CapitalistImperialistPig

Early in Confidence Men , it looks like Ron Süßkind is auditioning Larry for a villain's role. Most interesting to me was his argument that the feminism issue was a theatrical side show on the real reason Larry got the boot as President of Harvard. Susskind says or implies that the Summers' real sin was meddling in the management of Harvard's endowment by getting it into the financial derivatives market, a venture which made a bundle at first but ultimately cost 1/3 of Harvard's ginormous endowment.

Somebody noted that it's hard for Americans to get too worked up about rich guys running for President because everybody running is pretty rich compared to an average American. Determining exactly where one winds up on the income scale seems to be a bit of an inexact science, since estimates vary a bit, but to be a bare minimum one per center you need to make something like $400,000 per year. One percenters are a fairly diverse lot , but executives are the largest component by far, though large numbers of doctors, financial professionals, and some lawyers also make the cut. Add in a few actors, athletes, salesmen, lottery winners, etc. The President qualifies, probably on the basis of salary alone, but he also makes some from his book sales. The jump is steep to the next factor of ten, the 0.1%. It takes about $2 million to qualify here, and the Obamas missed last year, though not by too much. Candidate Newt Gingrich made it easily with his $5 million dollar income, but he ...

Josh Marshall : Mitt puts Newt in a crate, ties the crate to the roof of the car and starts driving the family all the way to the nomination.

I love this science video (via Andrew Sullivan ) - presented at a frenetic pace that inhibits any boredom:

If you happen to be science, the arts, politics, philosophy... Via Marginal Revolution , a new paper looks at the relationship between family psychopathology and intellectual specialization. It turns out that this idea is not exactly new: A link between intellect and temperament has long been the subject of speculation. Aristotle claimed that “those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia”, while the physician Benjamin Rush noted a link between manic episodes and “talents for eloquence, poetry, music, and painting” ... Studies of the artistically inclined report linkage with familial depression ..., while among eminent and creative scientists, a lower incidence of affective disorders is found ... In the case of developmental disorders, a heightened prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has been found in the families of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers ... These threads of evidence suggest that ...

Quote of the Day: January 25, 2012 "The history of enterprise in antiquity therefore falls naturally into two periods. First is the development of economic practices in Mesopotamia circa 3500-1200 BC. By the end of antiquity we find gain-seeking shifting away from productive enterprise to land acquisition, usury, profiteering from political office, and extraction of foreign tribute by force…" --David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, The Invention of Enterprise 12:59 AM in Books, Economics, Economics: Growth, Economics: Health | Permalink Comments Gene O'Grady said... Uh, when was this end of antiquity?

Obama hewed closely to the tradition of making the State-of-the-Union speech a sort of national soporific. Predictions that he would throw down the gauntlet to the Republicans turned out to be greatly exaggerated. The experience of watching it was sort of like paging through the more boring sections of one those mail order catalogs that specialize in stuff I would never buy.