Note taking

“genial incompetence.”
And what form of incompetence is Tyler Cowen and the rest of the GM economic department supposed to represent?
No matter what, I think I prefer the Italian variety.

And why do at least two of the academics in the small circle posting their choice of 10 important books put the Bell Curve as a positive influence?

Get off your high horse.

Umberto Echo-Echo
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I think people should acknowledge that one of the reasons for what you would consider “positive” change is the fading of the old aristocracy and the rise of the aspirant petit bourgeois. In England that meant Thatcher, and in France Sarko. Since the subject of the miners’ strike comes up now and again on this site, it’s worth noting that the old aristocracy had at least a sense of noblesse oblige. Thatcherites had none. But now London is full of millionaire stockbrokers with accents straight from the pub or the coal mine.

Enzensberger argued once that Italy should be something of a model: nothing gets done, nobody starves.
I’m not entirely unsympathetic to that argument.

Clod Levi-Strauss
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“the rise of the aspirant petit bourgeois.”
I guess I should have written “victory.”

Pierre Bourdieu wrote a silly book called “Distinction,” with arguments that could never be applied to the US and apply less and less to western Europe. The words of old “oiks” describing their childhood relations to the “toffs” in another post and the words of the miners linked to a couple of weeks ago here made the same point. “We are what we are and it’s ok,” but a little more respect would be appreciated.
Those days are done.

I wish people wouldn’t confuse the old conservatism of land and the new conservatism of capital. It gets tiring to hear “economic liberals” refer to Tocqueville as one of their own. As tiring has hearing neoliberals refer to themselves as socialists

Clod Levi-Strauss