Microsoft es malo

Typically I think people being passionate about Microsoft vs. Apple is a pathetic waste of human energy, but maybe it's worth it just for this YouTube comment:

Microsoft=

M ierda
I nfestosa
C abrona
R oedora
O fensiva
S openca
O bsoleta
F alsa y
T onta

Oh rexiphone.

PS: Surprisingly, YouTube comments don't have permalinks--but maybe that's a good thing.

Leslie Gore

I Twittered about this the other day, but it's worth saying a few things about:

I love everything about this video. Gore, looking very staid and pre-sexual revolution, steps up unusually close to the camera, which looks like it has Vasoline smothered all over it (maybe an inept attempt to create a soft focus effect). Usually with these old videos of a live musical performance on TV, the camera shoots things pretty wide and the singer stands there awkwardly in the middle of the stage (probably under strict instructions not to stray from his or her mark) splitting time between singing to the audience and singing to the camera. But this footage comes off as strangely low-fi, amaturish, and so therefore realistic. Gore basically ignores the camera and sings to the audience, even craning her neck way up to connect with the screaming girls in the nosebleed seats--breaking even more with the TV performance conventions and lending to the gritty feel of the footage (and also allowing us some wicked angles of her expressive face--lots of eyebrow action, lots of lopsided smiles...her facial expressions are doing a lot of work in this performance).

The song itself is great, too, sounding like something Nancy Sinatra would sing in a Tarantino movie--I like that the same person who is known for the inanity of "sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows" also belted out "don't tell me what to do / and don't tell me what to say / and please when i go out with you / don't put me on display". The contrast is awesome.

Also, performance-wise, she kills this thing. I like the way she builds in intensity all the way through, and the way she alternates between moody/sultry and I'm-not-taking-this-to-seriously playfulness. I even approve of the minor-y refrain that the song ends on.

Well, anyway. I guess one more thing I will add is that, of all social movements, feminism has to have one of the worst image problems--I mean, when someone mentions "badass feminist" or "cool feminist", it's difficult to say if an iconic image comes to mind besides maybe Rosie the Riveter. But I think feminism really does have a cool aesthetic when it's taking place just before all the actual progress got made in the 60s, when it was 50s housewives in perfect hairdos chain smoking and calling bullshit on society, or, as in this case, some teeny-bopper coming out of left field with a rage-filled anthem for freedom and equality, thinly disguised as a diatribe against an overbearing steady.

To borrow a phrase from Andrew Sullivan...

...Poseur Alert:

Stout is a collector in the best sense of the word. Though he joked that he began acquiring books when he realized he’d never have a 401k, it is probably more accurate to say that Stout is in complete thrall of the smell of ink, the feel of paper, the intellectual and physical heft of the literary object, the near-indiscernible sound of the turning of pages.

Intellectual heft?

Incidentally, there needs to be a ban on a) articles mourning the decline of print media, b) references to how print media smells, and c) smug-ass bragging about what a special appreciation one has for print media.

Google sucks

Ok Google search, you've been resting on your laurels for too long and now you kind of suck. I should be able to search for stuff in blog posts and news articles while specifying a date range. Don't tell me you're not smart enough to identify datelines and blog post timestamps. The information's out there.

Make it happen.

Through the looking glass

David Brooks touches, I think, on a lot of the same things I was getting at in my earlier post about personal responsibility going out the window during a depression:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.

...

...Individual responsibility doesn’t mean much in an economy like this one. We all know people who have been laid off through no fault of their own. The responsible have been punished along with the profligate.

...It makes sense for government to try to restore some communal order. And the sad reality is that in these circumstances government has to spend money on precisely those sectors that have been swinging most wildly — housing, finance, etc. It has to help stabilize people who have been idiots.

As Krugman would say, we're "through the looking glass"--virtuous behavior on an individual level is sinking the economy, and the only way to bring it back up is to give money to those who behaved the worst.

