Reviews and News:
How the credit rating was created: “It’s a fun fact of business history that the modern credit-rating industry owes its existence, at least indirectly, to a group of 18th century British salesmen sick of being cheated by deadbeats.”
* *
Odysseus is on a beautiful island with an eternally beautiful woman who offers him eternal youth and life. Why does he leave? “The eternal life and youth she offers come at too high a price. To be Nobody forever is a living death. Sex that is that anonymous, even with a nymph, is no compensation. And even though Calypso and Odysseus have been having sex nightly for seven years (about 2,500 times), they have no children. The absence of progeny signals the absence of a future, and with it the absence of history.”
* *
The supercilious existentialist: “Publishing his diaries in the Daily Mail, Wilson announced ‘I am the major literary genius of our century’, and this generous estimate of his own significance remained consistent: ‘It strikes me’, he told an interviewer four decades later, ‘that in five hundred years time they’ll say “Wilson was a genius”, because I’m a turning point in intellectual history.'”
* *
Professor claims to have discovered only known footage of Marcel Proust. Watch it here.
* *
Instamom: “The more our house becomes Pinnable, the more it leads back to the website….We want it to traffic well. We want it to go viral.”
* *
Dumas’s swashbuckling sequel to The Three Musketeers: “The Red Sphinx may be as subtle as a Verdi opera worked over by the Daily Mail — but who cares, when it’s so enjoyable?”
* *
Essay of the Day:
How did Europe become so rich? Because of two things, Joel Mokyr argues in Aeon—competition and free exchange of ideas:
“How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Learned tomes by historians, economists, political scientists and other scholars fill many bookshelves with explanations of how and why the process of modern economic growth or ‘the Great Enrichment’ exploded in western Europe in the 18th century. One of the oldest and most persuasive explanations is the long political fragmentation of Europe. For centuries, no ruler had ever been able to unite Europe the way the Mongols and the Mings had united China.
“It should be emphasised that Europe’s success was not the result of any inherent superiority of European (much less Christian) culture. It was rather what is known as a classical emergent property, a complex and unintended outcome of simpler interactions on the whole. The modern European economic miracle was the result of contingent institutional outcomes. It was neither designed nor planned. But it happened, and once it began, it generated a self-reinforcing dynamic of economic progress that made knowledge-driven growth both possible and sustainable.
“How did this work? In brief, Europe’s political fragmentation spurred productive competition. It meant that European rulers found themselves competing for the best and most productive intellectuals and artisans. The economic historian Eric L Jones called this ‘the States system’. The costs of European political division into multiple competing states were substantial: they included almost incessant warfare, protectionism, and other coordination failures. Many scholars now believe, however, that in the long run the benefits of competing states might have been larger than the costs. In particular, the existence of multiple competing states encouraged scientific and technological innovation.”
* *
Photo: Wave
* *
Poem: Marjorie Maddox, “Anniversary”
