Posts filed under ‘Cultural Conservatism’
Charles Dickens, Capitalist
| Peter Klein |
Did you know 2012 is the centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth? Dickens is often lumped with Carlyle, Shaw, Ruskin, etc. as a Romantic, Victorian, literary anti-capitalist. (Carlyle indeed disliked capitalism, but not for the usual reasons.) But Dickens, as I originally learned from Paul Cantor, was a wildly successful capitalist and entrepreneur, a driving force behind the great nineteenth-century innovation of the serialized, commercial novel. Consider the following from one Dickens scholar:
Stephen Marcus has called Dickens “the first capitalist of literature” in the sense that he worked within apparently adverse conditions to take advantage of new technologies and markets, creating, in effect, an entirely new role for fiction. In Charles Dickens and His Publishers, Robert Patten quotes Oscar Dystel (president and chief executive of Bantam Paperbacks) on the three “key factors” in his development of a successful paperback line: availability of new material, introduction of the rubber plate rotary press, and development of magazine wholesalers as a distribution arm. As Patten points out, parallel factors operated in the Victorian era: a plethora of writers, new technologies, and expanded distribution. And as methods of papermaking, printing, and platemaking increased in efficiency, so did means of transportation. By 1836, a crucial network of wholesale book outlets in the Strand, peddlers, provincial shops, and the royal mailmade possible by the development of paved roads, fast coaches, and eventually the national railway systemhad been consolidated. The final task facing early publishers was, then, to develop the newly accessible market for their commodity. By lowering prices, emphasizing illustrations and sensational elements, and increasing variety of both form and content, publishers created readers within the largest demographic groups: the rising middle and working classes, where readers had essentially not existed before. . . . (more…)
Somewhere Over the Rainbow!
| Peter Lewin |
I am envious. My brother in law and my nephew are in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. He is sending short reports via his Blackberry. His descriptions are graphic — he is awe-struck. Sounds incredible, beyond imagination — to those of us veteran Africans used to having to search hard for game on our game park safaris. In the Serengeti there is game in exaggerated profusion. Lions, leopards, and cheetah virtually next to each other. Huge migrations of herds, hundreds of thousands strong. A trip for a lifetime. I should live so long.
It seems clear that this wonder of nature (a giant crater-bubble full of wild life) would not exist in the absence of the revenue from international tourism. Though government managed, it is subject to vigorous competition from other game parks in that part of Africa. The area is the traditional homeland of the legendary Masai tribe, who have a cattle-based economy. Population growth, technological change, and the pace of modernity threatened to destroy their world. Now they seem to be flourishing. The Masai have turned out to be successful entrepreneurs! I wonder if this is an instance of Ostrom’s successful local initiatives.
More generally, the preservation of wild-life in Africa has turned on the successful management of a plethora of wild-life game parks (many of them quite small relatively speaking), some having the status of super luxury hotels. There is an irony in there somewhere. (I wonder what it is like to have to manage a wild-life park as a business firm).
Of course most of the environmentalists never tell you about the preservation successes of market competition.
Fundamentalism
| Peter Klein |
Wikipedia on market fundamentalism: “a pejorative term applied to an exaggerated religious-like faith in the ability of unfettered laissez-faire or free market economic views or policies to solve economic and social problems.”
Alvin Plantinga (from Tom Gilson via T-bone) on religious fundamentalism:
I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize [my model of Christian epistemology]. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term “fundamentalist.” On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like “son of a bitch,” more exactly “sonovabitch,” or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) “sumbitch.” When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of “fundamentalist” (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like “stupid sumbitch” (or maybe “fascist sumbitch”?) than “sumbitch” simpliciter. . . . The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like “stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.”
Maybe I should be more careful calling people “Keynesians.”
