Well, good question. If Happy Days aren’t here again, and they aren’t, life is better, definitely. To have the House of Representatives back in Democratic hands after eight long years is definitely a pleasure if not a treasure. As one representative put it “Being in the majority is a thousand times better.” Furthermore, the party’s…
Search Results for: economic growth
Daniel Drezner, harrumphing audibly, but not (alas!) intelligibly
Okay, whole lotta’ unpackin’ goin’ on here, whole lotta’ unpackin’ goin’ on. A couple of weeks ago, WashPost guy Dan Drezner, whom I (sometimes) like, uncorked a whole lotta nonsense due to the death of Princeton professor of international affairs Robert Gilpin, writing in praise of Gilpin in a column bearing the pungent subhead “It’s…
Alan Vanneman’s Mythbusters! Why the “myth” of upward mobility does and does not matter
Robert Samuelson, who is, frankly, rarely my favorite economics pundit, writes a not entirely terrible column, “Upward mobility is a myth”, largely pivoting off a recent study, “The Fading American Dream: Trends In Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940”, issued by the National Bureau Of Economic Research, put together back in March 2017 by a bunch…
Those Mean Old Disestablishment Blues: Why it’s so hard to put Humpty-Dumpty together again
Dreary old Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by almost three million votes, despite being deeply loathed by millions of voters, many of whom held their noses and voted for snatch snatchin’ Don. Post election, Trump’s poll ratings have never reached the 45% mark, despite a booming stock market and a steadily expanding economy. So why…
Never-Trumpers, learning to lie back and enjoy it
You can’t blame anti-Trump conservatives—well, you can’t blame them too much—for squirming under the pressure of having to constantly agree with, you know, liberals that Donald Trump is a continuing disaster and disgrace to the United States of America, easily the worst man ever to occupy the White House, a man without honor or scruple….
The Apotheosis of Paul Ryan is the Apotheosis of Hypocrisy
It is likely that Republicans in Congress will pass something resembling House Speaker Paul Ryan’s tax package—because if they don’t they’ll look like complete fools, and they’d rather fuck up the country than look like that. It’s “amusing” that everyone, even me, has pointed to the massive Republican hypocrisy of having spent eight long years…
The Columbus Myth Myth
I’m too lazy to link to any of the many articles commenting on the culture wars swirling around Mr. European Hegemonist himself, Christopher Columbus. But I would like to complain, a little, about the myth of the Columbus myth. We are taught that we were taught that Christopher Columbus was a great and good man…
A World of Struggle at Harvard Law
(Author’s Note: The following is a sprawling takedown of David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle, a book that clearly got my goat.) Pankaj Mishra is the author of several fascinating books, including From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and his new one Age of Anger, which I am struggling to get…
Why Did Hillary “Lose”?
The most important, and the ugliest, thing to happen in 2016 was the decision of 46 percent of the American electorate to vote for the worst major party presidential candidate in American history. The second most important was the decision of 48 percent to vote for Hillary Clinton. So why did Hillary “lose”? It is…
Harvard douchebaggery not exclusively a left-wing phenomenon, study reveals
Well, it did. I did the study, and I’m revealing it. In fact, I already revealed it last week, with my takedown of right-wing Harvard douchebag N. Gregory Mankiw for trying to make us feel sorry for trust-fund babies. Well, now I have a new study, and it seems that there’s a goddamn outbreak of…