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The eminent Victorian Thomas Carlyle famously castigated economics as “the dismal science.” The epithet first appeared in his 1849 screed, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” — in which the “humanist” attacked free-market economists for their role in the anti-slavery movement. For Carlyle and “progressives” such as John Ruskin and Charles Dickens, economics was dismal because it sought to replace hierarchy with democracy.

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The anti-capitalism view is an ideological fixture of our education systems at every level, from grade to graduate school.  We could call it orthodoxy if it were not so much like boilerplate.  It’s not so much argued as assumed.

Capitalism doesn’t have heroes.  It doesn’t have people called to higher motives.  It doesn’t have noble sacrifices for the good of others.  It doesn’t, usually, have daring action on a public stage.

No, capitalism is just has some guy who owns a handful of dry cleaning outfits in a small town in New Hampshire.  He works hard, supplies a service, pays off his loans, coaches Little League, goes to church, gets his kids through college, and spends his very few disposable hours on the golf course.

Script!  Casting!  Some one call the studio!   This is appalling.  It doesn’t matter that out of these mundane activities in lots of towns big and small, played out by millions of people across the US, something remarkable will come.  This just isn’t a story anyone wants to listen to.  So no one much wants to tell it.  Not Hollywood.  Not our mythmakers.  Not our story tellers.

Highly recommended.

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Apparently ace werewolf-story writer Carrie Vaughn is in the SCA.

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As is true in most times of structural change, those who figure it out (or stumble on the right answer due to a happy accident, which happens far more often – go, Darwin) will make money and survive, and the rest will fall off the cliff yelling on the way down, ‘But he doesn’t know the territory!’

Ian Murray turns over the rock.

The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report  into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.

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Whatever the new problem, environmentalists always end up back at the same old ‘solutions.’ No matter how many times green gloom is discredited, lapsing into the old eco-fundamentalism is just too irresistible.

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But it’s off-Broadway, so nobody cares.

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Texas has strict rules on home-equity lending, relative to other states, and this has helped to prevent ratios of loan size  to home value from rising as high as they have elsewhere. This is certainly worth thinking about in considering potential changes in the regulatory environment. A word of caution, however—it’s very easy to underplay the importance of both the relative strength of the Texas economy and the advantage of not having a significant housing bubble.

A lot of it’s just being a red state.

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If you think about it for a moment, you’ll figure out the source of this seeming paradox (although this simple insight did not occur to anyone before Feld published his paper in 1991).  You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends. There are 12 people who have a friend who has 12 friends, but there is only one person who has a friend who has only one friend.  And, of course, there is no one who has a friend who doesn’t have any friend.  Yet there is actually only one person who has 12 friends.  So “12” gets counted only once when you compute the average number of friends that people have, but it gets counted 12 times when you compute the average number of friends that their friends have.  Hence the seeming paradox that your friends have more friends than you do.

Happy to be here, dragging down the average for everybody.

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I’m looking forward to one that can iron shirts.

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As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.

Joel Kellum says he’s living proof that the claim is a lie.

The Other McCain overturns a rock.

Drew M. at Ace of Spades says John Cornyn is “starting to go wobbly,” which involves the wholly unwarranted assumption that Cornyn was ever steady to begin with.

Over and over, we have seen recently that Republican “leadership” in Washington is a joke, their cowardice exceeded only by their incompetence.

Preach it, brother.

Disgusting.

Another of the reasons I never practiced law.

Heh.

Getting your comeuppance in internet time. This is a great time to be alive.

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One of the reasons to have hearings on legislation is that so people who comb through it can point out hidden traps, ambiguous language, unintended consequences, etc. But large parts of the Senate bill on health care that went into law were written behind closed doors. And it shows.

Quelle surprise.

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Most people want cheap. Some people can only afford cheap. Walmart helps people maximize the return from their financial resources and all it gets is crap from the Crust.

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Just sayin’.