From late last November:

Mr. Gibbs said one of the main challenges for Mr. Obama was tamping down expectations a bit without making anyone think he was moving away from the promises of his campaign.

From a few weeks before that, in the Economist:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

From late in the campaign, Senator Obama:

What this crisis has taught us is that at the end of the day, there is no real separation between Wall Street and Main Street. There is only the road we're traveling on as Americans, and we will rise and fall on that as one nation, as one people.

From last December, Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Now, from Ezra Klein:

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that's an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

Imagine a group of men sitting in a dim prison cell. One of the walls has a window. Beyond that wall, they know they'll find freedom. One of the men spends years picking away at it with a small knife. The others eventually tire of him. That's an idiotic approach, they say. You need more force. So one of the other men spends his days ramming the bed frame into the wall. Eventually, he exhausts himself. The others mock his hubris. Another tries to light the wall afire. That fails as well. The assembled prisoners laugh at the attempt. And so it goes. But the problem is that there is no answer to their dilemma. The problem is not their strategy. It's the wall.

Long ago, from a young(er) Donald Rumsfeld:

For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.

Simply because a problem is shown to exist doesn't necessarily follow that there is a solution.

And yet still now, Rory Stewart observes:

It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate.

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

Cormac McCarthy:

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

The Wall

David Schneider:

The problem is that as larger, better systems are grafted onto the older, smaller ones, like palimpsests, they become more and more complex; whereas the vast systems can protect themselves against superior competitors through equally vast reserves of marketing capital, and sheer ubiquity, which encourages inertia.

With the growth of the technocracy, with advanced industry and professionalization, and with the spread of the career into the private life, the toxic elements of industry jargon have infiltrated our mental environments just as mercury has leached into fish.

Leveraging human capital -- I wonder: who's the weight, what's providing the force, and how heavy is that debt load that needs to be lifted? Is the debt load really being lifted?

Ernie and Big Tom:

Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

If there is, I don't want to know about it.

Alex Pang:

Tinkering is a bit like jazz.

Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

David Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Andrew Revkin:

Sharks take years to reach sexual maturity and, unlike most other fishes, produce small numbers of young, making them particularly vulnerable to overfishing.

Did you know:

Fully 88% of the EU's stocks are overfished.

Nicholas Kristof:

More than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. Up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles.

Notes From A Meeting:

Underscoring the gravity of the situation, the President convened an early morning meeting.

At one point he urged everyone to do the "jazz clap," on the off beat.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Money Talks Back: The Linguistic Infrastructure of Corporatese

Michael Lewis:

For a brief moment you had a glimpse of how harshly financial people might be treated if Wall Street ever lost its political influence.

Jake DeSantis just wanted to know why the public perception ... was so different from the private perception of the people inside AIG FP, who actually knew what had happened.

It's unlikely that Obama did know what he was talking about, except in the broadest outlines. Nor, for that matter, did the people who had engineered the bailout. How could they?

Across AIG FP the view of Joseph Cassano was remarkably consistent: a guy with a crude feel for financial risk but a real talent for bullying people who doubted him. Every one of the people I spoke with admitted that the reason they hadn't taken a swing at Joe Cassano, before walking out the door, was that the money was simply too good.

It would be nice if Joe Cassano came out of hiding and tried to explain what he did and why, but there is little chance of that. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn't that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right.

Truth:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

More Truth:

AIG, knowing it would need to ask for much more capital from the Treasury imminently, decided to throw in the towel, and gifted major bank counter-parties with trades which were egregiously profitable to the banks, and even more egregiously money losing to the U.S. taxpayers, who had to dump more and more cash into AIG, without having the U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner disclose the real extent of this, for lack of a better word, fraudulent scam.

Nothing But The Truth:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

The Man Who Crashed Wall Street

Martin Wolf:

The UK's fiscal position, with a deficit of 14 per cent of gross domestic product forecast by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for 2010, is radically unsustainable. Big spending cuts and tax increases, relative to GDP, are inevitable.

Paul Krugman:

Lost decade, anyone?

Mike Shedlock:

Today, Riksbank, Sweden's central bank cut the deposit rate to -0.25%, effectively charging savers interest on deposited money.

Ruins of the Second Gilded Age:

Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital maniupulation, traveled from rural Georgia to suburban California, visiting large construction projects that began during the speculative boom years and then came to a sudden halt, often half-finished, when the housing and securities markets collapsed.

The abandoned or stalled developments -- and Martins's photos of them -- can be seen as signs of the hubris (and occasional criminality) that typified the boom and the economic and human damage that remained in its wake.

Tom Vanderbilt:

Sure, people were gullible, living beyond their means as Edmund Andrews admits to doing. But as Alyssa Katz reminds us, the real estate bubble was also a crime scene. The only trouble is delineating where crime ended and social policy began.

Richard Florida:

One thing we know about crises is they frequently bring about significant changes in the system of housing tenure. The Great Depression and New Deal innovations in housing finance and housing policy, plus the post-war boom and infrastructure building, brought a massive shift toward single family homeownership. My hunch is it's time for new hybrid forms of housing tenure which mix the benefits of ownership with the flexibility of renting.

