Words&Dirt

“Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.”

––The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson, loc. 310

“Despite the very different institutional particulars, the most important factor in Europe’s self-inflicted economic distress is the one that mirrors the American experience: the political dominance of financial interests. In Europe as in the United States, the collapse did not lead to greater restraints on speculative finance. On the contrary, the vulnerability of sovereign debt created new opportunities for speculative windfalls and escalating attacks on government bonds. By 2011, a crisis created largely by private financial excesses had been redefined as a crisis of improvident public spending, leading to the self-defeating remedy of general austerity.”

––Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility, by Robert Kuttner, pg. 112