Apr

21

great book that i'm reading as I am taking Aubrey around to visit colleges that accepted him:

The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.

For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us.

McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.

visit to Sam's in Berkeley coming after 60 years:

Sam's Grill and Seafood Restaurant
Serving Mesquite-grilled Fresh Fish and Classic
San Francisco Dishes from the Gold Rush to today!

To Our Friends and Patrons,
We are happy to present to you an Old-Fashioned Eating House with Old Fashioned Waiter Service and Private Booths together with a professionally equipped kitchen for better and faster service. We want to continue to serve you as we have done over the past 75 years and keep our reputation as one of the GOOD EATING PLACES of “Old San Francisco.” We are proud of it and hope you will be, too.
Thank You! (taken from Sam’s menu from 1946)

An update: nothing has changed much at Sam's in 160 and 60 years - the petrale is still the best sole (better than Dover), the bread is the same excellent sourdough, and on a wed. evening it was packed (the lavatories were messy).

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