Lost in Translation

People often put too much information about themselves online. I don’t see the problem, as long as the statute of limitations has passed.

Some years ago our insurance company suddenly realised we had an imported car and dropped us, the presumed risk of driving what my mechanic called a left-hooker not negated by a spotless record. Getting a policy from another company was complicated by the fact that I didn’t have a British licence; indeed, had been using my Ohio license on British roads for a decade. (Oops.)

The usual thing to do would be to suck it up and go through the painful process of obtaining the correct laminated rectangle for the country you’re actually living in, but having failed the practical test, I wasn’t in the mood to retake it; nor did my wife care to jump through the necessary hoops. And so we became a carless household — a rare thing in rural England. It’s just us and the kids and the old folks in the nursing home.

The train station is two miles down the road, an easy if occasionally hair-raising bike ride given the lamentable state of driver education. As yet another motorist speeds by with a grudging nudge of the steering wheel to barely avoid decorating his bonnet with an expatriate, I have to keep reminding myself that (most of!) these people actually passed the test.

Anyway. Yesterday we adopted some plants from Homebase.

from Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly:
It is not merely a matter of “who gets listened to” but why they get listened to. Recall in this connection the peculiar comment of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney in December of 2011 as he scrambled to get the Obama administration off the hook for its tepid response to the slump: “There was not a single mainstream, Wall Street, academic economist who knew at the time, in January of 2009, just how deep the economic hole was that we were in.”

Of course there were plenty of economists who knew how bad things were. That one was easy to call. But if you limited your inquiries—as Carney is confessing the administration did—to the statements of economists who are “mainstream” and “Wall Street” you would not have encountered such economists. You would have been counting on the wisdom of people who had been “wrong about everything,” as Dean Baker puts it.

On the other hand, you would also have been listening to the greatest names of professional economics. And this, we know, is in keeping with President Obama’s deepest instincts: trust the experts.

Preferably ones who haven’t earned scare quotes.