Johann Hari: How to survive the age of distraction
Read a book with your laptop thrumming. It can feel like trying to read in the middle of a party where everyone is shouting.
In the 20th century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined that books would be burnt. In the 21st century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart's novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic Apparat – an even more omnivorous i-Phone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn – and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing.
I have been thinking about this because I recently moved flat, which for me meant boxing and heaving several Everests of books, accumulated obsessively since I was a kid. Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice and insist that I just couldn't bear to part company with it, no matter how unlikely it is I will ever read (say) a 1,000-page biography of little-known Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar. As I stacked my books high, and watched my friends get buried in landslides of novels or avalanches of polemics, it struck me that this scene might be incomprehensible a generation from now. Yes, a few specialists still haul their vinyl collections from house to house, but the rest of us have migrated happily to MP3s, and regard such people as slightly odd. Does it matter? What was really lost?
The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.
In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating – but then, a few years ago, he "became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read". He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. "What I'm struggling with," he writes, "is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there's something out there that merits my attention."
I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That's getting harder to find.
No, don't misunderstand me. I adore the web, and they will have to wrench my Twitter feed from my cold dead hands. This isn't going to turn into an antedeluvian rant against the glories of our wired world. But there's a reason why that word – "wired" – means both "connected to the internet" and "high, frantic, unable to concentrate".
In the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: "The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can't afford to lose."
We have now reached that point. And here's the function that the book – the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: "Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise."
A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now. The French writer Jean-Phillipe De Tonnac says "the true function of books is to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy." It's precisely because it is not immediate – because it doesn't know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen's apartment – that the book matters.
That's why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don't just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals.
I'm not against e-books in principle – I'm tempted by the Kindle – but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words – offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person's internal life – can sing.
So how do we preserve the mental space for the book? We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism. Sugar, alcohol and the web are all amazing pleasures and joys – but we need to know how to handle them without letting them addle us.
The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I've learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I've learned to limit my exposure to the web – and to love it in the limited window I allow myself. I have installed the programme "Freedom" on my laptop: it will disconnect you from the web for however long you tell it to. It's the Ritalin I need for my web-induced ADHD. I make sure I activate it so I can dive into the more permanent world of the printed page for at least two hours a day, or I find myself with a sense of endless online connection that leaves you oddly disconnected from yourself.
TS Eliot called books "the still point of the turning world". He was right. It turns out, in the age of super-speed broadband, we need dead trees to have fully living minds.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Tea Baggers in the Family?
Real Families Sunday, Aug 7, 2011 13:01 ET
What if my daughter grows up to be Republican?
At 12, Lizzie is a liberal like me. But what if one day she embraces the Tea Party, like her grandparents?
By Sue Sanders
iStockphoto/gchutkaMy parents are Tea Party. I'm a liberal. My husband is to the left of your average communist. Dinners together walk a tightrope of small talk -- none of us wanting to veer too far in either direction, frightened we'll go careening into a political abyss. Our daughter, Lizzie, is always a safe topic. She's our Switzerland.
But I'm not sure how much longer that will last. Lizzie, at 12, is becoming politically aware.
She's always been well informed. Not that she had much of a choice. After the 2000 election and before her first birthday, she participated in her first protest. I stuffed her in her bright green baby backpack and headed to Times Square. There, she grinned and drooled as tourists in fanny packs and white tennis shoes yelled mean things at a dozen of us who were demanding that votes be counted. They weren't, thanks to the Supreme Court, and George W. Bush was sworn in -- thus assuring that Lizzie's formative years had ample opportunities for protest. Her favorite was the huge antiwar rally in Central Park, when she was 3. There were balloons and face painting -- and the playground near the park was more exciting than the ones back in Brooklyn, N.Y., where we then lived. Riding the train home, she waved her small paper flag like a sword and chanted, "No Twar! No Twar!" Then she yawned and asked for her sippie cup.
