From the monthly archives:
As DD mentions below, I’m dealing at long distance with floods in my hometown of Brisbane. But there’s nothing to be done now until the waters recede, so I’m going ahead with some planned events in Washington DC, plugging Zombie Economics, and this time I’m giving CT readers in the area at least a little notice. The events are:
and
Politics and Prose Friday evening
Just a quick post for CT readers who don’t also subscribe to John’s blog: he’s on the road and many miles from Brisbane at the moment (and so not flooded) and his family are OK, but apparently there’s property damage and flood damage is in my experience a real bugger to sort out, so probably not much blogging for a while. In the interim and because he hasn’t apparently posted about here (I found out when we met up for a pint on the Zombie Economics book tour), I will boast on his behalf that John has been elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. That is a big deal. If you are not impressed by this, take my word for it that if you knew more about the professional structure of the economics profession you would be. Best of luck John.
In Spring a young man’s fancy turns to love. Rapidly aging academics such as myself, however, have to decide which readings to assign. This semester I’m teaching Organizations and Management to students in Duke’s MMS certificate program and Markets and Moral Order to a small group of seniors at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Both classes were a lot of fun last year (perhaps not for the students). I’ve rearranged the running order in the Orgs course a bit, as the flow was wrong last time.
If you think there’s something that absolutely has to be included in either course, I’m open to suggestions. But you’re not allowed to suggest something without also saying what I should drop in order to include it. Unlike the economy, a syllabus is not the sort of thing that you want to grow aggressively in order that everyone gets more and bigger slices of the whole.
Over at his “other blog-digs”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/two-syllabuses/, Kieran is looking for suggestions for a course syllabus on Markets and Moral Order. By sheer coincidence, when browsing Daron Acemoglu’s “web page”:http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/paper today, out of curiosity to see how many new papers he had written this month, I noticed that Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson apparently had a piece that was directly on topic. It’s entitled a ‘Reply to the Revised (May 2006) version of David Albouy’s “The Colonial Origins of Comparitive Development: An Investigation of the Settler Morality Data.’ Sadly, the link seems to lead to a quite different (and rather duller) piece about death rates. Nor, despite some efforts, have I been able to establish precisely which instrumental variable Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson are using as a proxy for the morality of European settlers in Africa during the colonial period – presumably, this time it isn’t “mosquitoes”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/13/one-economics/, despite the tempting analogies. Suggestions for possible such variables gratefully received in comments.
Provoked by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Matthew Yglesias ponders the difficulty adapting Gatsby, in the face of the looming 3D threat.
I agree this seems like a problem. But I think an awful lot of it has to do with the fact that Gatsby is basically crap, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why everyone disagrees with me about this. Yglesias quotes a typical bit:
Or consider: “some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away.” How is it that Nick know for certain that Eckelburg isn’t practicing in Queens any longer but is unsure as to whether he’s moved or died?
I can answer that one. Fitzgerald is a bad writer.
Let me illustrate, by way of offering advice to aspiring 3D directors:
Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool, as if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the office window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.
Now that would work great in 3D! [click to continue…]
For very personal reasons, depressing as it is, I cannot hear this one without smiling:
I’m at the American Economic Association meeting in Denver, and just attended a panel of the great and serious discussing the US budget deficit. The numbers are pretty impressive – on current projections, US government expenditure (properly measured) is likely to be around 25 per cent of national income (around 3 trillion/year) and the default budget deficit is around 10 per cent of national income. While current and former CBO directors went over the usual options, it struck me that I had seen those numbers before.
Roughly speaking, the share of US national income going to the top 1 per cent of the income distribution has risen from 15 to 25 per cent over the past decade, mostly because of the growth in size and profitability of the financial sector. As I’ve argued before, this payment to the top percentile can be seen as a kind of tax paid by the population as a whole for the benefits of living in the kind of economy that has developed over the past few decades of financialisation. (Please check irony alerts before responding!)
Clearly, any attempt to claw back some of this money to fill the budget hole would have what economists call “incentive effects”. More precisely, it would necessitate a big contraction of the financial sector. Judging by the reaction of the assembled experts when I raised this point (all declined to respond), this is literally unthinkable.
* I’m alluding to Richard Feynmann’s joke that, in view of the size of budgets, we should talk about “economical” rather than “astronomical” numbers.