Most Interesting Path-Dependence Paper I Saw Today
| Peter Klein |
Just to show that econometric models apply anywhere and everywhere, check out this new Barro paper (via Danny Sokol):
Saints Marching In, 1590-2009
Robert J. Barro, Rachel M. McCleary
NBER Working Paper No. 16769
February 2011The Catholic Church has been making saints for centuries, typically in a two-stage process featuring beatification and canonization. We analyze determinants of rates of beatification and canonization (for non-martyrs) over time and across six world regions. The research uses a recently assembled data set on numbers and characteristics of beatifieds and saints chosen since 1590. We classify these blessed persons regionally in accordance with residence at death. These data are combined with time-series estimates of regional populations of Catholics, broadly-defined Protestants, Orthodox, and Evangelicals (mostly a sub-set of Protestants). Regression estimates indicate that the canonization rate depends strongly on the number of candidates, gauged by a region’s stock of beatifieds who have not yet been canonized. The beatification rate depends positively on the region’s stock of persons previously canonized. The last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI (the only non-Italians in our sample), are outliers, choosing blessed persons at a much higher rate than that of their predecessors. Since around 1900, the naming of blessed persons seems to reflect a response by the Catholic Church to competition from Protestantism or Evangelicalism. We find no evidence, at least since 1590, of competition between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
Megachurches and Management Education
| Peter Klein |
This month’s Fast Company profiles Willow Creek, perhaps the world’s most famous megachurch. The article opens by describing a conversation between Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels and management guru Peter Drucker:
Hybels decided that one of his unique contributions [to ministry] could be to create a resource for pastors who didn’t have firsthand access to thinkers like Drucker. The need was clear. A 1993 survey of evangelical pastors by seven seminaries found that while they said their education had prepped them well in church history and theology, they felt undertrained in administration, management, and strategic planning. “In the 1950s, a pastor preached on Sundays, did weddings and funerals, and visited the sick,” says Dennis Baril, senior pastor of the Community Covenant Church in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, which hosts a satellite summit site every year. “I have almost 50 ministries that need to be put together, scheduled, organized, and led. It’s a different skill set.”
Church conferences did little to address that need. “Most of them are pastors learning from pastors,” says Jim Mellado, who wrote a 1991 Harvard Business School case study on Willow Creek. “If you only hear preaching from the choir, you’re never stretched. You never see things from another perspective.”
Sounds a bit like university administrators, most of whom learn administration from, well, other university administrators. (Who may have been English professors in a previous life.)
Here’s the HBS case on Willow Creek, and here are Mike Porter’s PowerPoint slides from his 2007 presentation at Willow Creek’s leadership summit. Interesting factoid from the Economist via Wikipedia: in 2007, five of the world’s ten largest Protestant churches were in South Korea.
In Defense of English
| Peter Klein |
Co-bloggers Nicolai and Lasse probably speak better English than I do, despite the handicap of Scandinavian birth, but I sure like it. So does Rishidev Chaudhuri:
To me, the most striking thing about English is its diversity of vowels, something I only noticed after many years of speaking the language. English, in many dialects, has about 15 vowels (not counting diphtongs). Listen to the vowels through these words: a, kit, dress, trap, lot, strut, foot, bath, nurse, fleece, thought, goose, goat, north. There are languages that have more (Germanic ones tend to be vowel rich), but there aren’t many of them, and none that I know well enough to frame a sentence in. And compare this vowel list to the relative paucity of vowels in so many other languages. Hindi really has only about 9 or 10 vowels; Bengali, which has lost several long-short distinctions has slightly fewer (though lots of diphtongs). Some languages (including these two) do include extra vowels formed by nasalizing existing ones; these nasalized vowels often sound lovely, but feel very similar to their base vowels. It’s more a flourish than a genuinely new creation. Japanese and Spanish have about 4 or 5 apiece, and I’m told that Mandarin and Arabic have about 6.
English, then, is capable of exceptionally rich assonance and exuberant plays on vowel sound.
I mean, savor the delights of “methodological individualism” or “apodictic certainty” or “heteroskedasticity consistent standard errors” and tell me it isn’t sheer poetry!
Most Courageous Person in Academia?
| Nicolai Foss |
Here.
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“De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum”?
| Nicolai Foss |
History of econ nerds (wonks?) will know that John Stuart Mill was trained by his father (James Mill) from the age of three in the Greek and Latin languages. Since Mill, economists’ Latin capabilities have deteriorated rather badly (a result of the dominance of Greek notation? ;-)). In fact, most economists only know two Latin sentences (or rather, dicta) that, however, they love to blurt out, often with a smug smile. One is a sound analytical principle, namely the ceteris paribus principle. The other is a much more problematic (if applied outside of economics) claim, made famous to economists by George Stigler and Gary Becker, namely ”de gustibus non est disputandum.”