You shouldn't even have to make this argument

I think this Sullivan post is a must-read. One thing it does well, I think, is do away with the Jack-Bauer-inspired cartoon version of torture that I think most passive supporters of "enhanced interrogation methods" have in mind: thumbscrews, beatings, etc., all taking place in the context of the proverbial "ticking time-bomb" scenario. Indeed, torture can be anything that "sustained long and relentlessly enough, can break a human being". That could mean subjecting a prisoner to freezing temperatures for long periods of time; but it could also mean something as mundane as sleep deprivation for several days in a row. Both are torture; both violate core American ethical commitments; both are illegal.

Also, I like his phrase "the pseudo-world-weary". I might have to steal that.

It begins

We're all welfare queens now

When it's economists blabbing about statistics, it's "scary"; when it's the formerly middle class lining up at food banks, it's scary:

Once a crutch for the most needy, food pantries have responded to the deepening recession by opening their doors to what one pantry organizer described as “the next layer of people,” a rapidly expanding group of child-care workers, nurse’s aides, real estate agents and secretaries who are facing a financial crisis for the first time. Over all, demand at food banks across the country increased by 30 percent in 2008 from the previous year, according to a survey by Feeding America, which distributes more than two billion pounds of food every year.

...

And amid the million-dollar houses of Marin County, Calif., a pantry at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center last month changed its policy to allow people to stop by once a week instead of every other week, since there are so many new faces in line alongside the regulars.

“We’re seeing people who work at banks, for software firms, for marketing firms, and they’re all losing their jobs,” said Dave Cort, the executive director. “Here we are in big, fancy Marin County, but we have people who are standing in line with their eyes wide open, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m here.’ ”

I think these sorts of stories and images will start to have a noticeable impact on the national dialog--I think you're going to start to see (even more of) a swelling of support for Obama's big government interventions, and maybe even a second stimulus. And I don't mean to be cynical, but I actually think a lot of it will have to do with the fact that the people requiring handouts are white, suburban, middle-class-looking people--and that's just not supposed to happen in America. I'm not accusing Americans at large at being racist or anything, it's just that I think it's human nature to have a more visceral and empathetic reaction to something happening to one's in-group.

A constitutional convention for California?

I don't generally like to post about California politics or the current budget crisis, because I know--and everyone else knows--exactly what the underlying problem is, and there's a limit to how many different ways you can point out that the government has been hijacked by an intransigent Republican minority. The California government is seriously flawed, and the reckoning is upon us.

Of course, the natural steps to take in fixing some serious procedural flaw with the government would be to rewrite the constitution. But as the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters points out, the same forces that prevent California from passing a budget would also prevent it from agreeing on a new constitution:

Fundamentally, however, a constitutional convention is only a process, not a product. And there isn't even any agreement on the process – how many delegates would be selected, how they would be chosen and how they would go about their work.

The state constitution is silent on those issues, leaving it to an ideologically polarized Legislature to set the ground rules with a two-thirds vote required.

Some legislation calling for a convention or setting forth its procedures has already been introduced, which is a clue to the pitfalls of the process. If the Legislature is incapable of dealing with California's burning political issues, including the budget, how could we expect it to agree on how a constitutional convention would work – especially the partisan or ideological makeup of convention delegates?

Democrats would want a convention likely to embrace removing impediments to raising taxes, for instance, by containing a strong majority of their colleagues, while Republicans wouldn't go along with that – thus mirroring their essential conflict over the budget.

What all this basically means is that California has painted itself into a corner: every possible path to a fundamental change in the way the government works would need the approval of an overpowered and entrenched minority party. I only see two ways out: the first is that the state of affairs is allowed to proceed to utter crisis, causing such a tectonic shift in the political dynamics of the state that obstructionism becomes a liability for the Republicans. The second is that Republicans are somehow unscrupulously removed from their position of power, for instance via some gerrymandering scheme.

Neither of those options is very palatable--or likely. So I'm guessing that this crisis will go like the others: at the 11th hour some concession will be made to get the budget passed, the state will stagger onwards--and we will all find outselves in the same situation next year.

