Graduate School Life
I went out to dinner tonight after class with a few classmates. When ordering, one of them asked how much more the curly fries were than the regular fries. "40 cents," said the waitress. His response? "Well, I'll have the cheaper ones then."

That's God's honest truth.
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 8:21 PM 1 comments

 
Why Historians are REALLY good for
In class today I picked up this really interesting tidbit: John Tyler, who was born in 1790 and who was President from 1841-45, has, get this, a grandson who currently lives in Richmond and is around 80 years old.

It turns out President Tyler is the only President to marry while in office (the inspiration for the American President???). His wife died, and he married Julia Gardner, then 24 years old and 30 years his junior. He had seven children with her (after having 8 children with his first wife), the last when he was 70. One of them was Lyon Gardiner Tyler, who was the President of William and Mary, and who married late in life and had a son when he was around 70, in about 1925. Apparently (according to my Professor) that guy is still kicking and living somewhere in Richmond.

Now really, it's that kind of interesting minutiae that people really want historians around for, not for the "origins of the progressive party" stuff that historians generally think is interesting.
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 6:48 PM 0 comments

 
I Should Have Stayed Home...
Cigars in the Sand (see our blogroll) is a superb source of on the ground news in Iraq from an intelligent supporter of American policy. He suggests this blog, so I do too.
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 8:40 AM 0 comments

 
Smarter than Your Average Bear
Jonathan Rauch is one of my favorite journalists. His pieces are clear without being simple, and express opinion without being polemical. I also happen to agree with him more often than not. (You can see a good sample of his work here, but for real brilliance, you can see what I regard as the most interesting article to ever appear in the most interesting magazine in the world.) His most recent article, though, strikes me as being accurate without being right. He argues today in the Washington Post (and more completely in a longer National Journal piece) that Social Security is about values, not about economics:

what Bush and the Republicans are focused on is not the economy, stupid. It is conservative social engineering on the grandest possible scale.

The focus, he says, in not on saving social security per se, but on helping to create an "ownership" society.

I think that's right, as far as it goes, and that may be all that many of the people pushing reform think. But I rather think it's not. The vision of an ownership society can be justified on economic as well as moral grounds: when people own their stuff they make better decisions about how to use it; resources are distributed more efficiently; we create more stuff; and we can all benefit. That's certainly where I am - if someone convinced me that the government could better invest my retirement savings, I'd be strongly against personal social security accounts. But I don't believe that for a second, so support them.

The reason the economic perspective on the ownership society ought to be included in his piece, I think, is that without it, it looks like he's revealing supporters of personal accounts as ideologues ignoring practical issues, rather than as people trying to improve our society - both morally and economically - by making an important government program more efficient and effective. Perhaps all he's trying to communicate is that we ought to discuss this issue on those grounds, rather than on the more dubious grounds of "crisis." Maybe, but for those who support an ownership society for either moral or economic reasons, or both, this may be the only chance we have. In that sense, at least, it is a crisis.
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 9:17 AM 0 comments