henry_flower

1. Older innovations that failed: the pedestrian catcher.

2. Atul Gawande on the Senate health care bill.  David Brooks on the bill.  Holtz-Eakin on the bill.

3. How ESPN got into economic trouble.

4. “It has enough lifting power to carry a single wrapped hot dog during flight, but details on condiment capacity are still unknown.”

5. Valuable thread on ACA and mortality risk through opiates.

6. Chuck Blahous on Medicaid reform.

Ben was wildly charming and charismatic before the crowd.  My questions tried to get at how he thinks rather than the hot button issues of the day.  Here is the transcript, audio, and video.  We covered Kansas vs. Nebraska, famous Nebraskans, Chaucer and Luther, unicameral legislatures, the decline of small towns, Ben’s prize-winning Yale Ph.d thesis on the origins of conservatism,  what he learned as a university president, Stephen Curry, Chevy Chase, Margaret Chase Smith, and much more.

Here is one bit from Ben:

Neverland and Peter Pan is a dystopian hell. Neverland is not a good place. You don’t want to get to the place where you’re physically an adult and you have no moral sense, you have no awareness of history, you have no interest in the future. Peter Pan is killing people, and he doesn’t really care; he doesn’t remember their names. It’s a really dystopian thing. Perpetual adolescence is the bad thing.

Adolescence is special. We need to figure out how to use adolescence; it’s a means to an end. So that’s what the book’s about.

I am an Augustinian in my anthropology, but Rousseau is a romantic. I think he’s wrong about lots and lots and lots of things, but I think he’s really, really smart. You have to engage him, and you have to engage people who have ideas that are different than yours because you may ultimately be converted to their view, and you need to encounter things that are big and challenging and threatening to your worldview. Or you may sometimes come to believe you’re right and be able to respond to the counterarguments, while your argument will be better. You’ll grow through it, and you’ll become more persuasive to others through it.

So I think Rousseau’s fundamental anthropological understanding of why we feel that things are broken in our soul is, he’s got a reason to blame society for everything we feel is wrong in the world, and I think there’s a lot of brokenness deep inside all of us, and so, that’s the Augustinian versus Rousseauvian sense of what’s wrong.

But I think the Emile is brilliant, both because it forces me to wrestle with ideas that I don’t agree with, or mostly don’t agree with, but I think it’s also just an incredibly good read.

Then there was this:

COWEN: …Might one argue that the more one thinks and writes about sex, the more you’re led to Rousseauian conclusions that a certain kind of constraint will prove impossible, and then one is pulled away further from Ben Sasse–like conclusions.

SASSE: That’s a really fair question. I wanted to stay away from sex 100 percent, and then ultimately I couldn’t do it.

COWEN: There’s three pages in your book about sex.

SASSE: Yeah.

COWEN: And page 33 mentions it once.

You’ll have to read the whole thing to see where Ben took that line of inquiry, his answer was excellent.

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, more or less, here is one bit from it:

That leaving is so difficult, however, may in part explain the desire to leave. In the most sophisticated cases for Brexit, there is no acceptable resolution to the negotiating dilemmas. Rather many Brexiteers think their nation’s culture and legal system need to take their own courses. For better or worse, they think England in particular simply can’t become that much more “continental.” What appeared to be a wonderful deal — free trade but no euro — actually was viewed as a Trojan horse for the disappearance of British uniqueness. Over time the encroachments of EU law and governance will clash more and more with the underlying institutions and culture of the U.K., and something will have to give. Law and culture eventually must prove congruent, but EU legal and bureaucratic powers will inevitably grow, ultimately clashing with the notion of Britain as an idiosyncratic and independent nation. Culture and law cannot remain so separate forever.

I have myself been strongly pro-Remain, but I don’t dismiss the Leavers as a bunch of ill-informed voters or hapless victims of globalization. Counterintuitively, it is the supposedly undereducated Leavers who have the more theoretical and historical perspective. It doesn’t help that they initially were promised a much weaker set of ties with the EU, and so mistrust makes all of the complaints more potent.

On top of all this, many Brexiteers suspect there won’t be any better time to leave than now, and so “Remain” is for them an impossible stance over the longer run. Returning to history, ejecting James II seemed risky and destabilizing at the time, but for the most part the decision wasn’t regretted and it was better not to have hesitated.

Do read the whole thing.

An excellent book by Brian Merchant.  Two neat things I learned that I hadn’t known before.  First, when you are typing the software guesses which letters might be coming next and gives you extra latitude in hitting those keys.  (I believe this oddly makes the QWERTY keyboard efficient once again, also.)  Second, there are non-disclosure agreements for reading a possible non-disclosure agreement to sign (or not).  You have to sign one of those before you even get to see the non-disclosure agreement for the work at hand, in other words if you don’t sign the NDA you can’t even report on how much secrecy they were demanding from you.  Apple used those.