Lovely video.

Lovely story in today’s Times Diary:

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the death of Sir Douglas Bader and I couldn't let it pass without this story about the RAF hero. He was giving a talk at an upmarket girl's school about his time as a pilot in the Second World War. "So there were two of the f***ers to my right, three f***ers to my right, another f***er on the left", he told the audience. The headmistress went pale and interjected: "Ladies, the Fokker was a German aircraft." Sir Douglas replied: "That may be, madam, but these f***ers were in Messerschmitts".

Terrific story. Wonder if it’s true.

On Saturday, Richard Posner retired from his position as the lead judge on the Seventh Circuit Appeals court. For some of his legal peers this may come as a relief, because it means that they won’t have to continue their unequal struggle to keep up with the rulings of the most influential jurist in recent American history. Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar and colleague of Posner’s at Chicago has a nice appreciation of his mentor in which he enumerates the 3,300 judgments that Posner handed down during his time as a judge and explains his significance as a legal thinker. “In the modern era”, he writes, “no one comes close to Posner in terms of the sheer width and depth of his influence on contemporary law”.

Posner’s approach has a deceptively simple starting point: We should focus insistently on the real-world consequences of legal rules.

Suppose that a company has emitted pollution, causing injuries to its neighbors, and the neighbors want to shut the company down; that poor people have purchased refrigerators on credit for what seems to be a very high price, and they want to get out of the deal; that a company has gotten really big, and regulators want to break it up.

In his academic work in the 1970s, Posner asked what different legal rules would actually do, and he used the tools of economics, with its focus on incentive effects and unintended consequences, to answer that question. If the victims of pollution have a legal right to shut companies down, the injuries will stop, but the companies’ workers and consumers will be hurt, which means that courts have to make some tough trade-offs. If poor people can get out of the refrigerator deal, they won’t have to pay that high price, but companies might not want to give credit to poor people in the future.

In countless areas of the law, Posner showed that economic analysis casts a new and often surprising light on questions that people might otherwise try to answer with unhelpful intuitions.

What has always fascinated me about Posner is his role as the most formidable public intellectual in the US since the death of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. For anyone interested in ideas he’s both inspiring and infuriating: inspiring because of the range of his interests and the power of his intellect; infuriating because of his astonishing productivity and his ability to write pellucid prose.

On his intellectual range, Sunstein writes:

It is astounding but true that many of Posner’s contributions have come wholly or mostly from outside of the area of economic analysis of law, with valuable work on (for example) law and literature; on how to deal with catastrophe; on economic crises; on national security threats; and on the federal judiciary itself, and whether it is political, and what it does well and poorly.

On his literary style, the two books of his that I know are Public Intellectuals: a study in decline and his 2011 book on the 2008 banking crisis, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression.

Reviewing the latter in the New York Times, Jonathan Rauch observed:

You know that story, and Posner tells it well, with a particular flair for showing how dozens of moving parts interacted. Being Richard Posner, however, he is not content to be an amiable guide through the thicket. His real interest is in finding and detonating grenades in the underbrush.

One is right there on the title page, which flaunts the D-word. The current crisis, Posner maintains, is a depression…

The thing that’s really interesting abut the book is that Posner — in characteristic contrarian style — doesn’t buy the conventional wisdom that the banking catastrophe was (in President Obama’s words) “a perfect storm of irresponsibility and poor decision-making that stretched from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.” In other words, capitalism is a perfectly good system ruined by crazy, greedy and irresponsible people. Posner disagrees — which, for a guy who has spent most of his career using ideas from economic theory to illuminate legal questions, is remarkable. Instead he argues that what the crisis showed is that markets are not intrinsically the self-correcting mechanisms of economic theory. “The mistakes were systemic”, he wrote, “the product of the nature of the banking business in an environment shaped by low interest rates and deregulation rather than the antics of crooks and fools.” Markets, of their own accord, will sometimes collapse and be unable to right themselves completely for years at a stretch.

That remind you of anyone? For me, it’s back to Keynes, for two reasons. The first is that Keynes had the same insight into the capacity of a market system to reach an equilibrium at a very low level from which it cannot recover. And secondly because Posner, in his ability to change his opinion on something he has believed for years, brings to mind Keynes’s alleged retort to a journalist who accused him of inconsistency: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

(Sadly, this attribution may be apocryphal. Sigh. Some things are too good to check.)

Anyway, the good news that although Posner will not be judging any more, he will still be writing. And still exploding grenades in the undergrowth. More power to his elbow, as we say in Ireland.

The man who — together with Bob Newhart — made phone calls into an art form, has died.

Reading Two Paths for the Personal Essay by Merve Emre, I was struck by this passage:

Taking an unapologetically snobbish tone in her 1905 essay “The Decay of Essay Writing,” Virginia Woolf lamented how the nineteenth-century democratization of literacy had flooded the literary marketplace with personal essays. A new class of writers, blinkered by the “amazing and unclothed egoism” that came from asserting one’s importance through reading and writing, thought nothing of sacrificing “their beliefs to the turn of a phrase or the glitter of paradox,” Woolf complained. Theirs was a mass demonstration of newly acquired cultural capital over and above any aesthetic or political purpose they may have had for putting pen to paper in the first place. “You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast in the form of the essay,” Woolf wrote, scolding those middle-class writers who would dare leave their grubby prints on the windowpane of good prose. If one can set aside her disdain, there is a larger point: too many people writing have nothing interesting to say and no interesting way in which to say it.

So if Mrs Woolf were alive today she would be similarly dismissive of blogs, especially this one!

Fifteen years ago today my beloved Sue died and for me this is always the most sombre day of the year. One ‘gets over’ the death of a loved one in the sense that people ‘get over’ the loss of a limb. But, as C.S. Lewis acutely observed in A Grief Observed, “you’ll never be a biped again”. He was right.

What weighs 800kg and runs Windows XP?

Answer: an ATM machine.

Wonderful, hypnotic video, courtesy of Alex Ross.

True to form, Alex Ross found an original take on the eclipse story — from the diary of Virginia Woolf, June 30, 1927:

“At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker & darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank & sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; & we thought now it is over — this is the shadow when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a spooky aetherial colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind — fresh, various — here blue, & there brown: all new colours, as if washed over & repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. That was within the power of nature…. Then — it was all over till 1999.”

En passant, isn’t it interesting that a lot of Americans who presumably don’t trust scientists on climate change were rushing to get a view of a phenomenon that, er, scientists predicted?

I’m sure that Mrs Woolf and I wouldn’t have got along if we’d met. (After all, I’m a countryman of James Joyce, and we know what she thought about Ulysses). But her diaries are simply wonderful.