- UID
- 644982
- 在线时间
- 小时
- 注册时间
- 2011-6-28
- 最后登录
- 1970-1-1
- 主题
- 帖子
- 性别
- 保密
|
计时1 （280 words）
Rational Irrationality
John Cassidy on politics, economics, and more.
April 27, 2012
G.D.P. Puzzle Holds Key to the Election
First the politics, since it’s more straightforward. This morning’s news that economic growth slowed markedly between January and March is an unmitigated bad for Obama and an unmitigated good for Romney. The President’s reëlection chances largely hinge on being able to point to evidence that the economy is finally improving. If the perception spreads that it isn’t, Romney’s “Obama isn’t working” slogan could well turn out to be a winner.
Now to the economics, which are a bit ambiguous. What is perfectly clear is that hopes that the economic recovery was picking up going into 2012—hopes I shared—have so far been disappointed. After expanding by three per cent in the fourth quarter of last year, the gross domestic product—a measure of all the goods and services produced in the economy—grew by just 2.2 per cent in the first quarter of this year. On Wall Street, most economists had been expecting growth of 2.5 per cent, or even a bit higher. (These figures and the ones that follow are for growth on an annualized basis.)
If you delve into the Commerce Department report, you can find some even more disappointing numbers. Setting aside the production of inventories—goods that companies add to their stockpiles in anticipation of selling them later—the economy grew by just 1.6 per cent in the quarter. Capital investment, which should be surging at this point in the recovery, hardly rose at all. And personal disposable income—the amount of money people have to spend after paying taxes—expanded by just 0.4 per cent.
计时2 （286 words）
On the face of it, these figures suggest that the recovery, which began in the summer of 2010, is faltering badly. Skeptics who have long cast doubt on the U.S. economy, even raising the possibility of a double-dip recession, seized upon the details of the figures. “For how long can consumption grow much faster than income and households run down their savings as income growth in Q1 was very mediocre?” Nouriel Roubini (a.k.a. “Dr. Doom”) tweeted.
To make the case that Obama’s policies have failed, Romney doesn’t need a full-blown double dip to materialize. For his purposes, another few months of slow growth and, in particular, an uptick in the unemployment rate would suffice. But how likely is such an outcome? Purely on the basis of today’s figures, it is difficult to say.
To begin with, the 2.2-per-cent figure may well get revised upwards. This was the Commerce Department’s “advance” estimate of G.D.P., which is notoriously unreliable. As more data comes in, the government statisticians will produce two more estimates that are more accurate. Recently, these revisions have tended to be on the upside. The advance figure for Q4 2011 was 2.8 per cent. Today, the figure stands at 3 per cent. Sometimes the revisions are much bigger.
Second, there were some special factors that held down growth in the first quarter. Over-all spending by the federal government recorded a sharp fall, led by an 8.1-per-cent drop in defense spending. Ironically, Obama’s success in drawing down the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to be hurting the economy. The end of the stimulus also appears to be having an effect. Between January and March, non-defense spending fell slightly. This seems unlikely to be sustained.
计时3 （307 words）
Other parts of the economy are doing better. Consumer spending, which makes up about two-thirds of over-all spending, rose at an annual rate of 2.9 per cent, its biggest jump since 2010. Americans are still buying new cars and trucks in large numbers, and there was a welcome pickup in residential investment, albeit from a low base. On the White House blog, Alan Krueger, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, pointed out that if the private-sector components of G.D.P. alone had been tallied, the headline figure would have been 3.5 per cent growth. “These are encouraging signs that the private sector is continuing to heal from the worst recession since the Great Depression,” Krueger wrote.
That is true, but the government sector is part of the economy, too, and there is no assurance that it will pick up in the months ahead. Roubini’s point about consumer spending outstripping consumption is also a valid one. The savings rate dipped in the first quarter, suggesting that people are running down their assets and taking out more credit to maintain their desired levels of spending. Obviously, this isn’t sustainable in the long term. But with interest rates low, it could well continue through the election and beyond.
