In his review of S.A. Venkatesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard) in the 6/22/07 Times Lit Supplement, Paul Seabright, U. of Toulouse econ prof and author of The Company of Strangers: A natural history of economic life, 2004, accepts V’s assessment of rampant intelligence among S. Side Chi residents (dubious tho it may be) but notes the non-transferability of the skills by which they survive.
Much of their capital turns out to be highly personalized, dependent on their network of contacts and loyalties, on favours given and returned, and to have little or no value to anyone who tries to set up in a different city or even a different neighbourhood. People are risk-averse, and the neighbourhood is an informal insurance system, so it takes an unusual degree of self- assurance to take the gamble of leaving.
He asks what would help, for instance, more or less regulation of “labor markets.”
After all, regular jobs at the minimum wage are a luxury here, so does this make the minimum wage an irrelevance, or is it a part of the problem?
I have my strongly held opinion in this matter, having embraced the teaching of F.A. Hayek in these matters. Even without it, however, Wal-Mart wages seem irrelevant in this situation, as opposed to legislated ones. The starving man is glad for bread, and telling him to eat cake for the sake of union power is not a good idea.
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Coming up on the St. Sabina RC parish calendar is Bible class by televangelist Tommy Tenney, of Godchasers Network, tonight at 7. Tenney is a white guy out of Pinevilla, LA. It is not surprising that he’s not RC, which I presume he is not, because with all its protesting and marching and hosting Dem pols and other demagogs in the pulpit, St. Sabina is a Bible church.
That is, most of its members are black church-goers, which means mostly evangelical-oriented. When the irrepressible, undigestable Al Sharpton mounted the pulpit a few years back for a largely political harangue, the packed church included people who consulted their Bibles, not their missals, during the service. Pfleger is successful because he plays not only to black social concerns but also to their Bible orientation.
In this he isn’t out of sync with Things Catholic, where The Word has come to equal if not supersede The Sacrifice in importance. He just goes at it more vigorously. I’m sure this Tenney fellow is a boffo performer. And I’d like to say the same for more Catholic preachers and teachers.
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“Thank you, Christopher,” Hugh McDiarmid’s wife wrote him, using his real name, after he’d written a glowing poem about her, he having been a very difficult husband for many years. “Always remember . . . I love you and only you.” But she added, pointedly and poignantly, “ . . . and could have been so very much more if you’d only let me.”
This from her letters to him, edited by Beth Junor, in a TLS review 8/10/07.
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In his review of DESIRING ROME. Male subjectivity and reading Ovid’s “Fasti” (Ohio State) in TLS 6/8/07, T.P. Wiseman skewers author Richard J. King for characterizing Ovid as “submissive, feminized and, of course, symbolically castrated” (Wiseman’s words).
“If psychoanalysis has a value,” Wiseman writes of such a treatment, “it is surely therapeutic. There seems little point in attempting it on a man who has been dead for nearly two millennia.”
I’d say so.
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And finally, world population growth since the 1950s has been not from people “breeding like rabbits” but from their no longer “dying like flies,” says an unnamed UN advisor quoted by Bjorn Lomborg in his Skeptical Environmentalist. You can remember something like that. All things being equal, a simile works better than a metaphor.
Blithe Spirit 