I don't want to indoctrinate my child into the cult of my political beliefs. I want her to make up her own mind. But, since she's a kid, she mirrors our beliefs, as her friends do their parents'. If I were a neo-Nazi, a Know Nothing, or a Glenn Beck-watching right-winger, she would probably share my misguided views. But I'm a Prius-driving, composting liberal -- and therefore so is Lizzie. (Except the driving part -- at 12, she doesn't yet. Thankfully.) It's not like we sit her down with Karl Marx flashcards or whisper Howard Zinn to her as she sleeps, but we talk a lot at dinner, discussing politics and what's going on not just in our neighborhood or city, but in the world. (We recently chatted about climate change and chocolate eclairs -- and, because my husband is a historian, she probably knows more about Alger Hiss than any other kid her age.) But how to balance the way we view the world with how other people do? How to show her both sides of the political picture?
Continue reading
Our family dinners are very different from those when I was a kid. Back then, we didn't discuss politics at the dinner table -- or anywhere else. Our household was more of a dictatorship, with my dad's conservative beliefs reigning supreme. There was no room for dissent and none encouraged. When I was in second grade, I made up my own mind about an election. Our teacher gave us each a copy of the Weekly Reader, which still smelled of fresh newsprint. One story was about the '72 election and we got to vote! I'd checked the box next to McGovern's head. It was a nice head, I'd thought. He looked so kind compared to that Nixon fellow. I skipped to our house, no doubt wearing an outfit like a plaid jumper with a bow affixed to my hair, something that would have fit in more in, say, 1964 Omaha rather than 1972 San Francisco, where we lived at the time. I have no way to prove this scientifically, but I'm pretty sure we were the squarest family in San Francisco. While other kids were singing along to the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar," we attended an Up With People concert.
Dropping my plastic school satchel on the ground, I proudly pulled out the secret ballot to show my parents. "No one in our house votes Democratic!" my dad scolded. He was joking, of course, but I still felt ashamed, like I'd just admitted I loved macrame plant holders or hippies. How could I have been so wrong? I should have voted for Nixon! My parents later did, and he won. Meanwhile, I slunk off, feeling like I'd committed a crime -- as the man my parents voted for soon would. I have no idea if I crumbled up that Weekly Reader or if my mom eventually stuffed it in the trash. In my mind, I picture myself crumbling it up, my first foray into politics a horrid mistake.
But do my husband and I truly encourage dissent with our daughter? What if Lizzie decides she wants to volunteer for whomever runs on the GOP ticket in 2012? She'll be in eighth grade then. Would I drive her to help with that campaign? I happily drove all over eastern Pennsylvania when she wanted to canvass for Obama. She held pamphlets as we meandered door to door, encouraging registered Democrats to vote. Would I do the same quite as cheerfully if she supported Michele Bachmann or Mitt Romney? I don't think so. But I honestly can't see Lizzie embracing a Republican candidate. For her, politics is all about values, and for now, at least, she values fairness and the environment.
And how to explain "values" and the coded semantics of political language to a kid? During a recent local election, Lizzie and I trawled the voters' guide, which was filled with names and photos of candidates and blurbs about their positions on various issues. One candidate had written she supported "family values." I muttered, "Uh-oh. I'll stay away from her."
"But Mom, aren't family values a good thing? Our family has values," she said, puzzled.
I tried to explain that those "family values" were often quite different from what our family values.
If she someday embraces "family values," the Tea Party or other right-wing agendas, could it damage my relationship with her? Although I try to understand my parents' political beliefs, I don't. When I see what Newsmax "article" or Wall Street Journal editorial my father "likes" on Facebook, or glance at a photo, taken a few years back, of my folks dressed as McCain and Palin for Halloween, I feel physically sick. Sometimes it's hard to even have simple conversations with them. Even the most innocent pleasantry, like "Nice weather," could spiral out of control if I don't watch what I say. (For the record, they are loving grandparents and are far more gracious than I am about not bringing up delicate topics.) If my dad says, "I bet you guys are happy you're not back east this winter. All that snow in New York." I'm tempted to mutter something about climate change, but instead I bite my tongue and say, "Yes, in Portland we don't have to shovel rain."