A more immediate threat to the recovery, and to Obama, is what is happening to jobs and employment, which, until recently, was a bright spot in the economy. The recent pickup in Obama’s approval rating dates back to late last year, when the unemployment rate started coming down from above nine per cent. Actually, today’s G.D.P. report contained some more encouraging news on the labor market. Total hours worked in the private sector rose by 3.7 per cent in the first quarter, indicating that many businesses are operating at full tilt, which could well presage further hiring in the months ahead.
计时4（460words）
But therein lies the puzzle: if demand remains healthy, why is G.D.P. growth so weak? “What were these workers producing?” John Ryding and Conrad DeQuadros, of RDQ Economics, asked. “The unemployment rate fell from 8.5% in December to 8.2% in March—how can this be if the economy was only growing” very modestly.
My tentative answer is that the economy is still growing at a fairly decent clip but the official figures aren’t yet reflecting this. If this is right, today’s numbers should eventually be revised upwards, and worries about a sustained slowdown should recede. But much still hinges on next Friday’s employment report for March. If the job figures come in weak for the second month in a row, the growth optimists (a camp I joined towards the end of last year) may well have to concede we got it wrong and put on our glum faces. There will be genuine dismay at the White House. At the Romney HQ, today’s smiles of relief will give way to loud cheers. (Not that anybody will acknowledge this, of course.)
Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/GettyImages.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/04/jobs-numbers-economy-election.html#ixzz1tRlIkvoX
The Nationals Election
Posted by Steve Coll
In Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1859, some government clerks, “fascinated by newspaper accounts of the Game of Base Ball in other cities,” started playing with bats and balls just behind what was then referred to as the President’s Mansion, as the sportswriter Shirley Povich recounted in a history published about a century later. One of the early teams was called the National Club, later the Nationals.
Entering Wednesday’s games, with just over a tenth of the 2012 season played, a team called the Washington Nationals stands in first place of the National League East division of Major League Baseball, with a record of 13-4. This is a novel and fragile situation. The last time a team in Washington won the World Series was in 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge attended the ballpark to watch the Senators defeat the New York Giants in the twelfth inning of the seventh game. This, then, is the moment to ask whether the Nationals’ success could affect the 2012 Presidential election—quickly, before the Nats revert to form and the question becomes moot.
The path between 1859 and 2012 has not been straight. It took a while for baseball to organize itself as a professional sport, and when it did, a team called the Washington Senators (but sometimes referred to as the Nationals or the Nats) joined the American League. By the dawn of what would be known, for other reasons, as the American Century, the Senators were so bad that they had become a popular vaudeville gag: “The folks in the theater, the man in the street and the children in school knew that Washington was first in peace, first in war, and last in the American League,” Povich wrote.
计时5（334 words）
A Renaissance began when Walter Johnson came to town—several pennants were captured, in addition to the ’24 Series. The political exploitation of D.C. baseball by incumbent Presidents also flourished. William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower all successively mugged for photographers and tossed out first pitches to the Senators on Opening Day, even if, after 1933, the home team usually stank.
In 1960, an era of betrayal, open racism, and disillusionment arrived. Clark Griffith, the son of a successful Nats owner and manager, Calvin Griffith, became concerned that his Washington audience was “getting to be all colored,” as he put it, so he moved the Senators to Minnesota to create the Twins. “You only have fifteen thousand blacks here,” he explained later to Minnesota businessmen. Griffith said he appreciated his new fan base of “good hardworking white people.”
President Eisenhower strong-armed baseball into creating an expansion team, also named the Senators, to compensate for Griffith’s departure. Those Senators floundered, and were bought by a debt-burdened failed Minnesota politician named Bob Short. Short schemed to move his team to a more lucrative market and sell them at profit. He eyed Dallas, Texas. On Short’s last night in town, in 1971, drunken fans carrying signs calling for the owner’s demise tore up stadium seats and the field.
