Nathaniel Ward

What I’m Reading — November 29th

  • Inappropriate and Unacceptable Language. “As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it. But intolerance has not been eliminated, merely thrust underground.”
  • [Dealing with America’s fiscal hole The Economist]2 “[I]gnoring the future is also costly. The problem is not the deficits in the next couple of years, but in the years that follow. Uncertainty over how taxes may be raised to shrink deficits may already be weighing on business confidence. Worries about inflation or default could start to push up interest rates. Eventually, private investment will be crowded out.”
  • East and West Berlin. “West Berlin was full of bright colors, from shop windows and pennants flying on buildings, to the clothes worn by Berliners on the street. All of the buildings in East Berlin were gray and dirty. Some were still unoccupied and had bullet holes; they had never been repaired or renovated after the end of World War II. West Berlin was full of bright, sparkling vistas and shops filled with consumer goods of all kinds. East Berlin was dark and dingy.”

What I’m Reading — November 8th

  • Unintended Consequences of Credit Card ‘Reform.’ “‘We basically socialized the bearing of the risk,’ said Ken Clayton, managing director of card policy for the American Bankers Association, a trade group. ‘That’s why good customers sometimes have to bear the cost of the risk that others pose.’”
  • Ponnuru on Repositioning Conservatism. “The [GOP] problem has instead been that voters have not thought Republicans of any stripe had answers to their most pressing concerns. Addressing those concerns, rather than repositioning itself along the ideological spectrum, is the party’s main challenge.”
  • Big Ben on Twitter

What I’m Reading — October 26th

  • Robert Samuelson on the Public Option. “The promise of the public plan is a mirage. Its political brilliance is to use free-market rhetoric (more ‘choice’ and ‘competition’) to expand government power.”
  • Unlearning the Lessons of State Health Reforms. “Despite these state-level failures, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are pushing forward a slate of similar reforms. Unlike most high-school science fair participants, they seem unaware that the point of doing experiments is to identify what actually works. Instead, they’ve identified what doesn’t—and decided to do it again.”
  • Just How Relevant Is Political Science?

What I’m Reading — October 11th

  • The New Yorker Explores What ‘Management Science’ Really Is.
  • How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect. “When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.”
  • The Administrative State Strikes Again. “We’ve long thought the Railway Labor Act should be rewritten for numerous reasons, but that is Congress’s job.”

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