“the most cruel and foul injustice”

That's how Dick Cheney described the indictment of his chief-of-staff Scooter Libby back in 2007.

I think my eye just twitched a little.

Dubai

Via Sullivan some pretty entertaining copy, although I think the author is a bit of a poseur:

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.

...

Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East....

...

It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.

I never thought of Dubai as a New-York-minus-the-freedom-and-authenticity before, but I think that's right.

I'd still like to visit some day.

Stagnant wages, falling home prices

A look into how household spending patterns are contributing to the slump:

One concept that has gotten a lot of attention the last few months is the household balance sheet: the relationship between household assets and liabilities, and what that means for household behavior (consumption versus saving). Though not the precipitating factor in the current crisis, the weakening of household balance sheets (fewer assets, same liabilities, less net worth, more anxiety) has likely had a significant effect in depressing consumption, which has been the single largest factor in our recent decline in GDP.

...

On the headline level, [from 2004 to 2007] median income fell from $47,500 to $47,300 (all figures are in constant 2007 dollars), while median net worth (assets minus liabilities) grew from $102,200 to $120,300. No surprise there: we already knew wages stagnated, while real estate and stocks appreciated. However, since the survey was conducted in 2007, median net worth fell by 17.8% according to the Fed estimate, to $99,300, and that’s just to October 2008. Given that the cumulative returns of the stock market have been about -15% since October 31, and that housing prices have fallen as well (and the Fed used a housing index that has fallen less than the Case-Shiller index*), that net worth is probably between $90,000 and $95,000 - significantly less than in 2004, and back around 1998 levels ($91,300).

One of the reasons why the real estate crash has hurt so much is because rising home prices were driving consumer spending, and consumer spending accounted for something like 70% of GDP. So when home prices fell, households saw their net worth shrink and started to save instead of spend, causing GDP to fall.

George Will smackdown

George Will's latest article contains some specious empirical claims about global warming, and the internet has responded with force.

Liberal Lieberman

Looks like I had it right all those months ago about the much-maligned Joe Lieberman. From Joe Klein:

It seems Lieberman played a crucial role in talking several Republicans off the ledge, thereby vindicating President Obama's refusal to be vindictive toward the Connecticut Senator, who had some nasty things to say about Obama and Democrats in general during the presidential campaign. Lieberman has always been a moderate-progressive on economic issues so his vote should not be a surprise--but his active lobbying for the bill has to be considered directly attributable to the grace with which Obama treated him. Those who wonder about the President's efforts to be nice to Republicans--a singularly ungracious lot, cult-like in their devotion to failed economic policies past--should bear this particular example in mind as we go forward.

Lieberman is as liberal as the next Senator when it comes to the economy, health care, and energy.

Bon mot watch

Bryan Appleyard (via Sullivan), explaining gofugyourself.celebuzz.com:

Don’t think this sartorial eye of Mordor is trained only on Hollywood...

That's pretty good.

Time for nerds to get crunk

Yay!

A good point about eating healthy

I never thought about this, but I think it's really true:

Home prepared meals are much less standardized, and not so fined tuned to hit the salty/sweet/fatty buttons over and over. Also, much of the shopping is done for them when you aren't actually hungry, and so you're likely to pick healthier foods with lower caloric density--committing your future self to behave more virtuously than it probaby would decide to on the spur of the moment.

Selecting what food you're going to eat on the fly is dangerous because your hungry tummy can end up persuading you to get the processed, fatty thing. But buying groceries forces you to pre-select your future meals while you are in a reasonably level-headed state (of course, if you shop while hungry you could end up getting all sorts of unhealthy stuff--which is why it's a bad idea to shop while hungry).