I’m almost reluctant to add to the hype, but the story is so unusual, and the pictures so good, that I think I’ll overcome that. In brief, then: Chicago is about to see the first exhibition of the photography of Vivian Maier, a recently-deceased, partly-French, nanny who seems to have neither sought nor received any exposure or recognition in her lifetime. Thousands of negatives were then bought by a real-estate agent at a flea market. Astonished at what he found, he’s now promoting her work, making a documentary film, putting a book together and so on. Well, I know, it all sounds too good to be true. But the pictures (at least the ones we’ve seen) are superb. I have some qualms about the ethics of developing unprocessed rolls of a photographer’s work. (Famously, Garry Winogrand had tons of these.) This is for the simple reason that the photographer may just have know that that roll contained crap. Unprinted negatives get you a bit closer to the finished article, but there too, there’s the matter of editing, selection, etc. So the world will never see the work the Maier would have chosen to represent herself, if she’d have wanted exhibiting at all. But, still, the pictures are wonderful.
Links: “New York Times”:http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street-photography-60-years-old/ (great slideshow – view it full screen); Blog post at “The Operable Window”:http://theoperablewindow.blogspot.com/2011/01/vivian-maier-chicago-street.html (with link to TV news item); Chicago “exhibition”:http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/event_landing/events/dca_tourism/FindingVivianMaier_ChicagoStreetPhotographer.html details; John Maloof’s “site”:http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/ (he’s the real-estate agent); “details of the documentary film”:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding-vivian-maier-a-feature-length-documentary (and scroll down for many more links).
I’ll be catching up on my sleep over the next few weeks, having spent many an evening up late in front of the telly followed by rising at six to see the last few overs. “A tremendous achievement”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/9343026.stm , almost without blemish, with records broken and many wonderful individual moments. One Australian I was drinking with last night claimed that the Ashes never meant much to them, because they could never take the urn home. Well, the fox who tried so hard reach the grapes claimed they were sour anyway. Open thead.
This “Vanity Fair”:http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102 piece on the journalistic politics of Wikileaks is well worth reading – it’s the most comprehensive account of the evolving relationship between Wikileaks, the Guardian and other news organizations that I’ve seen. I _think_ (this perhaps reflects my preconceptions as much as anything else) that the piece provides implicit support for two propositions. [click to continue…]
Since that Flaming Lips deal seems to have expired; since concerns have been expressed in comments, to the effect that the very category of Metaphysical McGuffin may constitute deplorably Platonic confusion about the very nature of art, I’ll offer some free music that settles all that. How about Of Montreal’s cover of “Color Me In”? (From this page.)
Something new and nothing to do
I’m just the idea
I must be real cause somehow I feel
That I’m just the idea
The original Broadcast version is here.
Is that clear?
A stray note on the history of science fiction, in relation to theatrical absurdity qua independent but relatable phenomenon, via the intermediation of McGuffins, actual and potential, scientifical, metaphysical and occasionally fistical, and suchish chickenegg castings of shadows …
The note is: Beckett’s 1930 poem, “Whoroscope”, seems like an interesting work to think about.
It also seems worth chicking and eggsamining how Beckett and co. came close to satirizing, avant lalettre, Gernsback’s glorious goose egg of a golden coinage, ‘scientifiction‘. But I see that Gernsback actually proposed the term a few years earlier, in 1926. So that would be upsetting the eggcart before the chicken. And we wouldn’t want to do that o no.
Why am I thinking these thoughts? In part because I’m reading Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd
Couple quick thoughts about that. [click to continue…]
Man, I haven’t heard this
I like the fact that the engraving on Jim Woodring’s Nibbus Maximus is so clearly influenced by my own recent work (via boingboing): [click to continue…]
No, he doesn’t call them that. But here’s what he says:
I think you can be as outlandish as you want or as surreal as you want, as long as the characters are based in something real. You can put them in any situation or any reality as long as their reactions have something to do with humans beings and you’re focused on that element of it. I’m not interested in necessarily doing realistic things, obviously. I like fanciful stuff. But it can’t be just fanciful without people in it. Then it’s of no real interest. If you decide that people are turning into carrots or something as your story idea, then I think that I would have to figure out why that’s important to me as a person and why that story resonates in some way. Otherwise there’s no story. It’s just a gimmick. (10)
Quoted in Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original Mind
This isn’t the most incandescently brilliant theoretical formulation I’ve ever encountered, but … [click to continue…]