If there was a lot of coverage of this speech by George Shultz at the Economic Club of New York, I missed it. Here’s a sample:

I also think it is fair to say that there has been created a kind of global commons in economic and security terms. And the leading role in creating that commons has been that of the United States.

We’ve benefitted tremendously from it and so have most of the people around the world.

Now we are at a time of tremendous change, seismic change in many ways around the world, that needs coping to try to create the right kind of global commons for this new world. And right now the United States is, to coin a phrase, leading from behind. To a certain extent, it reflects our economy, to a great extent. You can’t lead if your economy is in the doldrums as ours is.

So what I thought I would do tonight is two things. Number one, to briefly suggest to you some of the underlying deep changes that have the world awash in change. What are they? And then I want to tell you what I think should be done to get our economy back on track. And I’m going to use two stories from my own experience to draw on in that set of prescriptions.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the speech including some remarks on demographics, partisanship, and bailouts. Unfortunately, it appears to me that he does a better job of laying out the challenges than proposing solutions but it’s an interesting speech nonetheless.

The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week. First place in the Council category was The Colossus of Rhodey’s Let me tell ‘ya something.

First place in the non-Council category was Barry Rubin with A New, Selective ‘Semi-Antisemitism’? Only Jews Opposing Obama Are Evil, Greedy, and Have Dual Loyalty.

You can see the full results here.

Here are the results for the previous week. First place in the Council category was Bookworm Room’s Honoring 9/11 By Remembering We Are Warriors.

First place in the non-Council category was John Bolton with The Innocents Abroad.

You can see the full results here.

I watched two movies over the weekend, streaming via Netflix (natch). The first was Precious and the second was Max Manus.

I’d put off seeing Precious because I was pretty sure it would be a harrowing experience. It was. The acting was uniformly outstanding. Mo’Nique deserved her Oscar. The editing is really superlative as well. If you’re just looking for an evening’s entertainment, this picture is not it but not only is it well worth watching, it deserves to be seen. It needs to be seen. I’m surprised that the reviews don’t seem to comment on it but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more scathing indictment of AFDC.

Max Manus is a Norwegian biopic about Norway’s most prominent resistance fighter during WWII, one of the most successful saboteurs of the war. He and his team managed to take out a number of transport ships in harbor including the large SS Donau using limpet mines, a mine attached to the hull of a ship with magnets.

Manus himself was a very interesting guy. He’d spent his adolescence bumming around Latin America, returned to Norway to volunteer to fight the Soviets in Finland and then, when Germany invaded and occupied Norway, he joined the resistance and fought the Germans. As best as I’ve been able to tell many of the incidents portrayed in the movie are true. He did, in fact, escape after being capture by the Germans by jumping out a window, being taken to the hospital, and escaping the hospital by climbing out the window on a rope. The guy was incredibly Norse. Entertaining film.

One odd little sidelight: although in real life he received a lot of his training as a saboteur in the States and Canada in the movie you receive the impression that he got all of his training in Scotland.

This graph comes courtesy of John Mauldin (hat tip: Tyler Cowen, who sees it as evidence for his “Great Stagnation” story). Note that, as should be obvious, public sector revenues vary with private sector GDP while public sector expenditures do not. We have now lost a full thirteen years of private sector economic growth.

The graph raises all sorts of questions for me including

• How far can real per capita total GDP deviate from real per capita private sector GDP before total GDP becomes meaningless?
• What to do about an elusive recovery in real per capita private sector GDP? The correlation between increased public spending and growth in the private sector is a weak one.

If there is better evidence that we continue to be in an L-shaped recession, I don’t know what it is. I think I’ve been pretty clear that my confidence in the Keynesian explanation and remedy for our economic woes is becoming increasingly shaky and that I think that serious structural change is necessary.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Although Yeats wrote that in 1920 doesn’t it sound as though it could have been written yesterday? Some of that may be due to a deliberately mysterious and portentous, numinous character. Some may be that our times, like Yeats’s, convey a sense of something ending while what may replace it is infuriatingly beyond reach, on the horizon.

Who are “the best”? Are the best always without conviction? Robert Louis Stevenson, for one, certainly thought so. His attractive, fascinating characters are his villains. No one would read a book about the dull Dr. Jekyll; it is Hyde that is irresistible to the reader as much as he is to Jekyll. Squire Trelawney’s bland virtue pales in comparison with Long John Silvers’s wonderful villainy.

So did Milton, apparently. Lucifer in Paradise Lost is certainly more interesting than the schoolmasterish Jehovah.

