My ears are still a little ringy. The inside of lip got punctured. I have a bruise on my arm. I am hungover, and I may have significantly worsened a cold.
Tom tells me he has a friction burn on his back. He is missing a t-shirt. He looked dog-tired and right now he's at work because they couldn't afford to give him a Friday AND a Thursday off.
I think both of us are about as happy as two young miscreants can get.
The Pixies were awesome.
If you don't know about the Pixies, don't worry. You aren't the uncoolest person in the world. Just check them out at some point. They rock in a pleasant sort of way. You should let yourself be wooed by them. I fyou don't like the Pixies, that's cool too. I just don't particularly want to hear about it.
For us fans, this was something. The Pixies broke up just as I was becoming musically sentient. When I first bought Doolittle they were something amusing I had heard at a party. I continued buying Pixies CDs until I had almost all of them. They have a large catalogue and very few bad songs.
So that sort of anticipation had built up into my head, and no doubt the rest of Freeborn Hall yesterday.
So, knowing that, would you like to be the opening act?
The poor bastards to whom this job fell (I think their name was "Quiver") had a sense of doom. Even a good band would cause the audience to shift about uncomfortably, "come on, come on, Pixies." Quimmer or Quitter went up there, performed half-heartedly, sucked, then left. They sounded alot like Rush but without the talent or the benefit of me giving a crap. In between every song, Tom yelled "Next!"
Again, worst job in the world, but Quilter still did it badly.
After thirty minutes of sound checks and watching roadies arrange bottles of beer for convenient on stage consumption, the band finally came on.
They did all that rock and roll stuff: smoke and lights. They started off with the first song off their best album: Bone Machine. The audience got moist.
Then Kim Deal forgot how to play "Wave of Mutilation." They had to start over. Frank Black chewed her out a bit. Things were not tense though. The show went on and smoothly too.
The mosh pit got started and we leapt in. At first, there were a few people annoyed at that. Those people were silly. The Pixies are a punk band, no matter how idiosyncratic. People are going to mosh to "Debaser." But these things quickly sort themselves out as the people don't mosh get away from those that do.
I'm a pretty meek guy, but jostling about with a bunch of other twentysomething idiots is pure fun. And when a tiny Asian girl with horribly sharp elbows who got in there and tussles with the rest, it is one of the most glorius sights in human nature.
I put my licks in the pit, but neither I nor anyone else could outdo Tom. The man was everywhere: being the most obnoxious guy in the pit, being accosted by security for crowd surfing and taking off his shirt and throwing it to Kim Deal.
We unwound with over Sophia's with filtered water, whisky and the company of old friends.
That was a great birthday.
Tyler Cowen has a snap review of Growing Public, that Peter Lindert book I was talking about a little while ago. Cowen takes Lindert's discomforting vision in good stride. Lindert in his own good natured way is trying to put a hefty dent in the neoliberal consensus, at least when it comes to the welfare state.
On a slightly relevant side note, I have added a furl link to the sidebar, for whenever I come accross an interesting article. If you click on the link you should get a list of articles. I think that maybe it would be possible to make the furl page a larger part of this blog. I'll look into it.
I have hit upon a novel scheme for storing my books when I go overseas.
I'm going to lend them all out, and keep track of who has what using a WIKI, or journal entry.
So requests will be fulfilled. Visitors get first preference for books, but hopefully I'll have my entire library catalogued later this week.
The Littlest Coyote has already spoken for my copies of Quiddities and The Open Society and It's Enemies.
I tend to have a lot of nonfiction. A number of books on the sciences, econ, cog-sci, philosophy, humor things and politics. The fiction tends to be Nick Hornby, sci-fi, Richard Russo and Gore Vidal. I have about every Bill Bryson book ever written.
Occasionally a coworker commits an act of such heroic stupidity that you doubt that you'll ever see anything like it again.
An angry customer called, up my store wanting to know the District Manager's phone number so she could complain about some damn thing or another. One of my coworkers, a supervisor amazingly enough, looked up at the emergency information on the wall and gave her the DM's cell.
And then(!) he asked what she wanted it for.
