The Price Of A Best Seller

Inflation-adjusted edition.  From The Awl:

1961
Half a century ago was 1961. John F. Kennedy was newly in the White House, the Cold War was in full effect and the Freedom Rides were taking place down south. But hey, everyone, “Mad Men,” right? And speaking of cultural artifacts destined to become curriculum, here we find J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey as the Fiction bestseller, which was yours for only $4, or $30.26 in 2011 dollars. That would be the Salinger that has fewer “goddamn phonies” per page.
And the phenomenon of John F. Kennedy as failsafe publishing topic was taking root, as Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore H. White was the Nonfiction bestseller, the first in a series of five books to examine American elections, (no doubt catching the eye of a young Richard Ben Cramer). This was the one book of which I could not pin down the precise historical retail price. The older prices I dug up with the help of book collectors’ websites, which sometimes list the initial price along with info concerning spine condition, dog-ears and foxing. But even though Making won the Pulitzer in 1962, it does not make a splash with current collectors. So instead we will substitute the price of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1960 book, The Enemy Within, which was $3.95 (or $30.19) at the time, and which I hope to God is as ominously sci-fi as its title.

Yeah, I mainly ran that because I have a bit of a fascination about Salinger.  Mainly, why did the guy just up and quit writing?  Anyway, as far as inflation goes, it looks like best-sellers have gotten slightly cheaper over the years, but less so than more technology-laden stuff.

Economic Good News May Be Transitory

NYT (via nc links):

“Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a slowdown over the course of next year,” Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told reporters last week. “Not only do we have the European crisis spilling over and hurting U.S. trade and confidence,” he said, but the United States economy also faces “homegrown shocks.”
There are two reasons for the renewed pessimism. First, economists say that temporary trends increased growth in the fourth quarter and may not continue into next year. Second, the economy faces significant headwinds in 2012: some from Europe’s long-lingering sovereign debt crisis, and some from domestic cutbacks beyond the control of President Obama, whose campaign would like to point to a brightening economic picture, not a darkening one. Even the Federal Reserve is predicting that the unemployment rate will remain around 8.6 percent by the time voters go to the polls in November.

The article doesn't even mention the potential of bad news out of China.  I sure hope the economy is recovering, but as is usually the case, I remain skeptical.  I just get the feeling that a Communist Party might not be fully prepared for dealing with a Capitalist eff-up.  Kind of like Homer Simpson saying, "Who knows more about electricity than the Amish?"

Top 25 For Student-Athletes

Yglesias:

College football players don't get paid, in part on the theory that they're really mere students participating in a little recreational athletics and not at all the main labor force for a multi-million dollar industry. But how do the universities participating in the bowl games this holiday season actually stack up in terms of educating football players? Our partners at the New America Foundation devised this interactive infographic that helps you see how all the top 25 BCS teams stack up academically. Player often graduate at far lower rates than regular students at their schools, and black players' graduation rates lag behind those of their white teammates. TCU, for example, climbs to third in the Academic BCS rankings, while Alambama and LSU drop to fifth and 13th, respectively. (No. 1 in the Academic BCS? Penn State.)

At first I thought it was a ranking of all the bowl teams, but then I saw it was the Top 25.  No wonder Ohio State and Notre Dame weren't in there.  Joe Pa may have grossly mishandled the Jerry Sandusky case, but his academic BCS was number 1.  I guess that might reflect a low overall graduation rate at a school that is consistently in the Top 10 party school rankings.

James Madison, Agricultural Conservationist

D.W. Sabin reviews Andrea Wulf's “ Founding Gardeners, The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation" (h/t the Dish):

The book follows the garden-centered lives of primarily Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison but also touches upon such early American scientific innovators as the Plantsman family Bartram from outside Philadelphia along with that other classic polymath, Benjamin Franklin. We see the different personalities of the Framers–an august Washington, the diffident and cantankerous Adams, an omnivorous yet evasive Jefferson and the retiring Madison yet they all converge simpatico while standing in the rich earth of their gardens and farms. All of their correspondence was liberally filled with shared agricultural insight, requests for new seeds and the arts of manure management. Would that our current leaders might manage their manure.
The America of the Framers was an America firmly grounded within both the productivity and the beauty of our natural world. A couple of tidbits of note from the book are the facts that Washington, in the depths of the war, sent extensive directions by dispatch to his farm manager every Sunday and that one of the more important compromises of the early government came about principally as a result of a visit to Bartram’s nursery when the Philadelphia Convention was deadlocked. Seeing the grandeur of the plants from across the colonies, side by side was an effective reminder to the early legislators that we have more in common than we might like to think and that our differences, when composed harmoniously create a remarkable tableau of formidable distinction.
The most important produce for me however, was the news that Madison was our first Conservationist. Fifty years before the acclaim of Thoreau or Emerson, James Madison delivered one of the most groundbreaking speeches in American farming and conservation history. In May of 1818, engaged in farming pursuits like the rest of his Cincinnatus former Presidents, Madison delivered an address to the Agricultural society of Albemarle. In it, Madison covered here-to-for generally unknown notions of ecology, plant physiology, nutrient recycling, soil erosion control, soil chemistry and in a word, Conservation. The speech was enthusiastically received at the time and pamphlets detailing it were published both here and in Britain as well as France. This co-author of the Federalist Papers knew that American Liberty was deeply indebted to the long-term health of the land we live upon.

That's pretty heady stuff for back in the olden days.  Likewise, Washington did a good bit of agricultural research at Mount Vernon.

