The Null Blanks

We have plans for much retrospecting, both passive and active.  Much of this will be grumpy.  Because one thing a decade means for sure is that you are 10 years older at the end of it.  And ten years is long enough.  And Retrospective is, by definition, a way of seeing.  So, how to see it?  Some proposals:

Proposal #1:

The Null Blanks were the decade of fear.  Or maybe that’s not quite correct.  It was the decade of cowardice.  We got started early by being afraid of sharks (if we remember).  Then it was terrorists.  Terrorists!  But some people weren’t afraid, and we were glad they weren’t afraid, because we, we were afraid.  But they weren’t, and so they took care of things for us.

Some stuff happened, for awhile.  It was nightmarish, violent, and nearly everyone was a real-estate agent.  At the end of this, a markedly higher percentage of people stared at or listened to small electronic devices whilst riding commuter trains.  Were we still afraid?  Not of terrorists.  Or not specifically.  But something.

The way all anxiety is a anxiety about death?  Maybe all fear is a fear of money, and all cowardice is a quaking before it’s awesome powers, it’s unquestioned status as the fundamental abstract.  By the end of the decade of cowardice, we feared Money.  We found the proper abstract form for the wealth of our century, and we ritually quake before it.  O, what it would do to us if we didn’t pay it the proper heed!   What its acolytes might do if we questioned their rights to do what they liked and extract as much as they wanted!  Every indignity and sacrifice is validated by obeisance to money’s stern presence.  The temples to money must be shored so that money would not wreak vengeance at the affront to its prerogatives.

Now there is just the many things we must do, and the many things we are told we cannot do.  We end the decade fearing a different God than the one with the rag tag army.  And this is perhaps progress.  We slink out of this decade, small and afraid.

1989

One way to think about history:

Europe got communism too early; the US got capitalism too early.

Related.

Seduction Theory

Paul Krugman, in this weekend’s New York Times magazine – and nothing can make us ever link to that specific section of that specific paper – runs the rule over the failings of the economic profession, capping off a year of navel-gazing and head-scratching, including in this blog.

The article is good, and historical, but again it tells us what happened, not really why.  What drove so many in the economic profession (Krugman calls them “Freshwater economists”, after their concentration in places like Rochester and, of course, University of Chicago (“the latest craze from the people who brought you nuclear bombs!”)) to espouse the most radical theories of self-correcting, efficient markets, and to cling to these theories to the point of scorn for all others?

This blog suggests – and has suggested – that economics is a capitalistic science, and that the structure of the same is its undoing.  That is, the precepts of economics are based on human action as a function of aggregated rationality, with price as the ultimate informational reduction.  This “fact” of its structure lurked in the background of the work of those we’ll call “messy economists” like Adam Smith (who considered himself more of a philosopher, with what he considered his chief work on moral sentiments) through Keynes (aesthete, art lover , ironist).  They were messy economists in that they studied a human system devised, willy-nilly, by humans, and therefore bound to be flawed.

But their methods couldn’t last the mechanical and technical era, or the competition with Communism.  If the heart of economics is price, which corrects, eventually economists will land on a theory which always corrects itself.  Human messiness?  Self-cleaning oven.  Communism, remember, was the God that failed; capitalism couldn’t really by the jalopy that muddled.  It had to work towards its own perfection.

And they’re right.  Everything does correct itself.  It is just a matter of time.  Global warming will correct itself by killing us off and the clouds of toxicity will dissipate!  The pain in my leg will correct itself when I die!  Any country that  drives its economy to shit will “correct itself” when it is eventually bought at a bargain or taken over by a rival.  In the meantime, however…

To these theorists, human existence is simply the “meantime” of the theory.

The original function of “economics”, first known as “political economy”, was to consider the state’s actions in terms of the polity, the lives of citizens, happiness, productivity, gains to wealth, etc.  Our modern day heroes reverse this.  They merely describe what capitalism does if given enough time, be damned the humans who are yoked to it.  We serve it, not it us, and ours is merely to admire its elegance.

The urge to make this “move”  is old, and endemic.  Few theorists – economic or otherwise – since (at least) Kant have been able to resist the lure of becoming a theologian of rationality.  Marooned in the mess of history, they long immoderately for the absolute, the Chair of the divine at a medieval diet, a seat on an ancient council.  They take the tools of their time – in this case maths and clockwork self-correction – and creates their version God.

Krugman doesn’t arrive at much of an answer.  How could he?  If there is one aspect our theories can never grasp, it’s humility.  It negates them in their ground.  God building is not for the ironic.