Michael Spence:

What can we expect as the world’s economy emerges from its most serious downturn in almost a century?

Lower growth is the best guess for the medium term. It seems most likely, but no one really knows.

It is not inconceivable that the baby will be thrown out with the bath water.

Joel Stein:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

Rory Stewart:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. This misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions.

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban. But the Taliban are very unlikely to take over Afghanistan as a whole.

My First Dictionary:

Today's word is disillusioned.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

From the archive:

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Graeme Wood:

“Is the boy a Talib?” I asked. “Future Talib,” he said.

Elizabeth Rubin, from the Korengal Valley:

It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

Nora Johnson, from 1961:

An Englishman said to me recently, "You Americans live on a much higher plane of expectancy than we do. You constantly work toward some impossible goal of happiness and perfection, and you unfortunately don't have our ability just to give up. Really, it's much easier to accept the fact that some things can't be solved." He is right; we never accept it, and we kill ourselves trying.

Rory Stewart, from today:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

The Irresistible Illusion

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power.

The expensive part of making drugs has never been what happens in the laboratory.

On price points:

Generally, the farther away a country from the main producers and the more isolated it is, the higher the price charged.

James Surowiecki:

Consumer finance, in other words, is an industry in which keeping customers confused often seems to be a business strategy.

Anderson responds to Gladwell:

It's now clear that the bane of my next year will be questions about the future of the newspaper industry from journalists.

Priced To Sell

D. Graham Burnett and Jeffrey Andrew Dolven:

Irony is a powerful and incompletely understood feature of human dynamics. A technique for dissimulation and "secret speech," irony is considerably more complex than lying and even more dangerous. Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes. And yet while major research resources have for forty years poured into the human sciences from the defense and intelligence community in an effort to gain control over the human capacity to lie (investments that led to the modern polygraph, sodium pentothal-derived truth serums, "brain fingerprinting," etc.), we have no comparable tradition of sustained, empirical, applied investigation into irony. We know very little about its specific manifestations in foreign cultures; we understand almost nothing about the neurological basis of its expression; we are without forward-looking strategies for its mastery and mobilization in the interest of national defense. This project-a sustained three-year, three-pronged, interdisciplinary investigation, drawing on social scientists, engineers, and neurobiologists--will position Lockheed Martin for field leadership in a crucial new area of strategic and commercial growth.

H.P. Lovecraft:

From the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

Justine Cooper:

What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.

We do quite a good business with the more affluent residents of South Central. They, at least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.

John Gray:

The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.

On Barbara Kruger:

By using familiar images and text from modern advertising, she forcefully exposes the misleading and aggressive lies of pop media. Her works involve humor and irony, though they are often disturbing at the same time.

Recently, ubernoir on Decius:

An accusation that I have heard repeatedly leveled at Americans is that they have no sense of irony. I think I might bookmark [a post by Decius] as Exhibit A in my case for the defence.

Marc Siegel:

We live temperature-controlled, largely disease-controlled lives.

And yet, we worry more than ever before.

The ironic cloud

Robert Lee Hotz:

The flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. "You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight," she says.

Carolyn Johnson:

Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

David Lynch:

Trillions and Zillions of Ideas.

Consciousness is a Ball.

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Richard Sennett:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Freeman Dyson:

It's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive.

Kevin Kelly:

Upcreation is my term for the peculiar, profound, and still mysterious way by which complex structures appear in the universe.

A large part of the difficulty lies in our lack of a good understanding of what happens during emergence. What does it mean to make a new level, how do we recognize one, and what are its preconditions?

From TED:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

A Wandering Mind Heads Toward Insight

As the sharp, stabbing pain, fear, and panic associated with rapid and visible blood loss is superseded by a panoply of chronic ailments and a general sense of unwellness, Robert Skidelsky reviews Martin Wolf's "Fixing Global Finance":

After the collapse of the dot-com boom in 2000, the US became a much less desirable place for direct foreign investment. So East Asian countries, especially China, started to buy US Treasury bonds.

In short, it was via their impact on the financing of the federal deficit that Chinese savings made it possible for the US consumer to go on a spending spree.

The fact is that the present system has suited the United States -- specifically the power holders in the United States -- just as much as it has those in China. The phrase "it has enabled the Americans to live beyond their means" is too vague to be useful. One needs to ask: which Americans? Certainly many middle- and low-income American households have been given opportunities to borrow beyond their means.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Decius:

Sometimes the market drives off a cliff.

John Lanchester:

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

I get the strong impression, talking to people, that the penny hasn't fully dropped.

Recently:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Louis Kahn:

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.

The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission

Michael Chabon:

Childhood is a branch of cartography.

James Akerman:

The "Gospel Temperance Railroad Map" is an example of an allegorical map.

Joseph Epstein:

Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Michael Chabon:

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

From the archive:

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

Michael Chabon:

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Jeff Goldblum, in Jurassic Park:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Matthew Crawford:

One of the hottest things at the shopping mall right now is a store called Build-a-Bear, where children are said to make their own teddy bears. I went into one of these stores, and it turns out that what the kid actually does is select the features and clothes for the bear on a computer screen, then the bear is made for ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Wilderness of Childhood