Sarah Wrote That

Maybe "Invisible Vigilantes" Or "The Confidence Fairy" Will Catch On? →

Paul Krugman:

somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed… 

…As Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, recently put it, “There is no intrinsic contradiction between providing additional fiscal stimulus today, while the unemployment rate is high and many factories and offices are underused, and imposing fiscal restraint several years from now, when output and employment will probably be close to their potential.”

This Is What a Bubble Looks Like →

"We too have lived through an era of stability, certainty, and the illusion of indefinite economic improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be as economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain. We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, our environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since World War II. We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own in reassuring ways."

Tony Judt

The Fascination Of What’s Difficult

Laura started a good discussion at Apt. 11D about Friedman’s take on the need for education reform.  The moustache of understanding Friedman thinks that education needs to focus on… well, on what Tom Friedman focuses on:

So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

(You might note the missing gerund in front of “entrepreneurship”—perhaps ‘teaching’ or ‘encouraging’?)  But, as Laura notes, it’s heartening simply to see education on the Times editorial page, and Friedman manages to avoid putting too many metaphors through his usual enhanced interrogation.

Is it useful, though, to draw the kind of distinctions the piece is about?  The idea of teaching creativity is more than the inadvertently ironic fodder for self-satisfied hipster smirking it initially seems. 

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