“This isn’t exactly a pleasure,” the team’s slugger, Frank Howard, remarked after the last game. “Nobody’s going to buy a horseshit product, and that’s what we’ve been.”
Short created the Texas Rangers, sold them as planned, and thereby created the conditions under which a failed oil wildcatter named George W. Bush could, as the Rangers’ managing partner, redeem himself as a moderately competent baseball executive. This set the stage for Bush to become governor of Texas and, later, move into the White House. It is a little remarked upon fact that the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis are the responsibility of the late Bob Short.
自由阅读 （554 words）
For a long time after the second Senators left town, there was no Major League Baseball in Washington, and it seemed as if there never would be. The city and the suburbs constituted a large market, but the Baltimore Orioles played nearby, and they built an appealing stadium, Camden Yards.
In 2005, following an unlikely and faintly miraculous series of events, Major League Baseball agreed to move the insolvent Montreal Expos to Washington; they became the Nationals. A shiny new ballpark beside the Anacostia River opened a few years later. The ring of fame honoring the club’s history on a strip of stadium concrete has to be one of the most confused and confusing in sports—a bizarre mix of Expos, Senators, and random names. As invented traditions go, the Nationals offer an unusually unconvincing story.
However, baseball had recruited the Lerners, a local family of real-estate moguls with deep pockets and established ties to the city, to buy the team. The theory is that they won’t decamp if hard times return. The Lerners have proved to be cautious and not dazzlingly adept in their baseball decision-making, but lately their patience and devotion to building through young pitching has delivered. The Nationals have an awesome starting rotation of power arms, and, at 2.21, the lowest earned-run average in the game by almost half a run.
All very interesting, but as I write this, the Stephen Strasburg bobblehead doll above my desk is shaking his head to indicate that the Nationals’ hot start might not matter much outside the Beltway. But Stephen, you are ignoring the calendar.
The next president of the United States will be elected on November 6, 2012. The most important nationally televised sporting event preceding the vote will be the World Series, likely during the last week of October. And what if the World Series includes the Nationals? What if there are games in Washington? What if, as in 1924, there is a thrilling game seven, and it goes into extra innings, and the President of the United States is in attendance, smiling confidently during television cutaway shots?
Consider this the start of the Washington Nationals subset of the general election contest. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each have considerable ground to cover.
The former is a Chicago White Sox fan—a credible sports head, but one who has neglected the Nationals unduly. (This year, the team recruited the actor and former Army soldier J. R. Martinez to toss out the first pitch for the home opener. The Nationals’ Opening Day game was on the road in Chicago, where Bill Murray did the honors.) Romney recently conducted an interview with ABC Television in Fenway Park, and declares himself a Red Sox man. He is not a baseball obsessive, however; he was unaware that the Tampa Bay Rays, a division rival of the Red Sox, play under a dome.
Neither candidate has yet admitted that Washington, D.C., is not a terrible place to live in a mansion or that its live-armed squad of 2012 deserves attention. This might be the time to show initiative—turn up at the ballpark while optimism is in the air, commune with some players, toss it around. By October, those in the stands may well be calling, by habit, for the heads of hypocrites, betrayers, and latecomers.
President Woodrow Wilson throws out the first pitch at a season-opening baseball game, in 1916. Photograph: Corbis.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/04/the-nationals-history-and-presidents.html#ixzz1tRmF4EOM
越障 （857 words）
Spheres of Knowledge
Artistic discovery in Renaissance Europe
The sixteenth century marked the beginning of modern scientific exploration. Instead of relying principally on classical accounts of the natural world, scholars began employing direct observation to measure, probe, and expand fields of knowledge: astronomy, cartography, anatomy, and medicine. Well-known artists of the period such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, and Peter Breugel enthusiastically depicted what would today be considered scientific subjects, says Susan Dackerman, Weyerhaeuser curator of prints at the Harvard Art Museums, even though the notion of scientific inquiry was in its infancy. (The word “scientist” wasn’t even invented until the eighteenth century.) Shortly after arriving at Harvard five years ago, Dackerman began wondering how extensive a role these important artists played in the pursuit of knowledge in early modern Europe. “We all have this idea of scientific illustration,” she explains, “but that is not what I am really interested in. I’m interested in the way that the most famous artists of the time collaborated” in the production of specialized knowledge. Just how much did Dürer know about astronomy, for example, when he carved the first known woodcut of a celestial chart?
