The Ambassadors, book twelfth, chapter iii
He wished not to do anything because he had missed something else, because he was sore or sorry or impoverished, because he was maltreated or desperate; he wished to do everything because he was lucid and quiet, just the same for himself on all essential points as he had ever been.
So the revelations in April 2013 of the errors of Reinhart and Rogoff came as a shock. Despite their paper’s influence, Reinhart and Rogoff had not made their data widely available—and researchers working with seemingly comparable data hadn’t been able to reproduce their results. Finally, they made their spreadsheet available to Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—and he found it very odd indeed. There was one actual coding error, although that made only a small contribution to their conclusions. More important, their data set failed to include the experience of several Allied nations—Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—that emerged from World War II with high debt but nonetheless posted solid growth. And they had used an odd weighting scheme in which each “episode” of high debt counted the same, whether it occurred during one year of bad growth or seventeen years of good growth.
Without these errors and oddities, there was still a negative correlation between debt and growth—but this could be, and probably was, mostly a matter of low growth leading to high debt, not the other way around. And the “threshold” at 90 percent vanished, undermining the scare stories being used to sell austerity.
Not surprisingly, Reinhart and Rogoff have tried to defend their work; but their responses have been weak at best, evasive at worst. Notably, they continue to write in a way that suggests, without stating outright, that debt at 90 percent of GDP is some kind of threshold at which bad things happen. In reality, even if one ignores the issue of causality—whether low growth causes high debt or the other way around—the apparent effects on growth of debt rising from, say, 85 to 95 percent of GDP are fairly small, and don’t justify the debt panic that has been such a powerful influence on policy.
...
Without these errors and oddities, there was still a negative correlation between debt and growth—but this could be, and probably was, mostly a matter of low growth leading to high debt, not the other way around. And the “threshold” at 90 percent vanished, undermining the scare stories being used to sell austerity.
Not surprisingly, Reinhart and Rogoff have tried to defend their work; but their responses have been weak at best, evasive at worst. Notably, they continue to write in a way that suggests, without stating outright, that debt at 90 percent of GDP is some kind of threshold at which bad things happen. In reality, even if one ignores the issue of causality—whether low growth causes high debt or the other way around—the apparent effects on growth of debt rising from, say, 85 to 95 percent of GDP are fairly small, and don’t justify the debt panic that has been such a powerful influence on policy.
...
Everyone loves a morality play. “For the wages of sin is death” is a much more satisfying message than “Shit happens.” We all want events to have meaning.
When applied to macroeconomics, this urge to find moral meaning creates in all of us a predisposition toward believing stories that attribute the pain of a slump to the excesses of the boom that precedes it—and, perhaps, also makes it natural to see the pain as necessary, part of an inevitable cleansing process. When Andrew Mellon told Herbert Hoover to let the Depression run its course, so as to “purge the rottenness” from the system, he was offering advice that, however bad it was as economics, resonated psychologically with many people (and still does).
By contrast, Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play—that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared that “we have magneto trouble”—i.e., the economy’s troubles were like those of a car with a small but critical problem in its electrical system, and the job of the economist is to figure out how to repair that technical problem. Keynes’s masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is noteworthy—and revolutionary—for saying almost nothing about what happens in economic booms. Pre-Keynesian business cycle theorists loved to dwell on the lurid excesses that take place in good times, while having relatively little to say about exactly why these give rise to bad times or what you should do when they do. Keynes reversed this priority; almost all his focus was on how economies stay depressed, and what can be done to make them less depressed.
I’d argue that Keynes was overwhelmingly right in his approach, but there’s no question that it’s an approach many people find deeply unsatisfying as an emotional matter. And so we shouldn’t find it surprising that many popular interpretations of our current troubles return, whether the authors know it or not, to the instinctive, pre-Keynesian style of dwelling on the excesses of the boom rather than on the failures of the slump.
...
So is the austerian impulse all a matter of psychology? No, there’s also a fair bit of self-interest involved. As many observers have noted, the turn away from fiscal and monetary stimulus can be interpreted, if you like, as giving creditors priority over workers. Inflation and low interest rates are bad for creditors even if they promote job creation; slashing government deficits in the face of mass unemployment may deepen a depression, but it increases the certainty of bondholders that they’ll be repaid in full. I don’t think someone like Trichet was consciously, cynically serving class interests at the expense of overall welfare; but it certainly didn’t hurt that his sense of economic morality dovetailed so perfectly with the priorities of creditors.
...
...
