I have been writing poetry for a while. I put something on my blog earlier this month. A number of the poems have a political theme and won’t stand the test of time or literary chops, so I might as well expose them now. I will be adding more from time to time. Here’s a sonnet, written about a year ago. An Old Poet’s Warning “The centre cannot hold”–Yeats’s sharp line Seems to be on the verge of coming true. His “second coming” is blocking my view And I feel shivers moving up my spine. His slouching “rough beast” has… Read More
Continue ReadingRight v. Rights
I have been doing some computer and files housekeeping, and uncovered an older article from the NYTimes “The Stone” column (about philosophy), that merits comment. The article, “What We Owe to Others: Simone Weil’s Radical Reminder,” by Robert Zaretsky recalls that her “reflections on the nature of obligation offer a bracing dose of sanity in our perplexing and polarizing times.” It’s a great article and deserves to be read in its entirety. Zaretsky focuses on Weil’s concern about the focus on one’s rights, a personal concern versus what is morally right, an impersonal, universal concept. The problem, for Weil, with… Read More
Continue ReadingMy Safety Valve
I think I may have posted a few of my poems on this blog before. I have been writing poetry fairly seriously for the last couple of years. Mostly sonnets, but a few old-fashioned, structured poems like villanelles, sestinas, and pantoums. Here is a villanelle I wrote around Election Day, 2018. I find writing verse is a good way to relieve the tightness that I find pervades every part of me these days. Villanelles repeat the 1st and 3rd lines of the first stanza in an ordered way through the rest of the poem. Where I stand on the political… Read More
Continue ReadingUpside-down Economics
We now have, thanks to Kate Raworth, donut economics. Herman Daly gave us steady-state economics. Regular professionals gave us micro- and macroeconomics. And so on. Today, I am announcing a completely new type of economics: upside-down economics. It is the science of too much. From Adam Smith onward, economics has been largely about how to manage scarcity. But today, while scarcity is still a real issue for much of the world’s population, here in the US and other rich countries, the issue has been turned on its head; we have too much of a lot of things. It is important… Read More
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