In the inbox this morning we had an angry note about last night’s program from a French expat living near Boston. “The country that [guest Jerome Guillet] described is not France,” she wrote. To be sure, Jerome reflected the liberal end of the spectrum and he certainly didn’t hide his disdain for Sarkozy. We who know no better thought perhaps he reflected a European point of view not normally heard in this country. We’re still wondering about one thing he said, though — that if you leave out the American mega-rich, the average French person’s standard of living is actually higher than it is here. Our crack fact-checker Sam is on the case.
Next week is filling up. Chelsea is producing both Monday’s show on Ishmael Beah and Wednesday’s show on aging (yes we keep score). Read the Atul Gawande’s New Yorker piece and post your comments.
Tuesday we’re airing a rerun because Chris has been asked to moderate an afternoon debate between Stephen Walt and G. John Ikenberry at the Watson Institute at Brown on the subject of crafting American foreign policy beyond 9/11 and the GWOT (Global War on Terror). Walt and Ikenberry had a lively exchange on the TPM blog and we’re planning to record the event to air on Open Source at a later date.
David and I voted to rerun the Japanese baseball show from last winter. The show covered the impact of Japanese baseball players like Ichiro and Dice K on the major leagues, and it holds up well as long as you overlook Dice K’s current slump, Yankee outfielder Matsui’s injury and the fact that we never talked about superstar Sox reliever Hideki Okajima. Emmett O’Connell, who suggested that show, will have to keep us up to speed on any other updates we need to know about.
The Walt-Inkenberry debate is interesting. I think it’s a continuation of the pre-Iraq War/ post 9/11 debate ( it probably pre-dates that) about how the US should conduct itself post the fall of the Soviet Union. Now that there is consensus that we have made a tremendous mistake in Iraq, the conversation needs to emerge again more than ever. I hope we don’t get stuck in terms like realist, liberal internationalist, and neo-conservative which polarize. In the end we have to arrive somewhere. Thanks for the link Mary. I look forward to the airing of the forthcoming debate.
“If you leave out the American mega-rich, the average French person’s standard of living is actually higher than it is here.” Another example of why the MEDIAN is a better statistical measure than is MEAN (i.e. average) — but try teaching folks the difference. You will see their eyes glaze over…. Interesting how in some cases simple words are expanded to long explanations and in others (e.g. the communications network whereby computers are linked both graphically and textually) a simple word is substituted. (Yeah, ‘internet’).
tbrucia The reason their eyes glaze over is because 1 half of the people in the U.S. are below the median in intelligence.