Jeff Rubin, CIBC:

US auto sales, already at a 34-year low, will likely drop another 30 to 40 percent and may never recover to previous levels.

Roughly half of the 51 light vehicle plants in the US will be permanently closed in the coming years.

There will be 25 million fewer cars on the road in the US in the next five years.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into.

Recently:

A survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car, down from 48 percent in 2000, contributing to the slump in sales.

Riding the Blue Highways

Martin Feldstein and Simon Johnson.

If economic analyses earned ratings like movies, this two-fer would receive an X for extremely disturbing.

Two of the field’s most prominent voices spare any sugar coating in their unsettling accounts of the world’s unfolding economic crisis.

From the archive:

Cookies have long served as economic icons.

Challenges to the Global Economy | MIT World

Joseph Epstein on Malcolm Gladwell:

The first step in the bestseller formula is to tell people something that they want to hear.

Bill McKibben on Thomas Friedman:

Thomas Friedman is the prime leading indicator of the conventional wisdom, always positioned just far enough ahead of the curve to give readers the sense that they're in-the-know, but never far enough to cause deep mental unease.

From the MemeStreams documentation:

The whole point of recommending an article is to tell other people to take a look at it.

Cory Doctorow:

The difference between alchemy and science is if you tell people what you’ve learned.

Michael Hopkins on Chip and Dan Heath:

The stickiest ideas, regardless of intrinsic merit, have a lot in common. Or, more accurately, the ways they are presented have a lot in common.

Jack-Out-of-the-Box

Kenneth Minogue:

The most difficult of all tasks is making sense of one's own time.

The question about our own time I want to explore is: why have the British (and to some extent other Anglophones) allowed family and school life to collapse so extensively?

To Hell with Niceness

Brigid Delaney:

Their disquiet about the site is not always due to the usual concerns — privacy, data ownership, the stealth advertising — but something more grubby, and modern: self-promotion.

Oh, vanity, thy name is all over Facebook

This chart shows the US Savings Ratio as percentage of total household disposabale income over Time.

Move the slider along the bottom all the way to the left to look at the full time span from 1959 to the present.

US Savings Ratio over Time

Victory now sounds a lot like what victory in Iraq might be for the US: lower violence just enough so that people won't talk about it anymore.

From 2006, John Rapley:

As states recede and the new mediaevalism advances, the outside world is destined to move increasingly beyond the control -- and even the understanding -- of the new Rome. The globe's variegated informal and quasi-informal statelike activities will continue to expand, as will the power and reach of those who live by them. The new Romans, like the old, might not enjoy the consequences.

The Perilous State of Mexico

Jeffrey Sachs:

Most important, we should stop panicking.

From 2004:

We'll see skyrocketing tax rates, drastically lower retirement and health benefits, high inflation, a rapidly depreciating dollar, unemployment, and political instability.

But don't panic.

From last November:

Fear not!

We'll show you how to endure the forthcoming recession with a bit of grit, some nous and the wise advice of our post-war forebears. Let's begin with a celebration of the true heroine of austerity Britain: the housewife.

From 1929:

The Country is Fundamentally Sound; 'Don't Panic, Stocks are Safe!'

From last year, or 1929:

"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"

The Economic Need for Stable Policies, Not a Stimulus

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rearview mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Of course, the past ten years hasn't been lost in the way that the next ten years might be.

From last year:

Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old.

Douglas Haddow:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

Already lost

Mandy Brown:

Once a reader has commanded the aura of solitude around them, they become nearly impenetrable. A reader who is thoroughly engrossed in reading may not hear you if you call her name. Call her name again, however, and she will look up, annoyed. The key is not to halt all activity around a reader, but to give her her space.

See also, Michael Lewis:

I like the feeling of knowing that nobody is trying to reach me.

Did you notice?

Droves of people are canceling their Facebook accounts.

And what are these droves saying?

I’ve recently realized that not only do I think Facebook itself is trivial and stupid — but it’s starting to make me think my friends who are on Facebook are also trivial and stupid. Every time I read that someone became a fan of something, or posted a link with a one-word recommendation (”Neat!”, “OK”), I loathe that person a little more.

In Defense of Readers