"Everybody says this who meets with him, but like, he's, he's an incredible host. So we, we met with him at Bedminster Golf Club in, in New Jersey...

"... which is like, you know, absolutely beautiful, you know, we had a great time.... [What did Trump serve at dinner?] Oh, he said, he said what do you guys want to eat? And I, I just, I, for some reason I was just like, I, I, I, I know exactly what to say and I'm like, meat, I want meat. And so he literally ordered every meat dish. And, and by the way, he ordered every meat dish and nothing else. [There were no sides?] There were no sides.... It was all meat and it was glorious. There was so much meat. I don't think there was room on the table for sides. [Were there drinks or no alcohol?] There? It was a diet coke. He, he, he, he mainlines diet coke. And I was mainlining it right next to him."

Said Marc Andreessen — with questions from Bari Weiss in brackets — in this "Honestly" podcast episode. This is a great podcast. (Andreessen, to quote Weiss, "got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser... He then co-founded Netscape... [and] now runs a venture capital firm... [that] invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft and Oculus to name just a few.")

There's a nice "lightning round" at the end of the podcast. After asking about the food Trump, the "incredible host," served at Bedminster, Weiss asks: "Tomorrow you wake up and you're the DNC chair, what's the first thing you would do?"

"One of the striking things about 'Western civilization' is that as an idea it is not particularly old."

“It came to the fore during World War I, when the fight against Germany and its allies — the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires — was conceived by Anglophone liberals as a war of Western civilization against Eastern despotism. John Maynard Keynes, a cosmopolitan liberal, was convinced there was a civilizational gulf even between Germans and Anglo-Saxons, while the Russians, though allied with the West, were well beyond the pale of Western modernity. In the wake of World War I, courses on 'Western Civilization' began to be taught at elite American universities. By the onset of the Cold War, the term 'Free World' supplanted 'the West' because American power demanded a more globally inclusive banner that could rally South Vietnamese, Indonesians and others in the war on Communist 'slave societies.' After the Cold War, however, conservative American thinkers, such as Samuel Huntington, revived the idea of 'Western civilization' as a way of dramatizing how a set of values was now under siege from new threats: migrants, terrorists and moral relativists."

From "Vladimir Putin Has Revived ‘The West.’ Is That a Good Thing?" by Thomas Meaney, who does not think it's a good thing.

"The Bullshit-Job Boom/For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind?"

By Nathan Heller at The New Yorker.

In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster), David Graeber, an anthropologist now at the London School of Economics, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for what he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” He thinks these jobs are everywhere. By all the evidence, they are. His book, which has the virtue of being both clever and charismatic, follows a much circulated essay that he wrote, in 2013, to call out such occupations. Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them. Others were pointless in opaque ways....

Corporate lawyers? That doesn't sound right! How is a corporation supposed to stay on the right side of all the law? It would make more sense to say the law is bullshit. But I can see how a corporate lawyer might feel that the tasks he's stuck doing are bullshit, that his is not a spiritually rewarding way of life, but Heller wrote that the clients wouldn't miss their lawyers if they all suddenly "disappeared." Wishing mass death on lawyers is an old tradition, replete with Shakespeare quote. And it's common to think this murderous ideation is cute.

By the way, the oft-trotted-out Shakespeare quote is almost always misunderstood:

Shakespeare's exact line ''The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers,'' was stated by Dick the Butcher in ''Henry VI,'' Part II, act IV, Scene II, Line 73. Dick the Butcher was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who thought that if he disturbed law and order, he could become king. Shakespeare meant it as a compliment to attorneys and judges who instill justice in society.

Shakespeare quotes are often presented as if Shakespeare were not a playwright and the ideas expressed were Shakespeare's own opinions. The lines are spoken by characters, who can be evil, stupid, deceitful, or badly mistaken.

Back to Heller:

I do digital consultancy for global pharmaceutical companies’ marketing departments. I often work with global PR agencies on this, and write reports with titles like How to Improve Engagement Among Key Digital Health Care Stakeholders. It is pure, unadulterated bullshit, and serves no purpose beyond ticking boxes for marketing departments. . . . I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting. The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point.

