L.C. Cooke - Sufferin'

I first heard of L.C. Cooke a number of years ago but at the time could find very little information about him. Nowadays, however, that has been rectified. Last week saw the release of The Complete S.A.R. Recordings, SAR being the label run by his older brother, the much better-known Sam Cooke. The similarities between Sam and L.C. as vocal stylists are clear, but L.C. has a quality all his own that makes him well worth listening to.

nada's eccentric path

Nothing today, sorry.

Pink Floyd - Arnold Layne

Happy birthday to Joe Boyd, American-born English producer. His list of work in the late sixties and early seventies in particular is amazing, consisting of a lot of the most interesting rock coming out of London. Here's one of his earliest.

Krugman on Dodd-Frank

Dr Krugman refers to it as Obama's "other" success.

The Dodd-Frank reform bill has, if anything, received even worse press than Obamacare, derided by the right as anti-business and by the left as hopelessly inadequate. And like Obamacare, it’s certainly not the reform you would have devised in the absence of political constraints.

But also like Obamacare, financial reform is working a lot better than anyone listening to the news media would imagine. 

BBC Proms 2010 - Sondheim at 80 - Sunday from Sunday In The Park with George

Ernest Dowson - They Are Not Long

It's the birthday of Ernest Dowson, born this date in 1867. He died in 1900, and his brief life resonates well with what might be his most famous poem. The Latin epigram may be translated as "the brief sum of life forbids us from thinking of far-off hope."

    Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.

    They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
    Love and desire and hate;
    I think they have no portion in us after
    We pass the gate.

    They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
    Out of a misty dream
    Our path emerges for a while, then closes
    Within a dream.

Krugman on Experts and Reality

Dr K discusses what the economic consensus is and what the general perception of that consensus is.

Are we as societies even capable of taking good policy advice?

Economists used to assert confidently that nothing like the Great Depression could happen again. After all, we know far more than our great-grandfathers did about the causes of and cures for slumps, so how could we fail to do better? When crises struck, however, much of what we’ve learned over the past 80 years was simply tossed aside.