January 2007

I just finished reading ,The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (UK) and want to recommend it to everyone else who is several years behind the curve. (My next review will be of a book that has today as its publication date, honest). Before Daniel rolls his eyes about “bloody Marvel comics” I should say that initially I had no intention of reading it. Chabon is compared on the sleeve with Cheever and Nabokov, neither of whom I have read; there is no indication of any murders in it, or English detectives solving them; and even I find the idea of a novel about people writing comics slightly silly. What prompted me to read it was the enthusiasm of my wife, a person who holds comics in the kind of contempt that people with a sense of humour reserve for the “humour” pages of Reader’s Digest. (My daughter and I finally made her read some Tintin and Asterix a year or so ago, at which point she relented slightly, but only with regard to French and Belgian comics). And she was right, Kavalier and Clay is a wonderful novel. The central characters (surprisingly enough called Kavalier and Clay) are both realistically drawn – Kavalier is a brilliant obsessive who lives mostly in his head, escapes pre-war Czechoslovakia in a coffin and, once in New York is drawn into the comic business by his cousin, Clay, right in the middle of the golden age. He is determined to bring his family to join him, and, like Clay (who idolizes him) determined somehow to bring America into the war. Their great creation, The Escapist, seems to be loosely modeled on the radio serial character Chandu the Magician. Its hard to say much more without giving too much away, but there are really five central characters, all of them lovingly drawn – Kavalier, Clay, the bohemian girl Rosa Saks with whom both of them become involved, a long-dead New York City, and the world of the comic book production team. Though long, its moves at a fast pace, and I think what I liked best about the novel was the good-heartedness of the author – all the central characters and most of the supporters are flawed but decent people, and none the less interesting for that. I guess I’ll have to read his novel with the word “mysteries” in the title, even though it doesn’t seem to involve any murders, unfortunately…

2007 marks the 400 year anniversary of the Flight of the Earls, the moment the political leadership of the Irish aristocracy left Ireland and scattered all over Europe. Following an unsuccessful rebellion in 1601 that marked the end of a nine year campaign against the English, the leaders, Hugh O’Neill (an antecedent of Henry’s and mine, I believe) and Rory O’Donnell, left Ireland for the continent. O’Donnell died suspiciously in Rome the following year, and O’Neill’s plans to use his Spanish allies to mount a further military campaign fizzled out. I’m pretty hazy on the details, but I think the Irish colleges in Paris and Louvain have strong connections with the Flight of the Earls.

Learning about the Flight of the Earls in primary school, I remember feeling very sad that the last stand against colonialism ended so decisively, and that its leaders were forever (self)-exiled. But chatting to some Irish ex-pats in Brussels recently, I found myself wondering aloud if the English actually did us a favour. Certainly, the Flight of the Earls opened the way for the plantation of Northern Ireland, a forced colonisation whose implications we’re all still struggling with. But perhaps Ireland also gained something from losing its native aristocracy.

[click to continue…]

If you want to see the new flexible workforce, go to Walmart (hat-tip Tim Dunlop). As Tim’s title suggests, there’s nothing new about workers being told, from day to day, whether they’ll be wanted and for how long – look at any old movie about the waterfront for illustrations. All that’s new is that it’s being done by computer now. And flexibility, in cases like this, is a zero-sum concept: the more flexibility our bosses have to direct us, the less we have to run our own lives.

Obviously, I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by pieces pointing to purchases of consumer goods as evidence that rising inequality isn’t really a problem. As Henry says, this is a tired shtick that lots of us are sick of.

But, as an economist, it particularly annoys me when this claim is put forward by people who claim to understand markets. I’ve been going on about this for yearsand years.

The most important thing that happens in markets is that relative prices change. If prices change, but income and preferences don’t, what we expect is that people will consume more of the goods and services for which prices have fallen and less of those for which prices have risen. So, when Jeff Taylor tells us that

With price points dropping below the $1000 mark, high-end TVs are moving down-market fast with Wal-Mart leading the way.

we can all cheer this renewed verification of the Law of Demand. But, of course, this tells us precisely nothing about what’s happening to inequality.

[click to continue…]

One of the more annoying libertarian shticks to us lefties is the “increasing poverty and inequality don’t matter because consumer spending is going Up! Up! UP! ! !” three card monte routine. I think it must surely have reached its apotheosis in this “failed November hack job on Edwards”:http://www.reason.com/news/show/116797.html by Jeff Taylor in _Reason Online_ which I didn’t see until Nick Gillespie linked to it today.

However, the slapstick of the Edwards misstep should not obscure the really big picture, the fatal flaw in his “Two Americas” spiel. Many thousands of Americans evidently have $600 to spend on a video game machine. What’s more, this Christmas is expected to usher in the year of the flat-panel. With price points dropping below the $1000 mark, high-end TVs are moving down-market fast with Wal-Mart leading the way. Contrary to the Edwards’ pitch that labor-hostile companies are leaving American workers destitute, somebody is making some money out there in America. More importantly, they are making it in many, many cases without a union card. This reality will very hard [sic] for union-funded Democrats like Edwards to ignore as the 2008 presidential campaign unfolds. Hewing to the union rules, clear evidence of prosperity, like perhaps a shortage of $600 game machines, will have to be swept out of the campaign.

