Less is more

A little less than two months ago I made this comment on another blog post here:

It continues to be depressing and disheartening that the spectacle of things (and people) being blown up provides satisfaction to many people, but it’s not new and shouldn’t be surprising. Films with lots of explosions are frequently successful. More generally, violence as a form of entertainment has a long history.

The first two examples strike me as evidence of deep and widespread moral depravity among the political and cultural elites in the US and elsewhere. (The first case also shows widespread depravity among non-elites in the US, to the extent that they shared the reaction that bombing things was “presidential” and to be applauded. I don’t think non-elites in the US are as likely to care about prices at art auctions, though that may simply indicate that they don’t care about art at all, rather than indicating that they have a better grasp on artistic value.)

The third one seems very different. If it is evidence of bad judgment of some sort, it seems like a sort of bad judgment that manifests itself in many areas of human life. Is “dilution effect” a term of art for this? I go to a concert consisting of two exquisite works of chamber music; I come home delighted and full of praise. I go to a concert with the same two works of chamber music played in the same exquisite manner, sandwiched in between a greater volume of mediocre playing and composition; I come home restless and inclined to complain. You offer me a perfect strawberry; I contemplate it with awe and consume it with delight. You offer me a vast table full of stale and badly-prepared food with the same strawberry lost in it somewhere, and I turn away from the whole in disgust.

Ought I, when faced with the table full of mediocre food, seize on the one best thing in it and ignore the rest? Possibly; and possibly this is a good recipe for enjoying life and what it has to offer. But if this seems like sage advice, it is because only sages take it. The human tendency is to average. And while that may be evidence of depravity in some lapsarian sense, it is not the sort of extreme depravity manifested by the first two cases, and it tells us more about human nature than about any particular cultural/political moment.

I don’t know as much about publishing in economics, but in biology, historically, there has been some adjustment for relative impact, relative importance of the questions, and so on – the things that tended to land articles in high impact publications. People argue about these things all the time, and status anxiety as well as morality and practical concerns play a role in the arguments, but there is no a priori reason to think that a bunch of low impact, competent publications represent the same sort of effort or progress that one high impact article does. The adjustments are flawed, but simply counting noses is at least as bad, probably far worse.

More precisely, an academic economist with a small number of publications in top-rated journals is better regarded by other economists than one with an equal (or even somewhat larger) number of ‘good journal’ publications along with more research published in less prestigious outlets.

This is probably true, but (unlike the other things you mention) it isn’t clear that this is a Bad Thing.

Something similar is explicitly part of the exam marking scheme at certain notable universities — completely (or near completely) answering a smaller number of questions is much better than partially answering a larger number of questions.

If you want to pretend this is like an economic model, it’s like a view on how fast the utility function falls off with the ranking of the journal, with a fast falling function corresponding to “you don’t have to go down the list very far before finding a vanity publisher”.

In my department, at least, there’s a running gag about journals that should count for negative points when assessing academic promotions.

The significance of art and artists is determined by the whims of billionaires

I’m friends with several people who are professional artists. What strikes me about it is that they are viewing themselves as being in a low volume/high unit cost business, where the objective is to sell one painting for a lot of money. (My friends are not nearly as successful at achieving this as Basquiat). While as a research scientist, I act like I’m in a high volume/low unit cost business, where the objective is to come up with something that can be replicated cheaply and in mass volume.

Practically non-one’s going to pay any money for my paintings, but even if I could be granted a wish, I think it would be to have a success in the high volume/low unit cost end of the art market … I’d rather draw a successful comic book than get a painting bought by Saatchi.

(cf. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” etc.)

Consider a researcher with T papers in top journals, M papers in mid-tier journals and L papers in lower-tier journals. In my field (Accounting), reputation is always enhanced by increasing T, but reputational effects of increasing M and L depend a lot on the likely reasons the paper didn’t get into a top journal. Some papers don’t get into top journals because they are unusual (a taste issue) or because they are quite ambitious in ways that force compromises in other ways. Those papers tend to be reputation-enhancing. But many papers don’t get into top journals because they are just what top journals would publish if only they were better executed or had more interesting findings. Those tend not to enhance reputation so much, and if M gets really big, people start thinking that the researcher doesn’t really know how to do good work consistently. The same logic pertains to L, but to a greater degree–you’d better have a really good reason for publishing in lower-tier journals if you want to maintain a top-tier reputation.

