The tempting answer is to try to wriggle free from the dilemma with a compromise that would permit innovation but exert just enough control to squeeze out financial failure.

It is a nice idea; but it is a fantasy.

Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.

From the archive:

The most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation's prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms.

The training in self-censorship starts, sensibly enough, with risque pictures on MySpace. It produces, decades later, the kind of silence that leads to violent insurgency halfway around the world.

Canada may be the source of modern multiculturalism, but I think it is simultaneously a model for the sort of national transformations required in Europe. Canada's English majority transformed their country's identity from one that was primarily tied to the British Empire to one which all of its citizens can connect with. I think there is something to learn from that.

Credit crisis | Fixing finance | The Economist

Robert C. Merton, founder of Long Term Capital Management:

Let me give you this analogy. If you're driving in inclement weather, you'd say that a four-wheel-drive car is safer than a two-wheel-drive car. Now suppose that we observed that over the last 15 years, the number of passenger accidents per passenger mile driven hadn't changed at all. And someone says, Now wait a minute: Has four-wheel drive made us safer? And the answer would be, Technically, no, because we're having just the same number of accidents we used to have. So, was this all a waste, or were we wrong? I think you know the answer, as I do. What really happened is that people get something that will unambiguously make you safer if you behave the same way you did before. That's the key element to understand first. The amount of risk we take personally, individually, or collectively is not a physical given constant. We choose it. What happens is, we look at some new, safer instrument and we say, Yes, we could be safer doing the same thing. Or, we could take the same amount of risk and do things that were too risky to do before. So with a four-wheel-drive car, you look out the window and see six inches of snow, and you say, That's okay: I'm going to go over and visit my family. So the question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

On Markets and Complexity

Yet Another Yoo Memo ...

In the memo (part 1, part 2) released today, John Yoo writes:“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.” The memo goes on to say, “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

The 81-page memo and an earlier one issued to guide the CIA have since been withdrawn, but they show how sweeping the Justice Department viewed presidential power to be after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

From last month, President Bush:

Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists.

Unfortunately, Congress recently sent me an intelligence authorization bill that would diminish these vital tools. So today, I vetoed it.

Errol Morris's latest film opens April 25.

2003 Memo Allowed 'Enhanced' Interrogation

Anyone who has ever tried to digest The Da Vinci Code, for example, or the Left Behind series, will know that bad writing, aimed at a subliterate audience, is actually much more difficult to read than anything by Borges or Kundera. But a certain populism, perhaps, inhibits critics from saying so.

Christopher Hitchens, on the collected works of Edmund Wilson recently published by the Library of America.

Literary Companion | The Atlantic Online | September 2007

To demonstrate why using fingerprints to secure passports is a bad idea, the German hacker group Chaos Computer Club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister.

According to CCC, the print of Schauble's index finger was lifted from a water glass that he used during a panel discussion that he participated in last year at a German university. CCC published the print on a piece of plastic inside 4,000 copies of its magazine Die Datenschleuder that readers can use to impersonate the minister to biometric readers.

Good Job!

Hackers Publish German Minister's Fingerprint | Threat Level from Wired.com

10 years into the Berkman Center and 5 years into Creative Commons, former Berkman Center Faculty Director and current crusader against congressional corruption Lawrence Lessig is coming back to Cambridge.

Celebrate Professor Lessig's return to the Harvard campus on Friday April 4th, where he will speak about his new effort: Building the Change Congress Movement.

Building the Change Congress Movement | Berkman Center

I previously recommended this book in August and November. Now the full text is freely available from the author.

"A timely, vivid, and illuminating book that will change the way you think about privacy, reputation, and speech on the Internet."

The Future of Reputation

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

(This was previously recommended by Decius here, but I missed it at the time.)

NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

Anthony Lane profiles David Lean.

There are two of them, man and boy. They emerge from a sandstorm and pass through the remains of civilization—a few broken walls and a swinging door. Beyond, they see something amazing: a ship sailing calmly through dry land. Only as the pair advance does the vision explain itself. This is the Suez Canal, a shocking stripe of blue. A motorbike buzzes along a road, on the far side, and the rider catches sight of the stragglers. He halts and shouts across the water, “Who are you?,” and again, “Who are you?” We look at the face of the man from the desert. His eyes are even bluer than the canal, but he says nothing. Maybe his tongue is too dry for speech. Maybe he has no answer.

Later in the essay, we encounter this turn of phrase:

Lean said, “Being brought up a Quaker, I was blissfully ignorant of anti-Semitism.”

This means that he was ignorant of Semitism, period, but the problem is not the ignorance. The problem is the bliss.

Master and Commander

Louis Menand:

We’re likely to find the outrage and alarm over comic books psychologically simplistic and politically opportunistic. But this is winner’s bias. Other people’s culture wars always look ridiculous. That’s partly because we frame cultural controversies as battles between the old and the new, and, given that the old is someone else’s status quo and we have no stake in it, we naturally favor the new. So one way to look at the comic-book inquisition is to see it as an effort to repress an edgy, provocative, satirical popular form and to dictate to people what books they should and should not read. In this view, a big, powerful, established social entity is squashing a bunch of little, powerless entities.

But the psychiatrists and the officials almost certainly perceived things the other way around. For youth culture is commercial culture. If an industry is moving a hundred million units a week, then someone is making money. The comic book creators were no doubt interesting, complicated, talented people who believed in what they did, but they were businessmen manufacturing entertainment for children.

An argument can be made that comic books were dying anyway ... At the beginning of 1950, there were four million television sets in the United States; three years later, there were more than twenty-five million. Fifty per cent of American homes had one. There was a new place for children to be seduced.

Television was the Cold War intellectuals’ nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But by exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically. We read the horror comics today and smile complacently at the sheer over-the-top campiness of the effects. In fact, that is the only way we can read them. We have lost our innocence.

See also:

Brian Unger looks at how comedy has changed and evolved in the five years since the Sept. 11 attacks. Ironically, predictions of the end to the "age of irony" never materialized. Irony, it seems, is made of tougher stuff ...

The Horror