Hmm. That reminds me. One of the reasons I chose to retire is that the bullshit work spiraled upward over the years. When I started in the 80s, there was hardly any committee work and some of the required paperwork — e.g., progress reports on pre-tenure professors — wasn't even done at all. Toward the end, there were so many large committees taking themselves very seriously, producing reports and reporting orally on reports at faculty meetings that dragged on for hours. There was always another "self-study" report to be laboriously cranked out, and you couldn't even say: Come on, we know this is bullshit... can't we just admit it and get it done as efficiently as possible? No, we had to perform in the Theater of Utmost Seriosity in the production of mindnumbing paperwork. If it had been a committee of 3 or 4 tenured professors, we'd have laughed about the stupidity and done it as fast as possible. But in later years, it would be a much larger, much more inclusive group, and you'd seem like an obstructionist if you rankled at bureaucracy and insane if you cracked a joke.

A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.”... [B]ullshit work [is] “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Ugh! The pretense is part of the work.

Hollywood is notoriously mired in development, an endeavor that Graeber believes to be almost pure bullshit. One developer he meets, Apollonia, had been kept busy working over reality shows with titles such as “Transsexual Housewives” and “Too Fat to Fuck.”...

To be fair, those shows do sound interesting. But what is bullshit is working on them without believing that there's a chance they will become real shows.

In a famous essay drafted in 1928, John Maynard Keynes projected that, a century on, technological efficiency in Europe and in the U.S. would be so great, and prosperity so assured, that people would be at pains to avoid going crazy from leisure and boredom. Maybe, Keynes wrote, they could plan to retain three hours of work a day, just to feel useful.

Here we are nearly in 2028, and technology has indeed produced dazzling efficiencies. As Keynes anticipated, too, the number of jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, and mining has plummeted. Yet employment in other fields—management, service—grows, and people still spend their lives working to finance basic stuff.... “It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the office upstairs,” [Graeber] writes.

Maybe the reason we don't have single-payer health care is that we need to preserve the bullshit jobs!

“Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork,’ ” [President Obama once said]. “That represents one million, two million, three million jobs.” Graeber describes this comment as a “smoking gun” of bullshittization. “Here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs,” he writes. Politicians are so fixated on job creation, he thinks, that no one wonders which jobs are created, and whether they are necessary. Unnecessary employment may be one of the great legacies of recent public-private collaboration.

Ugh! But look where this line of thinking goes, for Heller at least:

Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk time to play computer solitaire or shop for camping equipment online.... 

John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."

Here's something worth reading in light of Niall Ferguson's remark about Keynes (something about his being gay and therefore childless and unconcerned about the future). Keynes was writing in 1930:

My purpose in this essay... is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?...

"What I find interesting about the Ferguson controversy is how disconnected it is from the past."

Writes Jonah Goldberg:

Even academics I respect reacted to Ferguson’s comments as if they bordered on unimaginable, unheard-of madness. I understand that we live in a moment where any negative comment connected to homosexuality is not only wrong but “gay bashing.” But Ferguson was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago. Now, because of a combination of indifference to intellectual history and politically correct piety he must don the dunce cap. Good to know.

Perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago.

If that's what intellectuals were doing — kicking members of an out group when they were on the outside — before the outsiders were on the inside and it became awkward to disrespect them to their face, then why should I be impressed by this history of intellectual discourse?

Maybe times change and it's hard to keep up, but let's not cry over a Harvard professor's difficulty keeping up.

What Niall Ferguson said about John Maynard Keynes being gay and therefore not caring about the future.

I feel compelled to do a post about this story:

Perhaps in an effort to save his job at Harvard, or his gig with the Daily Beast, or just his professional dignity, Ferguson apologized Saturday for his "tactless" and "off the cuff" remarks. "I should not have suggested... that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay," Ferguson wrote on his website. He called his assertion "doubly stupid" because of course people without children care about future generations and "I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried." Right, yes. That's why his remarks were dumb. Because Keynes tried to have a baby and failed....

"If Obama isn't an old-school Keynesian, what is he?"

Asks John Cassidy (as he reviews "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein):

One answer is that he is a behavioralist—the term economists use to describe those who subscribe to the tenets of behavioral economics, an increasingly popular discipline that seeks to marry the insights of psychology to the rigor of economics....

The central tenet of the Chicago School is that markets, once established and left alone, will resolve most of society's economic problems, including, presumably, the mortgage crisis. Keynesians—old-school Keynesians, anyway—take the view that markets, financial markets especially, often fail to work as advertised, and that this failure can be self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting. In some ways, the behavioralists stand with the Keynes-ians. Markets sometimes go badly awry, they agree, especially when people have to make complicated choices, such as what type of mortgage to take out. But whereas the Keynesians argue that vigorous regulation and the prohibition of certain activities such as excessive borrowing are often necessary, behavioralists tend to be more hopeful about redeeming free enterprise. With a gentle nudge, they argue, even some very poorly performing markets—and the people who inhabit them—can be made to work pretty well.