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Wednesday, April 2, 2008

04/02/08 - Benjamin Dueholm's Suggested Reading List



Good Stuff to Read

I don't post a lot of links because I don't spend as much time as I should reading stuff that you all don't also read, but in case you missed them, there's a rare decent article on Trinity UCC in the New Yorker (the reporter was there at the same Easter sunrise service I attended)....

...I don't usually read Newsweek's money coverage, but this week's offering by Daniel Gross is really, really good....

.....Wall Street types don't live in ghettos, barrios or the hollows of Appalachia, but they do inhabit environments that are sealed off socially from the rest of the world—the Hamptons on Long Island; Fifth Avenue; Greenwich, Conn. Because they rarely interact with people of middle-class means (save the odd doctor, lawyer or interior designer), they have become woefully out of touch with the solid bourgeois values that made America great.

In the underclass, unmarried young fathers don't take responsibility for their children. In the overclass, twice-married, middle-aged Wall Street daddies don't own up to the consequences of their insane financial miscues. Wall Street titans are almost incapable of seeing the problem with taking nine-figure payouts in years in which their stocks plummet. "There's just a total disconnect between the compensation and the responsibility for their actions," says William Cohan, a former Lazard banker turned author.

In his book "The Age of Abundance," libertarian author Brink Lindsey boils down the difference between the desperately poor and the blissfully rich to an ability to focus on the long term. "Members of the underclass operate within such narrow time horizons and circles of trust that their lives are plagued by chronic chaos and dysfunction," he says. By contrast, he says, elites are well-organized long-term thinkers. Riiiiight. "Modern Wall Street is a system," says Charles Morris—a former Chase banker and author of "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown"—"that rewards crazy risk-taking in the short term without regard for the long-term consequences.".....

...Speaking of the spoiled and morally corrupt overclass, I fell hook, line, and sinker for this Reader whopper. It made me indignant, too.

The Private Intellectual - http://tpi.blogspot.com/

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