I have always been surprised by the readiness of many economists to endorse this claim as a general claim that goes beyond the simple implication that in economics we take preferences as given and applies on the aesthetic domain (perhaps this simply reflects the fact that many people nowadays subscribe to total or near-total relativism in aesthetics). However, understood as an aesthetic claim, “de gustibus non est disputandum” lies entirely outside of the orbit of economics (and economists-as-economists should shut up), and is emphatically not implied by subjective value theory, or any related branch of subjectivism in economics. (more…)
The Fate of Famous Economists
| Peter Klein |
Even very famous ones. The Dundee Courier (what, you don’t read it?) reports that Adam Smith’s gravestone, in the courtyard of Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, is in bad shape: “Smith’s gravestone could be in danger of deterioration after years of exposure to the elements, vandalism and neglect” (HT: MGK). According to a spokesperson for the World Monument Fund, cemeteries in the central parts of cities like Edinburgh have become “unsafe environment[s] home to illicit activities.” Apparently David Hume’s grave, elsewhere in Edinburgh, is also threatened. How ironic that we put dead politicians in great cathedrals and mausoleums (and, while living, give them Nobel Prizes), while actual heroes are abandoned and forgotten.
An Obamanable Housing Plan
| Peter Klein |
So, let me get this straight. We’re in a major recession triggered by a collapse in the housing market, itself the inevitable result of government policies, led by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to get the wrong loans to the wrong people so they could buy the wrong houses. The Obama Administration’s remedy is not to let Fannie and Freddie die a long-overdue and merciful death, but to prop them up, to give them additional powers, and to subsidize private mortgage lenders who extend yet more credit to more borrowers who can’t pay it back, thus making what might have been a temporary misallocation of the housing stock into a permanent one. Brilliant!
I am bewildered. But, more than that, I am angry. I can’t count how many news accounts I’ve seen about the poor, struggling homeowners who can’t make the monthly mortgage payment, are about to be foreclosed, and risk losing the family home, yard, white picket fence, and piece of the American Dream. But I haven’t heard one word about the poor, struggling renters, the ones who scrimped and saved and put money away each month towards a down payment, who kept the credit cards paid off, stayed out of trouble, and lived modestly, and thought that maybe, just maybe, the fall in housing prices meant that they, finally, could afford a house — maybe one of those foreclosed units down the street. These people are Bastiat’s unseen. For them, Obama’s housing plan is a giant slap in the face. To hell with the prudent. Party on, profligate! Now that’s what I call moral hazard.
Update: Here it is in pictures (from EconomiPicData via Wayne Marr).
Think Globally, Drink Locally
| Peter Klein |
Railing against corporate dictatorship, delocator.net helps consumers find locally-owned cafes, bookstores, and movie theatres in their area — alternatives to the “invasion” of Starbucks, Borders, and their ilk. The site itself is actually quite an interesting capitalist idea in its freshness and creativity, and people certainly should eat or drink or shop where they are most comfortable. That’s the beauty of competition! And the kind of community-building that often takes place at familiar, time-tested, local shops is to be encouraged.
But to say local businesses possess some kind of moral magic simply by virtue of being family-owned and homey is preposterous.
That’s Brooke Levitske, writing on the Acton PowerBlog. Recently a friend asked what I thought of Wendell Berry and his agrarian, anti-industrial philosophy. My response was similar: If people wish to live according to these principles, more power to them. I object only when materialist urbanites are forbidden by law from pursuing their own path to enlightenment.
Incidentally, does anyone remember the WSJ article a few years back suggesting that local cafes benefit when Starbucks moves to town? The theory is that the presence of a Starbucks increases local demand for premium coffee, providing spillover benefits to local stores. I haven’t seen any systematic evidence on this, however.
Jewish Economic Theory
| Peter Klein |
Five principles of Jewish economic theory, as described in Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myths from Reality by Corinne Sauer and Robert M. Sauer (forthcoming from the Acton Institute):
- Work, creative activity, and innovation are the avenues through which the divine image is expressed.
- Private property rights are essential and must be protected.
