Virginia Postrel's article: "Economic Scene: The Trend of Vanishing Tech Jobs" takes a good free market look at the current IT outsourcing scare. It draws some nice analogies with the "Japan, Inc. will eat our lunch!" scare of the 1980s. As usual, we will all gain from free trade (even some nasty foreigners!).
Calling Iraq's Bluff (washingtonpost.com) is a very interesting column by Charles Krauthammer on why all the intelligence agencies believed that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled WMD, when it seems likely that he did not.
Friedman continues his excellent analysis of Iraq and the war on terrorism in Thomas Friedman: War of Ideas, Part 5. Key quote:
'First, this notion, put forward by Mr. Dean and Al Gore, that the war in Iraq has diverted us from the real war on "terrorists" is just wrong. There is no war on "terrorism" that does not address the misgovernance and pervasive sense of humiliation in the Muslim world. Sure, Al Qaeda and Saddam pose different threats, Mr. Marshall notes, "but they emerge from the same pathology of widespread repression, economic stagnation and fear of cultural decline." Building a decent Iraq is very much part of the war on terrorism.'
It's an interesting discussion of how the Democratic candidates have been trapped between Bush and Dean - and what they should do about it.
The Morality of the Market is an article by Jerry Z. Muller, a professor of history, on the ways in which capitalism is "morally good" rather than merely "economically good". It's pretty dense reading, but provides some good insights and reminders for those of us who live in "the" capitalist society.
Here's a Virginia Postrel column in the Boston Globe on Friedrich Hayek. He was a Nobel Prize winning Economist, and one of the best-known exponents of libertarian economics. This is an excellent short overview of the man and his writings.
Here's a very interesting discussion at Slate:
Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War - Iraq revisionism. By Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
These are a set of (mostly) liberals who backed the Iraq war at its start. In hindsight, they mostly seem to still think it was worth doing, but the reasons vary. An interesting read.
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything is a wonderful paper by a computer professional analyzing and explicating the current state of "literary criticism". It's very entertaining, and informative - definitely recommended.
Here's the conclusion of what is actually good in lit crit:
"Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader's credulity and willingness to accept the text's own claims as to its validity."
For what's bad, I encourage you to read the original.
Tom Friedman does it again. Here's the first of a promised series of articles on the challenge of Islamist terrorism. Thomas Friedman: War of Ideas, Part 1
Here's a key quote:
"What you are witnessing is why Sept. 11 amounts to World War III - the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years. As the longtime Middle East analyst Abdullah Schleiffer once put it to me: World War II was the Nazis, using the engine of Germany to try to impose the reign of the perfect race, the Aryan race. The cold war was the Marxists, using the engine of the Soviet Union to try to impose the reign of the perfect class, the working class. And 9/11 was about religious totalitarians, Islamists, using suicide bombing to try to impose the reign of the perfect faith, political Islam."
Doing nothing is not an option. He does an excellent job here of identifying the problem. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with for solutions.
OK - here's a commentary on "Chuck Schumer and Paul Craig Roberts rethinking the theoretical underpinnings of free trade" on the NY Times op-ed page. It provides a great, quick summary of why free trade is a good thing, and has special relevance to the outsourcing of white-collar jobs (e.g. software development) to places like India and China. Check it out at The New Republic Online: etc.
You can read Schumer's original piece here
Here's another great item from Andrew Sullivan's weblog (www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish..). I suspect all my many readers will strongly agree.
"BRITNEY'S CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT: Look, I know some of you will object to the logic, but can you not see how something like Britney Spears' insta-marriage in Las Vegas might infuriate long-committed gay couples who, even now, don't have a shred of the rights Ms Spears enjoyed for a few days? It is one thing for people to declare their commitment to traditional marriage - i.e. procreative, life-long, heterosexual. It is another thing when that ideal has almost no relationship to civil marriage as it now exists for straights; and when it is nevertheless used to deny gay people access to the institution. Over the holidays, I found myself watching all those VH1 list shows, and happened across the top ten or twenty (I forget which) shortest Hollywood marriages in history. Ha ha ha. We live a world in which Britney Spears just engaged in something "sacred" (in the president's words), where instant and joke hetero marriages and divorces are a subject of titillation, and where a decades-long monogamous lesbian marriage is a threat to civilization as we know it. Please. Can we have a smidgen of consistency here?" Monday, January 5, 2004
I have to add that Andrew's position has been echoed by a large number of people. Maybe the strength of the response will serve as a wake-up call to the woman herself - who knows?