Long Weekend

The best – or at least them most…erm…emblematic – story in the New York Times, at least this decade.  100% guaranteed to reach the top of the “most emailed list” in record time, a tingling gift to readers on their holiday morning, before they head off to the UAW parade.  (Right?  That’s what people still do?  Thick-handed men and women walking down the street with banners?)

How good is this article?  Let us count the ways:  Does it involve Harvard?  Check.  What about navel gazing over the symbols of affluence, inequality, and privilege, without so much as a hint at the underlying social basis?  Yerp!  So, does it involve faux outrage at (symbolic) privilege?  Yes, yes!  Can we even find famous members of the media who went to Harvard to be faux-outraged?  How could we not?  Didn’t they all?  So: check check check!

Righteous indignation covering advertorial pandering: works in the Style Section, works in the Business Section.  Boo hiss bankers!  Avert your eyes from accompanying ads for $15,000 watches!  See them quake!

The Times stands for the proposition that there is “the conversation” and, beyond that, the rest of the world (outside the conversation).  The latter are meaningless, except as occasional “suffering colour” who have run up credit cards (or something) and, sadly, are probably rather fat.  I don’t want to listen to them either!  But I also don’t want to listen to the conversation because it doesn’t matter what these people say and, worse, they know this.  They’re like kids, sitting around, imagining “shocking” song lyrics: “yeah, this shit will really get them!”

If I don’t want to hear it, luckily I can simply not listen.  Like I am now.  Stupid story, luckily you didn’t induce me with your odious soporific of sleep reason!  Luckily, I wasn’t faux-outraged by your tedious tricks!

What?  Eh?

Oh.

Green Shoots of…Revolution?

To a Marxist, every moment is a Marxist moment, en route to the laying bare of contradictions that will consume the capitalist system in fire, if only one has eyes to see it and a real consciousness to put in place of the false one. But let’s look at the current moment not through a lens, but as a question we haven’t seen answered.

We have near unanimity that we are in “recovery.  Though it may not feel like a recovery, a raft of statistics – including unemployment moderation – supports this conventional wisdom. The stock market, by definition reflection of perceived future growth in earnings, is trending up, mostly on the backs of layoffs and production cuts, but of late even factory orders are slightly up. Housing starts are creeping.  Deflation fears are easing.  For our purposes, let’s start there: recovery is here.

We then need to find an explanation for what appears to be anomaly: namely, that no one believes broad-based consumer spending, generally a function of wages and savings, is improving or will shortly improve. The former is downsloping (unemployment + lack of labour market wage power) and the latter is, for the majority of people with any appreciable savings, pent up (negative) in devalued homes. The overwhelming consensus is that unemployment will continue to increase and wages will remain stagnant. As for savings: not only will home prices take time to rebound to break-even levels, but even the cash savings of most (middle-income) Americans is negative.  Unless you count total war production, there is no such bird as a “non-consumer recovery”.

So, what is the recovery we see?

The financial crisis was the result of many things, and the causes by defy reduction.  But it occurred notably in a world awash in money. Huge piles of it, more than has ever been stacked in human history, with the additional characteristic of being concentrated in the hands of third-world states, giant banks and funds, the wealthy of the west.  Movable and liquid.  That money is the symbolic end-product of the world’s growth – not just in the technical sense of something like GDP, but also technological, population, labor, etc. – since 1945.  This growth was massive, comparable in size to all growth since the dawn of time.

To the extent we are recovering, is it possible that recovery is merely a function of the size and durability of this money as it chases real assets in retreat from financial ones? That the stock market and commodities rise are functions of money needing to find a place for itself? Recall, also, that the lesson the states of the world took from the Great Depression is that you must, at all costs, protect the massive stack of money, mainly by supporting banks and other financial institutions. Is it an unexpected result that as wages and employment suffer, and are predicted to suffer indefinitely, that the disembodied stack of money, on the other hand, appears to have been salvaged, even burnished?

In short: who will you believe, economists or your own eyes?

Is it possible that we are so enslaved by our stack of money that it has even captured our statistical sense of recovery?  Or that, far from a “financial crisis”, 2008-2009 represents the final victory of the pile of money over its creation? That our economy, like a pining lover, or a miser, cares now only for the now-distributed returns of 60 years of broad-based growth, it’s stack of cash? When we complain that Wall Street and the banks own the government, aren’t we are really saying: the big stack of money owns us all, and we are powerless against it, for only in worshipping it do we have any hope of our own recovery?

