The following letter was published by April 14 edition of The Economist in its Letters section.
Unbelievable
SIR – A recent issue of The Economist (March 24th) showed an Orwellian enthusiasm for the prefix “un”. I counted “un-Tory”, “un-Downton”, “un-Italian” and “un-Einsteinian”. How very unimaginative, and how very unEconomist.
ADAM DALTON
London
Funny.
I suppose there are times when there is a piece of news that the mainstream media rather not report, but it has to because it is still a news organization and the readers do want to know. If the news organization wants to keep its readers loyal, the readers have to be served lest they migrate to another comprehensive sources all else being the same. This is especially so when the news organization is the old-style media complete with deadwood newspaper section to manage in this digital age, and the reader profile is English-speaking and mostly better educated than the rest of Malaysians.
The big news yesterday was the success of Shahrizat Abdul Jalil in holding back insurrection in Wanita UMNO, complete with the backing of UMNO and BN President Najib Razak. Shahrizat is already controversy-ridden with her family members through and through involved in the NFC corruption scandal. For a coalition that is trying hard to shed its corrupted image even since the last general election, this controversy is a major setback. That the man who supposedly carries the transformation banner to be fully behind Shahrizat, this is beginning to develop into a story of a leopard and its spots, instead of The Ugly Duckling.
The Star realizes this and The Star is obviously owned by MCA, an ally of UMNO within the BN coalition. They need to keep their owners happy. They need to prop their owner up or at the very least, not make them look bad given the constraint of the digital age. Not to highlight the unfortunate news and not trying to blatantly pretend that nothing happened yesterday, on its front page, “Be phone smart”, trumpeting a clarion call for consumers to know their cell phone and their bills.
There is a small subsection about Shahrizat and Najib, telling readers that the news is somewhere inside. Somewhere, inside.
And of course, a picture of a top-South Korean girl band singing in Kuala Lumpur.
And a big KFC finger licking good commercial at the bottom.
Crowds of the inhabitants of the faubourgs in their Sunday clothes, sometimes even decked with fleurs-de-lis like the citizens, were scattered over the great square and the square Marigny, playing games and going around on wooden horses; others drinking; a few, printer apprentices, had on paper caps; their laughter resounded through the air. Everything was radiant. It was a time of undoubted peace and profound royal security; it was the time when a private and special report of Perfect of Police Anglès to the king on the faubourgs of Paris, ended with these lines: ‘Everything considered, sire, there is nothing to fear from these people. They are as careless and indolent as cats. The lower people of the provinces are restless, those of Paris are not so. They are all small men, sire, and it would take two of them, one upon the other, to make one of your grenadiers. There is nothing at all to fear on the side of the populace of the capital. It is remarkable that this part of the population has also decreased in statute during the last fifty years; and the people of the faubourgs of Paris are smaller than before the Revolution. They are not dangerous. In short, they are good canaille.’
That a cat may become changed into a lion, prefects of police do not believe possible; nevertheless, it may be, and this is the miracle of the people of Paris. Besides, the cat, so despised by the Count Anglès, had the esteem of the republics of antiquity; it was the incarnation of liberty in their sight, and, as if to serve as a pendant to the wingless Minerva of the Piraeus, there was, in the public square at Corinth, the bronze colossus of a cat. The simple police of the Restoration looked too hopefully on the people of Paris. They are by no means such good canaille as is believed. The Parisian is among Frenchmen what the Athenian was among Greeks. Nobody sleeps better than he, nobody is more frankly frivolous and idle than he, nobody seems to forget things more easily than he; but do not trust him, notwithstanding; he is apt at all sorts of nonchalance, but when there is glory to be gained, he is wonderful in every species of fury. Give him a pike, and he will play the tenth of August; give him a musket, and you shall have an Austerlitz. He is the support of Napoleon, and the resource of Danton. Is France in question? he enlists; is liberty in question? he tears up the pavement. Beware! his hair rising with rage is epic; his blouse drapes itself into a chlamys about him. Take care! At the first corner, Grenétat will make a Caudine Forks. When the tocsin sounds, this dweller in the faubourgs will grow; this little man will arise, his look will be terrible, his breath will become a tempest, and a blast will go forth from his poor, frail breast that might shake the wrinkles out of the Alps. Thanks to the men of the Paris faubourgs, the Revolution infused into armies, conquers Europe. He sings, it is his joy. Proportion his song to his nature, and you shall see! So long as he had the Carmagnole merely for his chorus, he overthrew only Louis XVI; let him sing the Marseillaise, and he will deliver the world. [Les Misérables. Book 3: In the year 1817. Page 90. Victor Hugo]
Fun-quotation-that-has-something-to-do-with-Australia:
…he had confessed to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm; perhaps that was how he had contracted the mysterious microbe.
This incident sounds bizarrely one-of-a-kind and of no possible broader significance. In fact, it illustrates an enormous subject of great importance: human diseases of animal origin. Very few of us love sheep in the carnal sense that this patient did. But most of us platonically love our pet animals such as our dogs and cats. As a society, we certainly appear to have an inordinate fondness for sheep and other livestock, to judge from the vast numbers of them that we keep. For example, at the time of a recent census, Australia’s 17,085,400 people thought so highly of sheep that they kept 161,600,000 of them.
Some of us adults, and even more of our children, pick up infectious diseases from our pets. Usually they remain no more than a nuisance, but a few have evolved into something far more serious… [Guns, Gems, and Steel. Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock. Page 196. Jared Diamond. 1999]
Happy Australia Day!
From those precursors of food production already practiced by hunter-gatherers, it developed stepwise. Not all the necessary techniques were developed within a short time, and not all the wild plants and animals that were eventually domesticated in a given area were domesticated simultaneously. Even in the cases of most rapid independent development of food production from a hunting-gathering lifestyle, it took thousands of years to shift from complete dependence on wild foods to a diet with very few wild foods. In early stages of food production, people simultaneously collected wild foods and raised cultivated ones, and diverse types of collecting activities diminished in importance at different times as reliance on crops increased.
The underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocation time and effort. Foraging humans, like foraging animals, have only finite time and energy, which they can spend in various ways. We can picture an incipient farmer waking up and asking: Shall I spend today hoeing my garden (predictably yielding a lot of vegetables several months from now), gathering shellfish (predictably yielding a little meat today)? or hunting deer (yielding possibly a lot of meat today, but more likely nothing)? Human and animal foragers are constantly prioritizing and making effort-allocation decisions, even if only unconsciously. The concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff. If these are unavailable, they shift to less and less preferred foods. [Guns, Germs, and Steel. Chapter 6: To Farm or Not to Farm. Page 107. Jared Diamond. 1999]
A lot of words.
Luckily, any economics student who has his or her bases covered will understand this as [latex]\frac{dy}{dx} = \frac{P_x}{P_y}[/latex] in one way or the other. Simple! We can thank the marginal revolution that began in the late 19th century for that. Marginal revolution also solved the paradox of value. Indeed, marginalism is the foundation of modern microeconomics, regardless of your cup of tea.
And oh, did you know that the marginal revolution also made Marxian economics in its original interpretation completely obsolete?