Chartbook #178 Witnesses to the automobile revolution

But that was the experience also of a working-class kid like my father. In Birmingham after, he grew up in a street where the only motor-vehicles until the 1950s were a motorbike and a delivery van. No one could afford a car. Whereas my upper-class paternal grandfather regaled us with tales of his outings in Bugattis in the 1930s, and beat his cars to bits, my paternal grandfather treated his 1960s vintage gold metallic Vauxhall Viva like it was a crown jewel and liked to take the family for “a drive”. No destination. Just for a drive. In the early 1970s that was, for their generation, still a precious and exciting novelty.

This is from a fun post by Adam Tooze interweaving some of his own personal history and that of the motor car. The going for “a drive” echoed with me. My father drove many miles on some bloody awful roads in Wales in the 1950s through to the 70s. And yet, at the weekend, his relaxation was to just go for a drive somewhere. Sometimes we would end up at Cardiff docks where you would see thousands (yes, I mean thousands) of MGBs and other small sports cars waiting to be loaded onto ships. No longer.

London Playbook: Striking back — Pestminster update — Rishi’s Christmas drinks – POLITICO

One palpably relieved No. 10 staffer confirmed everything was “a lot more chilled” under the new PM, apart from the small matter of “the country falling apart.”

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I entered academia as an established professional musician, and I continue to work as a performer, but my research and teaching are equally centred around traditional academic scholarship, as well as practice outputs. This is unusual; most music practitioners on research contracts primarily pursue practice-based projects (compositions, performances, recordings, multimedia works), outputs from which are submitted to the REF with the near-mandatory 300-word statement setting out why they should be considered research.

And people try and justify the REF. Utterly stupid:SRFM.

(Title: h/t King Crimson)

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Woolliness is the enemy of accuracy as well as utility. A word like “sustainability” is so fuzzy that it is used to encompass everything from a business that thinks sensibly about the long term to the end of capitalism. This column may well count as sustainable because it keeps recycling the same ideas.

To which I might add, this blog.

How many more attacks can our institutions withstand? | Prospect Magazine

But when institutions are creations of the central state and (at least in significant part) paid for by it, their autonomy is limited; they risk becoming government brands, not self-created institutions as Burke might have imagined them.

“They who destroy everything certainly will remove some grievance”, Edmund Burke wrote of the French Revolution: and that has been true of the Year Zero element of the Conservative party. The country isn’t working, so smash things. When that fails, smash some more.

Simon Schama: art versus the tyrants | Financial Times

All the stuff of mainstream history — wars, revolutions, economies — is becoming a subset of the engulfing, elemental question: the fate of the earth; what humans have done to it and what they may yet do to repair and redeem the damage. We are running out of time. But what we have not yet exhausted is what, in the end, makes us human: the great storehouse of visionary imagination. If, at the eleventh hour, we have what it takes to pull off the greatest escape act in the human story, it will not be databanks or algorithms that will have got us there, but something like a poem, a novel, a painting or a song. 

What Václav Havel, in his most original and penetrating text, called “the power of the powerless” is capable of putting despotisms on the back foot, simply by being in sync with the simplest and most natural human instincts. Authoritarians can mobilise their heavy artillery of terror, torture, imprisonment and persecution; but in the end, Havel argued, they are not that well equipped to fight the asymmetric battle between lies and truth. Havel believed that the vast majority of people are not content to be forever walled within a prison of falsehood, where the price of material security and domestic safety is the unconditional surrender of personal freedom. 

But what if Havel was wrong?

Pond Life: Princeton PhD inspires campus novel | Times Higher Education (THE)

When Jack Williams heard his PhD dissertation would likely be read by just a handful of people, he decided that a novel approach to expanding its reach was needed. Literally. “On average, only five people will read a doctoral thesis – and one of them is usually your housemate – so I thought it would be good if I could smuggle something of my ideas into a book,” said Dr Williams, whose debut novel, Pond Life, is published by RedDoor Press.

I had always thought fiction was an old form evident in many theses.

Georgina Sturge interview: “The numbers don’t count. People do” – New Statesman

An interview with Georgina Sturge, a statistician in the House of Commons Library. The first quote deals with an issue I have heard about before, although I do not know further details. If it is not true it will be.

Sturge also cites the cautionary tale of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two Harvard economists whose 2010 model purported to show that, if a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio exceeded 90 per cent, the risk of a negative impact on long-term growth became significant. This research was used by George Osborne to justify austerity, on the grounds that if the UK didn’t get its debt under control, the economy would shrink. The only problem? Reinhart and Rogoff had made an error, missing off five rows of data on their spreadsheet, negating their conclusion about the risk of negative growth. By the time this was spotted, austerity was well under way and its effects are still being felt now. And while it’s a stretch to say that David Cameron and Osborne would have pursued a different course had the mistake been caught earlier, bad data gave them cover for their economic programme.

If we want our politicians to use data more responsibly, Georgina Sturge argues, we need to invest in better ways of collecting it. It’s perverse that we know more about the performance of Premier League footballers than how many children are out of school.

Not really. It’s just money.

Do you really want to live to be 100? | Financial Times

Sarah O’Connor in today’s FT

I’m one of life’s optimists. When I think about living to be 100 years old, I picture a birthday party where I am surrounded by my devoted descendants, perhaps followed by a commercial space flight as a celebratory treat.

But I’m in the minority here. A lot of people would rather be dead. In a recent UK poll by Ipsos, only 35 per cent of people said they wanted to become centenarians.

Monday 17 May, 2022 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1

John Naughton’s Quote of the Day

”If people don’t believe mathematics is simple, it is only because they don’t realise how complicated life is.”

John von Neumann