Cheer up, it ain't so bad

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Marginal Revolution: "Fruitful Decade for Many in the World"
Tyler Cowen: My NYT column today is about how good the last ten years have been for China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and much of Africa. It is not, as Time magazine has suggested, the worst decade in human history. Here is a brief excerpt:

One lesson from all of this is that steady economic growth is an underreported news story — and to our own detriment. As human beings, we are prone to focus on very dramatic, visible events, such as confrontations with political enemies or the personal qualities of leaders, whether good or bad. We turn information about politics and economics into stories of good guys versus bad guys and identify progress with the triumph of the good guys. In the process, it’s easy to neglect the underlying forces that improve life in small, hard-to-observe ways, culminating in important changes.

Better than a cardboard box

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For Some of Japan’s Jobless, Homes Just 5 Feet Wide
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.

Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.

Alles klar?

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Liberal Conspiracy -  2010: A crunch year for us progressives
A General Election which always is a watershed moment in any countries political history. (sic)

This one will see a resurgent Conservative Party face an increasingly tired looking Labour Party and a Liberal Democrat Party that has aspirations to greatness.
Meanwhile, the Green Party could well be on the cusp of a breakthrough moment in Brighton Pavilion.
Read the whole piece and then ask yourself: how the fuck does this incoherent twaddle get published at LibCon?

PS: The author writes a blog titled, I kid you not, "Moments of Clarity".

Bourgeois guilt

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You can 'aspire', but don't you dare achieve
...(the new-style class war) is seriously flawed even in Gordon Brown's own terms. In modern Britain, most of the people whom Mr Brown calls the "privileged" are just those who were once aspirational and who, through hard work, talent, and sometimes self-sacrifice, made their wishes come true. In other words, they are precisely the sort of people with whom he and his alter ego Ed Balls are supposed to sympathise.

Of course, there are still a small number of players who win the lottery of life by virtue of their birth – and it is David Cameron and George Osborne's political liability to be among them – but the huge majority of those fortunate enough now to be highly educated, highly paid and professionally influential got where they are by some combination of merit, industriousness and, most important, positive attitude.


Yet another 'racist'. Yawn.

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Muslim writers say La Plante attack on BBC is 'insulting'
A row broke out yesterday after the creator of Prime Suspect stoked allegations that the corporation favours Muslims by complaining that its drama commissioning team would rather read a script by a "little Muslim boy" than one she had written. "If my name were Usafi Iqbadal and I was 19, then they'd probably bring me in and talk," the scriptwriter, who has mainly worked for ITV, told The Daily Telegraph.

But Muslim writers hit back, accusing La Plante of "old-style racism" for reinforcing stereotypes. Max Malik, a novelist and playwright, called her comments "divisive, unhelpful and discouraging for young writers". Mr Malik, who won the Muslim Writers' Award two years ago, added: "She's trying to force me and my ilk into a corner. I don't call her a ginger-haired, middle-aged, female writer. That would be insulting."
Eh? It wouldn't actually. She is, after all, ginger-haired, middle-aged, female and a writer. And how, exactly, is she trying to back anyone into a corner?  She may be wrong. She may have a chip on her shoulder but calling her an 'old style racist' is tired, lazy and just plain wrong. 

Everybody is a star

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How Simon Cowell helped take us from meritocracy to mediocrity in a decade
Simon Cowell is not a mass murderer, which is an important caveat. People do not die as a direct consequence of The X Factor — except in a few unverified cases of viewers witnessing their will to live exiting through the tops of their skulls as some off-key warbling nonentity makes a George Michael song even more emetic than it was in the first place and being congratulated on so doing by thick, doe-eyed, over-emoting panellists who themselves are possessed of not even a soupçon of talent.

And it’s here that there is something genuinely defining about The X Factor — in the elevation of suffocating mediocrity, the superficial, the banal and in the incontinent, demented shrieking of the studio audience, and — when the hopeless winner is announced, the statements of congratulation from No 10 and the opposition.

When the Geordie Joe McElderry won last year’s contest, they cut to a vast street party in his home town of South Shields where the idiotic mayor and his wife were dancing a jig, the sorts of scenes Britain once witnessed only on occasions such as VE Day.

We better start being nice to China

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Concern as China clamps down on rare earth exports
Britain and other Western countries risk running out of supplies of certain highly sought-after rare metals that are vital to a host of green technologies, amid growing evidence that China, which has a monopoly on global production, is set to choke off exports of valuable compounds. Failure to secure alternative long-term sources of rare earth elements (REEs) would affect the manufacturing and development of low-carbon technology, which relies on the unique properties of the 17 metals to mass-produce eco-friendly innovations such as wind turbines and low-energy lightbulbs.
The Rare Earth Boom