Two articles about orthodoxy: the first addresses the problem of set economic thinking, which is a surprising problem to be dealing with in a field so young and full of transformative discovery. I'm obviously no economist, but I sometimes have great difficulty giving up some economic notions, even when they pose major problems for coherent analysis. A couple weeks ago I was going down with the ship on the question of rationality in voting behavior: I found myself trying half a dozen workarounds to explain why rational thinking was still at the base of an apparently irrational behavior - until I realized that the whole point of taking rationality as a point of departure was to construct a revealing model. In this particular case, clinging to rationality as a baseline behavior was irrational.
The second article is about adjectives... blossoming writers have always been nudged away from adjectives, since nouns and especially verbs are where it's at. But Ben Yagoda takes a second look at adjectives, and he likes what he sees - the article ends up being a kind of pleased taxonomy of descriptive usage, with plenty of close examples. I'm not a big adjective user myself - the paragraph above for instance has only a couple examples of unnecessary adjectives, and the necessary ones are pretty pedestrian. Did the adademy steer me away from them? If so, maybe I can blame them for my insidious use of filler adverbs...
I should mention that the article on ossified economic thinking comes via the valuable filter Political Theory Daily Review, which I have added to the links at right.
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