So is the austerian impulse all a matter of psychology? No, there’s also a fair bit of self-interest involved. As many observers have noted, the turn away from fiscal and monetary stimulus can be interpreted, if you like, as giving creditors priority over workers. Inflation and low interest rates are bad for creditors even if they promote job creation; slashing government deficits in the face of mass unemployment may deepen a depression, but it increases the certainty of bondholders that they’ll be repaid in full. I don’t think someone like Trichet was consciously, cynically serving class interests at the expense of overall welfare; but it certainly didn’t hurt that his sense of economic morality dovetailed so perfectly with the priorities of creditors.
...
I’d argue that what happened next—the way policymakers turned their back on practically everything economists had learned about how to deal with depressions, the way elite opinion seized on anything that could be used to justify austerity—was a much greater sin. The financial crisis of 2008 was a surprise, and happened very fast; but we’ve been stuck in a regime of slow growth and desperately high unemployment for years now. And during all that time policymakers have been ignoring the lessons of theory and history.
It’s a terrible story, mainly because of the immense suffering that has resulted from these policy errors. It’s also deeply worrying for those who like to believe that knowledge can make a positive difference in the world. To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Papers and economists who told the elite what it wanted to hear were celebrated, despite plenty of evidence that they were wrong; critics were ignored, no matter how often they got it right.
The Reinhart-Rogoff debacle has raised some hopes among the critics that logic and evidence are finally beginning to matter. But the truth is that it’s too soon to tell whether the grip of austerity economics on policy will relax significantly in the face of these revelations. For now, the broader message of the past few years remains just how little good comes from understanding.
Because of its compromises and pains, because of the risk of embarrassment ever-present for those who “earn” their looks, the instant when fashion crystallizes, on the person, the person who earns it, is a great success, and resentment recedes, and wonder flows in, and you feel the love you instantly feel for all geniuses.
Her outfit points towards that other world, which this cosmonaut had to reach and return from, just to fan her feathers, peacock-like, on the sidewalk in front of you. The difference between the earned and the unearned is something you know when you see it, and true earned fashion comes in to interrupt the parade of detestable conformity like a breeze off the water: how else to explain the speed with which your emotions reverse, on any walk from Broome Street to West 14th, from derision, hatred, resentment, to fellow-feeling and fashion delight?
You think: what embarrassment, what false starts, what effort had to go into this expertise, to learn how to dress and decorate yourself like this, so originally yet so correctly? On the glorious street, now, you stand back and admire; you are a wanderer yourself; you look at the dressed-up strutters as if you were at an art gallery. In this gallery, you may be another of the beautiful portraits on the wall, well-appointed yourself. But it is not required for admission.
And the temporariness of it all. How amazing to know that this skirt will cease to fit, will go out of style, will be stained, and yet here it is. The heroes of fashion are the people who have had to make many compromises, and learned to win through, by their wits—and also by keeping faith with their predecessors, the true freaks, those who make no compromises, and suffer all the sanctions and embarrassments, because it’s worth it, it has to be undergone, so passionately do they adhere to idiosyncratic standards of glamour.
In between the naïve freak (the man who only wears purple, the man buying lumber in women’s clothing) and the sophisticated street success sits the childhood prototype of all great fashion: the girl who dares to come to school bizarre...
“The vulnerability,” agreed Rain.
“Like you’re safe to be your completely base, your most broken-down, crying, you can’t even talk.”
I didn’t say anything, but here’s what I thought: there was no great truth about the human condition that I would discover through celibacy.
middle age suicide, don't do it
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/health/suicide-rate-rises-sharply-in-us.html?hpw&_r=0
- Jen D
- New Jersey
NYT Pick
Economic hopelessness. My brother committed suicide last July. He had just turned 60. He lost his IT job in the Great Recession in 2008. Despite hundreds of resumes being sent out, and a lifetime of IT experience, he got few interviews and no job offers. He spent down his 401(k) and when he died the only thing he owned was a beat-up car. We later found out he had a lot of credit card debt, with which he had tried to keep himself afloat. After four years of no job offers, unemployment running out, having no health insurance, etc., his dignity was shot. He had lost hope of ever working again. How I wish he had not committed suicide; how I would give anything and everything to have him back. I consider him one of the casualties of the Recession and when I read of the fat bonuses the banksters award themselves, I shake with rage that they have continued to prosper while people like my brother lost all hope and people like me lost a loved one.
- Nuschler
- Cambridge
Addition to first comment.
Before my husband killed himself in November of 2009, we had made plans for our first trip to France. My spouse had been stationed three different times in Germany. He loved Europe.
I practiced my French religiously. Then he was gone. My doctor and colleagues encouraged me to still go.
