neonvincent

Reading Noah Smith reading John Cochrane solidified a thought I’ve been grasping at for a while: the extraordinary lengths to which the Chicago School is going to avoid a straightforward interpretation of the mess we’re in.
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[A]t Chicago and elsewhere in the freshwater universe they’re playing Calvinball (and what a good coinage that was from Mike Konczal). All kinds of novel and implausible effects — effects that weren’t in any of the models they were using before the crisis — are invoked to explain why we’re in a sustained slump; strange to say, all of these newly invented models just happen to imply the need for tax cuts and a shrunken welfare state.

But I don’t think it’s just political bias: part of what’s happening, I’m sure, is intellectual embarrassment. These people come from a movement that declared, with great arrogance, that Keynesian economics was dead – then failed to produce a workable alternative, and now finds itself in what is very recognizably a Keynesian world. Recognizably, that is, to everyone but them, because admitting that Keynesian-type thinking is useful now would just be too humiliating.

The physicist Max Planck had this to say about progress in his field, "Science advances one funeral at a time." If economics works the same way, then the freshwater economists have exploited this process to make economics retreat, not advance. It will take decades of work by the saltwater economics departments churning out Ph.D.s to undo the damage.

So, Dr. Krugman, how many grad students are you advising these days?

After viewing Chrysler’s two-minute Super Bowl XLV advertisement, during which the rapper Eminem emerged not from the all-new Chrysler 300, but from a 200 sedan, some Monday-morning quarterbacks felt that the brand missed an opportunity to showcase a superior product, one deserving of the spot’s emotional impact.

Well, it is now time for the 300’s “Imported From Detroit” turn. Following a spot in which Ndamukong Suh, the Detriot Lions defensive tackle, drives a 300 home to Portland, Or., to visit his mother, Chrysler’s new flagship, which was reviewed recently in the Automobiles section, faces the most feckless, image-conscious gridiron of them all: Manhattan.

From the Cloud, Google Pulls Down an Energy Saver

Amp Delivers Its First Electric Mercedes-Benz ML Conversion

As Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors, learned during filming of “Revenge of the Electric Car,” developing an E.V. from the ground up is a prohibitively expensive exercise. Amp Electric Vehicles, an Ohio company that removes the guts of internal-combustion passenger cars and replaces them with electric powertrains, says it has a more viable way to get E.V.’s on the road, even if those roads are almost an ocean away.

On Wednesday morning at its showroom and production complex in Cincinnati, Amp executives handed over the keys of an electric Mercedes-Benz ML 350 to the company’s newest and biggest client, Gisli Gislason, the chairman and chief executive of Northern Lights Energy, a utility in Iceland. The luxury S.U.V. is the first vehicle to be produced in a five-year contract between the two companies, during which Amp expects to ship 1,000 E.V.’s to the island nation.

Robert Stempel, a Voice for Alternative-Energy Sources, Dies at 77

Robert C. Stempel, the former General Motors chairman and chief executive who died on Saturday at 77, spent a turbulent two years atop the country’s largest automaker, during which he cut jobs and closed plants to minimize company losses. However, for every automaker that deepens its experimentation in alternative-energy sources, Mr. Stempel’s legacy as an auto-industry seer is bolstered.

But while sourcing batteries for the proposed EV1, Mr. Stempel befriended Stanford Ovshinsky, the noted scientist credited with the invention of nickel-metal hydride batteries, thin-film solar panels and a long list of other technologies.

I plan on using all of these for either Crazy Eddie's Motie News or Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday on Daily Kos later today. Right now, I'm just taking advantage of the rich text formatter so that I don't have to actually open the blog posts and create the HTML by hand. I have better articles and posts on which to use my 20 article per month allotment.

There is no more iconic suburb than Levittown, the postwar planned community built by the developer William Levitt in the late 1940s, so it is understandable that in launching Open House, a collaborative project to imagine a “future suburbia,” the Dutch design collective Droog in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects would make it the focus of their inquiry.

But in approaching a real place as a perfect blank canvas on which to execute distinctly urban interventions, the Open House project conveniently excused itself from substantively engaging with the real issues facing suburbia’s future. Which is a pity. Because it would have been interesting to see what they’d come up with if they had.

[T]he suburban existence is as exotic to them as say, Dubai, the site of Droog Lab’s first project where, says co-founder Renny Ramakers, they’d made a deliberate decision not to explore it as “a spending society — people felt we weren’t being critical enough; they couldn’t understand why. In this project I don’t want to be critical, I want to look for inspiration because in every part of the world, people are creating their own society, their own community.”

But that’s not really valid. Can we discuss the future of suburbia (or the future of anything, really) without being critical? Without talking about developing accessible transit or increasing walkability (and community) through mixed-use development, for example? This alas, is not uncommon. Addressing suburban ills requires massive change to systems, to finance, to transportation and infrastructure, and perhaps most challenging, to a culture deeply wedded to suburbia as emblematic of the American Dream.