I hope all of you on the eastern seaboard have made it through Hurricane Irene safe and well. I’ve been working remotely further north on a few longer-term projects, which I will share with you soon.

A few quick links:

(1) Virginia Postrel offers a reminder that the epochal change that happened in the 1980s wasn’t primarily political. Rather, it was a cultural shift towards the valorization of entrepreneurship and market production more broadly:

In 1981, business executives aren’t known for either personality or passion. The general public sees business as a boring, impersonal, possibly suspect activity. Its significance seems purely financial.
“Businessmen,” Tom Wolfe tells the Wall Street Journal, “no longer have the conviction that what they’re doing is exciting and glamorous, which is, I guess, another way of saying intrinsically worthwhile.”
That was all about to change.
In the 1980s, entrepreneurs became heroes, celebrities and role models. The Apple whiz kids, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were the new face of business.
Money was, of course, part of the appeal — millionaires in their 20s! — but there was much more to it than that. The aspirations for pleasure and self-expression that the sociologist Daniel Bell had condemned as the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” turned out to be its fuel.

There were many ways in which certain politicians aided and abetted this cultural shift, but this was really more of a bottom-up than a top-down transformation. The left often laments the deterioration of norms that restrained wage dispersion, CEO compensation, etc. Yet I’d argue that the “aspirations for pleasure and self-expression” that Postrel references were more central than is commonly understood. Contra Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, and various latter-day scolds, I am hard-pressed to see this phenomenon as anything other than a very good thing.

(2) I reread Gene Healy’s essay on “the cult of the presidency” periodically, just to keep his thesis in mind.

(3) What do you think of “banning the box“? Improving the labor market prospects of ex-offenders is a high priority as far as I’m concerned, but I fear that this approach will backfire, i.e., it will eventually lead employers to use other proxies and workaround that are more economically counterproductive. I’d rather we (a) incarcerate fewer people, (b) give prisoners work opportunities to help maintain and improve their skill levels, and (c) offer more support to ex-offenders as they re-enter the workforce. The “cost-effectiveness” of limiting the freedom of employers in this way might prove an illusion.

(4) Partha Chatterjee’s short essay on corruption and democratic politics is worth a look. What do we mean when we rail against corruption and its beneficiaries? The piece is about India and Anna Hazare, but I think it has straightforward implications for how we think about our own middle class welfare state.

(5) Jonathan Wai has written an informative post on the evidence that a really key contributor to national productivity is the braininess of the brainiest (the tentative title of an article I’m writing), i.e., the IQ of the top 5% of a country’s population.

(6) I recommend this fifteen-year-old review by Monica Diaz of The Scar of Race, and more to the point I recommend reading the book itself. The field has made progress since, but the book remains an important contribution.

(7) In light of the recent campaign controversies concerning climate change, I recommend revisiting, or visiting, Jim Manzi’s lucid essay in Summer 2008 issue of The New Atlantis on conservatives, climate change, and the carbon tax.