Charlie Rose

ShalomFreedman  01/23/2010 02:47 PM Report

I have great respect for Walter Isaacson, and have learned from reading his work, and listening to him on 'Charlie Rose'. Just the fact that he wrote biographies of Franklin and Einstein suggest what an interesting person he is. However he is a bit politically naive if he thinks that economic prosperity will, given the present climate in the Islamic world, satisfy the Palestinians. The Palestinians have received more aid per capita than any other people in the world and it has largely gone into the corrupt pockets of their leaders.

REMant  01/12/2010 01:44 PM Report

My thoroughly philistine half-brother gave me his Franklin bio for Xmas when it came out, and the kindest thing I can say about it is that it is not for professionals. I resent these Pulitzer-oriented books even when they are reasonably good, mostly because they are rarely objective, but also because their objective is to sell copies, not to relate new knowledge or even, in many cases, to educate. The Post reviewer, an historian, simply told readers to read other bios. I'm sure not all the Palestinians are interested in mkt society, particularly those in Gaza, and this is a fine example of what is wrong with his ideas. But also it doesn't take into account the obvious fact that much of Israel wants to take over the entire West Bank.

But he is right to consider Franklin a man of commerce. The notion of peace through commerce has a pretty long history, tho nobody so far has IMHO provided a good explanation why. A Princeton economist named Albert O. Hirschman wrote a so-so book about it several years ago, stressing the 18th c concept of interest, otherwise known as amour propre, (but there is much in primary and other sources). Smith, for instance, was undoubtedly speaking not of greed, but of interest in his infamous butcher line in Wealth of Nations (and in this following Hobbes and Mandeville, as against Cumberland and Shaftesbury, who offer yet another theory of commerce, and one more agreeable to Franklin, and the Obama admin). However, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary, that markets break down the kind of social bonds necessary to such rational restraint and with it the balance of power and peaceful trade.

On the question of ppl paying for things, there are several issues. One is that it has to fit into a complete pattern of behavior, for example, file downloads have replaced CDs to a great extent as the mechanism has become available for delivery and playback, which is clearly more efficient than the previous system of CDs and disc players. But they can of course be pirated, and aside from the questions of how much piracy is okay, and how much not, which was never really addressed in the analog age, this leads to the second issue, which is price. I do not think this a matter of true cost. And clearly, the public feels artists, or rather their handlers, were asking too much. This is a problem not just for music and films, but even more for plays and concerts. This issue has to be related to the general problem that I've harped on of inflation having a differential effect causing labor to be priced out of markets, and manufacturers focusing their attention more and more to a smaller and smaller public. IMHO this is the central problem in this age of central bank-managed economies, and if not stopped it is going to kill us if the climate does not. It also has a stifling effect on innovation.