Personally, I basically don't eat any meals at home because it takes too much time and effort, and I'm fortunate enough to have enough change rattling around in my pocket to afford that sort of thing. But I think I'm ill served by the options I have--restaurants--because they don't usually emphasize health, and the food is served in a very labor-intensive way (waiters, busboys, etc.), making it more expensive than it needs to be (or, if I'm going to be paying that much, I'd prefer the money go towards higher quality ingredients rather than a waiter's salary). I wish there was a place that was geared for everyday dining, with healthier choices, changing menu items, and less of an emphasis on service--something like a college dorm cafeteria, or the in-house cafeteria here at Adobe.

BSG Strategy

The following contains Battlestar Galactica spoilers.

There's been some chatter about the recent Zarek-Gaeta coup and the merits of a permanent human-Cylon alliance. I think Farley does an excellent job of showing just why the alliance is so difficult to live with, but ultimately I'm going to have to agree with Ackerman that the destruction of the Resurrection Hub was a game-changer (as he puts it, "the greatest act of unilateral disarmament in the history of the galaxy"): the rebel Cylon were willing to sacrifice their immortality in order to become our allies. That should be enough to buy our trust.

Also, I think Farley's worries about the fickleness of Cylon decision making are confused. Clearly, the Cylon have never been politically homogeneous--there have always been two factions jostling for supremacy. The razor-thin margins by which one faction controlled the agenda--combined with the perfectly democratic nature of their government--naturally resulted in abrupt shifts in policy. Farley appears to be making the logical mistake of presuming that a property of a group--its policy fickleness--necessarily applies to the members of the group, as well. But this is as absurd as thinking that Americans are fickle because America wanted to invade Iraq in 2001 but now wants to withdraw. Moreover, even if we take as Farley's point that the Cylon government's "attitudes and goals [were] fickle", it hardly matters now because that fractious government doesn't exist anymore. The faction that we are striking a deal with now is extremely stable and politically homogeneous, so we can be confident that we won't see the same kind of policy U-turns that we saw coming from the original Cylon government.

If a Judd Gregg withdraws and no one is around to care, does he give a press conference?

This Judd Gregg business strikes me as precisely the sort of thing that gets political junkies all in a tizzy, but that the overwhelming majority of Americans have little interest in. I expect everyone to have forgotten about all of this in like a month.

PS: Judd Gregg is consonant greedy. He clearly doesn't need the extra 'd' or 'g'.

More good Flash

Thought this was worth a re-post on the merits, but the fact that it's Flash makes Izott hum with synergy.

For SOCES eyes only

This is going to sound weird but--does President Obama remind you, somehow, of Mrs. Sima? It's something about the way he tilts his head, or maybe the halting way he talks. And maybe his mouth too.

I dunno. Just try to remember Mrs. Sima when you watch footage of the news conference, and see if it rings any bells:

The uncoupling of merit and economic performance in a depression

One of the most compelling arguments for capitalism, I think, is the idea that it is meritocratic: successful businesses are the ones that create products and services that people truly desire, and businesses that fail to create desirable enough products eventually go under. People who live beyond their means eventually fall into debt and go bankrupt; people who are careful with their money invest it and see their wealth multiply. If you work hard, you get something in return; if you don't work, you get nothing. And there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Of course, that's the Platonic ideal--in reality, even the most ardent capitalism-booster admits several points at which the meritocracy of capitalism breaks down. Not all wealth is earned through hard work--much of it is inherited. Many jobs are awarded based on personal connections and loyalties rather than skill. There are systemic injustices in our society: women and minorities see fewer opportunities to get ahead, and are paid less; children in poorer families receive a worse education than children in wealthier families; rich and powerful industries lobby Congress to give them unfair advantages, like subsidies or unwarranted deregulation (which most of the time is tantamount to subsidy, since the societal costs of the industry's activities end up being socialized); companies routinely violate labor laws that prevent workers from unionizing and negotiating better wages; etc. And, of course, there is the most powerful and arbitrary force of all: sheer dumb luck.

There are a lot of imperfections.

