Paris Thoughts, an Appeal to Readers, and a Note on the Blog

Paris
...was fantastic! A wonderful city, and I definitely want to go back. A few quick thoughts:

1. The cheese is incredible (as is the food more generally). When you go, get as much cheese as possible. I would have gotten less crepes and more of something else, though. We had crepes twice I think, and they're really no better there than around here I thought. But the cheese - oh the cheese!!!

2. I was actually surprised at how unimpressed I was with the coffee. Not always that great. I had one transcendentally rich and tasty espresso at Le Auberge, but a lot of others that were not so great. I normally drink a lot of coffee over the course of the day, so this was actually a real disappointment (the fact that it was so hard to get a coffee to go made it tough for me too... I appreciate relaxing at a cafe, but if you're going to see sights you want the opportunity to do that and take a coffee with you). But what was more disappointing was the availability. The earliest any place with coffee opened was at 7:30 am, and that was a Starbucks! What the hell?!?!?! American society would grind to a halt if no coffee was available before 7:30. And we had no coffee maker of any sort in our room (I suppose that seems crude to them or something - like you have to get your first cup of the day from a cafe?). Anyway - the coffee situation was a little frustrating (and surprisingly so) but c'est la vie.

3. The wine was very good too. We had as good a sampling as we could hope for for how long we were there - plus we went to one wine tasting, which gave us a broader sampling and some background on French wine regions - which I did not know much about. The different French treatment of varietals and the fact that they downplay individual wineries (it's all about the A.O.C.) makes it hard for me to report back on exactly what I liked. I think I need to get better acquainted with regions and sub-regions, and some A.O.C.s before I can really do that. But we had a great Petit Verdot with dinner one night (the only varietal we had the entire trip - which was the main reason why I ordered it. I knew what I was getting with a Petit Verdot, I like Petit Verdot, and I didn't know what I would be getting with any of the others on the menu). So wine, as with cheese, is a big yes for France, although I need to learn more about both. Coffee is more tentative.

4. My favorite stops were Notre Dame, Versailles, and the Louvre. I could have lived with seeing the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe from a distance. Versailles is incredible - it's like nothing I've ever seen before. And if you go, make sure to spend a lot of time in the gardens and walking around the Grand Canal too. We had ice cream walking along the canal in the shade - it was the most peaceful, restful experience I've had in a long time. The Louvre was great. We squeezed that in somewhat, but I could have spend considerably more time there. We looked mostly at sculptures, Greek antiquities, and medieval and Renaissance art. We caught some more recent French art too - a lot of Napoleon, etc. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, but the Mona Lisa is captivating. You just feel like you're in the presence of something extremely important that connects with something essential about humanity. And you really feel a connection with her, which is no small thing when you're walking through hall after hall of paintings. One interesting thing about the Louvre - I think art communicates better than anything else the transition from the pre-modern to the modern in Western civilization. The thematic and stylistic contrast is stark.

5. Make sure you stop by Angelinas on rue de Rivoli for the hot chocolate. Sit and read in the Louvre's gardens for a while. Eat Roquefort. Stop by the Salvador Dali gallery in Montmartre. Wait in line - even if its very long - to climb to the top of Notre Dame.

6. So I know next to no French. Kate's French is pretty good so that helped. You can get along with very, very little French. There's a lot of English in Paris, and it's not rocket science to find your way around anyway. But if you don't speak French, I really have to let you know that (to me at least), it looks awful to see an American or a Brit walk into a store and start yammering on in English to the clerk. I went around a lot without Kate to different places when she was taking a rest in the room, and I was fine without her language skills - but I tried to say as very little as possible, I used what French I did know, and I took an almost apologetic tone when I had to use English in the hope that they would know more English than I knew French. When the clerk doesn't understand what you want the solution is not to repeat exactly what you said in English again. English is the problem, not the solution. I didn't come across any Parisians that were rude on account of the language issue, personally. But it was still frustrating to see how entitled a lot of English-speaking tourists acted. I've come to the conclusion that getting around with almost no French requires four things: clarity, brevity, humility, and using every bit of French that you do know to show you're making an honest effort. Simply saying "merci" rather than "thank you" when you leave, even if that's all you can say, makes you look a lot less boorish. They don't expect fluency from a tourist but for God's sake - nobody has to do the salutations and the niceties in English.

Appeal to Readers
One of the things I like so much about our readers is that they can be a great bibliographical source. I have another request. Does anyone know any good treatments or examples - short or long - of thoughts on "technological unemployment" during the interwar period? This was a huge, if not leading, understanding of the cause of unemployment and the depression at the time - which is easy for a lot of us to forget because we usually come from either an aggregate demand, a monetary contraction, a malinvestment, or simply a bad-policy view of the depression (or some combination of the above). The technological unemployment view is often expressed in a way that provides nothing more than Luddite naivete and rumblings against capitalists - but I think there are interesting points to be made as well. If nothing else it's important to understand as a dominant view point historically. If anyone knows anything about these sorts of views, prominent proponents (not necessarily economists), etc. - I'm interested. I'm primarily interested in the 1910-1940 period.

A Note on the Blog
My blogging really picked up as a morning habit I tried to develop after finishing my paper on the 1920-21 depression. Previously I had spent my early morning hours writing. Well, I've got a backlog of ideas I want to write up again, and a few projects lined up (the NBER chapter, for example) that I need to focus more on. The fear that I will not be accepted into a PhD program makes me want to focus on my own independent research all the more, since I don't always get to work on what I want to work on at the Urban Institute. So activity on the blog will probably be much sparser. Sorry - I'll try to do a quantity/quality trade-off, I'll probably spend less of the morning responding to comments if I do post, and perhaps rely more heavily on short "this is an interesting link" posts.