Category Archive

the elevation of appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.

—Obama

As communion with the Sunday paper has replaced churchgoing, there is a tendency to forget that sermons had at one time been coupled with news about local and foreign affairs, real estate transactions, and other mundane matters. After printing, however, news gathering and circulation were handled more efficiently under lay auspices.

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The pulpit was ultimated displaced by the periodical press, and the dictum “nothing sacred” came to characterize the journalist’s career.

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The displacement of pulpit by press is significant not only in connection with secularization but also because it points to an explanation for the weakening of local community ties. To hear an address delivered, people have to come together; to read a printed report encourages individuals to draw apart.

—Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in early Modern Europe

Microsoft turned something that Britannica considered an asset (a door-to-door salesforce) into a liability.
—Josh Kopelman on shrinking a market

It seems my mission in history has already ended. I told myself that no matter what, I would not be the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students….On the night of June 3rd, while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire.

—Zhao Ziyang, on a meeting with Deng Xiaoping and party elders during Tiananmen

Now that the dollar’s position is no longer so secure, we need to shift our priorities. This will entail investing in our crumbling infrastructure, alternative and renewable resources and productive human capital — rather than in unnecessary housing and toxic financial innovation. This will be the only way to slow down the decline of the dollar, and sustain our influence in global affairs.
—Nouriel Roubini

and Victor Zhikai Gao

The economic recovery cannot be sustained unless China carries out structural reforms. China is too reliant on exports and investment.
—Yu Yongding

Raghuram Rajan – Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?

what a great idea

Statistics, on their own, do not tell the story of a great intellectual awakening. They only tell us where the market for culture stands. Grand statements about the dawn of mass intelligence are belied by everyone’s obsession with making their erudition public. No quicker is a book read than it appears in a personal profile online or is wedged inartfully into dinner party conversation .

“What of the social value of the sure informaton…? Suppose that by a collective payment to some knowledgeable outsider, an entire community consisting of the representative individuals above could all simultaneously be informed as to which future state will obtain – how large a payment would be justified? The answer is: NONE.”

—Hirshleifer, J. (1971). The private and social value of information and the reward to inventive activity, American Economic Review 61, 561-574.

Hirshleifer assumes a perfect, economical man, so the social value of information goes to zero when it’s given to everyone. But it flies in the face of common sense and experience. Therefore, implicit in that scenario is the question: what accounts for the variations among men that disprove the circumstances he describes and discredits, just a little, homo economicus?

It’s a special moment in the literature: kind of like he almost didn’t believe what he was writing.

The consumer remains in a difficult situation. It remains unclear how they will proceed forward as credit access fades alongside further home price deterioration and an increasingly difficult financial environment.
—Maxwell Clarke, chief U.S. economist at IDEAglobal

We’re still working our way through the slowdown. I think it will get better as the year progresses. The month of May will still be tough and I suspect by the summer that things will be a little broader in terms of the improvement.
—Mike Niemira, chief economist at the ICSC

And then there’s this little piece of wisdom…Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker, not to be confused with Nick Paumgarten of corsair capital who happens to be on the board of Scripps Networks.