“We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes.”
~ Michel Houellebecq, from an excellent profile by Justin E.H. Smith 🔗📚
Glad to see a third-party candidate enter the MN governor’s race. I don’t expect I’ll agree with the whole platform. But I agree with the principle: our current parties are broken beyond repair. 🔗🗳
Put the Oscars out of their misery 🔗 🎞
Most of the ceremonies feature flickers of genuine emotion amid hours of sanctimonious, self-serving or scolding speeches.
~“Opinion: Put the Oscars Out of Their Misery”
Yes. Oddly, this op-ed doesn’t touch on the main reason to get rid of awards shows: we don’t have any agreed-upon aesthetic standards for deciding what’s deserving of awards—so what’s the point?
My rule would be that you’re only allowed to hold an awards ceremony if Ricky Gervais hosts it. There’s nothing better than seeing the looks of horror on the faces of our self-satisfied celebrity class as Gervais relentlessly roasts them.
The world needs more Cavafy 📚
On the absurd counter-productivity of cancelling Russian culture. 🔗
The last thing we need is to assume that once we are confident in our position, there is no more thinking to be done.
In order for people to use social media responsibly—i.e., not get addicted—we essentially have to use these platforms in ways that they were not designed to be used.
Finished reading: Tradition and Apocalypse by David Bentley Hart 📚
Unsurprisingly if you’ve read much DBH, this is a very strange book. I’d highly recommend chapters 1, 6, & 7 for a compelling vision of Christian belief & practice oriented not just to the past but to the future. The middle chapters on Newman & Blondel? Quite dry by comparison.
Finished reading: London’s Fields by Mark Waldon 📚 ⚽️
A delightful oral history looking at some of London’s football clubs: their histories, rivalries, grounds, & fan bases. I most enjoyed chapters on Orient, Millwall, Brentford, Wimbledon, Fulham, & Charlton—clubs that don’t get much attention state-side.
Review: *The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance* by Eswar S. Prasad 📚
Eswar Prasad, The Future of Money
Reading Eswar Prasad’s The Future of Money was an odd experience. Let’s start by clarifying the author’s starting point. Prasad is the definition of an elite:
- a graduate of some of the world’s most prestigious universities (Madras, Brown, U of Chicago)
- a long stint at the IMF
- an occupant of a endowed chair in economics at an Ivy League school
- a senior fellow at the center-left-think-tank-to-rule-them-all Brookings Institute
- possessor of an advisory appointment as research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research
I mention all these roles not to impress you, but rather to give you a sense of what to expect from The Future of Money: cryptocurrency filtered through the perspective of someone deeply entrenched in the structures, institutions, and frameworks that define the world as it currently is.
That perspective has some real value: Prasad is a remarkably lucid explicator of those elements of crypto that he cares to understand. For instance, his plain-language explanations of the technical details of Bitcoin and of the distinctions between proof of stake and proof of work are both clear and thorough. They’ve increased my own understanding of the technical details of crypto.
Similarly, and unsurprisingly, Prasad provides an exceptionally interesting overview of the current state of money:
- the exponential increase in non-crypto digital money over the last couple decades
- the rise of the dollar to dominance as global reserve currency (and the resentment most other countries feel at the dollar’s dominance)
- the attempts by governments around the world to create digital currencies, and what we should expect in future attempts
Overall, Prasad’s book shines in explicating how we got to where we are, from a global economic perspective. But Prasad’s perspective has some very obvious and very unsurprising blind spots.
For one, though he refers fairly often to issues relating to privacy, he doesn’t seem to really “get” the degree to which crypto advocates are advocating for *decentralization—*the degree to which crypto is not fundamentally about economics but about politics, governance. He’s skeptical (and rightly so) of claims that Bitcoin and most other cryptos offer privacy and anonymous transactions. But this isn’t what decentralization advocates are getting at. The degree of privacy offered by Bitcoin is still far superior to the degree of privacy offered by the central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that Prasad thinks are the likely long-term digital-money solution. (To his credit, he’s quick to acknowledge the privacy challenges [quite the euphemism, in this case] that CBDCs present. But he’s certainly nowhere near terrified enough of these challenges for my taste.)
The need for political imagination is also far greater than Prasad acknowledges or seems capable of himself. Prasad wants the global order to remain more or less as it is. But for those less-well-served by this existing order, what are the alternatives? The populist revival? Some sort of web3 or other tech-driven new economic order? Just trudging along trying to survive? Or something even more violent and unsettling? Our economic and social problems need far greater solutions than CBDCs. For all their many flaws, web3 projects do suggest some remarkably creative new economic possibilities.
Do I recommend it? Well, if you have time for 375 pages that ultimately make an inconclusive case for the exisiting global order, sure. But while the economics and history are interesting, Prasad’s political imagination is simply too conventional, too obvious, too elite. The sort of book that tries to convince you that CBDCs are coming, no matter what you do, but don’t worry too much about it.
Everything about central bank digital currency (CBDC) is the stuff of totalitarian nightmare.
Expert ≠ leader (or vice versa):
The pandemic has shown us the dangers of expert rule, and the failures of political and institutional leaders to heed them. It has also demonstrated, through its absence, what good governance might look like.
~Joseph E. Davis in The New Atlantis
Social media & the human heart 🔗
From Mallory Owens’s review of Bruno Maçães’s History Has Begun:
It would be disturbing enough if, as Maçães predicts, the great lords of Silicon Valley left us to amuse ourselves in our virtual sandboxes while they went off to conquer the solar system. With an ever-expanding arsenal of digital tools at their disposal, however, they are unlikely to show such restraint. Their war against reality can never truly be won until they have triumphed over the most stubborn and deceitful of all things, the human heart.
When was the last time I link to a Slate article? Maybe never.
In any case, their “Best Jazz Albums of 2021” is excellent—introduced me to a number of albums I hadn’t yet heard; all the ones I have heard I also loved, especially the Mingus and the Shepp/Moran. 🎵 🔗
Tyler Cowen’s conversation with biographer-historian Ruth Scurr is delightful—bookstores, Cambridge, finding a book’s form, & much more. 🔗🎙
Beautiful light in my office this morning.
A fresh layer of snow overnight + fire-red sunrise.
Incredibly excited for the future of Slant Books. They have some wonderful titles coming in their first year as an indie not-for-profit press. 🔗📚
R.I.P, Robert Bly, one of Minnesota’s great poets. I’ll remember him most for his translations of Thomas Tranströmer; among if not the first translations into English of the incredible Swedish poet. 📚 🔗
A beautiful obituary of Chinese philosopher and aesthetician Li Zehou. 🔗
This sunrise this morning… unreal. 💥 🏡
