Charlie Rose

vongleichent  02/06/2012 11:01 AM Report

I'm sorry but I totally disagree on his point about the rat race. I don't know a single person who would prefer to be in the rat race. Ask this simple question would you rather be financially independent or the opposite?

SharkswithfrikingLazers  01/18/2012 07:32 PM Report

I doubt retiring too soon is detrimental to one's mental health. He claims that countries whose citizens retire early are less capable to do simply tasks.

Charlie, I would like to hear about this claim in your brain series.

It is probably the lack of activity after the early retirement and not the retirement itself but I await more information.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  01/18/2012 07:29 PM Report

Google, and others in Silicon Valley, provide a lifestyle not a job. So vacation is work and work is vacation.

Moving paper, or email around, and then meeting about it does not make one feel relevant.

Perhaps this author might watch an episode of "The Office".

SharkswithfrikingLazers  01/18/2012 07:24 PM Report

A wee bit on the light side Charlie. Substance, that is.

So I get to live about 30 years longer because of the rat race?

So when we win the rat race aren't we still rats?

REMant  01/16/2012 11:46 AM Report

I think maybe Mr Buchholz realized his book wouldn't sell as planned, it not being exactly novel, so why not be "outrageous"? But he is in fact a well-known enthusiast and something of a raconteur with a penchant for self-promotion and "motivational" speaking, tho not taken very seriously by anyone outside of the Bush administrations. But he is perhaps a poster boy wonder for their Calvin Coolidgism: born in 1961, a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard in economics 26 years later (not incidentally the way it is appears on book jackets), a lawyer for two years, then brought in to be Bush Sr's Director of Economic Policy. From there he moved to Wall St. In 2006 he was reportedly considered by the heir for the Fed. He made overly optimistic predictions about current affairs in both 2008. And in 2009 opined that we were all whiners and just needed to get back to work. Well, no doubt we need to work, but it's not proved all that simple, even it seems for writers.

An Amazon reader wrote of the "revised" version: "i was sorely disappointed by "rush" -- an interesting premise ruined by a presumptuous and lazy author. first, the content is pure fluff -- a ton of basic anecdotes without any serious supporting data. second, the writing style is terrible. it reads like a poorly written email. actually, it feels like the author sat down in a single sitting and wrote everything in a pure stream-of-consciousness format. third, the book is mind-numbingly repetitive. the entire thing can be summed up as: 'stress and competition can be good for you.' but the author goes around in circles saying this over and over again for 240 pages (again, with no real evidence -- and i want to believe the premise!). fourth, the book suffers from a massive number of over-generalizations -- some that can be racially, politically, and culturally insensitive and offensive."

But it apparently is hardly novel, either. One Jack Goodstein remarked: "Essentially the thesis of the book seems to be that human beings are best served by an economic system that encourages and rewards individual initiative through freewheeling competition as opposed to one where a paternalistic government tries to equalize rewards among its citizens. The book highlights examples of research purporting to show that people who work for what they get are better satisfied than those who get a free ride. People like to compete because they like to win. Competitive instincts are embedded in human genes, and to the extent that competition drives us to excellence, it is not only a positive force, it may well have been the force most vital to human development. We compete for rewards. Competition breeds innovation; innovation means progress. In a society where there everyone gets rewarded there is no need to compete; there is no progress."

What we apparently get is the old Fable of the Bees argument, the poor lived better than the rich before, or to mix metaphors, that a rising tide lifts all boats. To which Barney Frank in one of his better moments on this show retorted, if you haven't got a boat, the water goes up your nose. I shouldn't need to point out to libertarians that this is all about fighting the last war. That's what is so depressing about so much talk since 2008. The two sides took up the same old cudgels and began beating each other with them, and the PACs seem bent on defining this election in the same hackneyed manner.

But Mr Buchholz's take is wrong as the position it opposes. The history of the past century or so is the decline of rational Protestantism, honesty and masculinity, and its replacement with a return a feminine-dominated emotional Catholicism based on shame and productive of anxiety and outright hysteria. It is paralleled by the replacement of equilibrium with Keynesian economics, science with historicism, natural design or selection and Spencer with creationism and Huxley. This is retrogression, not progress, Weber either pinning the tail on the wrong animal, or mistaking eye candy for substance.

Men a hundred or so years ago could live just as long as they do today. That many didn't was not due so much to the industrial revolution, etc - there is much evidence that this could not have been so - but simply the accretion of knowledge. Mandeville, himself, didn't believe it. His only concern was with the hypocrisy of the liberals of his time in claiming that progress was immoral while at the same time profiting from it. As for himself, he'd live honestly on acorns. He was just as critical as Smith of the idea which would open the Wealth of Nations, that some sort of social feelings lay behind development. But Smith, no more than Mandeville (or Darwin) abandoned the idea of virtue. They all believed in rational progress - that ppl came to realize what was in their true self-interest. They were Stoics. They were not libertines. They most certainly did not believe we ought do evil so that good may come.

The Garden of Eden story is very well to the point. It hypothesizes that a fallen mankind is faced with the task of regaining an identity with God or nature. The question tho has been met with varying solutions (and concomitant interpretations), some of which tie our hands completely, while others range from mania to obsession. The issue can, however, be resolved by realizing that we know only reflexively, and that natural selection is itself such a reflexive act, constituting both will and idea at the same time. We essentially prove ourselves.

I am not sure what the writer means by competition, but I don't think it is this. Either the idea of a fall is absent, or it is tied up with a compulsive approval-seeking that detaches utility from real usefulness. Now, it does work out that animals are guided by evolution to things which are good for them, but we do not define that goodness, nature does, and nature is nothing if not totally ecological. There is design there, if no one can tell by whom or what intended. Poverty, indeed, prods us to understanding and innovation, but it doesn't guide it and it can no more be induced by deprivation than by the power of positive thinking.

Buchholz's position seems clear in an excerpt I found touted online, where he argues in Keynesian fashion that return on investment necessarily expected to be higher than the cost of borrowing, when interest rates are high, they discourage investment. (See http://www.trainingmag.com/article/interest-rates-fall-civilizations-rise and elsewhere) The trend is towards lower rates historically, which must mean the lower the rate the greater the spur to investment. That interest rates have fallen secularly is true, but it isn't the cost of borrowing that is important, as I said many times before, but the inducement to work and save. And these things must be kept in balance. You cannot artificially lower the one than raise the other, no matter how much you would like to make "tomorrow more appealing." We no doubt need purpose, but it can no more be imagined than credit spun. Purpose is, in fact, grace, that faith and love of God of which St Paul wrote, and on which Protestantism and republicanism have always rested.

Regarding some of his other arguments I would say the main reason retirees do poorly is that during their working years they really learned nothing. And altho crime seems to have dropped the last few years, it was declining well before that, when it was hypothesized that riches not need was the reason. But this may all be premature, because, at least in the nation's capital, robbery definitely appears on the rise. Then there's the belief that families are strengthened in hardship, but clearly the growth of the market has been the main reason for their demise.

This same kind of thinking, BTW, is what I think you can expect from a Pres Romney.

REMant  01/15/2012 03:15 PM Report

Mr Buchholz may get a rush from it, but I doubt everyone does. I'll have more to say about him and the subject later.