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Savonarola still wrong: another lesson from the mortgage mess
/0 Comments/in Blog, Economic Opportunity, News /byI lead with a fire-and-brimstone Renaissance preacher partly to make a point, and also to provoke Director Stergios, who I hope will comment in flawless Florentine dialect. This morning’s Globe features a point-counterpoint worthy of Curtin and Belushi. Bruce Marks blames evil lenders for the mortgage crisis; Bruce A. Percelay has it in for evil borrowers. To sum up: America is entering a recession because of the stain on each of our souls. Today’s forecast: Plague, followed by a French army and some locusts. Maybe because they have no boosterish agenda (other than Microsoft’s), MSN Money tends to offer some clear thinking about the macroeconomics behind the news. This Jon Markman piece is based on a discussion with Satyajit Das, […]
Portland is a City that Doesn’t Work?
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Economic Opportunity, Housing, News /byI walk to work, and I cannot for the life of me understand how people can sit in traffic for hours. I love cars–especially fast cars. Schizophrenic? No, just a pretty even-handed observer of the Smart Growthies’ passion for mass transit and walkable cities and the car-lovers’ and business’ passion for get up and go. I have given up on seeing an absolutely objective narrative of how well or poorly Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary/transit-oriented development experiment has gone. I would note that Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, long-time resident of Portland and author of the about to be released The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook and Your Future, is as systematic an […]
Shoot, did I miss Bastille Day?
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /by Liam DayFirst of all, let me just say how proud I am of my fellow Pioneers: eight, now nine, blog posts in a single day. A new Institute record, I do believe. And let me just also say how honored I am to have inspired two of them, which, I suppose, require me to respond. I was looking forward to posting on the Red Sox’ disappearing lead, but no matter. My own research had led me to believe the ancient Egyptians invented the tie, but I will defer to my learned colleague. Where we agree is in its modern inception: the court of the Sun King. Where we also agree is Jim’s suspicion of my revolutionary tendencies, but, alas, I am […]
Questionable ties
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byFrom a website providing “the history of the necktie” come several hypotheses re: M. Day’s refusal to provision himself of a necktie: He is anti-Chinese: The first neckties, it seems, date back to the China B.C. He is anti-Croat or anti-French. Per the above-mentioned site: “The Sun King,” Louis XIV of France, was intrigued and delighted by the colorful silk kerchiefs worn around the necks of Croatian mercenaries. A crack regiment, the soldiers were presented at court around 1660 so the King could thank them for a victory against the Hapsburg Empire… Many experts believe the French word for tie, cravat, is a corruption of “Croat.” Or he is a revolutionary. Per the same: In fact, French kings maintained an […]
The Emerging Anti-Necktie Consensus
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byThe necktie debate has roiled through our office several times. The following was brought to our attention by the Liam Day Joint Harvard-Oxford-Middlebury Institute for the Elimination of Class Distinctions: The National Health Service of Britain has called for the elimination of neckties for health workers, based on sanitary reasons, claiming that: Ties are rarely laundered but worn daily. They perform no beneficial function in patient care and have been shown to be colonised by pathogens.