Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Former Vice President Joseph Biden, in a recent announcement of his economic plan, used the phrase "shovel ready." There are lots of shovel ready jobs in building infrastructure. One might argue that this is a time in which all liberty loving folks should be directed all their/our fire at the Orange Dynast, not at Joe. Still, I have to have a go at this unfortunate phrase. Politicians talk about "shovel ready" jobs because they want to convey the impression that it is easy for public spending to put people to work. "There are jobs to be done, we [the clique making this claim today] know what they are, and some of it is as simple as pointing a new hire to a shovel, then pointing him to the place where the hole needs to be dug." Biden should remember the phrase "shovel ready," because he and former President Obama used that phrase in their own campaigning in 2008. They won. Those public investment jobs turned out to be tricky to create aft...

Last year at about this time I wrote about the prospect of disruptive repairs to a stretch of the highway I-91 as it passes through Springfield, MA, just a short ways north of the border of the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut. This is a vital piece of infrastructure in my neck of the woods, so I'd like to keep readers of this blog up to date on it. On June 25th, the Mass. Department of Transportation hosted a hearing on the project updating the community of those who drive there regularly, warning said community that preliminary construction work will begin any day now. J.F. White Contracting Co., of Framingham, won the bid and will serve as general contractor for the expected three year duration of the work. The MassDOT is funding 20% of this work, the Federal Highway Administration will pick up the rest of the tab. Finally, the project has become enmeshed over the last year with another timetable: that of casino construction. In the fullness of time, it has been d...

Just my stream of consciousness today. Back in May of this year I wrote a piece for the Agawam paper with the headline "Planned repairs of I-91 Viaduct Move Forward." I must confess that, yes, the Agawam paper does allow the reporters to propose their own headlines and, no, I couldn't come up with a better one than that. Plans move forward? Wow. They found space for it on the front page, though on the bottom right hand corner of the front page. As spacing goes, I actually prefer the top of page 3 to the bottom right of page one. In a tabloid-style paper, people often scan the top of page one quickly and then open that page -- the next thing they see, thus, is the top of page 3. Anyway, I-91 (the red line on the map you see before you) is a vital transportation corridor for my neck of the woods. Part of Ike's old system, it moves diagonally across the State of Connecticut in its southernmost stretch, from New Haven into the Connecticut River Valley. It g...

I've just googled the expression "you didn't build that" and received more than 40 million hits. Most of them surely (and all of them that I see on the first page of the list) involve the President's recent speech, and his statement two weeks ago about how successful people should recognize that they didn't get there, they didn't build their business, on their own. It is pretty clear from the context, where the phrase "on your own" appears repeatedly, what is meant. There are efforts to create a furor over this, but the statement in itself is unexceptional. Of course you didn't get there alone. If you are a successful entrepreneur, you are perfectly aware of the fact that you are not a hermit living in a self-constructed hut in the rain forest. There aren't any customers or investors in the rain forest. Why would you try to create a business there? You built your business in the middle of a social world, and a lot of ...