if you go down to bretton woods today...
Aug. 27th, 2008 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dubdobdeemummy bear
daddy bear [edit: may be better to start with this one!]**
(baby bear to follow, we're promised)
why i prefer stirling newberry to eg krugman:
ok SN is NOT an elegant or a clear writer -- he sure doesn't have krugman's gifts as a columnist -- but i think krugman, though currently gloomy, still has an "oh ultimately things will work themselves out" bias (the assumption that capitalism is self-correcting is endemic to economics as a post-marxist discipline); newberry seems to rely too much on the glamour of disciplinary jargon to lay out a far darker picture, but my sense* from the density of his argument is that these questions he's raising go untranslated because they're not being addressed (if they were easily dismissed within the jargon, they already would have been; if they were discussed outside the jargon in the terms he's discussing them, they would be easy to translate); i have no idea if he's correct on the merits, but i want the questions he raises squarely faced -- this facing would require the jargon he relies to be brought alive (i don't want it dropped necessarily, i want it animated) in the process of the broader public discussion
*(this sense based solely on my intuitions as a sub editor routinely tasked with clarifying the arguments of others, in areas where they are experts (or claim to be) and i am not: these intuitions MAY BE FALLIBLE obviously)
**(haha maybe i should provide a really tough sub-and-proof!!)
daddy bear [edit: may be better to start with this one!]**
(baby bear to follow, we're promised)
why i prefer stirling newberry to eg krugman:
ok SN is NOT an elegant or a clear writer -- he sure doesn't have krugman's gifts as a columnist -- but i think krugman, though currently gloomy, still has an "oh ultimately things will work themselves out" bias (the assumption that capitalism is self-correcting is endemic to economics as a post-marxist discipline); newberry seems to rely too much on the glamour of disciplinary jargon to lay out a far darker picture, but my sense* from the density of his argument is that these questions he's raising go untranslated because they're not being addressed (if they were easily dismissed within the jargon, they already would have been; if they were discussed outside the jargon in the terms he's discussing them, they would be easy to translate); i have no idea if he's correct on the merits, but i want the questions he raises squarely faced -- this facing would require the jargon he relies to be brought alive (i don't want it dropped necessarily, i want it animated) in the process of the broader public discussion
*(this sense based solely on my intuitions as a sub editor routinely tasked with clarifying the arguments of others, in areas where they are experts (or claim to be) and i am not: these intuitions MAY BE FALLIBLE obviously)
**(haha maybe i should provide a really tough sub-and-proof!!)
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 03:34 pm (UTC)(but i agree that newberry fudges the requirement to say why he's not a counterexample clearly: i suspect from other things he's written elsewehere that "impeachment" is a massively compressed metonym for the failure of the analog media's to grasp the dynamics of the situation, economic OR political at the time --- he's very much an internet-culture booster -- and thus extrapolating from obama's uneasy and rather controlling relationship with this new polity back to an analogy with the gap between the clinton administration's relative voter popularity, and failure to get any kind of decent break from the established "grown-up" media) (thusly: an obama boom when it falters will NOT have generated old-media love and will not effectively harness new-media solidarity: result = after obama another republican)
but i think this metonymy -- and this entire argument -- operates more in his head not on paper anywhere!