How Much Do I Love The Economist?

While I was an international relations student in the early 90s, the saying used to be that if you wanted to be a Foreign Service Officer, you had to read The Economist magazine or the New York Times every week for a year (every single printed word). If you did that, the conventional wisdom went, you were sure to have an FSO business card.

Since the New York Times has fallen on hard times, I suspect students today have dropped it from the list, but I am certain the belief in The Economist still persists.

Anyway, I never became an FSO (the Internet boom intervened), but I did start reading it every week and have never stopped. It is simply the best magazine published today. I could wax on and on about how great it is and why, but I will give one reason here:

The book review section is totally awesome. For example, the review of Alan Greenspan’s new book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World in the most recent issue (here) is perfect.

Plus, how much do I want to read Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy by Eric D. Weitz? A lot. Not because the review (here) is glowing, but because it is a perfect review.

Alan Greenspan Is Super Cool

The sage of our former times has been on the circuit hawking his new book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.

He was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart a couple nights ago (video clip here). His interview reminded me a little bit of what Albert Einstein said about understanding politics. Einstein said (paraphrasing) that math was much easier to understand than people.

Anyway, Greenspan said just about the same thing. He said (paraphrasing) that we rely on giant reams of data, because people make no sense.

Also, from what I understand, in Greenspan’s book he describes wooing his wife with an essay on the Sherman Antitrust Act. That is pretty funny.

Anyway, I’ve got to get the book!

Leslie Bennetts, Vicki Iovine and Ayn Rand?

I wrote about The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts here and have been following her various appearances (for example, her debate with Elissa Schappell on BookTV and on The Huffington Post).

She does insist that her book is not another lob in the “Mommy Wars” and I think that is probably true. Beloved “Girlfriend” herself, Vicki Iovine has a similar message (in that she says "it can be done") in many of her books including The Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood where she writes:

About half of all mothers return to work within the first year after giving birth, and another big chunk will return when the child is old enough for nursery school or kindergarten, so you know it can be done. Not only can it be done, it can actually be fulfilling and an essential part of your life, but we Girlfriends feel it’s our duty to tell you:

IN THE BEGINNING, GOING BACK TO WORK WILL NEARLY KILL YOU (emphasis Iovine’s). (223-224)

Now, while lots of people absolutely love Iovine, Ayn Rand is a much maligned voice for a bunch of reasons, but not necessarily known for her thoughts on motherhood specifically. In a giant book (Atlas Shrugged) she managed to insert a couple lines about work and motherhood.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley – two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have to look she had seen in the children of the outer world – a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value…(274)

I am not an Ayn Rand expert by any means, but her basic idea is that all work should be compensated with money and not to receive money for labor is to disrespect your human identity. She and Bennetts have a lot in common.

The Feminine Mistake

I first learned about The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts when I read a review of it in the Washington Post here. Suitably intrigued, I picked it up and read.

The Feminine Mistake darts around like a minnow and continually circles back to a couple of core points. It is a little Momento-ish since each chapter reads like the first, which can be disorienting, but, ultimately, it drives home her main point.

Bennetts main point is that “stay-at-home wives” (a term she uses frequently) risk financial security when they become economically dependent on someone else. Basically, the old “a man isn’t a plan”.

But, this is the thing, “a job isn’t a plan” either. The logic doesn’t flow straight to financial security from staying employed. Lots of people make lots of money and are still not secure in their future because they don’t have an actual financial plan. I think “only a plan is a plan”.

Exercise guru Bill Phillips said “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Even though he wasn’t referring to money, I think that might be better advice to take to the bank.

That all being the case, I did like the general “you can do it” (succeed) theme of the book. It is a welcome message when many people say “it can’t be done”.

The Feminine Mistake is over 300 pages long, but I would say the entire word of caution that she is preaching can be summarized in this giant quote:

Given the likelihood that you will have to fend for yourself at some point in the future, protect yourself against economic hardship by maintaining the capacity to support yourself. Protect your children by making sure you can take care of them financially should anything happen to their father. Protect your future happiness against the nagging doubts harbored by frustrated stay-at-home mothers who can’t shake the guilt and regret they feel about failing to explore their full potential. Protect yourself against the desolation of the empty nest, which inflicts the deepest sense of loss on full-time mothers with no other identity or outlets to sustain them. Protect your older self against the feelings of uselessness and isolation experienced by so many women who didn’t cultivate meaningful work that could nourish them in their later years. (317)

Freakonomics

While Freakonomics is by some definition an economics book and purists might say that the study of economics has nothing to do with useful math, when I read it all I keep thinking was “lies, damn lies and statistics”.

Admittedly, it is an entertaining book and has been on the NY Times hardcover non-fiction best seller list for over 90 weeks (in February occupying the 11th spot). But, I can’t help but thinking that it is a gimmicky mind game book intended to “show” that correlations and regression analysis are tools to prove anything you want – especially if it is shocking.

Ultimately, the book makes me think that economics is not the dismal science, but the silly science.