We use the term “final victory” with a sense of irony. Nothing is final.  We might even suggest that the “final” deification of the stack is more like the beginning than the end, the apotheosis which is also the apex.  The stack of money is a natural occurrence, as is the world’s idolatrous thrall to it. What comes next will also be natural. The pile will incur its destructive antithesis, in whatever form it takes.

Or so might a Marxist say.

In Theory…

In November 2008 the Queen of England, who owing to sensible dress or the mad derangement in our financial precincts that has transformed royalty (!) into a symbol, in the American mind at least, for pragmatism and common, asked a group of British economists: “Why didn’t you predict this?”  Look around.  Shrug.  Shift from foot to foot.

Since then, we’ve been treated to all manner of self-excoriations, faux-repentance, and toothlessly vague reform plans for the degraded practice of macroeconomics.  Of late, this has focused on the disreputable (and oxymoronic?) Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH).  The idea seems to be that economics needs to learn from the crisis and improve, much as astronomy needed to adapt to Galileo, and given enough op-ed space, it will.

Or not.

Here’s an alternative take: it cannot.

Economics as a “science” has finally been wholly captured by capitalism.  Capitalism has always held that any finding that theorizes or abstracts from market decisions, if not subservient to the market price, is bound to be “more” erroneous than price.  Ipso facto, Soviet Union!  (Monocausal explanations, it turns out, are sauce for the goose; market distorting government interference bordering on forced servitude for the gander.)  Capitalism’s basic claim to legitimacy that it is a non-ideology, merely the aggregate free exercise of the freedom of the individual.  EMH unfalsifiably states that capitalism is capitalism.  That the quasi-science of economics has been driven from the field should surprise no one.

(The articles bemoaning the failure of EMH seem to universally ascribe to EMH the premise that all participants are rational.  It says no such thing.  EMH doesn’t even claim that the aggregate participant is rational, it merely hypothesizes that price is the synthetic that gives the best possible location for the aggregated rationality, which rationality is the only possible convergence.  Irrationality cannot be aggregated, by definition.)

The central insight of economics is and has always been that capitalism is correct.  Therefore, eventually capitalism was bound to become economics, and vice-versa.  When adulthood is reached, childish things are put away, and the pretension to science by a non-science is one such childish thing.  Leibniz didn’t need a formula to deem this the best of all possible worlds, and capitalism doesn’t need science to tell itself the price is right.  Amidst the reams of navel-gazing by economists on the question of their own failures, we read not a single theory proposing to replace EMH.  Your ideology is showing, gents; hope that the much lauded green shoots will soon grow high enough to cover your bare legs.

In-Action

A much shorter version of our last post.  Despair creeps.

Health Care / Technocracy

We were speaking to a friend, casually.

Premise: the systemic lack of will in American politics evident in a dark-reading of health care never getting “done”.

Thesis: the US is the last nation with a late 18C form of government, the others having been knocked flat & forced to rebuild in the latter years of the industrial era (most post WWII), & thus the last nation forged at the dawn of conservatism.

The rebuilt states of the post-war world, on the other hand, are universally more open to state influence, progressive politics &, correlatively, the influence of experts, facts, & technology. Their “rights” are far less about capitalism & freedom, & far more about national identity, immigration, & traditional practice.

After more thought, this suggested an angle on Obamaism: that his ascent represents, at rather long last, the acknowledgement by large swaths of the population that technocratic solutions might be not just necessary but also possible. To climb out a little further on the limb, this insight is forged of a synthesis: the development of technology’s predictive/descriptive powers, on the one hand; & on the antithetical side, the corrosive skepticism of human self interest that argued against grand government projects. In one of history’s fine dialectics, these two parts might join to create a new technocracy (which we hope looks less like the odd deference granted to macroeconomists even now, after nearly all of them were wrong).

First, we admit that there is also an ACTUAL lack of will in American life: in spite of everything we know about the dangers of such things, we’re fat; drive drunk whilst text messaging; hate taxes & love spending; know various things we do are unsustainable & don’t care.

But this post is about the coding of the government into do-nothingness, and the peculiar form the American Will-to-Power – as strong as any other place – takes: a banging rhetoric, an vague sense of being the greatest nation on earth, a flat-earth mentality. In other lands the great come to make in ours, they come to laud.

Possible History: The Democratic Capitalist state, emergent protean at the end of the 18C & essentially unchallenged by the time it was honed by industrializing through the 19C, promptly burned down and exhaustededly reconstituted in the first half of the 20C, was forged in an era of rather daring claims about change: that society could be remade, tabula rasa, based on the unassailable claims of reasons. Kant, the French Revolution, the German Idealists. All emerged from the swamp of superstition into the sunlit uplands of reason.

