reviews etc.
Stuck on my remix; I'm at the "why do I sign up for these?" stage. Oh well.
Can’t say it better than the Columbia Journalism Review:
D’Souza perpetuates the Cokie Roberts idiocy-that Hawaii is somehow less American than the rest of the U.S. But hey-no problems with Alaska, which came into the Union the same year. Somehow, Sarah Palin always seem to be an examplar of “Real America.” Hmmm.
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Johnson takes network theory and points it in a particular direction, lauding the innovative possibilities that come from cities (and from the internet). The possibility of random collisions, moving knowledge from one field to another and developing a “slow hunch” over time, he argues, is the most likely source of innovation these days, such that building information walls between people and institutions is foolish. Instead of the commons, the usual trope for nonpropertized ideas, he wants us to think about the coral reef: a thriving ecosystem where entities use each others’ trash and discarded corpses, and in turn are used. It’s fun and well-written, though my favorite bit was mostly taken from Robert Darnton, who writes about the centuries-old habit of keeping commonplace books in terms that might, possibly, seem to have current relevance. Here’s Darnton:Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.
Johhnson uses the commonplace book to argue for the virtues both of borrowing and of putting disparate ideas/thoughts into fruitful juxtaposition, even when that looks a bit like chaos.
Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly: Shorter version: No, it’s not. This data-stuffed book is for people who know/care a lot about macroeconomics. I’m not sure it’s the best for general audiences (e.g., me), but they have looked at a lot of different data sources. The book connects external sovereign debt to internal debt (what the government owes its citizens, including sometimes what it extracts from them by regulating what interest they can earn in banks) and argues that internal debt plays a bigger role in debt crises than has been acknowledged. They also argue that the run-up in sovereign debt that occurs in financial crises owes more to decreased tax receipts than to bailouts, though the costs from the latter are not negligible. But the overriding message is more: everyone thinks that they’ve figured out where past bubbles went wrong, but in reality, when countries pull back on financial regulation, they get big booms that end in big booms.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Can’t say it better than the Columbia Journalism Review:
D’Souza perpetuates the Cokie Roberts idiocy-that Hawaii is somehow less American than the rest of the U.S. But hey-no problems with Alaska, which came into the Union the same year. Somehow, Sarah Palin always seem to be an examplar of “Real America.” Hmmm.
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Johnson takes network theory and points it in a particular direction, lauding the innovative possibilities that come from cities (and from the internet). The possibility of random collisions, moving knowledge from one field to another and developing a “slow hunch” over time, he argues, is the most likely source of innovation these days, such that building information walls between people and institutions is foolish. Instead of the commons, the usual trope for nonpropertized ideas, he wants us to think about the coral reef: a thriving ecosystem where entities use each others’ trash and discarded corpses, and in turn are used. It’s fun and well-written, though my favorite bit was mostly taken from Robert Darnton, who writes about the centuries-old habit of keeping commonplace books in terms that might, possibly, seem to have current relevance. Here’s Darnton:Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.
Johhnson uses the commonplace book to argue for the virtues both of borrowing and of putting disparate ideas/thoughts into fruitful juxtaposition, even when that looks a bit like chaos.
Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly: Shorter version: No, it’s not. This data-stuffed book is for people who know/care a lot about macroeconomics. I’m not sure it’s the best for general audiences (e.g., me), but they have looked at a lot of different data sources. The book connects external sovereign debt to internal debt (what the government owes its citizens, including sometimes what it extracts from them by regulating what interest they can earn in banks) and argues that internal debt plays a bigger role in debt crises than has been acknowledged. They also argue that the run-up in sovereign debt that occurs in financial crises owes more to decreased tax receipts than to bailouts, though the costs from the latter are not negligible. But the overriding message is more: everyone thinks that they’ve figured out where past bubbles went wrong, but in reality, when countries pull back on financial regulation, they get big booms that end in big booms.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.