It isn’t hard for me to believe that someone would make the hilariously cackleheaded argument that because “many thousands” can afford a Playstation 3, economic inequality is a non-issue; I see this kind of guff in the comment sections of blogs all the time. But it is rather surprising that it’s being published by a sometimes quite interesting website as a purportedly serious contribution to political debate.

(As an aside, Taylor also introduces us to the interesting sounding concept of ‘Pythonseque depravation one-upsmanship;’ a spelling error trifecta unless depravation is a portmanteau term indicating Taylor’s opinion of the moral qualities of those wicked enough to be poor. Someone really needs to be proofreading the contributions to Reason’s website a little better).

The Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association had its annual meeting last week. This year it was in Washington, and for the second straight year I attended but went to exactly zero sessions – I was conducting interviews. But the real excitement was at 4:30 am on Saturday when the fire alarm went off in the hotel. I basically assumed somebody had pulled a switch in a drunken stupor, but my wife and I decided not to take the time to get our 6-year-old dressed, so we just wrapped her up in her sleeping bag and I carried her down the hall to the stairs. We definitely smelled something burning when we passed the seventh floor, and as we waited outside some people were saying that they had crawled through part of the hall on the seventh floor because the smoke was so thick. The rumor was that one woman was taken away by ambulance after breathing in smoke, but I didn’t see that.

After about an hour (I’m guessing – I didn’t have a watch), we were allowed to go into the ballroom where we waited for another hour before being allowed back into our rooms. On the ground floor, there was some water damage from the sprinklers on the seventh. On our way back to our room we peeked into the seventh floor where the smell of smoke was strong and several of the doors had been broken down. No word on how it started, but I’m sure grateful that the alarms and sprinklers worked.

Last spring I put up a post about Randy Cohen, the NY Times Magazine “ethicist”, and I quoted the following passage from his book: “real virtue lies not in heroically saving poor orphans from burning buildings but in steadfastly working for a world where orphans are not poor and buildings have decent fire codes.” Let’s hear it for decent fire codes.

This YouTube video of our calico cat and a wind-up toy bird has had just over 9,000 hits. My wife initially put it up expecting that just a few friends would take a look. At some point, it went from a few dozen hits to several thousand. For the past couple of months, it has been poised to break the 10k barrier, but lost a lot of momentum somewhere along the way.

This is where you can help.

Besides, it seems like time finally to do my first CT post of 2007, and it was either this or something about the late Seymour Martin Lipset‘s place in the history of the Shermanite faction following its departure from the Workers Party. A tough decision. But I find that the video does not actually decrease my will to go on, so here it is.

I have little interest in cricket, but — like snooker — it is enjoyable to watch because of its psychological element: you get to see grown men crushed psychologically without any violation of the Geneva Conventions. Though at the moment Australia are pushing it pretty close to a Human Rights Violation with England. Shane Warne got 71, this from the second-to-last man in the batting lineup. In the process he said to Paul Collingwood, “You got an MBE, right? For scoring seven at the Oval?” And now England are in. Over to Tom Fordyce and the BBC online commentary:

*1433: Eng 0-0* Right England – let’s see what you can do after that onslaught. …

*1439: Eng 4-0* McGrath opens the Aussie bowling for the last ever time in a Test. Writing those words has provided me with a small crumb of comfort. He beats Cook twice outside off, but the Essex tyro then cuts him tastily for four.

*1439: WICKET – Cook ct Gilchrist b Lee 4, Eng 4-1.* Oh no…

Chin up, Tom. It’ll all be over soon.

Title says it all, really.

I finished Halldor Laxness’s “Independent People”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1860467768/junius-20 a few weeks ago. It took me a very long time to read. Usually this is a sign that I’m not getting on with a book, but not in this case. Rather, Laxness’s prose is so rich, his descriptions are so compelling and his observations so unsettling, that I found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time without taking a break. Certainly it is the best book I’ve read all year, and maybe over the last five or so.

[click to continue…]

Happy 2007! I wonder whether some marketing company did a survey of the top-5 of new year’s resolutions. Doing more excerise, stop smoking, losing weight, working less, spending more time with friends, perhaps? Apart from my resolution to finally get my act together and start writing the book that I’ve been wanting to write for the last 4 years, all my resolutions belong to the category of the ordinary and boring (alright, perhaps the book-resolution belongs to that category too).

Did you make any less boring good resolutions for 2007 ?

Since people seemed to enjoy this site, I thought the following might be of interest as well: Visual Acoustics.

Careful, the site resizes your browser, which has always been annoying, but is especially annoying in the age of browser tabs. You can get your window back in its original size, the site still works just fine.

[thanks]