As you can tell from my first post, I’m deeply suspicious of irony, and so I loved Christy Wampole’s courageously non-ironic article for NYT’s Opinionator. “Ironic living is a first-world problem,” she writes. “For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses.” The solution, she quotes a friend, is that “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.” Read the whole thing and let me know if you agree.
Month: November 2012
Compassion vs. Price-Gouging
In most cases where the the politicians debate about policy they can usually cite a bevy of economic experts, academic papers, and think-tank research to bolster their respective positions, but there are some issues where the experts pretty much all agree and the politicians don’t want to hear it.
One fun example is the tax plan NPR asked 5 economists to create that–though it reflects pretty unanimous economic consensus–is a political non-starter with either the Democrats or the Republicans. (Hint: removing the mortgage interest tax deduction doesn’t make anyone happy.)
Another example that’s like that is price gouging.
Mind the Gaps
Every so often as a teenager I would feel overcome by personal failures. This would culminate in an evening spent in recrimination and prayer as I tried to stoke the embers of idealism against the chill of disappointment. After a few hours of listening to my favorite music, I would feel renewed fiery ambition. In that spirit of fervor, I often scribbled hasty notes full of schedules and goals to guide my new life. At last I would go to sleep secure in my hopeful exhaustion that this time would be different. And yet each time I rose the following morning to look at the notes I had left myself, they seemed as foreign as if they’d been written by an alien hand. I had passed through the low valley and traversed the high peak, and both had left me unscathed. For good or for ill nothing had changed. I was as I had always been.