- The accumulation of wealth is a virtue not a vice.
- Man has an obligation to care for the needy through charitable giving.
- Government is inefficient and concentrated power is dangerous.
Sauer and Sauer compare this passage in 1 Samuel to Hayek’s warnings in The Road to Serfdom: (more…)
TV Dinners . . . and Non-TV Dinners
| Chihmao Hsieh |
Remember the times when families would get together at the dinner table for a meal and little Johnny would yell out, “Can we turn on the TV during dinner?” Ah yes, those were the good ol’ days.
How 1990s.
Nowadays, as highlighted in this AP article released today, television is not only losing its grip on families but also on individuals. (more…)
Mel Gibson and Social Category Bias
| Peter Klein |
Back to cognitive biases and heuristics. One interesting and common example is a sort of stereotype or social category bias. To make sense out of complex information about people we often think in terms of clusters of attributes, assuming that individuals possessing one trait in the cluster possess the other traits as well. Economics professors, for example, tend to be logical, systematic, nerdy, and socially awkward. If we meet someone who is logical, systematic, and nerdy, we assume he is also socially awkward, even without knowing anything specific about his social skills.
This came to my mind last fall when when reading about Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto. Gibson’s Passion of the Christ made him a hero among conservative Christians. In promoting Apocalypto, an action-adventure set during the twilight of the Mayan empire, Gibson was harshly critical of the Bush White House, likening the US invasion and occupation of Iraq to Mayan imperialism and the death of US soldiers to Mayan human sacrifice. In response, the conservative film critic Michael Medved accused Gibson of selling out to “Hollywood liberals.” (more…)
See, We Can Study Religion Too
| Peter Klein |
Dan Hammond shows how economists approach religion with this cheeky summary of Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison’s Marketplace of Christianity (MIT, 2006).
The Roman Catholic Church had an enviable monopoly for centuries, so powerful that it was able to engage in first degree price discrimination. Like all monopolists, though, it struggled with technical inefficiency and potential entry. The former manifested itself in excess capital investment in beautiful cathedrals and paintings. To forestall entry it practiced usual monopolistic techniques such as limit pricing, but also tortured and killed competitors. By the end of the fifteenth century the Vatican’s pursuit of ever larger monopoly rents against the background of technological progress (the printing press) set the stage for successful entry by an entrepreneurial monk named Martin Luther. Once Luther’s firm got a foothold, all hell broke loose. Actually, it was not all hell; it was all heaven. For as every student of economics learns, when monopoly gives way to competition consumer surplus expands. There were direct gains for consumers as the price fell from the breakup of the Catholic monopoly and, in addition, the entrants lowered real production costs.
The latter welfare gains warrant explanation. What happened is that the entry of Protestant firms reduced the real cost of itch relief by doing away with ornate churches, daily masses, pilgrimages, sacraments, and middlemen confessors. This is a classic case of efficiency gains from entrepreneurial innovation, not unlike the more recent case of Wal-Mart.
And you wonder why people worry about economic imperialism?
Galileo in Popular Culture
| Peter Klein |
Brief follow-up to our earlier post on the Galileo Legend. Happened to catch on the radio today “Galileo” by the Indigo Girls, from their 1992 album Rites of Passage. The song opens thusly:
Galileo’s head was on the block
the crime was looking up for truth
and as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
I try to trace them to my youth
The chorus, a fortiori, makes Galileo into a sort of secular saint:
How long till my soul gets it right
can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of Galileo
king of night vision, king of insight
I’ll buy the “king of night vision” part — Galileo’s greatest achievement, after all, was his improvements to the telescope — but “king of insight” seems a little extreme. (It’s a catchy tune, however.)
The Dark Side of Charisma
| Peter Klein |
Entrepreneurship has been described as charismatic leadership or charistmatic authority. But what exactly is charisma?