But even so, the capitalist will argue that, despite these difficulties, by and large capitalism is still meritocratic enough, still better than any other economic system yet devised, and so worth preserving and improving upon. And America--being a nation of mostly capitalists--have bought into this idea, and the idea is so ingrained and familiar that it becomes something like an axiom that markets are meritocratic. This belief in the meritocracy of capitalism is so certain, in fact, that we often use economic performance as a procedural criterion to determine the worthiness of a product, the acumen of a businessman, the work ethic of a laborer. The very fact that Google is the most successful search engine means that it is also the best search engine; the very fact that some company is successful means that the executives are doing something right; the very fact that this man started with nothing and rose to the position he's in today means that he's a resourceful, hardworking fellow. And, the converse: the fact that Yahoo has gone down in marketshare means that its search engine is inferior; the fact that this company has gone out of business means that the executives were incompetent; the fact that this man started with everything and is now penniless means that he's lazy, irresponsible. Because of the iron-clad assumption that economic performance is meritocratic, economic performance becomes a measuring stick for merit.

In normal times, and in a not-completely-dysfunctional free market economy, you can get away with this sort of thinking in a rough-and-ready sort of way: I think it would be reasonable for a person to presume, for example, that Google's search engine is superior even if that person has never used a search engine before in his or her life; it would be reasonable to presume that a fellow that has squandered a small fortune has some serious character flaws or other life problems; etc. Of course, there are always exceptions and mitigating circumstances and things like that, and so you have to judge people on the merits, and take into account all of the evidence in each case, and so on. But often in life you don't always have the time or energy to delve into each case and give your full consideration--lots of times we navigate the vast world of people, situations, and products on the fly, trying our best to size things up with a cursory glance. Thus, we perhaps avoid a restaurant that is nearly empty during peak dinner hour; we are attracted to the person at the party who is successful (and I don't mean money, per se, but professional success--maybe a successful comedian or writer, or big-time lawyer, or famous professor). In other words, we let economic success be a yardstick for actual merit--and most of the time, it works out okay.

That's normal times. But the times we find ourselves in now are anything but normal--on the contrary, we find ourselves in the midst of a depression. And the interesting thing about depressions is that they take the meritocracy of capitalism and flip it upsidedown: normally, when times get tough the right thing to do is cut back your spending and save your money; in a depression, though, cutting back your spending is precisely what is contributing to the downward economic spiral that is making you poorer (a phenomenon known as "the paradox of thrift"). Normally, when a company goes out of business for lack of demand for its products, we can safely blame the poor quality of the product for the lack of demand; in a depression, however, the lack of demand for a product has nothing to do with the quality of the product, because there is a lack of aggregate demand--general demand for everything is going down (that is to say, it's not as if the money not being spent on the product is being spent on superior competing products--it just isn't being spent at all). Normally, when someone loses their job, we can infer that--for whatever reason--they didn't have what it takes to compete with other employees for the job; in a depression, though, people who are excellent, productive employees lose their job through no fault of their own (they aren't losing their jobs to superior competing laborers--the jobs are just disappearing altogether).

The problem these days is that everyone is still wired to assume that because the nation's economic performance is so bad, we must somehow deserve it. Economic performance is still being used as a measuring stick for merit. And so you get a lot of people who think that the economic crisis was brought about because we as a nation lived beyond our means; or that all of this was the inevitable result of greed on the part of someone, somewhere. You have people who believe that the system is purging itself of waste, that this is an "adjustment" that is painful, but ultimately healthy. You have people who believe that we must all "tighten our belts"--government included--and stop the profligate spending and consumerism in favor of good old-fashioned saving. You have people who look at the disproportionate wealth of the United States and think to themselves "the party's over; here comes the great reckoning". The tendency is to frame the whole sequence of events as a morality play: in Act 1 some character flaw leads to sinful behavior, in Act 2 the bad behavior finally catches up with us, and in Act 3 we make the painful sacrifices and hard decisions and, finally, atone for our sins. There's no easy answers, no free lunch. It is a world that is basically intuitive and fair, where good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished--it is a world, in other words, where economic performance is meritocratic.