It sometimes seems my parents and I are as divided as Congress, neither side understanding the other's point of view. But when I'm around them, I'm somehow whisked right back to adolescence. I morph into a sullen 16-year-old with no power, whose views are considered childish. I want to engage, to discuss topics calmly with them, but my emotions knock any possibility of cool-headed debate out of the way. All my facts and statistics -- the cornerstone of rational debate -- get gummed together in my mouth by raw emotion and I only manage to get out incoherent raw ravings. And if history is any indication of the future, I'm doomed to repeat myself.
I wish I could calmly debate issues like my husband does. Or maybe I should take a lesson from Lizzie. The truth is, she can teach me a thing or two about politics. Instead of getting scorched by the heat of the moment, like I do, she's cool and collected. She listens intently. Then a question she asks will sum up the prejudice of the other side quite succinctly. "Why don't Grammy and Grampy want Charlie's moms to get married? That's not fair."
And she's right. It's not.
What if my daughter grows up to be Republican?
At 12, Lizzie is a liberal like me. But what if one day she embraces the Tea Party, like her grandparents?
By Sue Sanders
iStockphoto/gchutkaMy parents are Tea Party. I'm a liberal. My husband is to the left of your average communist. Dinners together walk a tightrope of small talk -- none of us wanting to veer too far in either direction, frightened we'll go careening into a political abyss. Our daughter, Lizzie, is always a safe topic. She's our Switzerland.
But I'm not sure how much longer that will last. Lizzie, at 12, is becoming politically aware.
She's always been well informed. Not that she had much of a choice. After the 2000 election and before her first birthday, she participated in her first protest. I stuffed her in her bright green baby backpack and headed to Times Square. There, she grinned and drooled as tourists in fanny packs and white tennis shoes yelled mean things at a dozen of us who were demanding that votes be counted. They weren't, thanks to the Supreme Court, and George W. Bush was sworn in -- thus assuring that Lizzie's formative years had ample opportunities for protest. Her favorite was the huge antiwar rally in Central Park, when she was 3. There were balloons and face painting -- and the playground near the park was more exciting than the ones back in Brooklyn, N.Y., where we then lived. Riding the train home, she waved her small paper flag like a sword and chanted, "No Twar! No Twar!" Then she yawned and asked for her sippie cup.
I don't want to indoctrinate my child into the cult of my political beliefs. I want her to make up her own mind. But, since she's a kid, she mirrors our beliefs, as her friends do their parents'. If I were a neo-Nazi, a Know Nothing, or a Glenn Beck-watching right-winger, she would probably share my misguided views. But I'm a Prius-driving, composting liberal -- and therefore so is Lizzie. (Except the driving part -- at 12, she doesn't yet. Thankfully.) It's not like we sit her down with Karl Marx flashcards or whisper Howard Zinn to her as she sleeps, but we talk a lot at dinner, discussing politics and what's going on not just in our neighborhood or city, but in the world. (We recently chatted about climate change and chocolate eclairs -- and, because my husband is a historian, she probably knows more about Alger Hiss than any other kid her age.) But how to balance the way we view the world with how other people do? How to show her both sides of the political picture?
Continue reading
Our family dinners are very different from those when I was a kid. Back then, we didn't discuss politics at the dinner table -- or anywhere else. Our household was more of a dictatorship, with my dad's conservative beliefs reigning supreme. There was no room for dissent and none encouraged. When I was in second grade, I made up my own mind about an election. Our teacher gave us each a copy of the Weekly Reader, which still smelled of fresh newsprint. One story was about the '72 election and we got to vote! I'd checked the box next to McGovern's head. It was a nice head, I'd thought. He looked so kind compared to that Nixon fellow. I skipped to our house, no doubt wearing an outfit like a plaid jumper with a bow affixed to my hair, something that would have fit in more in, say, 1964 Omaha rather than 1972 San Francisco, where we lived at the time. I have no way to prove this scientifically, but I'm pretty sure we were the squarest family in San Francisco. While other kids were singing along to the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar," we attended an Up With People concert.
