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From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe

6/21/2018

After Tom Wolfe died I felt an overwhelming need to read something of his, and have also been on an architecture/urbanism kick, so I took this out of the library.

It’s basically a very long essay/short book-length screed against the internationalist/modernist style brought to the U.S. by Walter Gropius and other architects from the Bauhaus in Germany. Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe come in for the most sustained criticism.

There may be some subtle subtextual argument that went over my head, but Wolfe basically suggests that Gropius and Mies took over U.S. architecture and steered it toward boring, interwar-style worker housing box structures through sheer status games. As always, it’s about what’s said in the most elite settings and exclusive parties that sets the entire agenda. Architects who tried to deviate were sneered at as inferior.

A big omission, though, is how these architects got builders and developers to actually pony up the money for their projects. That’s the detail I’m most interested in, coming from a finance/economics perspective. But Wolfe does take care to note that many of them did not in fact get many very buildings built.

As always, Wolfe tries to get inside the heads of the people he’s writing about, architects, and their thoughts on status and their neurouses. One notable passage is his description of the necessity for any aspiring architect of owning a chair designed by Mies:

“The Barcelona Chair. The Platonic ideal of chair it was, pure Worker Housing leather and stainless steel, the most perfect piece of furniture design in the twentieth century.... When you saw the holy object on the sisal rug, you knew you were in a household where a fledgeling architect and his young wife had sacrificed everything to bring the symbol of the godly mission into their home. Five hundred and fifty dollars! She had even given up the diaper service and was doing the diapers by hand.''

Although at times the book reads like a condemnation of all modern architecture, it’s not. The heroes of the story are Edward Durell Stone and Robert Venturi -- architects who would still be considered modernist but who defied the orthodoxies of the time and opted for greater ornamentation or more variation.

From Wikipedia:

Venturi is also known for coining the maxim "Less is a bore", a postmodern antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more".

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The Prince of Darkness, Robert Novak

5/31/2018

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Robert Novak’s autobiography is really a political history of post-WWII U.S.

The legendary columnist and reporter’s firsthand experience with the key figures of politics of that time is simply incredible. He had access to the main characters that would be unthinkable today, if only for logistical reasons.

In his early years reporting at the Capitol, he would join Everett Dirksen and other senators for off-the-record happy hours, just talking over the day’s events. Decades later, Novak mentioned the sessions to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and Lott was astonished it could have happened. He had personal relationship with a succession of presidents, as well as with key members of Congress, cabinet members, and White House aides in several different generations.

When Novak began in journalism, politics was also a much smaller universe. He mentions that Dirksen monitored every bill that advanced past the committee level, and would personally prepare briefs on the legislation. That’s unthinkable today. But back then, there were just fewer people in politics. When Novak began a decades-long career on CNN, he was one of the first to appear in that format.

Even into relatively recent history, though, Novak maintained amazingly close ties to the highest-profile politicos. Bill Clinton once gave him a lift on his plane when Novak got stranded on the campaign trail.

I borrowed the book from former Novak protege Tim Carney hoping to pick up on some tricks of the trade and some insight into journalism. Here are some things I learned:

-- Novak grew up in Illinois and not long after moved to D.C. But he spent time, while in the military, right near where I went to high school, at Fort Devens in Lancaster, Massachusetts.

-- D.C. used to be much more of a drinking culture and participating led Novak into what he acknowledges was probably high-functioning alcoholism. Source lunches with three-plus drinks were the norm for him, followed up with heavy drinking at night. He described campaign plane and bus trips, during the Nixon era, as a group binge session. He later curtailed his drinking after suffering spiral meningitis.

-- Novak was an opinion reporter for most of his career. As he grew older, he became more and more outspokenly conservative. Espousing that point of view sometimes hurt his ability to develop sources, although it also helped in cases.

-- Novak always wrote about horse race politics and gossipy insider information. The fleeting newsbyte was his bread and butter. Because those are the things people like reading, it helped him maintain an audience and -- on my own reading -- helped to keep politicos coming to him to talk shop and serve as sources.

But he wasn’t a lightweight or inconsequential, and he took his work and journalism seriously. He tried to travel each year to stay informed about world affairs. He put himself into danger in Vietnam and felt personal responsibility for the war ending badly for the U.S., on the grounds that better reporting could have helped lead to a better outcome.

