“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” — Robert Anson Heinlein via Rules for My Unborn Son
The Economist: Jay Rosen on the Media -
Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama is a Muslim or wasn’t born in the United States start winning, and more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren’t “wrong”, they’re just limited. The American press does not know what to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and “report both sides” reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there are such limits. But with this denial they’ve violated the code of the truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?
It’s quite possible this industry is not entirely stable.
This is an excellent piece from Paul Krugman that essentially states the obvious:
This isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters.
He rightfully points out that GDP growth means nothing at this point. Whether GDP is at +2% or -2% does not matter because our unemployment numbers are not coming down. We need jobs, not “productivity.”
I’d like to add that many of his proposed ideas are (obviously) smart, but they are all short-term strategies. We can toy with interest rates and change perceptions on inflation, but at the end, those are just numbers games. If we want to spur real growth, we need to invest in long-term assets: infrastructure and human capital.
We need to invest in infrastructure because such investment not only creates jobs in the short term, but improves our societal quality of life in the long term. Not to mention that businesses flock to communities with stronger infrastructure.
Also, we need a more productive education system that will make our citizenry smart and competitive again. Without this, jobs will continue to head overseas.
Unfortunately, these may not spur GDP growth in the near term, so our myopic policy-makers are most likely considering other options.