But this way of thinking obscures a more helpful way of thinking of the economy, which is that it is a big, complex mechanism capable of breaking down and, hopefully, being fixed--that the reasons for its breakdown are not necessarily attributable to some great human foible, and that the fix does not necessarily require some kind of painful, character-building sacrifice. Of course, in order to think of the economy in this dispassionate way, you have to spend a great amount of effort trying to understand how it works--an effort that many pundits, reporters, and members of Congress either cannot or will not undertake. So these folks rely on their intuitive, meritocratic notion of capitalism and sense of cosmic justice and end up advocating precisely the opposite of what ought to be done--that we should cut spending rather than increase it, that we should let companies die off (remember how people cheered the demise of Lehman Brothers out of concerns about "moral hazard"? How about GM and Chrysler?) because they aren't competitive, etc.

Of course, not everyone who opposes a large stimulus package is necessarily someone who is relying on an faulty, intuitive understanding of economics. There are some very capable economists who are skeptical, on empirical grounds, that such a stimulus would work. But there are too many people in positions of authority that do not appear to have even a basic understanding of the economic crisis, and who therefore reject the idea of stimulus with the air of someone who is told that the solution to their obesity problem brought about by eating too much candy is to start eating even more candy.

I cry out for magic

This ad is pretty silly:


I like the idea that the "Barack the Magic Negro" controversy is actually about Obama's magical powers.

And the award for Worst Jewish Person in the World goes to...

...Bernie Madoff! Not only did he swindle Sandy Koufax and Steven Spielberg's charity, but he took Elie Wiesel's charity for a ride too. That's just--I mean, c'mon. You just don't steal money from Elie Wiesel's charity. It's like Madoff was testing the theoretical limits of unethical behavior.

"The frontier of mass material comfort" comments

I thought the comments from this recent post were worth promoting to a post. I don't think I quite landed the dismount on my last response and came off sounding way more condescending than I intended, but hey I'm shooting from the hip here (metaphors mixed: 2):

Blinkity said...

Okay, this is a bit ridiculous. The upside of capitalism is that we have unbelievable material wealth and comforts? You don't say. I think that detractors of Capitalism (those who aren't concerned with the damage that it does directly) believe that these material comforts don't result in an overall increase in satisfaction or happiness. That they slowly raise our standards and expectations so that whatever we have seems barely enough. I don't mean to include extremes on either end of the spectrum in this. But there does seem to be something to the idea that our happiness level is largely a practical biological reaction to our circumstances, and one that is very good at adapting to the current situation. I like comforts as much as the rest. I just don't know that I would be that much less happy if it were taken away from me, or if more were given to me, for a sustained time.

February 2, 2009 12:05 AM

David Morris said...

"Okay, this is a bit ridiculous. The upside of capitalism is that we have unbelievable material wealth and comforts? You don't say."

My point wasn't to merely assert that the upside of capitalism is material worth--it was to see if we could frame it in a way that makes us appreciate just how extreme the improvement has been. I think realizing that 250 years ago you'd have to spend half your income on food--and that 5 out of 6 meals you bought were fucking oats--helps us truly understand how fortuneate we are to be alive in this place and this time, and how imperative it is that as many humans as possible be liberated from their dismal oats-only existences.

Now, is having material comfort sufficient for being really and truly happy? Well, maybe not. But when you frame the question in terms of a concept so big and monolithic--Human Happiness--the little things--like interesting food, like being able to buy any book you want, like having hot showers in the morning--fall by the wayside. But the cumulative quality-of-life impact of these things over a person's lifetime are significant! These are things that would make anyone, of any era, happier in an immediate and straightforward way.

Shouldn't we be careful not to be too quick to paint people of other cultures and other eras as happy, authentic, in-tune-with-nature faceless peasants and villagers? They are so authentic, they have no need for base materialistic things like televisions, cars, and French cuisine! That stuff doesn't really make you happy anyway, so there's no pressing need to give some dude wasting his life in rural China the opportunity to experience these materialistic trifles that I experience every day! Why, to think otherwise would be crass materialism!