30 hour trip to Paris from Honolulu. For three weeks I immersed myself in French culture...I spoke to everyone I could..in French. I dressed well, was polite, and everyone thought I was from Canada instead of the USA. (Les Etats-Unis)
I talked to shopkeepers, business men on the Metro, people seated next to me at the French Open...my spouse and I were doubles players. I talked with the doyennes at all the great museums, I sat at outdoor cafes on the Champs-Elysees for hours. I sat and cried at the Arc de Triomphe by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from WWI.
For three weeks NOT ONE FRENCH CITIZEN ASKED ME WHAT I DID FOR A LIVING!! Not one!! I asked them all: "Why doesn't anyone ask me what my job is?"
And they all said: "Because your job is not who you are!!!" Here in the USA our second or third question we ask anyone is "Hey what do you do for a living? Where do you work?"
We define ourselves in America by our profession. But I am not JUST a medical doctor! You all are not JUST business men, lawyers, teachers, writers...
But here in America that is EXACTLY how we define ourselves! We lose our job? We no longer know who we are.
Before my husband killed himself in November of 2009, we had made plans for our first trip to France. My spouse had been stationed three different times in Germany. He loved Europe.
I practiced my French religiously. Then he was gone. My doctor and colleagues encouraged me to still go.
30 hour trip to Paris from Honolulu. For three weeks I immersed myself in French culture...I spoke to everyone I could..in French. I dressed well, was polite, and everyone thought I was from Canada instead of the USA. (Les Etats-Unis)
I talked to shopkeepers, business men on the Metro, people seated next to me at the French Open...my spouse and I were doubles players. I talked with the doyennes at all the great museums, I sat at outdoor cafes on the Champs-Elysees for hours. I sat and cried at the Arc de Triomphe by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from WWI.
For three weeks NOT ONE FRENCH CITIZEN ASKED ME WHAT I DID FOR A LIVING!! Not one!! I asked them all: "Why doesn't anyone ask me what my job is?"
And they all said: "Because your job is not who you are!!!" Here in the USA our second or third question we ask anyone is "Hey what do you do for a living? Where do you work?"
We define ourselves in America by our profession. But I am not JUST a medical doctor! You all are not JUST business men, lawyers, teachers, writers...
But here in America that is EXACTLY how we define ourselves! We lose our job? We no longer know who we are.
...has complaining about the effects of American capitalism merely been our way of amassing cultural capital, meanwhile bolstering capitalism itself?
...
We are witnessing and sometimes personally experiencing a sharp de-classing of intellectuals. Our precious credentials are increasingly useless for generating income and — let us hope — social prestige, too. This should mean that most intellectuals view ourselves as sinking, economically, into the lower-middle or working class, and that “meritocratic” markers — the contents of our bookshelves and iPods; our degrees — accord us less and less social status in our own and others’ eyes. Not to say there won’t remain a self-protective cultural elite hoarding its prestige: the hostility to criticism among mutually appreciative writers, artists, and academics — an aversion to meaningful disputes — is contemporary evidence of such a siege mentality. But we can also hope for something else: perhaps intellectuals’ increasing exposure to socioeconomic danger will give a new political dangerousness and reality to what some of us produce. Might the continuing commitment of de-classed left intellectuals and radical artists to their vocations, in spite of withered prospects and eroding prestige, give our work an antisystemic force, and credibility, it has lacked?
...
Artists and intellectuals, to go on existing in serious numbers without much help from universities, corporate publishers, wealthy families, and rich patrons, will be groups marked by some sacrifice. And if we want to work hard—“Il faut travailler, rien que travailler,” Cézanne wrote to Rilke: probably the one common motto of artists and thinkers — many of us may quit the demographic islands where our very concentration drives up the rent. Released, unprotected, into the dark fields of the republic, we would find new things to say and, with luck, new people to say them to.
n + 1
and:
The preoccupation with “selling out,” in other words, played into the larger dynamic of what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have described as the “artistic critique” of capitalism, which focuses on the evils of commodification and inauthenticity at the expense of those of inequality and atomization.
First, there is the anti-copyright Free Culture movement, led and exemplified by Lawrence Lessig, who advocates for a “read-write” as opposed to a “read-only” culture and the promotion of increased collective creativity through loosened intellectual property laws. Then there are the “digital determinists,” represented by BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow, who hold that “you can’t fight technology”: “Armed with techno-utopian assumptions, a file sharer had a new way to understand their choice to not pay for their digital content: they were only doing what the computers ‘wanted.’” Finally, there are new media boosters like Wired’s Chris Anderson and Mike Masnick of the blog Techdirt, who propose that musicians need to adapt to the realities of the new market by providing incentives for their fans to pay for otherwise free content (the best known example of this being the much-discussed crowd-funding site Kickstarter).