The WSJ’s Saturday edition reviews Philip Rieff’s posthumously published Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us. Rieff, the distinguished cultural sociologist who taught at Brandeis, Berkeley, Harvard, and Penn, began the book in the late 1960s but went on to other projects, completing it just before his death earlier this year. Reviewer Adam Wolfson describes the book as a jeremiad against popular culture, much like Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. (more…)
Religion and the Market
| Cliff Grammich |
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has announced its 2006 Templeton Enterprise Award winners. The awards are “presented annually to scholars under forty who have produced the very best books and articles in the field of humane economics and culture over the past two years.” Many of the honored works, e.g., Thomas Woods’ The Church and the Market, provide an interesting reconciliation of (Catholic) Church teaching with free market economics, drawing inferences one won’t typically see in staff work of the bishops’ conferences.
Do I Need an (Ideological) Affirmation?
| Steven Postrel |
Arnold Kling has proposed that “libertarian conservatives” form an “Ideological Affirmation Task Force” (IATF) and requested comments on an initial draft of such an affirmation. Borrowing the lingo of Internet governance, he calls this an “IATF RFC.” I loosely qualify to be part of the interested group, so here are a few random thoughts, not a systematic treatise, on his first draft (which is a quick read, so you might want to look at it): (more…)
Social Capital and Diversity
| Peter Klein |
Speaking of social capital. . . . In case you missed it, there was a recent flap over research by Robert Putnam purportedly showing that racial and ethnic diversity is harmful to social capital. A Financial Times column broke the story in October 2006, implying that Putnam — feeling guilty about the study’s politically incorrect implications — was delaying or suppressing the results. Putnam put out a press release claiming the newspaper report was one-sided, though not addressing the claim that he was holding back the findings.
Steve Sailer calls Putnam’s remarks to the FT, while in Sweden to receive a prize for his work in Bowling Alone, “one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists.” Arnold Kling thinks Putnam is a publicity hound who “position[s] his research in ways to maximize sensationalist coverage, and then complain[s] about sensationalist coverage.”
“Atheist” Academics
| Cliff Grammich |
Peter kindly draws my attention to a study by Neil Gross at Harvard and Solon Simmons at George Mason, released last fall but discussed this week here, here, and here, about religiosity of American professors. Among the findings: (more…)
The Galileo Legend
| Peter Klein |
We noted previously how little most practicing scientists know about the history and philosophy of science. In many cases this is harmless; does the average chemist really need to know Lavoisier from Priestly? However, when scientists speak and write about the meaning of science, the role of science in society, public policy toward science, and such broader issues, such ignorance can be devastating.
An example is the legend that Galileo Galilei was persecuted by the Catholic Church for his heretical belief that the earth revolves around the sun. In popular myth Galileo represents the lone crusader, the revolutionary with the courage to speak out against the Establishment and the popular fallacies of his day. Don Boudreaux titles an (otherwise excellent) item on free trade “What Galileo Must Have Felt,” writing that “[w]hen I read or hear protectionists such as Sen. Byron Dorgan, I think that I can imagine what Galileo felt as he listened to the Leaders of his day insist that the sun revolves around the earth.”
The problem is that the leaders of Galileo’s day didn’t think the sun revolves around the earth. My former colleague Thomas Lessl is an expert on Galileo, and from him I learned that virtually every aspect of the Galileo legend is false. (more…)
Transaction Costs and the Church
| Peter Klein |
James Emery White, president of the highly regarded Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, is thinking about Ronald Coase. In a year-end reflection he writes that the most important phenomena of 2006, for religious organizations, may be the wiki, the blog, and the virtual firm.
[W]hat began with eBay, MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube may not stop with revolutionizing how companies such as Goldcorp or Proctor and Gamble operate (or are even identified). The heart of the change involves the ever-widening rejection of professional/intellectual elites, and the diminution of those organizations which exist as either the gathering of such elites, or serve as the repositories of their supposedly exclusive knowledge. Further, those organizations that were once thought necessary for basic transactions of other natures — such as communal transactions — may also face a rude awakening.
Such as the church.
As posed by [an article in] USA Today, “So if a core reason companies exist is to lower transaction costs, what happens if that reason goes away?” Do we have reasons for such institutions as a school, newspaper, court of law, or church beyond “transaction costs?” And my great fear is for the church, particularly in light of the woefully inadequate and often heretical ecclesiology present within the Christian faith at large which is already reducing both the value and definition of the church to utilitarian forms.
