Daniel Davies is brilliant
Two pieces he's posted lately bear reading. One on his own blog, and one on Crooked Timber. The first one he deals with American leadership, and our questioning of it.
D-squared Digest -- A fat young man without a good word for anyone:
...I never qutie understand why the pro-war crowd, left and right, seem to think that injecting the phrase 'Bush is a moron' into the debate is in some way unsportsmanlike, unmannerly or evidence that one's opposition is partisan or not serious. It's an entirely germane point in considering the costs and benefits of a war whether or not it's being run by a moron, and it is by no means established that the option of a war not run by a moron was completely out of the question. The benefits of waiting could have been considerable; we might have had a significantly better-planned war and post-war. And I'd argue that the costs were not so great; although Saddam was indeed a dictator or the variety 'brutal', the fact is that those mass graves were filled in the early 1990s. At the particular time when we were discussing this question, the actual Saddam-caused mayhem was at a much lower level (although, obviously, I would certainly not have chosen to live there). In any case, any argument based on the assumption that Saddam's domestic brutality was so horrible in 2003 that it could not be suffered to carry on for a single second longer runs into a particularly nasty tu quoque objection; like the rest of us, the humanitarian-bomber crowd were, observably, not out in the streets demanding intervention in Iraq during the first half of 2001, so how serious could this argument actually be?
The second is a topic dear to my heart: Malt Whisky and the economic value of aging in a structured model.
The Malt Whisky Yield Curve:
This is a piece I’ve been thinking about for around a year and have now finally got round to writing up now that the Cardhu Scandal has made it arguably topical again. Basically it’s an idea for anyone who wants an easy way into thinking about capital theory. I’ve thought for a while that the booze industry ought to be used much more as an example for people thinking about time and production, because it allows you to abstract from considerations of technology and the production process; there are any number of ways to produce a chair, some more time-consuming that others, but there’s only one way to produce a cask of ten-year-old whisky[1]; start with a cask full of nine year old whisky and wait. The fact that time is intrinsically part of the production process for wine and brown spirits is why you see “capitalised interest” on the balance sheets of drinks companies; part of the economic cost of whisky production, and therefore part of the eventual sale price and the value of the goods, is the interest foregone during the process of maturation. It’s this interest element which I’m going to concentrate on.
Read on. This is a fun serioius economics article. I wish I had written it.