Author: Aaron Weber

Home Economist

Home economics archives. Different kind of economics from the ones I’ve been looking at.

The cost of classes at Harvard Extension seems to obey interesting rules. The more you want to get from it, the more you have to pay, certainly: to take it for no credit, it’s three or four hundred. For credit, perhaps five. Writing intensive courses are seven hundred, enrollment limited (more labor-intensive as well, thus more expensive). And the business school classes are always part of a degree or certificate program, and cost a minimum of $1200, pointing out their extra economic value, or something.

I’d like to know more about economics, but that would require more math than I’m willing to suffer. I suppose there’s always business school, which would have the additional advantage of shocking and horrifying my parents.

How to Write

The O’Reilly “So You Want to Write a Book guide is quite a good one and takes you from the proposal through the publication. The GNOME Documentation Project Style Guide is enough to convince anyone that technical writing is the opposite of style. Same for this article from the Chronicle in which a textbook author chronicles his discontents.

Steve Almond knows how to write really well. In the first story the narrator recalls his rock-out youth as a rock concert reviewer for a newspaper, cheating on his girlfriend, and says: “It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.”

I, too, am still broken. I will always be broken, because I am human, and we are all inherently flawed. But it’s through the flaws that beauty comes in, I think. Or maybe just the rain.

Review

I’m a big fan of the weekly review over at Harper’s, so here’s my take: Americans are considering emigration to Canada again, while others hope to impeach Bush. The forged documents from Niger lend credence to the theory that the region, and in particular, Nigeria (its oft-confused neighbor), conduct all business in capital letters. Christian businessmen considered the communitarian nature of Linux and Jesus. We learned what’s wrong with the property market when a condo in NYC sold for forty five million dollars not including the approximately fifteen million that will be spent to outfit the completely empty space. Pakistani news agencies have noted that the US is frozen in the 1980s. A museum of psychiatric ad images is out there doing its thing.

Libertarian Morality

I’ve often ranted on about conflicts inherent in the Republican party: the economic conservatives with a libertarian streak, vs. the social conservatives with a paternalistic streak. Both, I’m sure, fit into the model of strict-father politics as opposed to nuturing parent politics, but that doesn’t mean that they are in any other way philosophically compatible.

At any rate, your standard neoconservative line is to deregulate business, devolve power to the states and local governments, (in the EU this is called subsidiarity and in the US it’s more or less equivalent to “state’s rights,” although the term was used to defend Jim Crow and slavery). They feel that the government should get out of people’s hair generally, and the federal government should be involved only in matters of interstate trade, international policy, and defense.

But in certain cases, as I’m sure you’re all aware, we see those principles bent. The re’s a test you can take about the consistency of your beliefs, but I don’t know if we could get all our politicians to take it, much less apply its lessons to their daily lives.

I am told that the Republican party’s social conservatism has its roots in its original moral crusade: abolition. Republicans of those days wanted to abolish all sorts of other moral scourges, too– alcohol, for example. Oh, you say, so that’s why we’ve got hardline maniacs running the DEA and trying to keep medicine out of the hands of terminally ill cancer patients: it’s only moral to make sure death is as painful and miserable a process as possible.

Good Advice

O’Reilly Says: The failure of many technical manuals is that they simply describe the subject. Many fail even in that. But even if they succeed, that’s only half the job. What we try to do in our books is to do some of the thinking for the reader, just as you would if you were talking one-on-one with someone, trying to explain what she really needs to know about the subject in order to get her job done.

Snark Snark Snark

The whole media world seems to be dishing and raving over Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which I find incredibly annoying, although I’d have been perfectly mesmerized by it if I’d been in front of a TV last night.

Positive coverage from Orlando Sun-Sentinel, the LAT, Pittsburgh Live, the Salt Lake Tribune (aren’t they too conservative for that?). Discerning cynicism from the Washington Post and of course Salon .

We’ve got two trends here. One of them is the metrosexual, which used to be known as “high-maintenance straight guys,” or “male grooming,” or just “fops and dandies.” Basically, men are now expected to dress well, trim their nose-hair, and so forth. I’m not sure this is a “new” thing though– men were expected to look good back in the day, and nose-hair trimmers have been around for ages. Stil, it was laugh-out-loud funny to hear The Economist, in discussing David Beckham’s supposed metrosexuality, discuss the trend in waxing the“Back, Crack, and Sack”. (Maybe it’s already too late for metrosexuals, though. Way-ahead-of-the-curve Vice Magazine has been mocking over-feminized straight men repeatedly, to the point of putting men with hairy backs in their DO section and putting the hairless South-beachers under DON’T.)

The other trend one is the gay-men-on-TV thing, as represented by America’s Fabulous Gay Friend. You’ve come a long way, baby. Now in addition to being Grace’s gay roommate, you can help out the straight guys without having them beat you to death or run screaming.

I’m not convinced that depicting gay men as style-obsessed, snark-dishing, crank-snorting divas is much of a step up from depicting them as Baron Harkonnen or the punchline of some joke about walking into the wrong bar. Nor, for that matter, is it very fair to portray straight men as filthy, sartorially incompetent, armpit-scratching knuckle-draggers. It’s probably amusing, which I suppose is what TV is for, but although it explains the stereotyping, it doesn’t exactly excuse it.

You ever go back and watch a movie from the 70s or 80s and suddenly realize how heavy-handed it was about sex and race? Yeah, that’s what this will look like in ten years.

Personal Responsibility

Isn’t “Personal Responsibility” a Republican mantra? So what the hell happened with the false words coming from Bush’s mouth? Did he not speak them? Were they not false? Does it depend on my definition of what “is” is?
Slate’s M. Kinsley punditizes:

Who was the arch-fiend who told a lie in President Bush’s State of the Union speech? No investigation has plumbed such depths of the unknown since O.J. Simpson’s hunt for the real killer of his ex-wife.