These are the rationales for contemplating a preventive attack. The problem is that the likely costs of carrying out such an attack substantially outweigh probable benefits.

Too soon to talk of attacks against Iran

Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.

That moment of ascendancy is now upon us.

The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.

Facing Down Iran by Mark Steyn, City Journal Spring 2006

The public reaction, however, shows the depth of popular misunderstanding regarding the realities of our globalizing economy.

Globalizing Good Government

Decius wrote:

"The question of how economics is taught in France, both at the bottom and at the top of the educational pyramid, is at the heart of the current crisis," said Jean-Pierre Boisivon, director of the Enterprise Institute, a company-financed institute that sponsors the internship program for economics teachers that Scache took part in.

This is the most intelligent analysis of the protests in France that I've seen thus far. The students are doing exactly what they have been taught to do.

If you found this interesting:

Durrleman, a former adviser to Chirac, said he aims to make future leaders studying at ENA more aware of how companies work. He has overhauled both the entry exam and the program to include topics related to applied economics and business administration. Since 2003, all students at ENA must go on a one-month internship in a company; 20 percent of the 100 students do a six-month corporate internship. From next year, everyone will have to spend at least three months in the private sector.

"I believe we need more cross-fertilization in France," Durrleman said. "Companies create wealth, they finance the state. The state must understand companies."

You may be interested in the review of new books on globalization in the New York Review of Books:

Berger is clear that acting on their own, companies cannot make all the needed adjustments. Governments have a major part in creating an environment in which businesses can plan for the future, but how governments do this will depend on the type of capitalism they must deal with. As she acknowledges in a lucid discussion, capitalism comes in several varieties reflecting different cultural traditions and political systems. Within this wide variety two different kinds of market economy can be distinguished:

liberal market economies, like Britain's and the United States', in which allocation and coordination of resources takes place mainly through markets; and coordinated market economies, like Germany's and Japan's, in which negotiation, long-term relationships, and other nonmarket mechanisms are used to resolve the major issues.

These divergent capitalisms are competing and they learn from one another but the result is cross-fertilization, not evolution toward a single model. What works well varies not only from company to company but also from country to country. There is no one set of policies or institutions that can yield prosperity in all societies—or for all companies. The belief that globalization means the triumph of one way of doing business is not only historically false. It is a dangerously mistaken basis for corporate strategy. As Berger puts it, summarizing the results of the years of research conducted by her team:

Succeeding in a world of global competition is a matter of choices, not a matter of searching for the one best way -- we discovered no misconception about globalization more dangerous than this illusion of certainty.

Economics, French-style | IHT

I saw this in the Borders print ad today. I hadn't realized this before, but apparently The Baroque Cycle is now being sold as a series of nine (or more?) paperback books. See #4 and #5.

The trials of Dr. Daniel Waterhouse and the Natural Philosophers increase one hundredfold in an England plagued by the impending war and royal insecurities -- as the beautiful and ambitious Eliza plays a most dangerous game as double agent and confidante of enemy kings.

Odalisque : The Baroque Cycle #3, by Neal Stephenson

I also pointed you to Daniel Cohen's previous book, "Our Modern Times."

The enemies of globalization -- whether they denounce the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or the imposition of Western values on traditional cultures -- see the new world economy as forcing a system on people who do not want it. But the truth of the matter, writes Daniel Cohen in this provocative account, may be the reverse. Globalization, thanks to the speed of twenty-first-century communications, shows people a world of material prosperity that they do want -- a vivid world of promises that have yet to be fulfilled. For most impoverished, developing nations, globalization remains only an image, a fleeting mirage. Never before, Cohen says, have the means of communication -- the media -- created such a global consciousness, and never have economic forces lagged so far behind expectations.

Today's globalization, Cohen argues, is the third act in a history that began with the Spanish Conquistadors in the sixteenth century and continued with Great Britain's empire of free trade in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, as in the twenty-first, a revolution in transportation and communication did not promote widespread wealth but favored polarization. India, a part of the British empire, was just as poor in 1913 as it was in 1820. Will today's information economy do better in disseminating wealth than the telegraph did two centuries ago? Presumably yes, if one gauges the outcome from China's perspective; not, surely, if Africa's experience is a guide. At any rate, it takes poor countries much effort and investment to become players in the global game. The view that technologies and world trade bring wealth by themselves is no more true today than it was two centuries ago.

We should not, Cohen writes, consider globalization as an accomplished fact. It is because of what has yet to happen--the unfulfilled promises of prosperity--that globalization has so many enemies. For the poorest countries of the world, the problem is not so much that they are exploited by globalization as that they are forgotten and excluded.

About this book, John Gray wrote in the New York Review of Books:

Globalization and Its Enemies is one of the most original and incisive inquiries into the subject I have seen. No one who reads and understands it can come away believing that the current phase of this complex and uneven process is leading to the peaceful universal market of business utopians, or accept the simple narrative of anti-capitalist movements in which underdevelopment is a consequence of the wealth of advanced countries. There is more wisdom in Cohen's short book than in dozens of weightier tomes.

Globalization and Its Enemies, by Daniel Cohen

Francis Fukuyama writes:

In our ever-more-polarized political debate, it appears that it is now wrong to ever change your mind, even if empirical evidence from the real world suggests you ought to.

I find this a strange and disturbing conclusion.

Enjoy this clip of Jon Stewart on Larry King, from March 2006.

Why shouldn't I change my mind?

This enjoyable article is a friendly, humanizing portrait of Rice.

"Before I leave this earth, I'm somehow going to learn the Brahms Second Piano Concerto," she said, "which is the most beautiful piece of music." It is also dauntingly hard.

Whether Condoleezza Rice some day becomes commissioner of the National Football League, president of Stanford or president of whatever is anyone's guess. But don't bet against her learning Brahms's Second Concerto.

Condoleezza Rice on Piano

Working at Muzak sounds like a blast!

“The first time I explained to my mom what I do for a living, she said, ‘They pay people to do that?’"

There's a certain General Memetics quality to it.

The Well includes seven hundred and seventy-five tracks recorded by the Beatles, a hundred and thirty by Kanye West, three hundred and twenty-four by Led Zeppelin, eighty-four by Gwen Stefani, a hundred and ninety-one by 50 Cent, and nine hundred and eighty-three by Miles Davis. It also includes many covers—among them, versions of the Rolling Stones’ song “Paint It Black” by U2, Ottmar Liebert, and a late-sixties French rock band with a female vocalist (who sang it in French) and approximately five hundred versions of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” which, according to Guinness World Records, is the most frequently covered song in the world.

A few years ago, Tom was looking for covers of Paint It Black.

Have you tried The Well?

The Soundtrack of Your Life | The New Yorker

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.

In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora.

This article is older and much shorter than the essay in New Scientist, but there is overlap between them.

The journal article Dyson mentions was covered here last year.

Biotech is for Toddlers, by Freeman Dyson