Watching Nigel Farage being interviewed on the Andrew Marr show this morning suddenly brought on the realization that the UKIP leader is the new Boris Johnson! He has the same easy fluency on TV, the same line in plausible half-truths, the same appeal to the battier elements of the Tory Party.

All that remains now now is for him to be kebabbed by Eddie Mair.

People often thoughtlessly quote Keynes’s observation that “in the long run we are all dead” as a way of closing off an argument or a discussion. But, as Paul Krugman points out, the quotation is ripped completely out of its context. What Keynes actually wrote was: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the storm is flat again.”

Krugman points out that “Keynes’s point here is that economic models are incomplete, suspect, and only tell you where things will supposedly end up after a lot of time has passed. It’s an appeal for better analysis, not for ignoring the future.”

What’s interesting about this habit of misquoting Keynes is the way right-wingers use it as a way of ridiculing Keynes on the grounds that he was a homosexual. Brad DeLong highlights, for example, the way in which a succession of reactionaries — Joe Schumpeter, George Will, Daniel Johnson, Gertrude Himmelfarb and, yes, Niall Ferguson — have all used “in the long run we are all dead” as the basis for sneering homophobia. It is, one of them observed, only the kind of thing that “a childless homosexual” would have said.

LATER: To do him credit, Ferguson recanted and apologised. The statement on his website reads:

During a recent question-and-answer session at a conference in California, I made comments about John Maynard Keynes that were as stupid as they were insensitive.

I had been asked to comment on Keynes’s famous observation “In the long run we are all dead.” The point I had made in my presentation was that in the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.

But I should not have suggested – in an off-the-cuff response that was not part of my presentation – that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.

My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life. As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.

My colleagues, students, and friends – straight and gay – have every right to be disappointed in me, as I am in myself. To them, and to everyone who heard my remarks at the conference or has read them since, I deeply and unreservedly apologize.

As the Gatsby tsunami gathers pace, ahead of the release of the new film based on Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Sarah Churchwell has a lovely essay on The Great Gatsby in the Guardian which dwells perceptively on the novel’s contemporary relevance.

Our gilded age bears a marked resemblance to Fitzgerald’s. It has become a truism that Fitzgerald was dazzled by wealth, but the charge infuriated him: “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction,” he insisted, adding later, “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works”. He wasn’t in thrall to wealth, but making a study of how it was corrupting the country he loved. “Like so many Americans,” Fitzgerald wrote in his 1927 story “Jacob’s Ladder”, “he valued things rather than cared about them.”

The materialistic world of Gatsby is defined by social politics in a metropolitan America. It is a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win.

Spot on.

The Oxford English professor, reviewing Richard Holmes’s history of ballooning, writes that

“Ballooning was a dream that failed and the lesson of Holmes’s story is that an invention that seemed to promise democracy and universal brotherhood became merely another means for humanity to exhibit its insatiable appetite for triviality and destruction. Perhaps the nearest modern parallel will turn out to be the Internet.”

This slick but idiotic ad for Facebook touted the metaphor that the social-networking service is like a chair.

“Chairs”, it burbles.

Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair. And if the chair is large enough, they can sit down together and tell jokes and make up stories or just listen. Chairs are for people. And that is why chairs are like Facebook. Doorbells. Airplanes. Bridges. These are things people use to get together so they can open up and connect about ideas and music and other things people share.

This cant was nicely shafted by Mike Monteiro of Mule Design thus:

A well-designed chair not only feels good to sit in, it also entices your ass towards it. So this is nothing new to Facebook. Where it gets interesting to me is when you start asking to what end you are designing. The big why. In the chair example, the relationship is clear. If I can design a chair that entices your ass, then you will buy it. I’ve traded money for ass happiness (and back happiness, but that’s less sexy). But it’s clear who the vendor and who the customer is in that case.

Where I have issues with Facebook is that they’re dishonest about who the customer is. They’ve built an enticing chair, and they let me sit in it for free, but they’re selling my farts to the highest bidder.

Right on!

HT to Alexis Madrigal for the link.

Hotmail is no more. The last remaining users are being ‘migrated’ over to Outlook.com. It’s a significant moment in the evolution of the Net because it was Hotmail that really ushered in the era of cloud computing for the average Internet user. This aspect of the story is told in Chapter 6 of my book.

My friend (and Wolfson colleague), Jon Crowcroft has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. This news has made my day, and I hope his. Among his many merits is the fact that he’s the only computer scientist I know who quoted Flann O’Brien in his PhD dissertation.

Good to see also that Mike Burrows of Google is also now an FRS.