Dropping my plastic school satchel on the ground, I proudly pulled out the secret ballot to show my parents. "No one in our house votes Democratic!" my dad scolded. He was joking, of course, but I still felt ashamed, like I'd just admitted I loved macrame plant holders or hippies. How could I have been so wrong? I should have voted for Nixon! My parents later did, and he won. Meanwhile, I slunk off, feeling like I'd committed a crime -- as the man my parents voted for soon would. I have no idea if I crumbled up that Weekly Reader or if my mom eventually stuffed it in the trash. In my mind, I picture myself crumbling it up, my first foray into politics a horrid mistake.
But do my husband and I truly encourage dissent with our daughter? What if Lizzie decides she wants to volunteer for whomever runs on the GOP ticket in 2012? She'll be in eighth grade then. Would I drive her to help with that campaign? I happily drove all over eastern Pennsylvania when she wanted to canvass for Obama. She held pamphlets as we meandered door to door, encouraging registered Democrats to vote. Would I do the same quite as cheerfully if she supported Michele Bachmann or Mitt Romney? I don't think so. But I honestly can't see Lizzie embracing a Republican candidate. For her, politics is all about values, and for now, at least, she values fairness and the environment.
And how to explain "values" and the coded semantics of political language to a kid? During a recent local election, Lizzie and I trawled the voters' guide, which was filled with names and photos of candidates and blurbs about their positions on various issues. One candidate had written she supported "family values." I muttered, "Uh-oh. I'll stay away from her."
"But Mom, aren't family values a good thing? Our family has values," she said, puzzled.
I tried to explain that those "family values" were often quite different from what our family values.
If she someday embraces "family values," the Tea Party or other right-wing agendas, could it damage my relationship with her? Although I try to understand my parents' political beliefs, I don't. When I see what Newsmax "article" or Wall Street Journal editorial my father "likes" on Facebook, or glance at a photo, taken a few years back, of my folks dressed as McCain and Palin for Halloween, I feel physically sick. Sometimes it's hard to even have simple conversations with them. Even the most innocent pleasantry, like "Nice weather," could spiral out of control if I don't watch what I say. (For the record, they are loving grandparents and are far more gracious than I am about not bringing up delicate topics.) If my dad says, "I bet you guys are happy you're not back east this winter. All that snow in New York." I'm tempted to mutter something about climate change, but instead I bite my tongue and say, "Yes, in Portland we don't have to shovel rain."
It sometimes seems my parents and I are as divided as Congress, neither side understanding the other's point of view. But when I'm around them, I'm somehow whisked right back to adolescence. I morph into a sullen 16-year-old with no power, whose views are considered childish. I want to engage, to discuss topics calmly with them, but my emotions knock any possibility of cool-headed debate out of the way. All my facts and statistics -- the cornerstone of rational debate -- get gummed together in my mouth by raw emotion and I only manage to get out incoherent raw ravings. And if history is any indication of the future, I'm doomed to repeat myself.
I wish I could calmly debate issues like my husband does. Or maybe I should take a lesson from Lizzie. The truth is, she can teach me a thing or two about politics. Instead of getting scorched by the heat of the moment, like I do, she's cool and collected. She listens intently. Then a question she asks will sum up the prejudice of the other side quite succinctly. "Why don't Grammy and Grampy want Charlie's moms to get married? That's not fair."
And she's right. It's not.
Downgrade vs. Republican Idiocy
Everyone with a brain knows that the problems in this country come from the ideological idiocy of the Republican Party. This fact alone is the reason for our political instability.
We're Being Downgraded For The Wrong Reasons
Jonathan Chait
Downgraded For The Wrong Reasons August 6, 2011 | 12:38 pm 48 comments |
S&P's argument contains a crucial flaw, but its ultimate conclusion is right. The American political system is much riskier and less stable than it was before.
The basic situation is that we have a political system that, in most cases, requires both parties to agree on major policy changes. One of those parties is only willing to bring revenue in line with outlay if the ideological terms of that adjustment are 100% congenial to their demands -- and even then, it is far from clear that the Republican approach would actually succeed in stabilizing the deficit. In the short term, action on a fiscal adjustment is hopeless.
Now, what about that flaw? The flaw is that the S&P seems to believe that Republican opposition to tax increases can block any fiscal adjustment indefinitely. It writes:
Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.
