Elliot Abrams explains how the Iranians won’t really mind if we launch airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities:

We are not talking about the Americans killing civilians, bombing cities, destroying mosques, hospitals, schools. No, no, no – we’re talking about nuclear facilities which most Iranians know very little about, have not seen, will not see, some quite well hidden.

So they wake up in the morning and find out that the United States if attacking those facilities and, presumably with some good messaging about why we’re doing it and why we are not against the people of Iran.

It’s not clear to me that the reaction let’s go to war with the Americans, but rather, perhaps, how did we get into this mess? Why did those guys, the very unpopular ayatollahs in a country 70 percent of whose population is under the age of 30, why did those old guys get us into this mess.

Suppose Iran decided to bomb an American military base, on American soil.  How good would Iranian messaging have to be, do you presume, for American popular reaction to be, “Well, who cares, they only killed a bunch of soldiers.  Maybe these guys have a point.”  I presume that that messaging would have to be really quite good.

Lee “Spezzatura” Siegel laments the intellectual vulgarity of our discourse, as revealed by the fact that when other people are trying to understand the causes of the current financial crisis and he starts namedropping random philosophers he gets funny looks:

Arguments about small versus big government used to entail reflections on the nature of man and society, the question of balancing the highest good against the greatest number of people who might benefit from that good, the meaning of power and of authority. Not anymore.

Now just about every political debate comes down to one phrase: economic policy. Occasionally, things grow more specialized, and just as intellectual disputes over class conflict once spilled over into philosophical differences over “dialectical” change, the issues of taxes and spending branch out into the exciting topic of “earmarks.” Sometimes things get fancy: You might hear the term “moral hazard.” But just when the intellectual wheels start to turn—Aristotle’s Ethics! William James’ pragmatism! Sartre’s existentialism!—you realize that you’ve eavesdropped on a conversation between an insurance broker and a management consultant about the proper way to structure a transaction.

Someone whose intellectual wheels were actually turning, not just grinding, might entertain the notion that even insurance brokers and management consultants sometimes know interesting things about things.

When Archimedes said, “Give me a lever that is long enough, and I will move the world,” he was talking about how you can think your way into a new actuality.

No, he wasn’t.  He was talking about levers.

It all started with massive downsizing at AT&T. In the mid-1990s, Karen Ho was studying anthropology as a graduate student at Princeton, searching for the focus of her dissertation. Ho, now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, remembers thinking that 40,000 workers losing their jobs was horrible news. But the stock market applauded it, sending AT&T shares up. 

She spent the next few years working on her ethnography, or study of Wall Street culture, by being a self-described pain in the you-know-what: interviewing hundreds of people, shadowing investment bankers at work and hanging out with them at bars and industry conferences. She’s turned that research into her forthcoming book “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street,” out this summer.

Q How are investment bankers different from the rest of us?

A Investment bankers are structured toward the next bonus. They’re compensated on how many deals they can push through, not on the quality of the deals or long-term strategy. Investment bankers have tons of job insecurity; they are a total revolving door. But what’s interesting is that because of their fairly elite biographies and kind of privileged networks they move in, as well as their lavish compensation, the way they experience downsizing is very different from that of the average worker. 

One of the things I argue in the book is that they cultivate a culture of liquidity, of continual restructuring and downsizing that they understand from their particular cultural point of view and privileged location as a productive challenge, as a building of character, precisely because their cushion is so thick. They can say, “Hey look, I have a really risky job, but that’s why I just got paid $1 million last year.” They’ll actually recommend this kind of churning for other workers who have a very different experience. This actually affects corporate America, how other industries are operating.

Q What are some other themes in the book?

A One of the main ideas is to figure out how short-term shareholder value became the undisputed mission of most corporations from the 1980s onward. Throughout the mid-20th century, Business Roundtable leaders would say: “Our mission is to negotiate the long-term interests of multiple stakeholders — consumers, employees, distributors, as well as the shareholder.” After 1980, it’s: “We don’t have to negotiate all these other interests; we just have to be concerned about the shareholder.” The corporate takeover movement Wall Street led in the 1980s helped to culturally make that shift so CEOs now imbibe that Wall Street mantra.

Even though Wall Street investment banks represent themselves as champions of shareholder value, their very recommendations and advice and actions actually undermine shareholder value through these continuous booms and busts.

This sounds excellent.  This woman sounds excellent. I want to buy her book.

The poetry of economics: imagine a car lot. . .

This explanation of the various possible approaches to toxic assets is very good, very clear, and should be circulated more widely:

Imagine a car lot that has 100 cars on it. However, some of these cars have problems. Half of them will have engine troubles that total the cars - the engines blow up and the cars are then worthless - and this will happen just after purchase. The other half are perfectly fine. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell prior to purchase which type of car you will get no matter how hard you try. Thus, half of the assets on the car dealer’s “balance sheet” - the cars on its lot - are toxic, and lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell which ones are bad prior to purchase.

It’s pitched at the level of a reasonably bright child, which is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Belatedly — I’ve been busy — noting that the ballot for the Hugo Awards was announced a couple of days ago, and I am on the shortlist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

That’s fantastically flattering.  Thanks so much to everyone who voted for me.

Traditionally one says at this point that it’s humbling to be nominated.  I’ve never understood what the mechanism’s supposed to be, there.  It’s not humbling!  Writing is chock-full of actual humbling moments, believe you me, oh my god is it ever.  This is fucking awesome.

Here.

Parents of small children should probably not click that link, actually.

Are you by chance looking for a freelance editor?

If you have a novel you’re hoping to get published, you should be.  Frankly your manuscript needs work.  There is a Thing in it, I don’t want to mention it here, publicly like this, but there is a Thing in it that Makes No Sense.  I benefited enormously from having the manuscript of Thunderer worked over by Bill Thompson before ever sending it to an agent.  

On the other hand of course a lot of the people who offer those sort of services are underqualified or basically scam artists.  They really are!  It’s unbelievable how many scammers are out there.  You should approach basically everything to do with the world of books as if it is an enormous conspiracy against you personally, a seedy netherworld of liars, psychopaths, thieves and ogres, in which you have no idea who if anyone to trust, in which the rules of the game are secret and rigged, in which everyone you meet is or could very well be constantly plotting to steal your teeth.  In this respect publishing resembles every other field of human endeavour.

Where was I? Oh yes.  Juliet Ulman, formerly of Bantam, who edited Thunderer and Gears of the City, is now freelance.   Here is her website.  Here, again, is Bill Thompson’s website; he is also freelance.  Both of these people are very very good, highly experienced, a pleasure to work with, and I hereby guarantee that they will not steal your teeth. 

This, on the other hand, is enormously satisfying:

(For those of you who don’t read judicial opinions for fun, you weirdos, you, this is the court’s opinion dismissing, in the most openly mocking and contemptuous tones I have ever seen a judge allow himself the pleasure of, the latest iteration of the crazy-people lawsuit challenging the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency on the ground that he was born outside the US, not that that actually renders him ineligible, but never mind, he was too born in Kenya, his birth certificate is a fake, the whole state of Hawaii is in on the conspiracy! also he’s black)

What is the saddest thing?

 No, Lie Bot. It’s this.