“Are we heading for conflict between the older and younger generations? It’s the scenario played out in this week’s drama documentary If...the Generations Fall Out. Far-fetched? Not so, says Laurence Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University, who thinks that unless the baby boomers pay up, parents and children could soon be at war.” (Thanks to James O’Neill) MORE
An inadvertantly hilarious NYT article: “The American project to build a stable democracy in Iraq has encountered many obstacles. But perhaps the most elusive enemy is an old phantom called rumor.” The trouble is that the US civilian bureaucrats “hiding behind the 13-foot concrete blast walls surrounding [occupation] headquarters” don’t know what people are saying on the street.
Just off hand, the New York Times happens to mention that “the passage of the Social Security Act [in 1935] created retirement as we know it”--which is another way of saying that it is wholly artificial, a creature of the interventionist state. From the FM 1997, William Diehl explains that retirement didn’t catch on until the late 1950s.
Via AubreyHerbert, a fascinating story from the Independent: “An Oxford engineering student was surprised but undaunted when he was approached to deliver a series of lectures in Beijing on global economics.”
Following up on Casey Kahn’s reference to Bartleby.com, I think that readers may also be interested in Project Gutenburg. All of their books are in plain ASCII format, so that they can be readable and searchable on any computer. Project Gutenburg is the oldest etext project on the net.
In the spirit of Jeffrey Tucker’s essay on book publishing, there is a great website offering all sorts of free books. It is Bartleby.com. They strive to be: The preeminent Internet publisher of literature, reference, and verse providing students, researchers, and the intellectually curious with unlimited access to books and information on the web free of charge.