That is a total misread of the debt ceiling showdown. It did demonstrate Republican opposition to increasing revenue. But the crucial reality is that the Bush tax cuts expire after 2012 barring action by Congress. What's more, Republicans have signaled that they will not extend the tax cuts on income below $250,000 a year unless the tax cuts on income over that level are extended as well. As I've argued endlessly, this provides a huge opportunity to the Obama administration. It can simply refuse to extend the tax cuts for the rich, demand a clean tax cut bill for income under that level, and when Republicans refuse, blame them for hiking middle class taxes while taking quiet satisfaction as projected revenue increases by $4.6 trillion, solving the medium-term deficit problem. I can't be sure by any means that this will happen. But this is an open question, and the debt ceiling deal did not reduce the likelihood of a tax stalemate.
So the risk does not lie between now and the end of 2012, and there's a decent chance that the stalemate will actually solve the problem. However, the long-run political risk is quite severe. No other advanced country has a major political party influenced by supply-side economics and the moral teachings of Ayn Rand, and therefore, no other major political party can match the GOP's theological opposition to revenue. One result is that the Republican Party is always going to use its political power to reduce revenue, which means that the U.S. budget can never be stable for an extended period of time. If a center-left coalition succeeds in stabilizing the budget, Republicans will eventually destabilize it. It is difficult to imagine the GOP, as it's currently structured, encountering conditions in which they believe taxes are not too high.
Presidential systems of government, with the legislature and the executive often representing opposing parties, are inherently prone to crises of legitimacy. The declared Republican goal of using the debt ceiling as an instrument to extract policy concessions on a regular basis adds an explosive new element of long-term risk.
In a nutshell, when you have a political party that does not agree that revenue levels must bear a relationship to outlays, and is willing to foment a systemic crisis in order to maximize its leverage, you're in trouble.
We're Being Downgraded For The Wrong Reasons
Jonathan Chait
Downgraded For The Wrong Reasons August 6, 2011 | 12:38 pm 48 comments |
S&P's argument contains a crucial flaw, but its ultimate conclusion is right. The American political system is much riskier and less stable than it was before.
The basic situation is that we have a political system that, in most cases, requires both parties to agree on major policy changes. One of those parties is only willing to bring revenue in line with outlay if the ideological terms of that adjustment are 100% congenial to their demands -- and even then, it is far from clear that the Republican approach would actually succeed in stabilizing the deficit. In the short term, action on a fiscal adjustment is hopeless.
Now, what about that flaw? The flaw is that the S&P seems to believe that Republican opposition to tax increases can block any fiscal adjustment indefinitely. It writes:
Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.
That is a total misread of the debt ceiling showdown. It did demonstrate Republican opposition to increasing revenue. But the crucial reality is that the Bush tax cuts expire after 2012 barring action by Congress. What's more, Republicans have signaled that they will not extend the tax cuts on income below $250,000 a year unless the tax cuts on income over that level are extended as well. As I've argued endlessly, this provides a huge opportunity to the Obama administration. It can simply refuse to extend the tax cuts for the rich, demand a clean tax cut bill for income under that level, and when Republicans refuse, blame them for hiking middle class taxes while taking quiet satisfaction as projected revenue increases by $4.6 trillion, solving the medium-term deficit problem. I can't be sure by any means that this will happen. But this is an open question, and the debt ceiling deal did not reduce the likelihood of a tax stalemate.
So the risk does not lie between now and the end of 2012, and there's a decent chance that the stalemate will actually solve the problem. However, the long-run political risk is quite severe. No other advanced country has a major political party influenced by supply-side economics and the moral teachings of Ayn Rand, and therefore, no other major political party can match the GOP's theological opposition to revenue. One result is that the Republican Party is always going to use its political power to reduce revenue, which means that the U.S. budget can never be stable for an extended period of time. If a center-left coalition succeeds in stabilizing the budget, Republicans will eventually destabilize it. It is difficult to imagine the GOP, as it's currently structured, encountering conditions in which they believe taxes are not too high.