A few hours later I got a call from the DM, wanting to know why we were giving out his personal phone numbers to irritating customers.
I briefly considered telling him that it was our new method of upselling. "If you get the extra shot, I'll throw in our DM's cell number, gratis. How about it?"
The phone conversation between the DM I did not go well. It never does. He seems to think that merely by announcing his name to me, I can decipher what it is that he wants from me.
ME: El Cerrito Starbucks how can I help?
DM: This is Mac Daddy.
ME: Hey. What's up?
DM: [long pause] This is Mac Daddy.
ME: What can I do for you?
DM:This is Mac Daddy.
ME: Yeah, do you need something?
DM: This is Mac Daddy.
ME:[long uncomfortable silence as mind drifts towards China]
In his defense, my DM probably compulsively checked his stock portfolio about forty times during that interval.
A teacher of mine from UC Davis, Peter Lindert has a new book out on the mixed blessings of European welfare states. I have not read this book yet, but true to form, it looks as though anyone looking for a clear moral about the superiority of american or european styles of welfare statecraft had best stay away.
Lindert's lectures are interesting, surprising and plausible. It is pretty amazing but he actually made economic history extremely entertaining, whether through dramatizing the debates between the Federal Reserve Banks prior to the Great Depression or through his moving summary of labor mobility's effect on the incomes of blacks in the south.
The best thing about having taken economic history from Lindert was the sheer number of things that I learned that could enrage people of about any given political persuasion. From the subject of inequality in America to the more hopeless aspects of the New Deal, there is at least one thing that would make you squirm in every class.
ps.
you really ought to read his essay on the links between democracy and growth. It is, I know, a longish pdf file but it is worthwhile and pretty unheadachey for something written by a professor.
I just sent off my resume to China.
I will turn it over to my man Shelley Timmins to explain.
In the intellectual kingdom, economics is situated on the border of politics. Economists have all sort of interesting things to say on a host of policy matters, from free trade to crime. Any time a policy addresses incentives, there's an economist who has something to say about it.
This lends economic debate a kind of danger that many of its practitioners find titillating. It can not be doubted that the thrill of influence is major motivator of economists especially the type that Richard Posner calls "public intellectuals." That is the kind of learned generalist that can speak to both the academic audience and the rest of us.
This danger leads to a much more exciting type of debate than is generally found in the social sciences. Even where economists are wrong, they are usually wrong about something that is important to someone. The other social sciences occasionally get this urgency, but must usually settle for the mere thrill of being right as opposed to being right and influential, which is slightly sexier.
The discipline's connectedness to policy has some predictably negative consequences. Some things seem too important to be left up to science. Not only that but despite it's fancy mathematical dress, economics is subject to the same vagaries, and problems of irreducibility that plague and bedevil debates in the other social sciences.
This gives economists a means and a motive to deform the truths of their science or to cherry pick those truths to serve a political end. More than any other type of scientist the economist must know the world of spin. There is a certain kind of permanent Lysenkoism that afflicts the field.
The saving grace is that it is actually very hard to pull off the mix of fact, theory and propaganda that is required of the economist public intellectual. Even the best ones, Keynes, Freidman, Krugman and Becker get the mixture wrong and spoil the brew every once in a while.
Even better the language that economists speak is an excellent tool not just for creating policy initiatives but for taking good, hard whacks at other policy initiatives. You do not wish to be caught with the less than optimal mix of theory, propaganda and fact. If you do there are many highly educated, eloquent people with a really excellent reason to very publicly pull down your pants, and thoroughly spank you.
The incentive to publicly say foolish things is stronger during an election year, and so is the incentive to embarrass those people, provided they belong to the opposing party. This paper purports to be a guide to the many debates and public spankings that occur on the border of policy and economics.
I suspect that, nationally, blogging tends to drop off when the weather gets better.
The weather is pretty okay in the east bay. But I've gotten entangled with a girl. The relationship is pretty casual, pretty fun. It does consume spare time pretty impressively.
Still, that is no excuse. Girls are distracting, but I'm not going to fall off.
More later, friends.