Word: lessons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Half history lesson, half celebrity exposé, author Alix Strauss's new book, Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious, is a pop-culture take on one of society's most painful topics. Focusing on 20 famous figures who took their own lives, Death Becomes Them provides the backstories behind the tragic and manic last days of icons ranging from Kurt Cobain to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. Equally sad and shocking, Strauss's profiles help fans and cult followers better understand how these brilliant, tortured souls crossed the line from depression...
That brings us to lesson No. 2. In the early 1930s, powerful voices at the Treasury and Federal Reserve argued that the deep pain of financial crisis was a necessary economic corrective. "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised President Herbert Hoover. "It will purge the rottenness out of the system." Late last year, you could hear a few people arguing this case on CNBC and even on the floor of the House of Representatives. But after Lehman's failure, no one at Treasury or the Fed talked that way. Instead...
...From ill-considered deregulation of banking and derivatives to over-the-top encouragement of home ownership, Washington's fingerprints were all over the crisis. Almost nothing has been done so far to right these wrongs, or otherwise rein in the excesses of the financial system. Which brings us to lesson No. 3: It's really hard for a democracy to make big changes in the absence of crisis...
...work, a fact as true for the nation as it is for you and me. As the Peterson Institute's Jacob Kirkegaard explains, "It is entirely possible that what started as a cyclical rise in unemployment could end up as an entrenched problem." Past crises have illustrated that lesson: the longer you wait, the harder it is to contain. This is as true for joblessness as it was for subprime mortgages, al-Qaeda and computer viruses...
...Because reforming health care is an extremely complex process that involves vast sums of money and influence peddled by huge industries and massive institutions. It seems unlikely or perhaps incorrect that a marginal individual like Wilson could have such a significant impact on the process. But this is the lesson that the Joe Wilson incident teaches us. The outcome of this plan turns on the actions of just a few individuals. Wilson may never be more than a footnote in the story of how Barack Obama passed health-care reform, but so much of the outcome will be determined...