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.