-- Novak admits to breaking and compromising on several key rules of journalism ethics. For instance, he says he lied about sourcing to protect sources. He hints several times in the book that he allowed personal relationships color his reporting, or that he shunned legitimate stories of public interest for his own purposes.

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The French Revolution

12/29/2017

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I tried something I’ve never tried before: Rather than read one book on a subject and not retain anything, I decided to read several book on one topic -- the French Revolution -- and see if I’d actually gain comprehension. I set out planning to read histories, biographies, and fiction.

Having finished, for now, I think it was worthwhile but I went about it the wrong way. I didn’t use any recommended reading list, and as a result the books I chose were probably not the best selections, and I definitely read them in the wrong order.

Here’s the list:
The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, William Doyle
The French Revolution, Christopher Hibbert
The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton, A Life by David Lawday
Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by Ruth Scurr
Reflections on the Revolution in France: Edmund Burke
The Ancien Regime and the Revolution: Alexis de Tocqueville

Some notes:

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was written contemporaneously, as a long rambling letter meant to lay out the case against revolution in England, and accordingly read as sort of a hazy and and amateurish history. But what is distinctive about it is that it represents a first statement of conservatism, a concept that may not ever have been needed in history before the revolution.

For that reason, some of the points he made sound obvious, because conservatism is a now well-established political reality. For instance, he pointed out that the French might be summoning up unintended consequences by hurriedly getting rid of all their institutions, including the monarchy, religion, and laws. Obvious point, but apparently it had never needed to be made before.

Key claim by Burke: There is an overarching law that should not be changed by the people who happen to be living and controlling government at any one time. Unlike business partnerships, which are set up to take advantage of a given opportunity in a moment in time, the state “is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Burke argued against the French appropriation of private property on the grounds that depriving someone of economic independence he had already achieved was worse than killing him. He argued against the expropriation of the Church -- and predicted that it would be the overreach that turned off the British people from revolution -- on the grounds that the Church, like private property, is a permanent institution rather than a creation of the state and that its privileges are not meted out by the government.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Regime and the Revolution is probably the most valuable high-level, critical history of the revolution. I wish I’d read this after some of the other histories, rather than before. Writing in the 1850s, he went through the trouble of digging up tax rolls at the parish level and unearthing administrative letters to try to reach some generalized descriptions of the Ancien Regime.

Part of his thesis is that the revolution brought about a collapse of civil society:

“...in such communities where men are no longer tied to each other by race, class, craft guilds or family, they are all to read to think merely of their own interests, ever to predisposed to consider no one but themselves and to withdraw into a narrow individualism where all public good is snuffed out.”

Despotism, he said, makes that situation irresistible, because everyone to run afoul of the despot is to lose wealth and wealth is the only basis for standing in society.

Other notes:

He viewed the French revolution as a political revolution with the character of a religious revolution. He compared the growth of the ideals of the French revolution to the religious revolution of Christianity: Unlike the pagan religions that were part of the social order in their respective city-states, Christianity didn’t limit itself to just one area or one political entity.
The French middle class chafed more at remnants of feudalism than other nationalities because they had some property rights, and thus had “skin in the game” and felt the burdens of feudal rights and mis-administration acutely.
Administrative overreach was a serious problem in the Ancien Regime. Quote: “The Ancien Regime in a nutshell: Strict rules, lax implementation.” The most glaring example, in his eyes: Prior to the Revolution, at the same time as Voltaire and other irreligious thinkers were on the rise, France actually has a law on the books imposing the death penalty for writings antagonistic to religion.
Prior to the Revolution, the middle class was actually becoming wealthier, in relation to the stagnating nobility. It was also becoming more homogenous with the nobility, in the sense that both were reading the same materials published in Paris and taking social cues from the king. Both were also increasingly out of touch with the poor.
De Tocqueville tried to explain why France went from being highly religious to murderously anti-religious within two decades, but didn’t really reach a satisfactory answer on irreligion. He thought that the Catholic faith was a casualty of the revolution because most people saw the church as tied up with the old guard. That’s one reason the revolution went so far, because the Church wasn’t able to exert moderating influence.
Although administration was arbitrary, the middle class and nobility also had some freedoms in France that similar classes in other countries didn’t enjoy
He argues that Britain was inoculated from some of the revolutionary sentiments by political liberty. Without the centralization and arbitrariness of the French government, British rule didn’t provoke revolt.
Meanwhile, the rural poor areas had long suffered brain drain. Increasingly, the nobility congregated in Paris, which was socially hegemonic, and anyone smart enough to achieve success would flee the poor outskirts. In some poor rural areas, the only educated person might be the priest, and he could grate on the population if perceived as an example of the distance of the other rich, educated people. The taille, a direct tax, hit those poor people. Partly as a result, de Tocqueville suggests that those rural peasants were not necessarily better off economically than three centuries before.

