Posts tagged writings

Some reactions:

• I was initially, wowed. It’s hard not to get swept up by Obama. His nuanced explication of the American creed and his ability to capture ‘the moment’ in words are second to none. I thought the end of his speech with his line about “We did not come here to fear the future; we came here to shape it,” was particularly powerful.

• It was a remarkable political tactic to “level” on the issue of tort reform / malpractice reform while not actually including anything in the plan. Subconsciously, anyone going back to read past critiques of this plan that derided it’s failure to address tort reform will have in the back of her mind, “yes, but he knows about that and will address it.” Obama is often at his best when he’s in his “I’m now leveling with you modes,” a zone he entered often and effectively in this speech.

• It’s completely unclear to me or any rational being why there would ever need to be a “public option” that is entirely unsubsidized, as Obama suggests it would be. Wouldn’t such an entity be a perfect candidate for a… nonprofit? Besides, why is the “public option” getting only 5% of the market? is it a bad plan? If so, why are we creating it? None of this made sense to me, and I suspect it doesn’t actually make sense to Obama; he just had to make one last, lackluster defense of a doomed idea.

• I don’t think Obama is leveling with us on costs… or the lack of benefit cuts. One or the other, not both. We shouldn’t be ‘saving money’ by expanding care to 30 million uninsured… and frankly, it’s fine if we’re not. If there are actual cost-cutting measures in the bill (I didn’t hear much about them, and magic expert panels don’t count), we don’t need to pretend that expanding coverage is one of them. Let’s put a price tag on universal coverage and admit that’s what we need to pay for a more humane society.

• I still don’t understand why we need employers involved in providing health insurance. If there’s going to be an exchange where individuals and small businesses can purchase competitively priced insurance plans, why go through the hassle of policing & fining employers? Why not just let those who aren’t being provided for by their employers just purchase through the exchange?

• Overall, Obama is pursuing a sub-optimal policy direction; I wish we were headed for what’s optimal (my comments after you read that link: yes, I do think people can make choices about their health care. yes, I think they would make mistakes, but so would the government. yes, sometimes people would have to forego care because they don’t want to spend money. yes, that person is in a better position to judge how to allocate his/her money than any of the alternatives).

• Something’s going to get passed… on balance, probably a good thing…

• I am not an expert on health care policy, and I have no idea why I just wrote this.

A final note: Keith Olbermann is a bully. No sooner did that poor Louisiana congressman Charles Boustany finish the Republican response, than Olbermann blurts, “This man has been sued for medical malpractice 3 times. He is a birther…” …and then I changed the channel. As if Boustany was relying on his eminent ‘stature’ viz the President to make his case on health care. Olbermann didn’t need to sink so low, as he too often does, to dismiss what was already a hapless effort.

An “Energy Instititute” was somewhat of an inside joke on the Crimson editorial board. We loved the idea, and advocated for it in several staff editorials:

Given the profound impact the academy can have on defusing potentially cataclysmic situations involving the global use of energy, Harvard should bring these scholars under one roof by creating a center for energy studies.

Once hubs for the confluence of ideas, modern universities have evolved into institutions fragmented by the bureaucracy of school, departmental, and research affiliations. Enter the peculiar institution of the research center, which circumvents arbitrary divisions on the organizational chart.

Yet, as the above excerpt suggests, more than anything else we wrote about, we felt we were shouting in the wind. In the often archaic departmental structures of Harvard, there simply was no natural advocate for such an institute. If it ever were to happen, we believed, it would have to come straight from the top, from someone more concerned the university’s overall interest than protecting an individual silo. And at the time, Harvard’s top honcho was embroiled in controversy.

So, over at the Crimson ed board, during the rare times when we were at a loss for words, calls to advocate for an “Energy Institute” would always draw hopeless chuckles.

Kudos to Stanford for pulling it off.

Nota bene: Adam Guren, who more ably co-chaired the editorial board the year after I did and is now a Harvard economcis PhD student, sent this to me in an email with the subject “Stanford took our Idea.” He is on top of my list of people to draft into (tum)blogging. This is a good list to have (see: Correspondence is Making a Comeback). I’ll formalize it somewhere sometime soon.

