Rory Stewart, the author of the best seller The Places In Between about Afghanistan and soon-to-be director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School, rejects both the troop increases and the idea that the success of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq can be duplicated in Afghanistan. Stewart, a former British infantry officer, would limit US involvement to carefully targeted economic development aid, and dismisses a counterinsurgency strategy as unrealistic and overly ambitious. He recommends that the US pursue a containment strategy and a narrowly counterterrorist military campaign.

Obama's Afghanistan Surprise

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is required to prepare economic projections for the Congress twice a year, and the housing market has been—and will continue to be—an important factor in that outlook. Over the past two years, starts of new homes have fallen sharply, and the resulting decline in real residential construction over that period subtracted an average of 1.0 percentage point from the growth rate of real gross domestic product. Looking forward, several alternative paths for residential construction are possible, ranging from a fairly quick turnaround to a severe slump that lasts several years.

This background paper examines the various factors that have determined the number of housing starts in the United States in the past and will continue to determine it in the future. Those factors include the underlying demand for new housing units, especially the role of demographics; cyclical and financial conditions, such as unemployment rates and lending standards; and the number of excess vacant units. CBO expects that housing starts will fall far enough below underlying demand for a long enough period to eliminate the current glut of vacant units and any temporary shortfall of demand due to adverse cyclical and financial conditions; this paper presents three alternative scenarios that could achieve that outcome. In keeping with CBO’s mandate to provide objective, nonpartisan analysis, this paper makes no policy recommendations.

The Outlook for Housing Starts, 2009 to 2012

Do you shudder at the thought of entering a Blackberry-free zone?

Consider this 1987 Newsweek article:

What can diplomats do to keep their communications secure? They can trade in their Selectrics for manual typewriters, which don't emit buggable signals. They can banish computer-controlled telephones, which can be programmed remotely to pick up all sounds in the room just like a live microphone. An entire embassy-or key rooms-could be shielded with copper to keep electromagnetic signals from reaching listening posts. But in this day and age, it's virtually impossible to function without computers, and it's immensely difficult and expensive to ferret out sophisticated electronic ears planted in walls. Unless the debuggers make technological breakthroughs of their own, diplomats may have to get used to Magic Slates.

There are alternatives, of course:

The Battle of the Bugs

This article investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. Pirates devised two institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.

An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization

Slavoj Žižek:

One should insist on the key question: which ‘flaw’ of the system as such opens up the possibility for such crises and collapses? The first thing to bear in mind here is that the origin of the crisis is a ‘benevolent’ one: after the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, the decision reached across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments in order to keep the economy going and prevent recession – today’s meltdown is the price for the US having avoided a recession seven years ago.

The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown won’t be the one that awakes us from a dream, but the one that will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry: not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the ‘war on terror’ and US interventionism in order to keep the economy running.

From the archive:

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Use Your Illusions

Calvin Trillin:

“What did you do when you heard that you were No. 1?” I asked.

“When we found out we were No. 1,” Bexley said, “we just set there in each other’s arms and we bawled.”

And now for something completely different, from the archive:

Even a buffalo separated from the herd has reasonable chances.

Dept. of Gastronomy: By Meat Alone

Chinese Hacker Methodology Flowchart

In August 1996, Peter Schwartz interviewed Peter Drucker. An excerpt:

The model for management that we have right now is the opera.

What you need now is a good jazz group.

From the archive:

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

The Relentless Contrarian

Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like. Open a history book and the images will be familiar: mobs at banks and lines at soup kitchens, stockbrokers in suits selling apples on the street, families piled with all their belongings into jalopies. Families scrimp on coffee and flour and sugar, rinsing off tinfoil to reuse it and re-mending their pants and dresses. A desperate government mobilizes legions of the unemployed to build bridges and airports, to blaze trails in national forests, to put on traveling plays and paint social-realist murals.

Today, however, whatever a depression would look like, that's not it. We are separated from the 1930s by decades of profound economic, technological, and political change, and a modern landscape of scarcity would reflect that.

What, then, would we see instead? And how would we even know a depression had started?

Depression 2009: What would it look like?

Robert Reich:

Pardon me for asking, but if a company is too big to fail, maybe – just maybe – it’s too big, period.

If They're Too Big To Fail, They're Too Big Period