Marty Manley on economics, politics, technology, and culture

Archive for November, 2007

Give Thanks for Enormous Progress

Foreign Policy puts Thanksgiving in perspective, noting five things that the whole planet can be thankful for: Fewer wars and fewer deaths from war: political violence has been headed steadily downhill since the early 1990s. The number of wars involving states, and the deaths they directly cause, has decreased dramatically. Between 1992 and 2003, the [...]

Money for Nothin'

Hollywood is a microcosm of the US economy: a tough place to make a living for most people and a place where it simply rains money for others. The current strike by the Writer’s Guild makes the difference clear, but with one problem. The union should attack not only the studios — they need to [...]

Confundus Economics

In case you aren’t keeping close score on these things, take a look around. This is a really strange moment in our economic history. On the one hand, times have rarely been better: GDP, the basic measure of economic health, was up 3.9 percent last quarter. Core inflation is under 2 percent and unemployment is [...]

Thanks and Praise

The indispensable Michael Yon posts a story (surfaced by Instapundit) and a remarkable photo "worthy of a Pulitizer". I photographed men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the [...]

Obama: Break Away from Hillary on Immigration

To me, the biggest surprise of the 2008 election is that the most wide open election in three generations is not that wide open.  The electorate is leaning heavily to early favorites Giuliani and Clinton, the two most centrist candidates. A Democratic Hawk vs. a Republican social liberal? My kind of election. The biggest disappointment [...]