Out of office?
Cambridge in the Summer?
Quote of the Day
”Holy Mother we do believe,
That without sin Thou didst conceive;
May we now in Thee believing,
Also sin without conceiving.”
- A.P. Herbert
My late mother, a very devout Catholic, would not have been amused.
## Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Haydn | Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major | II. Adagio | Yo-Yo Ma
Long Read of the Day
The Myth of the Informed Citizen
Nicholas Carr is one of the best communicators of our age. He’s terrific at diving into academic and other research on a topic and then coming up with a readable exegesis of what he’s found. His most recent book, Superbloom is coming out in paperback around now, and this essay is taken from it.
In it, he traces the evolution of the thinking of Walter Lippmann, one of the most interesting American intellectuals of the 20th century — and also one of the early members of the ’neoliberal thought collective’ that seized the ideological initiative from the late 1960s onwards and shaped the world we now inhabit.
Sample:
In 1919, Lippmann wrote a despairing essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Basic Problem of Democracy.” Democracy’s founding ideal—that of a well-informed citizenry capable of making reasoned judgments about national problems and plans—had come into being in a much simpler time, he argued, when most concerns were local and people had direct experience of them. The assumptions of America’s founders, a small, insular, largely agrarian elite, held little relevance to the bustling modern world, with its urban and industrial energies and lightning-quick communications. Society was much more complex now, and people’s sense of it came not from their own first-hand observations but through information received “at second, third, or fourth hand.”
The public’s understanding of social and political issues was fated to be incomplete, distorted, and easily manipulated. “The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding,” Lippmann wrote…
Worth your time.
My commonplace booklet
Ever wonder why Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful investors of the 20th century, said this?
“The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”
For an answer, try David Oks’s splendid article, “Why airlines are always going bankrupt”!
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