Just after graduating college more than a decade ago, I heard Michael Albert explain that some of the mayhem associated with demonstrations against the Vietnam War were part of an intentional strategy to "raise the cost of the war at home". In very dry terms, the idea was that feedback mechanisms were out of whack, that those bearing the costs of the war were far away and Asian, while those fundamentally perpetrating the war lived in American cities, and that in order for rational policy to prevail, Americans had to experience some of its costs. Since there wa no "natural" mechanism whereby costs to Asian villagers might be shared by Boston suburbanites, activists stepped into the breach and manufactured costs. There was something compelling to this reasoning, I couldn't reject it out of hand. And yet, there was something obviously dangerous, and dark about it. There ought to be better ways to encourage rational policy choices than by breaking shop windows. And as a very intuitive and wise college friend said about this line of reasoning, she was skeptical of any kind of politics that required the destruction of good things in order to do good things. Over the years, I've been more and more impressed by my friend's simple intuition and less persuaded Albert's impeccably reasoned argument.

As a short, I stand to profit from destruction of value, whether "creative destruction" or otherwise. I could claim that my investments are only a matter of sober prediction, and do not represent hope or advocacy. But, psychologically, it is very hard to resist "thinking ones book". Over the last year, I have come to believe that the US economy really ought to fail, badly, hard, and fast, that it would be better in the long term for both the US and the world if what I see as a pattern of unbalanced, debt-driven, currency-and-market destabilizing growth would end sooner rather than later, so that the eventual costs of setting things right are minimized and taken is as short a time-period as possible.

I claim to be optimist, especially about the US. I'm a great chauvinist about what I take to be the central ideas underlying the United States' politics, economics, and culture. I think that many of these ideas are fundamentally right, are universal and ought to be universally applied. I think the United States is the best thing ever, not as a particular nation-state, but as an exemplar of a framework for human affairs. But nevertheless, I think the US as a nation-state has erred perilously, that world capital markets have failed in their role of providing ongoing feedback to promote wise behavior, and that the US should take some serious lumps that it may find its way back to the path of righteousness. I do think that the US would do fine, in fact would do much better than fine, if its economy were set on a reasonable basis, after an "adjustment" as the economists like to say, after the revolution in the coinage of an older school. I want things to get worse in the US so that they can get better.

It's the Bolshevik old saw, "the worse, the better," not a point of view I'm flattered to associate myself with. It's like Michael Albert's argument all over again, which I thought I had discredited to myself. It's a set of ideas and beliefs that were nearly inchoate when I took my investment positions, that have evolved and crystallized in the context of my being a short. I feel like I have to treat these beliefs with some skepticism. So should you, dear reader. And yet, however I have arrived at them, they are my beliefs.

This is a book of exuberant words, and its exuberance is catchy. It's a small book, a short read, a few clever twists, but mostly it is just an explosion of words describing less life than imagination.

Time spent as an expatriate can sap your inner voice. Even as one learns a new tongue, one cannot help but be hesitant to use it. After all, it is not against the law to mock stilted foreigners. Even among impeccably polite hosts, one is constantly aware that whatever beyond mere practicality one wishes to express will be hopelessly marred. Your sense of humor will be misinterpreted, your irony will not be caught, your puns will be unintentionally obscene. People will laugh, or be offended, or they will be confused. You may be cute, but you will not be yourself, who you mean to be. If you are not careful, with each phrase misspoken you become something small in your own eyes, a curiosity.

This book I am hawking (I suppose I am hawking it, since I just signed up for Amazon's affiliate program in a what-the-hell kind of a moment) doesn't dwell on all of this. It doesn't dwell on much of anything. It runs rough-shod over any actual topic with the self-indulgent imaginings and ego-fueled explosions of its protagonist, and the plot of the book ends up seeming like an interesting enough travelogue, or like a cute joke, but you don't much care. This is a book whose purpose is to sweep you away in a torrent of words, and for that I am grateful. It is a book for an expatriate to savor, not primarily because what it describes is topical, but because it is an antidote to the mute colorlessness that threatens to quietly overtake the mind of the shy, unwary alien.