Sex, Economics, and Austerity. AP Photo John Maynard Keynes was the sexiest economist who ever lived. This might seem like half-hearted praise since in our mind’s eye the typical economist appears as a dowdy and almost always balding man, full of prudential advice about thrift and the miracle of compound interest. Keynes, with his caterpillar moustache and mesmerizing bedroom eyes, cut a more dashing figure. He had many lovers of both genders, and was married to one of the great beauties of the age, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Given all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that a much-publicized recent attack on the Keynesian policy of using government deficits to overcome economic recession resorted to homophobia to discredit it. Ferguson’s repudiation of his original homophobic comments should be commended.
But there is something deeper and weirder going on here. The Schumpeter claim has had a surprisingly robust life despite the fact that it is both biographically wrong and logically absurd. Advertisement Comments. ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt. Is Islam Compatible with Capitalism? by Guy Sorman, City Journal Summer 2011. The Middle East’s future depends on the answer. BeBa/Iberfoto/The Image Works A sixteenth-century Turkish bazaar. Muslim tradition has long accepted the marketplace, though sharia constrained its efficiency. The moment you arrive at the airport in Cairo, you discover how little Egypt—the heart of Arab civilization—is governed by the rule of law. You line up to show your passport to the customs officer; you wait and wait and wait. Eventually, you reach the officer . . . who sends you to the opposite end of the airport to buy an entry visa. The airport experience, had he been able to undergo it, would have been drearily familiar to Rifaa al-Tahtawi, a brilliant young imam sent to France in 1829 by the pasha of Egypt.
Egypt is, of course, a Muslim nation. Muslim economies haven’t always been low achievers. A key factor in the divergence was Italian city-states’ invention of capitalism—a development that rested on certain cultural prerequisites, Stanford University’s Avner Greif observes. The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science. Illustration: Jonathon Rosen "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. " Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Festinger and his team were with the cult when the prophecy failed. Read also: the truth about Climategate.At first, the group struggled for an explanation. From that day forward, the Seekers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize. In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. Dan Margolis: <i>From Fatwa to Jihad</i> **By Dan Margolis** Most comments on the rise of radical Islam tend to fall into either a left or right wing version of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s argument, first developed in 1992, that we are in the midst of a clash of civilizations. With the collapse of the Communist bloc, he argued, the world would become increasingly dominated by contradictions between rival civilizations, groups so distinct that they were bound to clash.
Of these there were many, but the biggest conflicts were likely to arise between the “civilizations” Huntington dubbed the “Western” and the “Islamic.” The extreme right wing shows its acceptance of this theory through crude attacks on anything Muslim, whether by protesting an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan or burning copies of the Koran. In a strange twist, much of the liberal left has embraced this concept of extreme irreconcilable difference. Radical Islam, says the author, failed pathetically in the Muslim world.