The alarmed conservatives of the day – indeed they were the BIRTH of conservativism– pushed back. The claims to disembodied reason were overdone, they said, even prone to tyranny (as were , sigh, all things); empirical data was scarce, history was short, science was new(ish). On what proof other than the dictates of the barely understandable Logik of Kant & Hegel & “we hold these truths to be self-evident” did this refashioning arrogantly proceed? Conservatives need not rebut the arguments on their opponents terms: they needed only rebut the possibility of an argument at all. Or, more precisely: to point out that it was ALL argument and no fact, a great leap of faith based on abstractions. When what we had right now was not soooooo terrible, was it? So bad, anyway, that we reject whatever it was sloshing through the unknowable movement of human history that got us here, still of body and mind, with operas to attend ? mostly enough food?

If Hegel thought the Geist of history was the idea of freedom realizing itself, and this got co-opted into all sorts of Materialist views of the perpetual dawning and forward thrust of rationality spearing into history, the conservatives were equally as deterministic, only from wherever they happened to be backwards: in the not-unreasonable view that, yes, we arrived at a place where we can ask these questions, which is undeniably good, but we don’t know how we got here, and anything we throw away in allowing rationality to blossom might be the crucial element that got us through the fires of history. (I’m simplifying, of course, they would surely believe that it was an unknowable combination of elements, & thus no piece-by-piece analysis could assure one wasn’t discarding a crucial element.)

To the conservatives of the 18/19C then, the objection too two forms:
1) Rationality cannot be grafted onto politics
2) There is not enough information to test our rational hypotheses, thus we are best considering the lessons of the past
The two objections are related. Conservatism in the west is now the full-on the party of capitalism and free markets, which is a form of “rationality grafted onto politics” and the signature of market capitalism, price, is the once piece of information conservatives typically find “sufficient”. The former objection has, I think, been given away by the alliance with market capitalism: the government gave it, it can take it: it’s rational in the sense of Adam Smith, not in the sense of historical development. It simply cannot be that massive disruptions to existence is fine if it can be rationalized by the market, not if you want to make objection #1.

It is the latter claim which interests us, because it developed historically, in a very different information (and information processing) environment: the old days. Before germs! The various state socialisms of the developed world were all built in mid-century, in an environment much closer to the present and open to the sort of experimentation and testing which is univerally considered to leads to progress. Of course, we are back on the horns of the political debate that probably started with the Bastille still smoldering: the Brand New Day versus Same Old Same Old. This threatens to dissolve us in the tedious Liberal-Conservative, Taste Great – Less Filling irresolveability. Breaking form here is dream of Obamism: to credit the insights of conservatism with developing our knowledge of their insights, and then declaring them discarded, not by internal invalidity but by the movements of history. That is: knowing how self-interested people always act, and how complex a machine society is, we can now model the society we want.

And what if? Or not? If we are ever to start knowing enough to make changes, why not now? If not now, when?

The original point: that the US is the last country with an 18C government, well-burnished by 19C debates. And good thing! one imagines conservatives saying. But the historical snapshot locks us in: our obsessive positing of abstract “freedom” set against – if not outright used as an excuse for – all manner of proven reasonable projects takes place nowhere else in the developed world. We somehow need & cherish the freedom to starve, get sick and die, fail to educate our children because without those things, we cannot maintain our “freedom”. This is callow nonsense: it adopts a set of conservative arguments forged by people with memories of true tyranny and retasks it for people conveniently uncharitable and unwilling to be taxed. To fight it, Obamism is wisely taking it on at its core insight: we don’t know the consequences of things. Obamism is as much as saying: we don’t either, but we have the tools to find out, and that is what we will rely upon. The great utopia of Obamism, one senses, is administered by humming servers plunking algorithms.

Liberals! They used to think they’re so damned smart. Now they think their damn disinterested science is so smart! (OK, maybe we aren’t moving the old debate with this post.)

Uncharitably (and unproveably) we could call the US the Great Lucky that, like so many Luckies, considers itself the Great Virtuous. Historical accidents are easily taken as signs & wonders. The former Administrations loved to cite the great currents of history, usually “freedom” coursing through every nation it didn’t like & wanted to invade. History happened only to other people, people backwards enough to be entitled to suffer collateral damage on the way. But not us. “Don’t mess with success” works exactly until it doesn’t. Health care, at the union of science and politics, is keen test for Obamism, & for our 18C form of state, & perhaps our long reliance on luck. Both sides believe that people can’t really “decide” anything; we’ll find out, as they talk past each other, where one goes from there.