Christopher Hibbert’s The French Revolution contains far more detailed and gory descriptions of specific highlights and lowlights of the revolution, with less of a focus on what drove events and which decisions proved pivotal.

One note that stuck with me is that he writes that, in 1789, before the Terror and the other major violence, the revolutionaries had basically carried out a successful constitutional reform, bringing the king to Paris to change the constitution. But, crucially, at that point, the peasants didn’t perceive any benefits, having happened to suffer a bad harvest and high unemployment. Their unrest helped precipitate the major shake-up of the constitutional order on August 4th and began the sequence of events that led into the bloody part of the revolution and the more radical changes.

One note from The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton, A Life: Lawday notes that that Thomas Paine was a hero to the Jacobins for predicting in The Rights of Man that the French Revolution would take over all other countries as well. That prediction didn’t pan out.

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$2.00 a Day by Kathryn Edin & Luke Schaefer, Evicted by Matthew Desmond

5/13/2017

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Evicted by Matthew Desmond is in many ways a model of what a scholarly, opinionated book should be.

Desmond, a Harvard social scientist, provides two major pieces of evidence in this book on the toll that evictions take on poor people.

One is that he spent several years living in poor Milkwaukee neighborhoods, developing incredibly close ties to poor renters and studying first hand how housing scarcity affects poor people.

The other is that he helped run a survey that includes new information about evictions that aren’t available anywhere else. Most importantly, it counts not just people who were forcibly evicted by law enforcement but everyone pushed out by landlords.

Both approaches suggested that eviction is a much more frequent and damaging experience for poor Americans than commonly appreciated. Desmond reports in incredibly detail how evictions come at the worst possible times for poor families, adding just one more source of desperation and compounding difficulty into their lives. And the survey showed that, in the past two years prior, more than 1 in eight Milwaukee renters were forced to move.

The anecdotes are especially impressive because you get the sense that Desmond is trying to present a comprehensive picture of the forces at work in people’s lives that lead to evictions, rather than stacking the deck in one way or another.

He makes it clear that many of the problems that his subjects encounter are their own doing. He doesn’t gloss over drug use, shortsightedness, laziness, negligence, violence, and all the other mistakes that the people make. At times, Desmond describes the interior thought processes and feelings of his subjects in greater detail than I would be comfortable writing.

At the same time, he manages to touch on a simply astonishing number of different traps and dead-ends that poor people encounter at work, in their family lives, and especially in contact with government programs. He runs down how some families use disability payments as a substitute for welfare, and how doing so discourages them from working and saving in some circumstances. He explains how slumlords profit off of poorly designed voucher programs.

After assembling all this evidence that evictions are a regular source of trauma that leads to cascading problems for poor families, Desmond concludes that people should have a government-guaranteed right to housing.

It’s an argument that is very appealing to me in many ways. As I went to write this post, though, Kevin Corinth wrote a piece laying out the opposite perspective that is worth taking note of. Corinth argues that housing programs should be limited to short-term housing to prevent homelessness and programs for the mentally ill or other people who can’t find their own way, and otherwise the goal should be cash assistance.

Also, a few notes on where Desmond’s perspective, I thought, was not fully fleshed out. As Desmond has noted, only about a quarter of the people eligible for federal housing assistance receive it, because of supply problems. That, to me, is an argument for supply-side reforms rather than for government subsidies. Desmond’s case that evictions are particularly harmful suggests that providing for very cheap construction, even if it’s low-quality and cramped, would be better than the current system, in which evictions are frequent.