Presidential systems of government, with the legislature and the executive often representing opposing parties, are inherently prone to crises of legitimacy. The declared Republican goal of using the debt ceiling as an instrument to extract policy concessions on a regular basis adds an explosive new element of long-term risk.
In a nutshell, when you have a political party that does not agree that revenue levels must bear a relationship to outlays, and is willing to foment a systemic crisis in order to maximize its leverage, you're in trouble.
Ron Chernow - Washington: A Life (6)
And finally, what I learned from reading this book is reinforcement of the centrality of George Washington to the founding of this country. Without him there truly would not have been a United States at least at the time and in the way it all came about. No country and no Constitution like we are lucky to have now. Yet I learned for the first time from this great biography that like so many of the other founders, GW professed to be theoretically against slavery, and he kept his slaves and did not free them until after Marth died. He had slaves with him in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention and he had them when he served 8 years as our first President. He hunted down his slaves that ran away. I did not know before reading this book how inbred W's life was with slavery. Slave labor built our nations capitol. This country has yet to fully come to grips with the fact that this country was built on slavery.
S & P
Everyone is gaga over the S & P downgrading our credit. The problem is that the S & P is rotten to the core. Doesn't ANYBODY know what they are talking about in our country anymore???
August 7, 2011, 9:23 am
by Paul Krugman
I Heard It Through The Baseline
Oh, my. Treasury has a fact sheet explaining that $2 trillion error by S&P; it may sound technical, but to anyone who follows budget issues, it’s a doozy.
When the Congressional Budget Office “scores” policies, it does so relative to a “baseline” — a set of assumptions about what would happen in the absence of that policy. The normal CBO baseline — mandated by Congress — assumes that discretionary spending will rise with inflation, but no more. This isn’t realistic most of the time, since the demands for government services rise both with growing population and in many cases with rising economic activity; that’s one reason CBO always provides an “alternative fiscal scenario” that’s supposed to be more realistic. Under current conditions, however, with Obama already committed, even before the debt deal, to fairly harsh austerity, the zero-real-growth baseline is more realistic — and it’s how the debt deal was scored.
But S&P initially assumed that the debt deal was subtracting off a quite different baseline.
The point here is not so much the $2 trillion, which makes very little difference to real US fiscal prospects; it’s the fact that S&P stands revealed as not understanding basic analysis of budget estimates. I mean, I don’t think I would have made that mistake; real budget experts, like the people at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, certainly wouldn’t have.
So what we just saw was amateur hour. And these people are pronouncing on US credit-worthiness?
August 7, 2011, 9:23 am
by Paul Krugman
I Heard It Through The Baseline
Oh, my. Treasury has a fact sheet explaining that $2 trillion error by S&P; it may sound technical, but to anyone who follows budget issues, it’s a doozy.
When the Congressional Budget Office “scores” policies, it does so relative to a “baseline” — a set of assumptions about what would happen in the absence of that policy. The normal CBO baseline — mandated by Congress — assumes that discretionary spending will rise with inflation, but no more. This isn’t realistic most of the time, since the demands for government services rise both with growing population and in many cases with rising economic activity; that’s one reason CBO always provides an “alternative fiscal scenario” that’s supposed to be more realistic. Under current conditions, however, with Obama already committed, even before the debt deal, to fairly harsh austerity, the zero-real-growth baseline is more realistic — and it’s how the debt deal was scored.
But S&P initially assumed that the debt deal was subtracting off a quite different baseline.
The point here is not so much the $2 trillion, which makes very little difference to real US fiscal prospects; it’s the fact that S&P stands revealed as not understanding basic analysis of budget estimates. I mean, I don’t think I would have made that mistake; real budget experts, like the people at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, certainly wouldn’t have.
So what we just saw was amateur hour. And these people are pronouncing on US credit-worthiness?
Friday, August 5, 2011
The Future of the Book
Design Thursday, Aug 4, 2011 21:01 ET
Is there hope for books?
A man who champions reading talks about our changing concept of books and how we can keep people interested in them
By Buzz Poole, Imprint
From Kyle Bean's "The Future of the Book."