Monday, Conceptually

No one hates Monday anymore like Garfield hated Monday, though we seem to recall that in Garfield’s heyday everyone hated Mondays as much as Garfield.  They also really, really like Friday.  There was at one time even clothing branded with an abbreviation of this phrase.  It adorned beer cozies and pick-up bumpers.

Yes, we were thinking this morning: we hate Mondays.  And sometimes on Friday, we do thank god.  But do we?  I mean: really?

And if not, is it because the writers of this blog live in a bubble of vague, not-particularly-scheduled (under) employment? Such that the week does not loom in a grey Monday morning poked with mechanical buzzing, or swan sunsettish into a Friday above the lips of our beer cans?   Was Garfield’s impotent rage the expression of an older, workaday nation that bitterly ate its ration of Monday, complaining as a way of accepting?

As a cat, Garfield’s Mondays demanded no more than any other day, and waking in the morning is rarely a problem a for cats.  But still, there he was, Monday mornings found him puffy-eyed, slugging dutifully from the coffee cup, barely suffering those around him.  Maybe Garfield’s loathing of Monday’s, as distinct from his love for lasagna, was purposefully impossible: a form of grumpy empathy, a connection across, which we too could all share. As a training for the unreal, perhaps: fore defanging the reminder of tedium.

Coming up the steps from the train, being perhaps too aware of our vaguely ironic sense of hating Mondays (actually saying it to ourselves, not just thinking it), we admit  that our vague irony was contained in the original concept of the empathy: in the form of saying something knowing it was meaningless, but seeing oneself say it as a charmed protection from actually doing what it said: hating Mondays.  It’s a loop, saying something that does nothing that causes you to say something.

We propose: I Hate Mondays is not the only phrase with which we trade.

Addition to Michael Jackson, Ad Nauseum

Lots of points on which to disagree (or avoid, or express wonder or confusion), but the over-arching, clever-person “take” seems to have settled on vague longing for (a passed, oh always passed!) cultural unanimity, as if the manufactured televisual reality of 1965-2000 which, at least for the last weekend sense of retrospect is said to have peaked the moment Michael Jackson moonwalked on TV, that this unanimity was some sort of paradise of togetherness instead of the spawn-era of horrifying social, class, and income division papered over by the national cultural form embodied by television. Somehow, this weekend, that time is now some “moment”, long gone and lamented.

It was not too long ago that this era was maligned by the right-thinking, hands were wrung, and cottage industries were spawned about manufactured consent and vast wastelands and the like. Now, the entire (allegedly splintered) culture is unified in speaking for it as golden age, no voice even given to the opposition, as though the voices spent the last of their cultural studies cred in the 1990s and have given up the rebellion for wistful moments of remembered cultural union. Leave aside for a moment whether national cultural uniformity was anything other than a false idea that made us ache even then – this at one point was the definitive read on the situation – and that today’s smaller culture(s) are more local and responsive, and presumably in contact at more points with the participant: what strikes this blogger as odd is that nostalgia has become such a (welcome) force in interpreting events. That’s surprise number one. I suppose nostalgia can be expected to be the top choice whenever someone dies; but the anxiety to find an “angle” to blow this story up into the proper size and connect it to insight come down, in this case, to a bizarre personal feeling for one’s own youth, for better days, for a thick national culture. That is to say: it’s so big because it was once so big (sigh). Well known, our era was born in the where-were-you-then Kennedy assassination, it now spawns a nostalgic ethos dependent on and in tune with TVs power lent, without real distinction or meaningful addition of insight, to the web; and if this old idea is alive and endowed with agency – and it is in the sense of being occupied and perpetuated by real people representing real money – its perpetuation depends on floating this noxious fog over the land whenever anyone dies, reminding you that you were in it together (thanks to us), no matter how few Michael Jackson you have in MP3 form (or even CD). It’s not nostalgia for something, it’s just nostalgia for nostalgia; it’s barely missing, more like simply being told you’re bereft.

This blogger is far from immune from this maudlin state, thinking back to his childhood: really just nostalgia for the old cultural-commercial Daddy who existed alongside the real one, in the same house, on different sides of the living room. But this blogger is surprised that so many younger than him seem equally taken with the supposed glory of the era of their dimmest memory, having themselves grown in a world that sold nothing so much as “alternatives” and “choice” and promptly found ways to supply them both with a real (if, as we are told, ever-diminishing cut) to the same old suspects. He wonders, too, towards what these younger will direct their sopping encomiums in their nostalgic aging, when their time actually comes? The lost nation they mourn will be the one here now of course, and one wonders what it will look like then, and what hurt their softness will hope to hide.