Imagining Recession

Or so we thought.

In doing so, we think that we are upholding our values.

Queerer than we can suppose comes from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

China is much more than just a nation state, Buruma concludes. Taiwanese scholar Lee Hsiao feng has recently argued that the concept Chinese is a meaningless word that was fabricated to justify rule over minorities.

My title Queerer than we can suppose The strangeness of science.

China is often thought to be governed by the Han majority.

Consider something that we all think we know the earth is (approximately) round.

But this attachment goes deeper than you think.

The idea that you can play a Medvedev card to balance Putin is a dangerous illusion.

As one can imagine, the results of this System I coup d etat are not pretty.

But irregularities now seem more serious than initially thought.

But it is a mistake to think that China s manufacturing will remain in the doldrums.

At first glance, Russia bears many of the hallmarks of a great power.

So China's democratic transition may be closer than anyone realizes.

This will prove more difficult than it first sounds.

However, the deeper reasons for some of these conflicts may well be more traditional.

We thought that Europe believed in sharing its burdens equitably.

Being alive, we tend to think that life is easy to grasp.

But it is wrong to think that massive accumulation of debt is a free lunch.

So you would think the same would be true for US households and embattled European governments.

No parents could want this future for their children.

How can you have a viable state carved up by fences, military roads, and barbed wire?

But this difference may have less impact than meets the eye.

It is a fantasy to believe that peace can be concluded without the radicals participation.

So the idea that what the world needs now is more fixed rules will not do.

We imagine residential streets with one for sale sign after another.

It is a strain to think that governments have the same motivations as private citizens.

It evokes the container metaphor of communication, in which we conceive of ideas as objects, sentences as containers, and communication as a kind of sending.

If we don t, the next one will come sooner than we think.

Better to cut and run than stay and die, and who is to say that the result will embolden Taliban terrorists?

But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized.

It is a mistake, however, to believe that extended deterrence depends on parity in numbers of nuclear weapons.

It is a mistake to believe that ecological concerns can be addressed only through negative growth.

It is easy to imagine what the euro s failure would mean for the EU as a whole a disaster of historic proportions.

One can imagine that he is applying that old adage, Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Listen to what comes out of Washington and Brussels, or read the financial press, and you would think you were witnessing a straightforward morality play.

More fundamentally, no one should think that North Korea s totalitarian communist system can be changed overnight.

And yet for decades we thought that the people who were managing those firms were much smarter than we were.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that this bloodlust represents widespread sentiment among Iraqis.

However, as long as Tibet remains part of China, it is hard to see how its distinct cultural identity can survive.

The imminent indeed, inevitable victory of politics over recalcitrant economics may well be at hand.

So to sum up language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another.

With this engine of growth turned off, it is hard to see how the American economy will not suffer from a slowdown.

The Bush administration is right to emphasize the importance of elections, without which democracy is inconceivable.