Well here’s a story that certainly brought a smile to my face:

Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — were selected in large part because they have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena.

The shift, which would come partly out of the military’s huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states.

Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

But the adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three have all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.

This is a really good idea! We do spend way too much on the military, and we do severely under-resource other elements of our foreign policy strategy. If Clinton and Gates and Jones are all on board for a big push to turn this around, and that’s why Obama wants them all on his team, then that strikes me as a very good reason.

Richard Holbrooke reviews a book on McGeorge Bundy and puts a liberal foot forward:

Bundy never believed in negotiations with the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese. This, coupled with his enduring faith in the value of military force in almost any terrain or circumstance, were his greatest errors. They contributed to a tragic failure. With the nation now about to inaugurate a new president committed to withdraw combat troops from Iraq and succeed in Afghanistan, the lessons of Vietnam are still relevant. McGeorge Bundy’s story, of early brilliance and a late-in-life search for the truth about himself and the war, is an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.

Seems sensible to me.

There’s a curious tendency for the portion of peoples’ brains that deals with supply, demand, and price issues to stop functioning when the subject turns to parking. Andrew Samwick has a great example:

Second, my otherwise delightfully governed town has this practice of putting bags over the parking meters around the holiday shopping season. I associate it with the downtown merchants, since the meters north of downtown (say, near my office) remain operational. I can’t figure this one out.

1. If you believe that the meters are there to regulate access to the town’s scarce resource of parking spaces, then you need that regulation even more, not less, during the busy holiday season.

2. If you believe that the meters are there to raise money for the town, then your best opportunity to get that money is when you know demand will be high, like during the busy holiday season.

Presumably, the reason the town does this is to accommodate a request from the downtown merchants. But why do they perceive this to be in their self-interest? Why does “free (but scarce) parking” attract people to drive to town? Wouldn’t the better marketing approach be “still cheap but available parking,” given that the cost of the parking (about $1 an hour) is still small relative to the cost of whatever the visitors are going to buy?

If it were me, I’d raise the fees during the holiday season (and lower some other local tax). Yet anoSether reason why I will never be town manager.

But the world could really use more town managers like Samwick! Virtually ever town or city in the United States of America could adopt smarter parking pricing policies and suddenly find itself with parking spaces more available, taxes lower, higher retail sales, etc. See also the problems with too cheap parking at Harvard Square.

Things are looking down in the far east, just like everywhere else:

China’s growth rate has been forecast to be about 9 percent in 2008, down from 11.9 percent the year before and close to the 8 percent that economists say China must maintain in order to keep the labor market stable.

“China is under growing tension from its large population, limited resources and environment problems, and needs faster reform of its economic growth pattern to achieve sustainable development,” Hu said, according to the People’s Daily newspaper, the official Communist Party newspaper. He did not provide specifics.

This hardly counts as an economic model, but for my part I just don’t see how China could possibly maintain 8 percent growth if we have simultaneous recessions in Japan, the US, and the Eurozone. And all indications are that we’ll have simultaneous recessions in those countries. Keep in mind that six percent growth would be, for a country that’s not China, an impressive figure — especially under bad conditions. But if China is unable “to keep the labor market stable” then I think you have to wonder about what the consequences of that would be for their political stability.