Newmark's Door

"Failure to communicate: The inability of many students to write clear, cogent sentences has costly implications for the digital age".

Joan Wickersham, Boston Globe, 9/3:

Recently I met a composer and asked how he got started. Was he musical as a kid? Not really, he said. He’d had a teacher in high school who assigned all the kids to write poems. “Everyone except you,” she’d said, pointing at him. “You write me a piece of music.” Forty years later, the composer was still mystified at how the teacher had known to send him in that particular direction. But he remembered the joy of writing that first piece of music, and the startled sense of excitement he’d felt at being so accurately and deeply seen.

A lovely piece.

Interesting little article about Brazil's food exports.

. . . and if you need some background on the young protagonist, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who just four years ago supposedly turned down an buyout offer of $1 billion, here's the New Yorker's take.

Al Gore's Internet may yet save us all:

But Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee suggests I have the wrong word for the Republican base. The word, she says, is not enraged, but "livid."

The three-term Republican deputy whip has been campaigning in Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. We spoke by phone about what she is seeing, and she sounded like the exact opposite of exhausted.

There are two major developments, she says, that are new this year and insufficiently noted, but they're going to shape election outcomes in 2010 and beyond.

First, Washington is being revealed in a new way. The American people now know, "with real sophistication," everything that happens in the capital. "I find a much more knowledgeable electorate, and it is a real-time response," Ms. Blackburn says. "We hear about it even as the vote is taking place." Voters come to rallies carrying research—"things they pulled off the Internet, forwarded emails," copies of bills, roll-call votes. The Internet isn't just a tool for organization and fund-raising, it has given citizens access to information they never had before. "The more they know," Ms. Blackburn observes, "the less they like Washington."

In the NRC rankings of Ph.D. programs in economics, just released yesterday afternoon, NC State's program ranks as high as 39th in the U.S.

(Why "as high as"? Because the new, super-improved rankings now have confidence intervals attached. We could rank as low as 78th.)

But--and it's a big deal in these parts--we're basically tied with UNC-Chapel Hill, interval (38th to 71st). If this were one of the lesser fields of human endeavor, like college football or basketball, NCSU students would be out TP'ing Hillsborough Street.

Link via Greg Mankiw. (Who teaches at Harvard, where they have three econ. Ph.D. programs ranked in the top 30.)

Matt Miller, Washington Post, 9/22:

The late economist Mancur Olson, in his classic study "The Rise and Decline of Nations," warned that advanced democracies eventually grow encrusted with powerful interest groups that hijack government to serve their narrow economic ends. Inefficiency reigns. Growth languishes. . . .

Is there a way to break this fatal interest-group stranglehold? Olson said war or depression could wipe society's slate clean, but that's a bit grim as a strategy. The better path is to promote entrepreneurial innovation and harness capitalism's bottomless capacity for finding new ways to deliver more for less.

Makes some fine points including this one:

For there to be an economic recovery in this country, some people are going to have to create businesses that grow and create jobs. If those businesses grow enough because customers want what they are selling, the entrepreneurs who created them become rich, just like Apple's Steve Jobs or Google's Sergey Brin.

The President or the press can insult those people or try to jack up their taxes and give their money away to other people. But if we want recovery and growth rather than redistribution and recrimination, a better approach would be to stop treating rich people as though they are the cause of America's problems and start concentrating instead on what can be done to create more of them.

Darn right. Reminds me of an old story. Two poor, down-on-their-luck people are talking. One says to the other, "I hate the goddam rich." The other one says, "I don't." The first one asks, "Why not?" And the second one replies, "No poor man ever offered me a job."

"Galaxy shocker: laws of physics may vary throughout the universe".

Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

Bill Clinton, 9/21: "Do you know how many political and economic decisions are made in this world by people who don't know what in the living daylights they are talking about?"

Idea, quotes, and link provided courtesy of The Amateur Economist.