¶ Geroge Friedman spells out the biggest and best argument against “austerity”: “Spain’s Angry and Unemployed Young Men.” (RealClearWorld)

Driving in Spain, things look quiet, neat and empty. But in that emptiness there is something ominous, perhaps not so much post-apocalyptic as pre-apocalyptic. Spain is still under control, and the European elite still believe an answer will be found. But I don’t see the path that leads to the redemption of a generation’s hopes. There is time, but in my mind there isn’t enough. And given the attitude of the Eurocrats I have met, there is no sense among the elite that time is running out.

(See also: the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.)

¶ So: you’re a newly-minted PhD. How do you present yourself as such? Colin Eatock suggests that you’d better not — in the way he signs his ruefully amusing consideration of the problem. (3 Quarks Daily)

¶ At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova considers a handsome new book about maximizing creativity, Manage Your Day-to-Day. The ideas that she highlights are all very good ones, but they assume something that appears to have been omitted from the discussion: the vital importance of personal autonomy. It is impossible to attempt a routine — and a routine of “small steps” is definitely what Popova’s gurus are advocating — a routine for creative work without the freedom to follow hunches for as long as they seem to be promising. This is not something that most employers can second-guess without spoiling the project.

¶ Maggie Koerth-Baker’s musings on conspiracy theories suggest a method of rebuttal that just might fail for being too sophisticated. You reply to the theorist that such ideas tend to be held by people who feel powerless and taken advantage of — and that such people would be the last to know about any actual conspiracies. (NYT, via 3 Quarks Daily)

In practice, a successful woman—like a successful man—must learn, early on, how much emotion to show and how much to conceal, depending on the circumstances. She must learn how much to speak and how much to keep silent, for that depends on the circumstances too. Above all, she must understand herself well enough to know which challenges are worth accepting and which—given her personal situation, her husband, her finances, her interests, her age—must be sensibly refused.

Sometimes it makes sense, in the lives of both men and women, to leap at opportunities. Sometimes it’s foolish. Some risks are worth taking and others are not.

That sort of calculation, unfortunately, takes up a lot of time and energy in the world of “work,” and a truly useful book about business would set out to suggest reasonable reforms. But there’s something else in Applebaum’s piece that’s even more disheartening.

Other factors, even harder to imitate, must also explain Sandberg’s rise. For example, she surely has an astonishing and unusual capacity to cope with difficult, socially awkward, borderline-Asperger’s men: Sergey Brin, Larry Summers, Mark Zuckerberg. This is not a talent that many women, or indeed many men, are lucky enough to possess. But then she has been very lucky in other ways as well. At Harvard, for example, Sandberg happened to take a class with Summers, who happened to hire her as a research assistant before he happened to become treasury secretary. Upon arriving in the government, he made her his chief of staff.

How can we keep men like these — and they are always men, and Steve Jobs was one of the worst — from becoming the hubs of networks which they manifestly lack the skills to direct in keeping with humane principles?

If Keynes’s economic vision is intertwined with his larger views on sex and love, meanwhile, the same is surely true of the many strands of pro-austerity thinking that oppose Keynesianism. Schumpeter was fundamentally a nostalgist who longed for a return to the heroic days of bourgeois family capitalism, a world he knew was irrevocably lost. No wonder Schumpeter was so unsettled by Keynes, a man at home with both modern economics and modern sexuality.

As Mark Blyth has shown in his new book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, the power of arguments for austerity come from the fact that they invoke the traditional moral system of the West, a way of thinking that is rarely questioned because it seems like common sense. Implicit in austerity are all sorts of moral adages: no pain, no gain; suffering builds character; thrift is virtue.

The problem with those adages is that manly types preach them as exhaustive. Thrift is a virtue, yes, but not so great a virtue as generosity. Endurance builds character, but I doubt that real suffering does anything but deform it. “No pain, no gain” is an arrogant insult, considering the sheer painlessness of gains enjoyed by the already-affluent.

¶ Christian Parenti reviews a new, and very gloomy, book about Pakistan — about Pakistan-US relations, specifically, and. boy, what a mess. Did anybody out there wince at the violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty while watching the exciting climax of Zero Dark Thirty? No, I didn’t think so: that’s how big a mess. Of course, as Parenti insists, Pakistan is a first-class mess all on its own.

The new editor is Pamela Paul, and quite unlike any before her. (I believe I can reel off all of them from the mid-seventies on without any effort … the columnist and reviewer John Leonard; the poet and editor Harvey Shapiro; one of the big newsroom bosses, Mike Levitas; followed by Times heavy, Rebecca Sinkler; then former New Yorker editor, Charles (Chip) McGrath; then Vanity Fair writer and Whitaker Chambers biographer Sam Tanenhaus.)

Paul has, pretty much, no writerly or literary credentials. She’s written some straightforward, but non-literary nonfiction – a book about marriage, a book about parenting, and a book condemning pornography – and she’s been the children’s book editor at the Book Review for a short time. Her resume includes two years as a blogger at the Huffington Post, which, it doesn’t seem entirely churlish to point out, is not a job, and a stint writing a column for the Times’ Style section.

But the vitality of the Book Review has been draining for many years now. Most reviews are blandly predictable, and enthusiasm is rare. Even long pieces have become oddly weightless. So long as the Book Review continues to be published, I’ll want to give it a glance, but I won’t miss it when it disappears, the victim of complete mission failure.

The one and only purpose of a book review is to promote the sale of books in a creditable manner. This means pitching reviews toward readers who may be expected to like the books when they read them, and away from those who won’t, and at a brief length that will not enable those who don’t read books to appear as if they do.

¶ If you’ve walked through Amsterdam, you know that traffic signals are not essential. In Poynton, UK, getting rid of signals altogether slowed traffic down, but to a steady flow, and pedestrians are a lot happier. (via kottke.org)

They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.

¶ No less important, in the long run, is Mark Bittman’s demand for a gender-neutral home ec program in our schools.

¶ “King of the Vatican” — who knew? The inimitable CGP Grey explains the Holy See.

Lots of people besides politicians enjoy applause on a regular basis. Stage actors and other performing artists certainly thrive on ovation. For the most part, however, audiences applaud them because of what they do. Politicians only rarely receive this kind of applause. Most of politics is compromise, and nobody likes that, much less applauds it. The thunder of many hands clapping breaks upon politicians’ heads because of who they are, or seem to be. And there’s no denying that Americans are enthusiastic adorers, as long as it doesn’t cost anything.

Finally, there is the profound and, I’m afraid, universal conviction that anyone who looks good on television must be special. This prejudice is the result of decades of technical honing, as television producers have gotten better and better at keeping people who don’t look good on television off the screen. We are as addicted to television’s glamour as candidates are to praise from whatever source derived. Considered as an ecology, the elected and the electorate live in perfect symbiosis.

When the alarm is sounded over the poor performance of our schools, we usually hear about children’s baleful performance in reading, math, and science. On the most recent round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, only one in three U.S. 8th graders scored “proficient” or higher in those three essential subjects. But if that’s a crisis, our performance in history and civics is near collapse: a mere 22 percent of 8th graders score proficient or higher in civics; in history, only 18 percent.

Many progressive people argue that this information inequality stems from income inequality, but it is just as arguably the cause. High achievers necessarily look past the junky popular culture in order to fasten on some body of solid knowledge. Low achievers are literally stupefied by what’s on TV.

Lowest-common-denominator culture will inevitably kill off democratic culture, by destroying its defenses against the culture of selfishness espoused by Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, and others guilty of the mortal sin of smug self-satisfaction.