Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
Yippee!!
The environmental benefits of this move are clear, but it will also make the roads safer.
Next up, SUVs? We can hope.
Archive for the ‘Commerce and its discontents’ Category
February 25th, 2010
December 2nd, 2009
The Obama Administration could fight for a bill to help people in danger of getting kicked out of their houses, but the banks don’t like it. Guess who Obama is listening to?
November 16th, 2009
If it’s good enough for B of A and Chase, then it is good enough for the Treasury Department. No questions asked.
October 6th, 2009
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Energy and Environment, Literature, Moral philosophy, Religion
…for a man to write this well every day.” But somehow, Thoreau could.
August 2nd, 2009
My colleague Michael Pollan begins a reflection on not cooking from the appearance this week of a new movie about Julia Child and his recollection that her book and TV show gave his mother the courage to try real cooking. Pollan’s point, not surprisingly, is that we should cook more. Of that, more [...]
April 6th, 2009
Category: Commerce and its discontents
Corporate managements should seek regulation if unfettered competition prevents them from offering socially optimal products.
April 6th, 2009
Category: Commerce and its discontents
Kevin Drum discusses legislation to outlaw phosphates in detergent (to protect waterways). A fun extra of the piece is a link to a blogger at Redstate salivating at the coming Great Times of vigilantes beating legislators to death, and armed rebellion, over this. But the line that rang a bell in my head [...]
March 20th, 2009
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Sports
If Dodgers owner Frank McCourt is going to be so contemptuous of his fans, then maybe they should return the favor.
March 1st, 2009
Category: Commerce and its discontents
The public outrage over excessive bonuses has transformed HR practice at UBS. This is huge. To understand it, watch carefully:
In the last few years, bank and financial executives were paid a lot during the year as salary, and then a lot more at the end of the year as a bonus. The [...]
February 22nd, 2009
Category: Commerce and its discontents
More plaintively, lately, than forcefully, this and that stumbling bank or corporation has claimed that capping bonuses (or taxing the rich) will make it impossible for them to retain the exquisitely rare, irreplaceable, talent at the top on which they depend.
Indeed. I guess all those stars will double up in the executive floors of the [...]