Monday 19 December 2011

Christmas Reading



This is a good time I think to recommend Rortybomb, my favourite American politics blog.

It is a superhumanly comprehensive yet accessible account of a collection of complicated but important issues - credit card charges, home foreclosures, mass incarceration, bankruptcy lawsunemployment - that dominate ordinary peoples' lives in the USA but are quite hard to get a handle on conceptually.

The author, cartoonised above, is former 'financial engineer' turned left-wing blogger/activist thingy Mike Konczal.

His blog goes right down to the details of festering foreclosed swimming pools causing disease outbreaks in Fern County California, and right up to the big historical picture of a country that suffers from an inherited Victorian/feudal prejudice against debtors, with plenty of in-between interestingness as well.

Konczal has the good habit of picturing economics, and academic theorising generally, as a useful explanatory tool rather than a deep underlying truth, which makes the blog pleasingly intellectually cosmopolitan and also less confrontationally evangelical, despite its decidedly radical political stance, than say Paul Krugman, Kevin Drum etc.

Perhaps connectedly, Rortybomb also does really well at playing the ideological Turing test game (perfected by Tyler Cowen here), where you try as convincingly as you can to defend the position of someone you disagree with. This long post about the roots of conservative radicalism  is by a guest but is typical. Here is an understanding the other side post by the main man. Here is another one asking why non-financial firms aren't pushing for bank reforms.

Why the blog is called "Rortybomb" is a mystery to me. It sounds kind of computery.

Finally, here is yet another excellent post featuring the line "there is no foreclosure Batman"(no comma).

Enjoy!

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