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NY Times Op-Eds

Richard Dooling’s op-ed columns in the New York Times.

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Rise of the Machines

I wrote this opinion piece for the New York Times in the fall of 2008. Since then I’ve become addicted to financial crisis entertainment and parables of the second gilded age: books, movies, documentaries, Matt Taibi in The Rolling Stone, and the incomparable Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times business section. The gateway drugs were William D. Cohan’s House of Cards and the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson, followed by Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, and Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. The first serious crisis film that made me feel the fear was HBO’s adaptation of Too Big To Fail. Margin Call beats them all. Shot by J.C. Chandor on a budget but a great cast including Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons. Released in theaters and Video On Demand via Amazon. As far as I can tell, the $65 trillion is still missing. Nobody has been prosecuted. And the Fed and the Treasury are still trying to pretend that the money will show up one day, if they can just keep up appearances until it happens. Rise of the Machines, by Richard Dooling, from the New York Times, […]

Book jacket for Critical Care, a novel, by Richard Dooling

Critical Care: Revisited

The Meaning Of Life Is That It Stops The new IT article on health care: How American Health Care Killed My Father, by David Goldhill, writing in the September 2009 Atlantic.   Richard Dooling on NPR’s Talk of the Nation discussing his opinion piece in the New York Times, “Heath Care’s Generation Gap.“ It was my first novel, and I wrote it almost two decades ago, but I doubt I’d change a word of it. If anything, the money and the madness changing hands in the ICU have only gotten worse. When I wrote Critical Care, circa 1990, total expenditures for health care ran at roughly 10% of our gross national product. Now, as my opinion piece in the New York Times indicates, it’s 16% and headed for 31% in the next 25 years, unless something changes. The new hysterical fear is that if we counsel elderly patients about end-of-life choices it means we are “pulling the plug” or sending them off to suicide parlors. People need to know what all of this aggressive, no-holds-barred, spare-no-expense intensive care buys you at the end of life. It’s not pretty, and that is the real subject of Critical Care: What happens when […]

The Wizard Drops the Curtain – New York Times

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I attended Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting and wrote about it for The New York Times Op-Ed page: THE Berkshire Hathaway Corporation held its annual shareholders meeting here last weekend, drawing a record 27,000 capitalist faithful from all over the world to worship at the Qwest Center in downtown Omaha. Onstage, the chairman and investor in chief Warren Buffett and his partner and vice chairman, Charles Munger, once again entertained the well-washed and well-heeled masses and educated them in the doctrine of value investing. And what’s not to worship? Berkshire shareholders gained $16.9 billion in net worth last year alone, an 18.4 percent increase in per share book value. Even more fun, the guy in charge, despite being the second-wealthiest man in the world, is a prize ham who loves to play his ukulele, show a video of himself “winning” a rigged one-on-one game against LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and then kick off the shareholder meeting by sending the singer Jimmy Buffett onstage to pretend he is a distant cousin who believes “that blood is thicker than water” and therefore he — the Margaritaville Man — should be Mr. Buffett’s successor. Succession was much discussed at both Saturday’s shareholder […]

Sweet Home Omaha – New York Times

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The fourth installment of The New York Times Home Economics series: Sweet Home Omaha – New York Times, by Richard Dooling. “HOUSING prices are falling on both coasts, and bubble panic is around the corner. The financial magazines are already grabbing their readers by the throat and taunting them with headlines like: “U.S. Housing Crash Continues!” “Where Will Housing Prices Fall the Most?” “Is It Time to Cash Out?” “What if it is time to cash out? Where do you go? If you sell on either coast, then you need to find real estate somewhere that the housing bubble missed. Guam? American Samoa? Wait, how about eastern Nebraska? Downright frothless when it comes to housing: the median home price here usually chugs along at the annual rate of inflation and never goes down (up 4 percent last year, up 22 percent over the last five years). . . [more] Or listen to NPR: Talk Of The Nation.

Home Economics – Sunday New York Times

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The third Economic Postcard from Omaha: “Immigration Beefs Up Nebraska,” by Richard Dooling is at the New York Times site, with links to the first two dispatches in the series. “Unemployment’s down, inflation’s up and consumer confidence blows with the wind. Just how are Americans actually doing? Last fall, the Op-Ed page asked writers to provide snapshots of their local economies over the course of the year. Here is their third round of dispatches.” More at NYTimes: Immigration Beefs Up Nebraska

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