You see what I'm trying to get at here? How there might be some cognitive dissonance at play in all this? Good liberals like us find it discomforting to praise ourselves, to praise capitalism...

February 2, 2009 2:04 AM

Blinkity said...

Yeah, I know this is a classic lame liberal move, and I didn't make it unconsciously. It's just that I see two actual pieces of evidence that point to it - the first is thinking a little bit about the way the brain surely actually works (there was a TED talk about this). The second is comparing my own experience to potential additional comforts that I might have in the future. It doesn't sound that great, and it's hard to imagine I'll be happier overall, despite the fact that two hundred years from now people will probably look back to my awful state with pity. I mean, alleviating suffering is one thing, but it's important to distinguish when people are actually suffering from when we are projecting suffering on them, because *we* would be suffering in that situation.

February 2, 2009 12:02 PM

David Morris said...

I take your point, but also I'd encourage you to go back to DeLong's original post and reread it carefully, because I think he basically comes to the same conclusion that you are coming to.

However, I don't think it's right to think that in 200 years, people will take pity on our awful standard of living--I think in 200 years, people will look at our lives and think they were just fine, just like how we might think that some wealthy noble 200 years ago lived a quality of life that was just fine. There is a real objective standard at work here, which in the DeLong post is quoted from Keynes:

Keynes thought that by today we would have reached a realm of plenty where "We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."

In other words, having plenty frees us from lives that are devoted almost entirely to subsistence, and allows us to get down to the business of living good and happy lives. We no longer are forced to spend 50% of our labor just feeding ourselves; we can use the majority of the fruits of our labor on things that are valuable not solely as a means for survival--things that are valuable in themselves.

Of course, the great irony in all this is that human nature--which puts such a prize on status--prevents us from really appreciating how well off we are, causing DeLong to sigh:

I'm convinced that everyone I know can easily imagine how to spend up to three times their current income usefully and productively. (It is only beyond three times your current spending that people judge others' spending as absurd and wasteful.) And everybody I know finds it very difficult to imagine how people can survive on less than one-third of what they spend—never mind that all of our pre-industrial ancestors did so all the time. There is a point at which we say "enough!" to more oat porridge. But all evidence suggests Keynes was wrong: We are simply not built to ever say "enough!" to stuff in general.

So I think DeLong agrees with you that humans in general aren't "built" to appreciate their material fortunes; but that doesn't mean that we can't put in a special effort to appreciate our material fortunes, nor does it mean that our material fortunes are not something truly worth appreciating.

February 2, 2009 2:36 PM

Data data everywhere

If you're interested in a whole slew of different indicators that show how bad the economy is, look no further than posts like this from Calculated Risk (which I often gaze at uncomprehendingly).

Hollywood Korner!

Hey--wanna hear Christian Bale get really angry at the director of photography for walking into a shot on the set of Terminator Salvation?

The frontier of mass material comfort

I was reading economist Brad DeLong's blog, and came across an interesting post that brings home the economic progress that's been made over the last few centuries:

Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.

Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer's earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century.

...

Today we still spend about one dollar in five on food—down from the half of income that Americans spent in 1776. The share hasn't fallen more because some of us buy buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise cooked, served, and cleaned up by others rather than (or in addition to) oats in the gunnysack.

(Chez Panisse, for those not familiar with Berkeley, is the fanciest--and likely most expensive--restaurant in Berkeley.)

I think this kind of mental exercise is useful for really appreciating the upside of modernity/capitalism. The vast majority of humans for the vast majority of history have had to live in uncomfortable, monotonous, shitty conditions twenty-four hours a day seven days a week for the duration of their lives. The phenomenon of significant portions of humanity living in material comfort is relatively new, and with each passing decade many more are being lifted up out of poverty.

Of course, the trick now is to figure out how we can continue to do this without also rendering the planet inhabitable to ourselves.