“I would have painted it for half that.”
Rebecca Daniels, Helmet Tester
From the Onion.

“…in the REVENUE pantheon.”
From the NYT.

When “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer ” sold for the record $2.3 M,
lines of non-elites formed around the block at the MMA to see it . Certainly not for any artistic value.

I agree with what many in this thread have said about the publishing comment, e.g., William U @ 3, BenK @ 6. But to amplify, one metric that people might employ (do employ) in judging their impact in the field is how cited they are. An article in top-tier journal might get 2+ times as many citations as an article in a good or mediocre journal, making it well worth the effort to have fewer publications in higher quality venues.

I report. You decide.
https://www.google.com/search?q=jean-michel+basquiat+paintings&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=Dustheads&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgFuLQz9U3MDEsLlHiArHKU0pM83K0lLKTrfTLMotLE3PiE4tKkJiZxSVW5flF2cWPGCO5BV7-uCcsFTBpzclrjF5cRGgSUuFic80rySypFJLi4pGCW67BIMXFBefxAAD2jWeJmAAAAA&tbs=kac:1,kac_so:0

I’m not worried about the art market really:

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/lets-pause-to-appreciate-basquiats-hundred-million-dollar-painting

The point about bombing is true however and it’s a tragedy: doing something means war more often than not – most people lack empathy and imagination, this is true of both parties in the US unfortunately.

JQ–you should edit your #19 to put the “not” into the first paragraph (sc. “…the comparison is *not* between…”). Fixed thanks, JQ

Yes, I assumed the wrong thing before clicking the link, but then read this sentence there:
“… we asked subsamples of economists in 44 universities throughout the world to rate either a publication list with only higher rated journals or a list with all of these but with additional publications in nearly as many respected but lower rated journals.”

“…with all these but with additional…” is the crucial part here.

Pavel A–yes, I’m familiar with the Fredrickson-Kahneman “peak-end” rule, and I don’t dispute it. But it seems to me to be an interesting complication of a basic averaging picture, rather than a total rejection of the role of averaging in human experience. (And it invokes some averaging itself.)

@22

Based on JQ’s correction/restatement, it seems that I was mistaken. I guess this is some form of mental averaging as you’ve originally stated.

Re: the CV paper, I don’t find their defense of the “career time” concern compelling (p13). They claim to not want to “prime” respondents by providing info about career time, but that just leaves lots of room for all sorts of confounding inference. For example, if the “long” CV (with the weak additional pubs) is assumed to be from someone who’s been out longer, that may be viewed differently than a recent graduate who is consistently hitting good journals. That is, unless told otherwise, it’s not crazy to infer that a person with 5 A’s and 5 B’s has been at it longer than someone with 5 A’s, and then the sort of comparisons/ratings in this paper get really muddled up.

George Akerlof is the epitome of academic economists who were like Sraffa – very few publications but each with big impact.

His most famous article (“Markets for Lemons”) couldn’t find a publisher for years among both top and middle level journals because it was too novel, with too big a potential impact (notoriously one referee rejected it with the comment “it must be wrong because if it is right our whole field is wrong”).

Of course, once he had made his name he had no trouble getting anything published in the top journals (though as it happens Akerlof’s subsequent papers were always innovative – not always so among those who’ve made their name with a single famous paper). The strategy worked well for him.

Another example of this is the extra importance people attach, after a death, to the last encounter with the deceased

I think we cannot help but imagine that what the deceased experienced at death essentially goes on into infinity. The idea of someone being traumatized and then dying shortly thereafter is instinctively far worse that someone living equally long, but suffering the same trauma in the middle.

We also tend to update our memories to the last experience. It’s very hard for someone whose marriage ended in divorce not to consider the entire experience a failure when they may have enjoyed 15 years of happiness first.

Tom West

Oh, I understand the instinct all right, but I think it misleads us. It may feel as if a divorce retroactively cancels the value of the marriage, but that’s not a good way of thinking about it.

This is an interesting discussion. Bombing people and things seems so wrong as to require no additional comment. That conservatives, ‘realists’ and neoconservatives find justice in the act never surprises me. I’m appalled when ‘liberals’ champion the selective destruction of others – selective as in those unable to respond in kind.

