Disagree this!

Brad DeLong points to Paul Graham's taxonomy of disagreement (and explanation of why it's more important than usual these days). Just so you know, in ascending order from worst to best, the kinds of disagreement are name-calling, ad hominem, responding to tone, contradiction, counterargument, refutation, and refuting the central point.

How did you disagree today?

"Creative destruction" for you and me

Economist and blogger Brad DeLong talks about his favorite economist:

"Marx saw that the coming of capitalist economies destroyed all feudal, traditional, and patriarchal relationships and orders. [Joseph] Schumpeter saw farther: that market capitalism destroys its own earlier generations. There is, he wrote, a constant 'process of industrial mutation -- if I may use that biological term -- that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in, and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.'"

Not to mention its employees.