Something funny I’ve noticed about my writing. I think that I’m actually mentally composing some of it in Russian and then translating that to English. It’s not so apparent in the final product but it’s pretty noticeable in the first drafts. So, for example, I frequently end uip editing in definite and indefinite articles, adding the verb “to be”, eliminating Russian proverbs that don’t mean much in English, and so on. Funny for a third (fourth?) language.

While I’m asking questions, let’s get down to more essential subjects. Is wine better than it used to be?

I’ve been drinking wine (not to excess, of course) for about the last 50 years. My completely unscientific impression is that German wine isn’t as good as it used to be, French wine is nearly as good as it used to be, Italian and Spanish wines are better than they used to be, and American wines are enormously better than they used to be.

I started drinking wine in St. Louis. Most people aren’t aware of it but until Prohibition Missouri produced more wine than any state other than California and produced more sparkling wine than anywhere else in the world. Missouri white wines are still great, its sparklers good, its ports excellent, and its reds barely passable (although they’re a lot better than they used to be). However, it was something of a backwater in terms of wine other than American, German, French, and Italian. I’d never tasted a wine from other than those places and, most especially, from Latin America or South Africa, until I was over thirty.

But back to the question. What do you think? Is wine better than it used to be?

I think I need to have somebody explain President Obama’s speech before the Congressional Black Caucus last night to me because I don’t believe I understand it. Let me give you some examples.

Consider this:

We knew at the outset of my presidency that the economic calamity we faced wasn’t caused overnight and wasn’t going to be solved overnight. We knew that long before the recession hit, the middle class in this country had been falling behind — wages and incomes had been stagnant; a sense of financial security had been slipping away. And since these problems were not caused overnight, we knew we were going to have to climb a steep hill.

But we got to work. With your help, we started fighting our way back from the brink. And at every step of the way, we’ve faced fierce opposition based on an old idea — the idea that the only way to restore prosperity can’t just be to let every corporation write its own rules, or give out tax breaks to the wealthiest and the most fortunate, and to tell everybody that they’re on their own. There has to be a different concept of what America’s all about. It has to be based on the idea that I am my brother’s keeper and I am my sister’s keeper, and we’re in this together. We are in this thing together.

I agree with that. However

We had a different vision and so we did what was right, and we fought to extend unemployment insurance, and we fought to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, and we fought to expand the Child Tax Credit — which benefited nearly half of all African American children in this country. (Applause.) And millions of Americans are better off because of that fight. (Applause.)

Ask the family struggling to make ends meet if that extra few hundred dollars in their mother’s paycheck from the payroll tax cut we passed made a difference. They’ll tell you. Ask them how much that Earned Income Tax Credit or that Child Tax Credit makes a difference in paying the bills at the end of the month.

How does the second quotation relate to the first paragraph of the first quotation? Is the president’s plan for “the economic calamity we faced” just to ameliorate the circumstances of those hardest hit? I think we should that but I don’t think it’s hardly enough.

There are some hints later on:

Right now we’ve got millions of construction workers out of a job. So this bill says, let’s put those men and women back to work in their own communities rebuilding our roads and our bridges. Let’s give these folks a job rebuilding our schools. Let’s put these folks to work rehabilitating foreclosed homes in the hardest-hit neighborhoods of Detroit and Atlanta and Washington. This is a no-brainer.

Will that put “millions of construction workers” back to work? Even the most sanguine of estimates of the number of jobs for construction workers created by the ARRA, the first stimulus package, are much, much smaller than that. Will this second, smaller package be that much more successful?

Or this:

Why should we let China build the newest airports, the fastest railroads?

I think I know the answer to this question: because we built our airports a long time ago and China is just catching up and whether high speed rail is worthwhile is in question, even in China after their major high speed rail accident a few months ago.

There are also a number of shout-outs about the importance of education. I wonder if the president is aware that only about 8% of the degrees in science and engineering are awarded to black graduates while African Americans make up about 14% of the U. S. population, a significant discrepancy. Does the president believe that the jobs of the future that education is preparing students for will not be in science or engineering?

I’m not being snarky or sarcastic here. I’d genuinely like to know. I don’t see the connections between the problems and the solutions.

This afternoon I entertained the idea of posting something at Outside the Beltway that wasn’t foreign policy related. I’d thought I might post a plea to eschew, at least for one comments section, the name-calling and finger-pointing that’s so typical and have everyone post their own affirmative suggestions for mending our ailing economy. After thinking about it for a while I recognized that it would be futile. The comments section would either garner very, very few comments or turn into a feces-flinging contest.

Me auld mither used to say “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”. I can only speculate that not enough mothers have told their children that.