Reviews and News:
The problem with Wikipedia: “Large parts of the media demonstrably use Wikipedia as their major or sole source of factual data; as a result, false or half-true claims (such as are found in any encyclopedia) can spread and take root with extraordinary speed.”
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“It needs more public-spirited pigs”: T. S. Eliot’s rejection of Orwell’s Animal Farm published online.
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Britain and Europe: “Brendan Simms has written a remarkable book. It is remarkable for his ability to steer between Brexiteers and Remainers with his own distinctive — though some may think fantastic — view of how Europe should develop and what Britain’s relationship with Europe should be.”
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The poetry of Stevie Smith: “She is a writer of astonishing skill, range, comedy, and depth of feeling; she is inimitable, strange, and utterly original. With her poetry collected as a whole, it becomes more apparent too that though she is a funny writer—funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar—her work is melancholy and despairing, full of pain, terror, and grief: ‘Not waving but drowning.'”
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The one and only King Lear?
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The life of a hack on Grub Street.
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Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, David Goldman praises ambition and risk:
“What Oswald Spengler called the Faustian spirit of the 19th century gave us all the great inventions that inform our daily lives: electricity, the automobile, the aeroplane, and so forth. The latter part of the 19th century was the most fecund period of human history, and Continental Europe contributed disproportionately.
“That is true no longer. Consider the 24 employees of France Telecom who committed suicide in 2009 and 2010 after reassignment to new jobs. One employee in Marseilles left a suicide note stating, ‘Overwork, stress, absence of training and total disorganisation in the company. I’m a wreck, it’s better to end it all.’ He was healthy, ran marathons, had enough money, and had no family problems, but was evidently terrified of change. For some, sameness and security are so precious that life is too frightening to bear without them. “France remains a very wealthy country — it ranks third on Credit Suisse’s table of net average wealth per adult — but the main wealth-acquiring activity practised by the French today is waiting for one’s parents to die. The French once were a paradigm of ambition; Napoleon said that every private soldier carried a field-marshal’s baton in his rucksack. Today, French entrepreneurs move to the US, the UK, Canada or Israel. A 2014 New York Times feature entitled ‘Au Revoir, Entrepreneurs,’ quoted a French transplant to London who heads a Google enterprise saying that in the UK, ‘it’s not considered bad if you have failed.’ He went on: ‘You learn from failure in order to maximise success. Things are different in France. There is a fear of failure. If you fail, it’s like the ultimate shame. In London, there’s this can-do attitude, and a sense that anything’s possible. If you make an error, you can get up again.’
“One might add that at 45 per cent, France’s top rate of taxation on capital gains is the highest in the OECD. “Aversion to uncertainty does not make for vibrant economies. Entrepreneurs who take on uninsurable risk, to be sure, do not always contribute to growth. Frank Knight, the great theorist of uninsurable risk, thought them ultimately wasteful. The two most recent waves of entrepreneurial effort in the United States, namely the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and the derivatives boom of the 2000s, support Knight’s point of view. But we know of no way to get long-term productivity growth other than innovation, and no agents of innovation other than entrepreneurs.” “Incentives and disincentives to entrepreneurship surely influence the willingness of individuals to take on uninsurable risk, for example taxation of corporate income and capital gains, bankruptcy laws, patent protection, and the cost of regulation. There is a vast literature on these matters. It is also fair to ask whether there also a cultural propensity for risk-aversion and risk-friendliness? If so, where does it come from and what informs it?”
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Image of the Day: Guilin
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Poem: Eric Smith, “The Shed”
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