The discussion of cultural capital in material culture is more interesting. I’d caution against the argument of ‘artistic’ value. A great many prized objects originally had value as keys to the afterlife, for example, – ‘realism’ and other attributes mattered far less than their production and veneration – both often social and repeated. Rare and well-crafted artifacts gain great value as gifts. Stealing and looting objects of great value is part of the fun. I’d suggest the Sotheby’s auctions tell us practically nothing about art, but a great deal about art markets and ‘tastes.’ If we discover value in a finger-painting, or a Da Vinci, good for us. It matters about as much as deciding whether we prefer plain, or salted peanuts. I don’t put food in my mouth and then ask a critic to tell me whether I like it. I may like the story the critic tells me about the food, but that’s not the same as the object itself. There’s a reason Turner painted light and Wordsworth wrote about lakes and mountains. The beauty is there. It’s wonderful to see artists transform emotions, ideas, and experiences into sound, texture, and taste. The economics associated with the exercise are another matter entirely.

As for the papers, nothing surprises me about academia any more. Papers that unlock doors are rightly praised. Only a dolt worries about the venue. As for respect – see above.

John Quiggin@21.2: I think we need a clearer definition of “lesser journal”.

In my own physics-ish field, there are 1) the top “glamour” journals (Science, Nature, etc.) 2) Solid respectable society level journals (e.g., Physical Review and its offshoots) as well as journals that publish high quality papers in very focused specialties and 3) Z grade journals that are widely agreed to publish a lot of sketchy and/or trivial stuff.

In my field, I can’t imagine that someone with X papers in category 1 would have their reputation diminished by Y papers in category 2. I could possibly imagine their reputation suffering from a lot of papers in category 3.

Regarding arts, one of the aspects at play:

Exclusivity. This is something that is beautiful to and prized by the super-wealthy. Having something that others cannot have is worth paying a premium for. This applies to things as mudane as banking services. The quality of service does not vary much from bank to bank, but only one bank can say they are a banker to a particular monarch for instance. Demonstrating that you can buy ex-chancellors of the Exchequer is a variation of this theme practiced by super-wealthy fin institutions.

But the advantage of an art piece over an Osbourne is that the art piece had a re-sale value, so long as there is confidence there will be super-wealthy individuals/trust funds in the future.

Thought for the day: the high-end art business– and the “culture” of the rich, in general– may very well be pretty crazy, but isn’t choosing Basquiat as the ground to make this point vaguely racist? If it was a Picasso setting a record, no one would blink, right?

Or could it be just that Basquiat seems *too recent*, and it’s presumed that the age of giants is in the distant past, way back before Warhol?

bos @38
yes, I think a painting — esp. by an artist who did a small-ish number of them — is a ‘positional good’. That partly accounts for the high prices.

They’re cowardly because they attack unarmed civilians rather than (other) soldiers.

That assumes that the only way to achieve military victory is to kill the opposing military’s personnel. We don’t believe that, nor do we conduct ourselves as such, nor do we count our servicemembers as cowardly for engaging in missions where they put themselves at risk to achieve objectives outside of killing enemy combatants – even when that risk is minimal, and even when we anticipate (oh, but we don’t intend) direct civilian “collateral damage” (to say nothing of when we anticipate, intend, and inflict indirect civilian casualties, or provide material support to allied military operations who directly target civilians, or when we engage in extrajudicial killings (often with civilian collateral damage) of “clearly bad” civilians who really shouldn’t count as civilians at all, amirite?).

All those things are not viewed as cowardly because the servicemembers are putting themselves in harm’s way, even if in some cases the harm they face is carpal tunnel syndrome at a computer monitor stateside. We don’t carefully ascertain whether our military puts itself at risk by facing “peers” before deciding they’re not cowards, and indeed we go out of our way to make our battles asymmetric. But it’s cowardly for the others to put themselves in harm’s way if the risk isn’t in pursuit of a flexibly-defined “honorable” end. It doesn’t really eliminate the double standard to say “our enemies should be standing in an open field in closed ranks waiting to charge at us with their bare hands or else they’re cowards”, which is the reductio this eventually leads to. Cowardly either means risk-adverse or it doesn’t, and in our political discourse it absolutely doesn’t. And that’s the point.

Regarding the Basquiat: It is indeed worth $110 million (or $110 billion) because it refers explicitly to where all that loot came from.

