This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… As Duncan Black Says, Time for Another WebLogger Ethics Panel!As Axel Oxenstierna wrote to his son Johan in 1648: ”Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” Perhaps the biggest reason to reject the idea of meritocracy is the...
As Axel Oxenstierna wrote to his son Johan in 1648: ”Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” Perhaps the biggest reason to reject the idea of meritocracy is the extraordinary absence of merit of any sort, including, indeed of basic ethical standards, among those who claim to be its exemplars…Michael’s Restaurant in Long Beach appears to seat 40 people in its upstairs dining room. Nathan Myhrvold’s pictures <https://web.archive.org/web/20170419075524/https://www.edge.org/event/the-edge-billionaires-dinner-2011> of the 2011 Edge Dinner show 28 people, including New York Times columnist David Brooks—and Jeffrey Epstein, recently released from jail. A New York Times spokesperson not named because they were not willing to be named says:
Note that “widely-attended” is here a term of art. A typical New York Times use of the term refers to the 500,000 people who attended a Renoir exhibition, or the 2000 who attended the Las Vegas SALT conference Not 40. But we are here because this dinner meeting of Brooks and Epstein—part of John Brockman’s attempt to rehabilitate him post-sentencing—is not mentioned a month ago, when we had:
If you had asked me, I would have replied “zero” to the question: What are the chances that Brooks attended a relatively small dinner with Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction, and yet did not mention it in his column? Because there is nothing more likely to raise the credibility of conspiracies than to be one degree of separation from a pedophile, and yet pretend that you are a dispassionate, disinterested observer of the whole situation. And it is not as though David Brooks could have believed that his one degree of separation from Epstein would go unnoticed. This had already been out there, from BuzzFeed, for six years:
And can be reached from the second page of pre-November 2025 Google searches for “‘David Brooks’ and ‘Jeffrey Epstein’”. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…#neofascism |
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