Dackerman’s subsequent quest to solve that puzzle took her to Harvard’s botanical libraries, Map Collection, Houghton Library, Countway Library of Medicine, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and many other sources. The collaborative effort was aided by regular interdisciplinary discussions at the Mahindra Humanities Center over the course of several years, and further honed in a class Dackerman co-taught with Katharine Park, Zemurray Stone Radcliffe professor of the history of science, in 2010.
Stunned by Harvard’s intellectual resources—the physical collections, the human expertise in “almost anything you can think of,” and a “corps of graduate and undergraduate students who are curious and eager and smart”—Dackerman realized that she had access to “an incredible potential laboratory for devising different ways of teaching”: a key goal of the University’s reimagined art museums. The work has culminated in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (through December 10 at the Sackler Museum), a model for bringing together a group of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students who all contributed their “interdisciplinary and intergenerational voices,” in Dackerman’s words, to the exhibition.
“We think of artists as individuals working from imagination or observation,” says Dackerman, but artists like Dürer—the premier painter, draftsman, and printmaker of the early sixteenth century—were familiar with important astronomical theories and discoveries and incorporated them into their work. Dürer’s woodcut of the constellations, with its combination of classically posed human nudes and naturalistic renderings (Cancer is a lobster, not a crab), subsequently became important to the history of astronomy. “Almost any representation of the stars made in the sixteenth century,” Dackerman says, “is some derivation of Dürer’s original,” which depicts the stars affixed to the outermost layer of the concentric spheres that also hold the moon and planets in place around the earth. The German artist’s influence persists even in Jan Saenredam’s copperplate engravings of celestial-sphere gores, dating to the end of the century. Based on the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s expanded star catalog, they are the first printed non-Ptolemaic depictions of the skies. Houghton Library holds the only surviving impressions of these gores.
Printing itself was an astounding technology at the time—the most sophisticated way possible to represent and disseminate knowledge. And printmakers were inventive in their use of this new medium: printed paper sundials, for example, included the instructions for their own manufacture. The facsimile shown in the seventh image above (which visitors to the exhibit can hold and manipulate) consists of a paper sheet (shown in the sixth image) affixed to a cylinder that is fitted with a precisely measured, protruding gnomon. The device would have allowed traveling merchants not only to tell time, but also to convert among the three different time-telling systems of the day as they traveled from one region to another.
In an era when ability to navigate long distances at sea was a relatively new skill for Europeans, maps of oceans and coastlines were valuable tools of exploration. But not all maps were topographical. Georg Glockendon’s 1511 copy of Hans Burgkmair’s “map” of a voyage up the east coast of Africa and down the west coast of India shows the different peoples encountered as the ship made various stops-, detailing their dress and customs in what may be the first ethnographic study ever made.
Another important development of the period was an emphasis on knowledge culled from experience and observation, rather than from books. Dürer, for example, asserts that his rhinoceros was drawn from nature because he worked from an eyewitness sketch and description, even though he never saw the beast himself. Depictions of cranial surgery, and innovative models of human anatomy that permitted delving into the viscera, promoted—as much as they described—a novel way of understanding and interacting with the world. Saenredam’s engraving of a beached whale shows the artist himself sketching figures who are busy measuring the carcass and studying properties of its skin and blowhole. They would now be called scientists, but were then fellow seekers after, and purveyors of, knowledge, just as he was.
|
|
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2012-4-30 00:33:36
收藏
收藏
楼主