There’s a 1981 painting by Basquiat called Scull (apparently spelled with the “c”) that I somewhat prefer to the ’82 painting that sold for 110 mill. They are similar, but also have some differences, and I happen to prefer the ’81, which can be seen here:

https://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-michel-basquiat/head

The link labels this painting “neo-expressionist” and I guess there are maybe certain echoes of, say, De Kooning, though I don’t know if that’s the intended reference or if “neo-expressionist” means something specific and identifiable to an art historian. (I suppose it probably does.)

@43

I’d say double tapping EMS workers, family members and bystanders with a hellfire missile from twenty thousand feet is pretty cowardly to me. Dropping white phosphorous on neighbourhoods and dispersing depleted uranium into the air is also pretty cowardly. Destabilizing countries until they turn into a bloody mess of a civil war is generally pretty cowardly.

Any time a trained military rides roughshod over the bodies of civilians I know who to call a coward.

A posible connection between the art market and scientific journals is that in both cases, there is an avoidance of making a value judgement,

In the case of academia, the basic assumption now seems to be that the people in charge of handing out the money have zero knowledge of the academic subject matter, and rather than actually read the paper to see if its any good, rely on a proxy such as journal publication. Obvious problem: if you have zero knowledge of the subject, you also can’t tell if the journal the paper was published in is a junk journal. (Hence more complex bibliometrics…)
[I exaggerate a bi, but e.g. Academic promotions have to be justified to administrators with no academic expertise]

Similarly, rather than actually making a value judgment about Basquiat’s worth as a painter, journalists resort to seeing how much the painting sold for. This is even less justifiable in the case of painting. It might be reasonable that papers in e.g. Quantum physics can only be evaluated by a small number of technical experts, But – do you really need an expert to tell you whether you like a painting?

If attacking civilians is cowardly then who is the greatest coward-
Gen. Curtis LeMay or Harry Truman? Or Eichmann?
Or my Great Uncle who dropped bombs on “hospitals and schools”,
in his words, leading him to a life after WWII of religion in search of forgiveness?

Some meandering reflections:

Way back in the 19th century, weren’t there highly organized annual events, exhibiting and judging contemporary art? The Salon de Paris of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and so on.

The rebellion against that system was part of the dramatic narrative of the emergence of modern art. Société anonyme and impressionism, Vienna secession and the revolution in the decorative arts, and so on.

We organize institutions to judge and promote quality and then, being human, we make them sclerotic, undermine them, rebel against them, reform them or start over.

Between the Wars and Post-WWII, a less formal, but still highly structured system emerged around a relative handful of wealthy collectors, galleries, critics and aspiring artists in the Bohemian quarters of Greenwich Village, a cousin to the long-standing Left Bank, with its chaotically evolving community of ex-pats stretching back into the 19th century when Beaux-Arts training brought painters and architects to Paris and continuing as war brought refugees.

That the hammer at a couple of prestigious (dare we also say on the basis of antitrust and other scandal, corrupt?) auction houses seems to be the supreme arbiter is the end of a long evolution.

I suppose my point is that “a scale of values” is not a spontaneous expression of tastes or judgement. It reflects the quality of institutions organized to generate and maintain a scale of values, and to create and put forth persistently a coherent critique and to open a path for reform (or revolution).

If you want to know what has gone wrong with American foreign policy (granting that it started going seriously wrong as soon as FDR was in the grave and continued going wrong despite Eisenhower’s warnings and probably put JFK in his grave), it seems to me that you can look for the rot at the New York Times or the Brookings Institution or the Council on Foreign Relations or the Woodrow Wilson School or the even the CIA (rotten by original design), places with a lot of rot indeed. Shocking I know, but Pinch Sulzberger is not Punch Sulzberger. Atrios at Eschaton “celebrates” the 14th “Happy Suck On This Day!” today and Tommy Friedman, despite his appalling lack of wit and discernment, not to mention his horrific mixed metaphors, remains ensconced in his prestigious place. And, if you hire out your best brains to Haim “Power Rangers” Sabin, as Brookings has shamelessly done, the result is not going to be pretty. Roger Ailes passing gave time to reflect on how The Fairness Doctrine, like Glass-Steagall, did matter after all.

The tragedy of reputation in economics is that people like Akerlof function as packing peanuts for a whole lot of scholarship that makes very little sense, but is given the imprimatur of the best journals. Pick up a leading economics journal from 1970 and I dare say an educated person can read and understand most of the articles (just as anyone can read an Akerlof article and get something out of it); good luck today. The DSGE phenomenon in macroeconomics is a self-licking ice cream cone — driven entirely by the irrational standards of graduate training in leading schools and for publication in leading journals and not at all by any genuine and demonstrable achievement in better understanding the actual economy.