“The wisdom of copyright,” Ruen writes, “is to focus the incentives, like a laser, upon the creative work itself. If our shared interest is the creation of more or better art, then why take away the fundamental right that incentivizes it, while setting artists off on a wild goose chase to find the best marketing scheme rather than to write the best song?”
...
We are witnessing and sometimes personally experiencing a sharp de-classing of intellectuals. Our precious credentials are increasingly useless for generating income and — let us hope — social prestige, too. This should mean that most intellectuals view ourselves as sinking, economically, into the lower-middle or working class, and that “meritocratic” markers — the contents of our bookshelves and iPods; our degrees — accord us less and less social status in our own and others’ eyes. Not to say there won’t remain a self-protective cultural elite hoarding its prestige: the hostility to criticism among mutually appreciative writers, artists, and academics — an aversion to meaningful disputes — is contemporary evidence of such a siege mentality. But we can also hope for something else: perhaps intellectuals’ increasing exposure to socioeconomic danger will give a new political dangerousness and reality to what some of us produce. Might the continuing commitment of de-classed left intellectuals and radical artists to their vocations, in spite of withered prospects and eroding prestige, give our work an antisystemic force, and credibility, it has lacked?
...
Artists and intellectuals, to go on existing in serious numbers without much help from universities, corporate publishers, wealthy families, and rich patrons, will be groups marked by some sacrifice. And if we want to work hard—“Il faut travailler, rien que travailler,” Cézanne wrote to Rilke: probably the one common motto of artists and thinkers — many of us may quit the demographic islands where our very concentration drives up the rent. Released, unprotected, into the dark fields of the republic, we would find new things to say and, with luck, new people to say them to.
n + 1
and:
The preoccupation with “selling out,” in other words, played into the larger dynamic of what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have described as the “artistic critique” of capitalism, which focuses on the evils of commodification and inauthenticity at the expense of those of inequality and atomization.
First, there is the anti-copyright Free Culture movement, led and exemplified by Lawrence Lessig, who advocates for a “read-write” as opposed to a “read-only” culture and the promotion of increased collective creativity through loosened intellectual property laws. Then there are the “digital determinists,” represented by BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow, who hold that “you can’t fight technology”: “Armed with techno-utopian assumptions, a file sharer had a new way to understand their choice to not pay for their digital content: they were only doing what the computers ‘wanted.’” Finally, there are new media boosters like Wired’s Chris Anderson and Mike Masnick of the blog Techdirt, who propose that musicians need to adapt to the realities of the new market by providing incentives for their fans to pay for otherwise free content (the best known example of this being the much-discussed crowd-funding site Kickstarter).
“The wisdom of copyright,” Ruen writes, “is to focus the incentives, like a laser, upon the creative work itself. If our shared interest is the creation of more or better art, then why take away the fundamental right that incentivizes it, while setting artists off on a wild goose chase to find the best marketing scheme rather than to write the best song?”
No doubt the belief that humankind is evolving toward a more harmonious condition affords comfort to many; but we would be better prepared to deal with our conflicts if we could put Marx’s view of history behind us, along with his nineteenth-century faith in the possibility of a society different from any that has ever existed.
John Gray
John Gray
From the unsettling, Eden Of The East
A NEET or neet is a young person who is not in education, employment, or training. The acronym NEET was first used in theUnited Kingdom but its use has spread to other countries including Japan, China, and South Korea.
In the United Kingdom, the classification comprises people aged between 16 and 24 (some 16-year-olds are still of compulsory school age); the subgroup of NEETs aged 16–18 is frequently of particular focus. In Japan, the classification comprises people aged between 15 and 34 who are unemployed, not engaged in housework, not enrolled in school or work-related training, and not seeking work.
I can’t claim that my life is any richer since I got a high-speed internet connection. For one thing, I no longer send or receive letters. And I wonder whether I made my way through Proust over a few winter months a number of years ago in part because those were still the days of dial-up; I went online once a day for maybe half an hour to read and send emails, and that was that. Even now, I guard my solitude jealously enough that I have never owned a mobile phone—a fact that may end up ensuring me more solitude than I like. When I am forced to admit to a fresh acquaintance that I have no mobile number to offer, suspicion of eccentricity or poverty is the most generous response I receive; sometimes I get a look of frank alarm. But it seems I would rather raise a few eyebrows, curse the occasional payphone, and miss out on some parties than to spoil my necessary concentration and even boredom with phone calls I know I couldn’t resist fielding or placing.
B. K.
B. K.
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