The economics of religion is a growing field (see Larry Iannaccone’s resource page), but I’m not aware of much work by economists or sociologists on the impact of technology on the existence, boundaries, an internal structure of religious organizations. Any suggestions?
Who Really Cares?
| Nicolai Foss |
Danish party politics is essentially all a variation on one basic theme. Thus, we have extreme left social democrats, less lefty social democrats, middle-of-the-road social democrats, and conservative social democrats. The conservatism of the latter, currently in power, lies in their wish to keep the total tax burden at its current level (which given the recently announced Swedish tax cuts will make Denmark the World leader in income taxation). The other social democrats essentially wish to let the tax burden increase, and few see any problems with a marginal tax rate that goes into the 70s and beyond. All in the name of equality, of course.
Recently, the minister of social affairs made a major faux pas that upset virtually everyone. She argued that economic equality should not be seen as an independent policy goal. Her political life barely survived the media turmoil that immediately arose. The predictable “jungle law,” “heartless market mentality,”"egoistic conservatism,” etc. labels were applied to the minister’s apostasy. The moral outrage was immense.
Enter Arthur C. Brook’s Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism which I am reading at the moment. It amounts to a frontal, data-based attack on the ideology that underlies redistributionism, that is,”in lieu of statist redestribution, nobody would really care for the poor, and most certainly not conservatives and libertarians.” (more…)
Pomo Periscope III: From Sex and the City to Spengler
| Nicolai Foss |
Although it lies somewhat outside the scope of the Pomo Periscope (cf. this and this), Steven LaTulippe has an interesting commentary, “Statism, Post-Modernism, and the Death of the Western World,” at LewRockwell.com that simultaneously blasts post-modernism and defends cultural conservatism, while reaching from “Sex and the City” (here is another great blasting of that show) to Oswald Spengler. It is a bit like “Scruton light.” (more…)
Economics and Literature
| Peter Klein |
Lest the “Pomo Periscope” series below make you think we at O&M are anti-literary or anti-narrative, let me tell you about one of my favorite literary scholars, University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor. A specialist in Shakespeare and English Romanticism, Cantor has recently begun writing about the relationship between literature and economic theory (and, in his Gilligan Unbound, the relationship between economics and pop culture).
Cantor burst on the (economics) scene with a 1994 article in the Review of Austrian Economics, “Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics.” Focusing on Mann’s 1925 short story “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” set in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, Cantor explores the parallels between hyperinflation and “hyperreality,” the condition of being unable to distinguish fact from fiction. “If modernity is characterized by a loss of the sense of the real,” writes Cantor, “this fact is connected to what has happened to money in the twentieth century.” Mann’s story, as interpreted by Cantor, illustrates how closely the commercial and cultural worlds are linked. (Cantor has also written about the economic views of such diverse literary and cultural figures as Percy Bysshe Shelley and W. C. Fields.)
Here is a series of Cantor lectures from a July 2006 seminar on “Commerce and Culture.” Topics include “The Economic Basis of Culture”; “The Economics of Painting: Patronage vs. the Market”; “The Economics of Classical Music: Patronage vs. the Market”; “The Economics of Modernism”; and “Totalitarianism and the Arts in the 20th Century.” All are well worth watching.
Politically Incorrect Entrepreneur of the Year
| Peter Klein |
A German entrepreneur wants to create a nostalgic smokers’ haven above the clouds by starting a nicotine-friendly airline offering Cuban cigars, caviar and flight attendants in designer uniforms — as well as smoking allowed in every seat.
Thanks to Lew Rockwell for the link. Incidentally, starting in January 2007 smokers in my town of Columbia, Missouri, will be banned from all restaurants, bars, and even the most sacred space of any American college town — the football stadium.
Scruton
| Nicolai Foss |
The Mission Statement of O&M stipulates that we occassionally discuss cultural conservatism. We do so too rarely, so the following is an attempt to meet that stipulation.
I am admirer of the British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton (Scruton’s homepage is here; check out his hilarious cv). Although I have not bought fully into Scrutonian conservatism (I have problems with his excessive statism — plus I just don’t get his love for Wagner!), I find him to be an extremely profound and challenging writer. One of the very few contemporary conservative thinkers worth taking seriously (e.g., see this and this). And if you really want cultural conservatism, this is it!. (more…)
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