I first learned about the Institute for the Future of the Book while working on a magazine assignment that eventually became this piece for the Millions. In getting to know Bob Stein, his colleagues and the projects they championed I became convinced that concerns about the death of reading and writing were deeply misplaced. What readers, writers, publishers and retailers really needed to worry about, and catch up with, was the increasing potential of what a book's content could be, the delivery of the content and how we could interact with the content. Of course, plenty has changed in the intervening years and the institute continues to instigate the exploration of ideas regarding the future of the book. I caught up with Stein over the phone for his take on today's culture of reading.
The first time we spoke was back in the pre-Kindle, pre-iPad days of 2006. For decades, you've actively been thinking about and working to augment the future of the book. What is your read of how the concept of the book has changed in the past five years?
There is the question of how it has evolved in my mind and how it has evolved in the minds of the public. I view the book as a place where readers congregate and the social aspect of reading is where we're going. The publishing industry is trying very hard to keep the traditional model of a book intact, selling 300 or 400 pages to one reader at a time.
There is this social aspect: Books are becoming these places to congregate, the form of expression is undergoing changes. In most cases e-readers and the e-book developers haven't caught up to this. There are concepts that are too far afield, like people trying to write a novel collaboratively in "World of Warcraft." I have no problem with such a book being considered fiction just like Tolkien, but the execution isn't there. And then there is something like Push Pop Press. Yes, the Al Gore book has interactive media but it is just for one reader at a time. They are simply books with audio and video on the page. We figured that out long, long ago. And it isn't sustainable. When you're doing something for the first time you can beg, borrow and steal all sorts of help when it comes to all this content. But when you go back to do it again and again you have to pay up.
My big problem with these apps is that they are like CD-ROMs, in the wrong sense -- both are islands unto themselves. I'm reading "The Waste Land" all by myself. The apps are all walled in, all you have is the app. Heaven forbid you have an idea and want to go down the rabbit hole. You can, but you have to leave the app. I believe we are heading toward browser-based materials.
In light of how quickly e-readers have evolved do you foresee a time when printed books truly are a thing of the past? Will there be a time when e-readers will be able to compete with the most lavishly produced art book?
Yes and no. The reality is we're always going to have books but they are going to play a different role in culture. There will be collectible, expensive art books and books as objects. Rich people will be able to have expensive art objects but in terms of how most information will be moved around it will be electronic. Books will be beautiful objects, the same as when I'm in an antique store and buy a salt shaker -- I buy the object, a unity of form.
When you talk about the future of the book, you are really talking about the nature of how content is generated and engaged, right? Is one of the greatest potentials for the future of the book that this fluid, democratized notion of a book's content will make for more transparency, especially in the ivory towers of the academy?
Let's look at it differently. Think of going to history class as a kid, 50 years ago, 15 years ago, it doesn't matter. The teacher gave you a book and the first impression you were given is, Here is truth. But we've developed a much more sophisticated understanding of truth -- it is something each one of us constructs from various perspectives. In the future we won't be as interested in one person's synthesis. Transparency is part of that but it is about coming at problems from different perspectives. My biggest thing moving forward is how we exploit this potential.
What is your ideal, your utopia, for the future of the book?
I've become interested in how context informs the reading experience, whereas a few years ago I was more focused on content. I'm interested by how context comes from different places, how it is shaped by different factors. During the Golden Notebook Project [a late 2008 "experiment in close-reading" that featured an ongoing conversation between seven readers that took place in the margins of the novel] I learned a huge amount just watching them read and debate the text. You can bring in various different glosses on a document. It is a richer experience with these different framing devices readily available, being able to see multiple perspectives and points of view at once. In the digital era context is what matters.
What was the last codex book you read? The last e-book?
The last codex book was Edmund Morris' biography of Beethoven. The last e-books were "New Culture of Learning" by John Seely Brown and Doug Thomas and Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story."
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
Is there hope for books?
A man who champions reading talks about our changing concept of books and how we can keep people interested in them
By Buzz Poole, Imprint
From Kyle Bean's "The Future of the Book."
