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I will not pretend to have been a large fan of the positions Christopher Hitchens but only because I found him too much the fundamentalist in his anti-religious tirades.  He remained always, however, a joy to read and as a writer he will be noted as one of the best of a generation.  One could not help but audibly whoop at the way he would make a point, assuming of course that he was on your side of the argument.  It is a loss to say goodbye to this English man of letters.

The death of Christopher Hitchens deprives us of a writer of verve and charm, a controversialist, and an intellectual. He was a journalist, above all – he filed many dispatches from war zones – and the long essay was the form in which he was most comfortable. His skill in this neglected discipline places him in the English tradition of men of letters.

Mr Hitchens did not produce many full‑length books, but he did turn out scores of graceful and erudite essays. This work will be seen as his distinctive contribution to the literature of our time; the belligerent, proselytising atheism that made him a celebrity is a distraction.

As a polemicist, he certainly could be intemperate. Often, he was rude to the point of absurdity, referring to Diana, Princess of Wales, after her death, as a “simpering Bambi narcissist”. But he spoke his mind, and in a world of anodyne public figures this was refreshing. Nor was all his work vituperative: he wrote with sensitivity about favourite writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and P G Wodehouse.

The despot Kim Jong Il is dead.  Long live the despot Kim Jong Un.  The death of the despot is only lamentable because he died in bed and of old age instead of a lamppost.  The succession to the son does insert a degree of instability into a regime that was already known for its provocations.  It is doubtful that the younger Jong enjoys universal support so future provocations are likely as either his opponents seek to undermine his leadership or as he attempts to consolidate it with new accomplishments.  As the Diplomat observes:

Kim Jong-un has apparently begun to put his own people in place, but it’s hard to imagine that such a process is complete or irreversible. There are many fissures within North Korean society, and relatively few individuals who can bridge those gaps to project power across the system. This works in the favor of the Kim family, which remains at the center of power.  

What we don't know is whether there might be cleavages within the family or other disconnects between the family and the bureaucracy that might emerge as points of conflict as the process unfolds.

Image from Salon.com

NY Times columnist and former Enron adviser Paul Krugman is joining the chorus of concern over what sounds like the eerie ripping of a property bubble in China.  Paul is not the first to mention a concern and we can agree with him that Chinese statistics are even a greater exercise in fiction than most economic statistics give one pause to assert a trend.  Moreover this is not Dr. Krugman's first note of concern about the situation in China.  If the future bears out the concern, however, there will be an increased criticism on the impact of stimulus on an economy and the Chan narrative will be used to support Austrian School against the Keynesian vision shared by Dr. Krugman.  The argument can wait, however, until after we know what the future holds and how it will impact the larger world economy.

And anecdotal evidence suggests that while China’s government may not be constrained by rule of law, it is constrained by pervasive corruption, which means that what actually happens at the local level may bear little resemblance to what is ordered in Beijing.

I hope that I’m being needlessly alarmist here. But it’s impossible not to be worried: China’s story just sounds too much like the crack-ups we’ve already seen elsewhere. And a world economy already suffering from the mess in Europe really, really doesn’t need a new epicenter of crisis.

I confess to a degree of sympathy for the Austrian economic argument but most of this is merely a reaction to the limits of Keynsianism.  It is not that one school is always right and the other wrong but economics is situational.  Economics shares this with parenting: sometimes there is a need to intervene and sometimes there is a need to stay out of the way.  The situation is complex and living in a different society with different challenges than the 1930's the connection between the value of Keynes to that original context becomes more clear.  Robert Samuelson makes this very point very well and reminds us that Lord Keynes (unintentionally) foretold it:

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."
-- John Maynard Keynes, 1936

WASHINGTON -- The eclipse of Keynesian economics proceeds. When Keynes wrote "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in the mid-1930s, governments in most wealthy nations were relatively small and their debts modest. Deficit spending and pump priming were plausible responses to economic slumps. Now, huge governments are often saddled with massive debts. Standard Keynesian remedies for downturns -- spend more and tax less -- presume the willingness of bond markets to finance the resulting deficits at reasonable interest rates. If markets refuse, Keynesian policies won't work.

Speaking of the 1930's and 40's Bloomberg publishes an opinion piece outlining how World War II did not end the Depression just by adding demand to the economy but by transforming the economy and adding entire an entire sector (aerospace) to the nation.  Of course it didn't hurt that once the war was over those our factories were the last left untouched for the rebuilding of Europe and parts of Asia.