Chart of the Day

From David Cay Johnson:

So that's the return-on-investment that businessfolks talk about.

Nuts!

December 22, 1944:

German troops demand the surrender of United States troops at Bastogne, Belgium, prompting the famous one word reply by General Anthony McAuliffe: "Nuts!"

A lot of good people died in Hitler's last major gamble of the war.  It was pointless, but it was the last major counterattack on the Western Front.

World's Tallest Buildings In 2020

The Atlantic Cities:

By 2020, according to the council's accompanying report, nine buildings will eclipse (or nearly break) the "megatall" barrier of roughly 2,000 feet (or 600 meters) — twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. As a point of comparison with today's skyscrapers, consider that the Petronas Towers, which were the tallest in the world when completed in 1998, will rank just 27th when 2020 arrives. In the words of the council's report, "600 m seems to be the new 300 m." Likewise, 300 meters (or 984 feet) seems to be the new snowman: by 2020 an estimated 198 towers will reach that height, compared to just 15 in 1995. All but one of the towers on the top 20 list will be built in the Middle East or Asia. The lone representative from the Western hemisphere will be One World Trade Center, which will scrape sky at a patriotic 1,776 feet (or a less patriotic 541 meters) with its radio antenna. (Which, by the way, why are skyscrapers allowed to include antennas in their height? If reaching my hand upward counted in my height I'd be playing center for the Knicks.) China leads the list with ten of the towers in seven different cities — the tallest being the Ping An Finance Center, in Shenzhen, at 2,165 feet (660 meters).
The tallest tower in the works is the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, a city on the western coast of Saudi Arabia. The tower will soar to 3,280 feet (over 1,000 meters), making it more than 500 feet taller than the world's current champion, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Built at a cost of $1.2 billion, the completed Kingdom Tower will be a mixed-use facility that includes a luxury hotel, luxury condominiums, and office space, in addition to the world's highest observatory. It will also boast "one of the world's most sophisticated elevator systems," according Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, the project's lead architect [PDF] — with observatory elevators reaching speeds of 10 meters per second, or over 22 miles per hour.

Wow.  So the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere will be 12th overall?  I've stood beside the Sears Tower (ok, Willis Tower) and just can't imagine buildings more than twice as tall.  I'm not sure why Bin Laden was so hellbent on knocking down tall buildings in the U.S. when the tallest building in the world is in Dubai.  I guess it doesn't matter now.

Spaceship? No, A Drone

Wired:

Note to the Navy: When trucking a giant flying robot with a rounded fuselage across the country, people are going to think they’re looking at an artifact from Area 51.
As the local news coverage above shows, residents of Cowley County, Kansas, were freaked out to see a truck rumbling down U.S. 77 towing what looks a whole lot like a 32-foot spaceship. “People were calling in saying, ‘Oh they think they found a flying saucer,’” Donetta Godsey of the Winfield Daily Courier told the ABC News affiliate.
Alas, the cargo wasn’t anything otherworldly. Just a trussed-up, wingless version of the Navy’s futuristic killer drone, the X-47B, which the Navy hopes will one day be the world’s first robot capable of landing on an aircraft carrier. For the past few days, it’s hitched a rather terrestrial ride from California’s Edwards Air Force Base to Patuxent River, Maryland.
“Oh, you mean the UFO?” Brooks McKinney, a spokesman for X-47B manufacturer Northrop Grumman, told Danger Room.

McKinney’s both embarrassed and amused by the UFO confusion. “They effectively shrink-wrapped the rest of the fuselage after taking the wings off the drone for the cross-country trek,” he said. “Because it was 32 feet wide, it could only travel certain hours of the day because we blocked off the road. That led to lots of weird stories, like we had abandoned [the X-47B] on the side of the road.”

It seems like almost every day there's a drone story of some kind.

Chart of the Day

Via Yglesias:

My understanding is that Japan doesn't face the same problems as Greece for two reasons: mainly it is internal debt and the debt is issued in yen.  But it is still a massive debt, and most likely one of the leading causes of the lost 2 decades, along with demographics.

MF Global Told CME It Used Customer Funds

Bloomberg (h/t Ritholtz):

CME Group detailed its dealings with MF Global in documents released yesterday by the oversight panel of the House Financial Services Committee. Christine Serwinski, chief financial officer for North America at MF Global, and Edith O’Brien, a treasurer, told Mike Procajlo, an exchange auditor, at around 1 a.m. on Oct. 31 in Serwinski’s Chicago office that the customer money was transferred on Oct. 27 and Oct. 28 and possibly Oct. 26, according to a CME Group timeline.
“About $700 million was moved to the broker-dealer side of the business to meet liquidity issues in a series of transactions on Thursday, Friday and possibly Wednesday,” Serwinski and O’Brien told Procajlo hours before the firm filed for the eighth-largest bankruptcy following record quarterly losses and $6.3 billion in trades on European sovereign debt.
The timeline, the most detailed account yet of what may have happened to as much as $1.2 billion of missing customer money, was released as Jon Corzine, the firm’s former chairman, chief executive officer and architect of the European trades, faced his third congressional panel in the past week. The former senator and governor of New Jersey said he doesn’t know what happened to the money.

Crooks.  I'm still leaning toward failing broker loots customer cash to try to stave off failure.  I just can't believe Corzine didn't know what was going on.  I don't know who the whistleblower will be, but I think somebody will confess that he told them to do the looting.