Financialization has made American businesses less resilient, less innovative and less competitive. It has been a major cause of slow wage growth and rising inequality. It has fueled the loss of manufacturing jobs across the heartland.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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What happens on the imperial level also happens at the local level, within the United States and the Western European societies that make the rules of globalization. Non-technocrats, whether they are the resentful members of the old working class or just people wisecracking about the progressive pieties of corporate human resource managers, are not going to be permitted to tangle up the system with their demands.
~ Christopher Caldwell
via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024
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A recurrent phenomenon among California governors, who tend to run glamorous, is playing against type. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man once known for toting a bazooka, turned himself into a sober-suited policy wonk. Jerry Brown, a onetime figure of “pop politics,” emerged as a curmudgeon.
~ Nathan Heller via The New Yorker
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The capitalists driving financialization and promoting its results have become capitalism’s worst enemy. Every consumer and every worker in the United States feels the effects.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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Measurement doesn’t abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting—of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts—signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. Over time, that intention matters. It’s one way a republic earns the right to be believed in.
~ Josh Tyrangiel via The Atlantic
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Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence.
~ Donella Meadows
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Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
~ David Foster Wallace
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The best Russian realist conflicts with the realism of Courbet. The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissaro.
~ Marc Chagall
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Millennials love to talk—and gripe—about ambition. What was once a virtue has become a generational bugbear. Millennial women, raised on Girl Power and rom-coms in which the heroine gets the job and the man, joined the workforce just in time for the girlboss culture of the 2010s, which promised that hard work would lead not only to personal success but also to feminist victory.
~ Lily Meyer via The Atlantic
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I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is guess from what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.
~ Haruki Murakami
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