Glad To Know ...

... I'm not the only one who makes fun of his previous government-funded job. Here's PK, ruminating on the bad old days, same as the bad new days:

And one of my jobs was to go to international meetings, where I helped draw up communiques. These communiques were, by design, bland and uninformative — because consensus, not insight, was the goal, so anything controversial was fuzzed over.

It was, in short, extremely boring: well-dressed important-looking men sitting around tables, saying nothing.

And reading reports on the latest G20 meeting brings it all back:

G20 finance ministers and central bankers conceded that the extent of the global economic slowdown following this summer’s turmoil in financial markets is difficult to predict.

Profound, isn’t it? Equally exciting:

In their communique, the G20 said recent events have ‘emphasised the need for greater effectiveness of financial supervision and the management of financial risks as well as to increase transparency among financial institutions’.

And grown men spend their time doing this.

His blog is at least as good as his column. I hope he keeps it up once the book-pimping is done with.