Ezra Klein joins the media chorus criticizing Israel’s “disproportionate response” to the Hamas missile attacks, but doesn’t really care to unpack what the argument actually means.

The notion that Israel ought to be faulted for responding “disproportionately,” presumes that there ought to have been some other, “proportionate” response. What exactly would that response be? Send missiles indiscriminantly back towards Palestinian citizens in Gaza? Then what? Wait for Hamas to escelate, and escelate “proportionately”?

When, in the history of mankind, has a sovereign nation ever defended itself under such a principle? Should the U.S. have met Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with a “proportionately” weak army? What would it even have meant to confront Nazi Germany “proportionately”? The bizarenesss of the questions belie the inanity of the proposal itself.

Hamas’ goal is clearly stated in its charter: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” In this context, Israel would appear to be reacting with disportionate restraint by not responding likewise.

But then again, proportionality, has never been, and will never be, an appropriate criteria for persuing national defense. So, please, let’s disabuse ourselves of the false standard.

Fred Wilson made an insightful post today about how correspondence is making a comeback. His points about how writing itself is being rediscovered by a mass audience are well made, but I think there’s also something even more fundamental changing about the changing nature of communication - whether it be expressed via the written word, images, videos, or anything else.

In particular, beyond merely encouraging writing, social media and personal publishing have enabled and popularized an entirely new paradigm of communication: one-to-one-to-many communciation, or what might traditionally be understood as an ‘open letter.’

An open letter is “a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally” (Wikipedia). Some significant percentage of communication that, even in the very recent past, would have been reserved for one-to-one exchanges are now often occuring publicly, with dual intended audiences, for the world to see.

The result is that everyone can gain from what person A has to say to person B. And person C can interject and join what would otherwise be an 1-to-1 conversation, and make it a genuine group discussion.

The rise of blogs and social networking profiles have essentially given each of us a forum from which to send and receive open letters. And we now receiving them all the time: wall posts, blog comments, and twitter @replies. All of these forms of communication, by their very nature encourage us to share with the world our direct communications with another individual.

Sure, some of the exchanges are frivilous (birthday wishes on your facebook wall) and the social dynamic that underlies many of these exchanges have their own pecularity (why does someone write on my wall that it was nice seeing me last night?), but beyond the noise, vast amounts of useful information that would otherwise be hidden are being exposed.

Just this week, for instance, I left a blog comment seeking further explication about a blog post by Dennis Mortensen on social networking metrics. I wrote an ‘open letter’ to him, and he responded with an ‘open letter’ back. Everyone, forever, can benefit from our exchange. We’re only scratching the surface in the rise of open letter communications.

“I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That’s what kind of man I am. You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It’s science.”

-Lawrence H. Summers*

No, the New York Times didn’t attribute this quote to Summers, but it’s come pretty darn close - twice. In its story reporting Lawrence Summers’ impending appointment as head of the NEC, the New York Times gives us this gem on Summers’ background:

“After leaving government in 2001, he was president of Harvard for five years but resigned after clashing with faculty over his remarks suggesting that women lack the intrinsic aptitude for math and science.”

One would think Summers were a bonafide Archie Bunker. It’s about time the media dispensed with its laziness with respect to this story. Summers did not say that women were incapable of doing math and science. Summers did say that there is evidence to suggest that the variance in scientific and mathematical aptitude is greater for men than it is to women (leading to a statistical likelihood that there are more males at both ends of the bell curve).

Now, that sort of explanation may be too much for a brief hard news piece on the appointment. But that’s no excuse for butchering the truth. Especially when it comes on the heals of another piece in which Tamar Lewin of the NYT completely misses the mark (and that’s perhaps, too generous a description) in interpreting the study that vindicated Summers’ view (here’s the original NYT piece).

Full disclosure: my own views on the whole Summers debacle are well-documented. I was the editorial chair of the Harvard Crimson during the whole mess. Summers certainly made his mistakes, and, in fact, I count this statement among them. We just don’t need shoddy journalism making Summers out to be a bigot rather than a flawed leader.

* actual quote is from Ron Burgundy in Anchorman