I first learned about the Institute for the Future of the Book while working on a magazine assignment that eventually became this piece for the Millions. In getting to know Bob Stein, his colleagues and the projects they championed I became convinced that concerns about the death of reading and writing were deeply misplaced. What readers, writers, publishers and retailers really needed to worry about, and catch up with, was the increasing potential of what a book's content could be, the delivery of the content and how we could interact with the content. Of course, plenty has changed in the intervening years and the institute continues to instigate the exploration of ideas regarding the future of the book. I caught up with Stein over the phone for his take on today's culture of reading.
The first time we spoke was back in the pre-Kindle, pre-iPad days of 2006. For decades, you've actively been thinking about and working to augment the future of the book. What is your read of how the concept of the book has changed in the past five years?
There is the question of how it has evolved in my mind and how it has evolved in the minds of the public. I view the book as a place where readers congregate and the social aspect of reading is where we're going. The publishing industry is trying very hard to keep the traditional model of a book intact, selling 300 or 400 pages to one reader at a time.
There is this social aspect: Books are becoming these places to congregate, the form of expression is undergoing changes. In most cases e-readers and the e-book developers haven't caught up to this. There are concepts that are too far afield, like people trying to write a novel collaboratively in "World of Warcraft." I have no problem with such a book being considered fiction just like Tolkien, but the execution isn't there. And then there is something like Push Pop Press. Yes, the Al Gore book has interactive media but it is just for one reader at a time. They are simply books with audio and video on the page. We figured that out long, long ago. And it isn't sustainable. When you're doing something for the first time you can beg, borrow and steal all sorts of help when it comes to all this content. But when you go back to do it again and again you have to pay up.
My big problem with these apps is that they are like CD-ROMs, in the wrong sense -- both are islands unto themselves. I'm reading "The Waste Land" all by myself. The apps are all walled in, all you have is the app. Heaven forbid you have an idea and want to go down the rabbit hole. You can, but you have to leave the app. I believe we are heading toward browser-based materials.
In light of how quickly e-readers have evolved do you foresee a time when printed books truly are a thing of the past? Will there be a time when e-readers will be able to compete with the most lavishly produced art book?
Yes and no. The reality is we're always going to have books but they are going to play a different role in culture. There will be collectible, expensive art books and books as objects. Rich people will be able to have expensive art objects but in terms of how most information will be moved around it will be electronic. Books will be beautiful objects, the same as when I'm in an antique store and buy a salt shaker -- I buy the object, a unity of form.
When you talk about the future of the book, you are really talking about the nature of how content is generated and engaged, right? Is one of the greatest potentials for the future of the book that this fluid, democratized notion of a book's content will make for more transparency, especially in the ivory towers of the academy?
Let's look at it differently. Think of going to history class as a kid, 50 years ago, 15 years ago, it doesn't matter. The teacher gave you a book and the first impression you were given is, Here is truth. But we've developed a much more sophisticated understanding of truth -- it is something each one of us constructs from various perspectives. In the future we won't be as interested in one person's synthesis. Transparency is part of that but it is about coming at problems from different perspectives. My biggest thing moving forward is how we exploit this potential.
What is your ideal, your utopia, for the future of the book?
I've become interested in how context informs the reading experience, whereas a few years ago I was more focused on content. I'm interested by how context comes from different places, how it is shaped by different factors. During the Golden Notebook Project [a late 2008 "experiment in close-reading" that featured an ongoing conversation between seven readers that took place in the margins of the novel] I learned a huge amount just watching them read and debate the text. You can bring in various different glosses on a document. It is a richer experience with these different framing devices readily available, being able to see multiple perspectives and points of view at once. In the digital era context is what matters.
What was the last codex book you read? The last e-book?
The last codex book was Edmund Morris' biography of Beethoven. The last e-books were "New Culture of Learning" by John Seely Brown and Doug Thomas and Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story."
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Obama Surrenders
Op-Ed Columnist
The President Surrenders
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 31, 2011
A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.
The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.
Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.
And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.
Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?
In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.
Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.
First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.
And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.
At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.
But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
The President Surrenders
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 31, 2011
A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.
The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.
Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.
And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.
Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?
In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.
Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.
First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.
And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.
At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.
But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
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