWednesday, August 05, 2009
Writes Thomas Sowell, in his August 4 column:
"Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." We have heard that many times. What is also the price of freedom is the toleration of imperfections. If everything that is wrong with the world becomes a reason to turn more power over to some political savior, then freedom is going to erode away, while we are mindlessly repeating the catchwords of the hour, whether "change," "universal health care" or "social justice."
Anyone with the slightest regard for human freedom should reflect on that passage. Better yet, read and reflect on the
whole thing.
