“But the trouble continued to spread over the country, and there were reports of big concerns, and even banks, in trouble.” — Upton Sinclair, Oil! (1927)

No doubt there are still those who think economics is a dull, plodding technical field, akin to accounting, which pale men in green eyeshades practice somewhere in the back rooms of banks and business schools. They’re missing the best part of the story. (more…)

“Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior.” — Pierre Lévy, The Collective Intelligence

The day before the New Hampshire primary, I went with a friend to hear George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, speak at Dartmouth College.

I knew George twenty years ago, when we both worked for Harvard and he was part of that old Cambridge literary culture, which has vanished as completely as Hazen’s, rent control, and the Orson Welles Cinema.

George was interested in unfashionable things in those days: the fate of Africa (his first book was about his Peace Corps service in Togo), the U.S. role in Haiti, the roots of liberalism. At Dartmouth in 2008, though, his subject was Iraq, and he complained that the subject, a hot one in the last two election cycles, seemed suddenly A.W.O.L. during the current presidential campaign.

George Packer — a star contributor to the rapidly growing literary sub-genre
the Iraq War has become for the better class of journalists

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