In many ways, I think Chris Hedges, with his Death of the Liberal Class correctly diagnosed the problem: the economic foundation of institutional support for a liberalism with its virtue and integrity intact was sold out from under the liberal intelligentsia by the liberals. Roger Ailes and company were there to manage it for the new owners.

I am an old man and prone, I know, to yelling “get off my lawn” at the kids and generally feeling nostalgic for the days of my youth. The past was not some golden age when truth and justice triumphed, but I think people with the memory of a mayfly who think Hillary Clinton is normal and the CIA a Pillar of the Republic, might consider that the country managed to get itself out of Vietnam, to get Nixon out of the White House, to bring on a revolution in civil rights and the Sexual Revolution. None of those were the accomplishments of majority opinion; they were the accomplishments of a coherent and persistent liberal critique by a minority with secure positions of leadership in academia, the Federal regulatory establishment, journalism, the bar and judiciary, the labor movement, Hollywood and the mainline Churches and a variety of other institutions. Their security was sometimes contested, most famously in Hollywood but also in academia and journalism, but they held on and often more than held on, they secured the commanding heights, so to speak. What especially pissed off the Right about “the liberal media” back in the day was that, although most newspapers were reliably right-wing mouthpieces of their reactionary publishers, the “best” papers by the standards of professional journalism, the agenda-setting papers relied on to manufacture consent, were recognizably liberal (in the American sense) (no doubt not least because reality has a liberal bias).

There’s always a lot of rot in a nation — Adam Smith said something to that effect I am told. We are far from completely gone, but we are in seriously dangerous territory, when a dominant political faction would rather people think Russia hacked the voting machines to elect a Manchurian Candidate than admit that their policy program has destroyed millions of lives and they can freely press their case thru old and new media by means of mindless hysteria. Where is the political will to get out of Afghanistan and stay out of Syria? The sentiment is there and it is hardly an intellectual achievement to see these efforts in Middle East as benighted, but organizing the political will seems out of reach somehow, but organizing hysteria over a Russia Conspiracy is easy.

There are far more prosaic examples of how tenuous is the integrity of the managerial and technical classes. How hard was it to test Flint’s water properly? How many years will go by before the Koch money runs out and PBS’s Nova science documentary series can seriously explore “global warming”? In Europe, how far must the Euro go on without effective reform?

Just for the record, I’m not defending the US military just stating stating my opinion it’s not unreasonable (all other things being equal) to describe an armed attack on unarmed enemy civilians as cowardly.

John Quiggin

In the early 1970s, Australia’s National Gallery paid over a million dollars for a Jackson Pollock . They were duly pilloried by the philistine press, but triumphantly vindicated when the estimated value of the work rose to (I think) four million.

Online I see suggestions of figures two orders of magnitude higher. I assume they mean nominal dollars; if you mean inflation-adjusted dollars, a tripling might be about right.

Wikipedia explains that the gallery director was limited to purchases up to one million, so the personal approval of the PM was required; his involvement contributes to an explanation of the backlash (some people were happy for any stick to beat him with).

@SusanC But – do you really need an expert to tell you whether you like a painting?

A friend of mine wrote her PhD in Art History on a not so well-known American painter of the late 19th century. When I asked her about her job prospects, she listed academic jobs then casually threw “and if everything fails, I can always work in the private sector” and then I discovered that many, many wealthy people and even many more corporations are very willing to give a lot of money to someone in exchange on an advice on, basically, whether they should like a painting (and particularly in the case of corporations, the investment value was apparently clearly a secondary question).

@engels They’re cowardly because they attack unarmed civilians rather than (other) soldiers.

Could it be a question of definition? My (American) English dictionary defines coward as “a person who lacks the courage to do or endure dangerous or unpleasant things” period. By that definition, a suicide bomber cannot be a coward. But another connotation I personally pick up from my own native language when thinking of the word coward is of the abuse of one’s own force to degrade or diminish the weakest. By that definition, a suicide bomber targeting civilians is pretty much a definitional coward. Whether one perceives the second connotation probably explains where one stands on the question.

I think the level of importance attached to cowardice as an evaluative criterion is itself part of the problem.