At different times, Desmond briefly touches on arguments that I think turn the economics of housing on its head. At one point, he suggests that construction of luxury apartments bids up rents, worsening affordability for poor families. Outside of rare exceptions, I think the opposite is true: More supply means lower prices throughout the market. Elsewhere, he creates a narrative that there is a proliferation of slumlords who evict and abuse tenants because it’s profitable and economically efficient in equilibrium. My guess is the far more efficient use of that urban land would be for high-quality housing for high-earners, and that what’s going on here is something else.

That’s not to diminish that this is an eye-opening book, definitely worth the attention and praise it’s been given.

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, by the sociologists Kathryn Edin of Johns Hopkins and Luke Shaefer of Michigan, is structured similarly to Desmond’s book in that it draws on both one major datapoint -- that the number of families surviving on just $2 a day or less has doubled since the 1990s welfare reform -- and a wealth of anecdotes taken from first-hand observation of poor families. The authors argue that a lack of cash, as opposed to in-kind benefits like food stamps, creates scarcity and compounds problems for poor families. Cash, unlike in-kind benefits, allows families the flexibility to stave off short-term crises that might arise. They conclude that the the minimum wage should be raised, housing should be subsidized more, and that states should be required to promote cash welfare more.

The anecdotes are incredible and sometimes heart-rending, as they narrate families trying to get cash by auctioning off food stamps, selling blood, engaging in prostitution, and more.

The big issue with this book, though, is that the case that extreme poverty has risen in the U.S. since welfare reform, based on the data, is not conclusive. The evidence Scott Winship has assembled appears to indicate more strongly that, based on cash alone, $2-a-day poverty probably hasn’t risen significantly since welfare reform. Taking into consideration the in-kind benefits that expanded after welfare reform, it seems virtually nonexistent.

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"Holding ourselves accountable"

12/8/2016

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That is the title that the editors put on my alumni column for my student newspaper, the Irish Rover:

I’m worried that the instant communications available today have harmed our ability to be honest with ourselves.

Specifically, I fear that because nowadays we are rarely forced to spell out what we are thinking and experiencing, we can avoid the necessity of coming to terms with our circumstances and ourselves.

It’s harder to evade reality in the kind of long-form correspondence that everyone took part in not too long ago. In other words, the fact that we can communicate with our families and friends without having to write out a letter telling them what’s happening in our lives means that we can avoid ever leveling with them or ourselves.

Think of the difference between checking out someone’s Facebook page and visiting them in person. Anyone can maintain a decent-looking public persona on Facebook. In real life, we are capable of living with a lot of disorder and slovenliness in our lives if we’re left alone. If a parent or friend were to drop in and see the reality firsthand, though, we’d feel embarrassed at the way we’re living.

The same is kind of true for a letter—it’s like a substitute for an in-person visit. You can’t hide everything about yourself in a letter. Omissions will stand out to your correspondent. You can keep up appearances forever through texts and tweets, though.

Maybe this is just my own experience, but I get the sense that we are doing a little worse in gauging our own hopes and fears, and that it’s harder for all of us to maintain a sense of direction and purpose.

As Stony Brook sociologist Michael Kimmel has documented, there has been a massive shift within the U.S. toward delayed adulthood, especially among men. Compared to the 1960s, men today are far less likely to be married and starting their own families by the age of 30 and far more likely to be living with their parents, trends that appear to have accelerated since the financial crisis. Men are increasingly delaying adulthood for a prolonged stay in what Kimmel calls “guyland”—an extended adolescence in which young men trade the responsibilities of marriage for low-risk, low-reward comfortable lifestyles heavy on video games and hanging out with other guys. Guys lacking the advantages of strong familial or social networks or rewarding, meaningful work are at special risk of slipping into that rut, but it could even happen to privileged Notre Dame grads.

The causes of this mass delayed adulthood are probably complex and numerous. But maybe one of the factors is that young men rarely, if ever, are forced to to be honest with themselves and with others about who they are and where they’re going.

Maybe writing a letter could force a reckoning. One example from the past that has stuck with me, as a history buff and Massachusetts native, is that of John Adams. Adams exchanged over 1,000 letters with his wife Abigail during the times that he was stationed in France, Holland, and England as a diplomat and in Washington as a politician, while she stayed behind in Massachusetts.

Skimming through their correspondence, it’s possible to see key moments in which writing with Abigail forced John to examine his own intentions and think through the implications of his decision not just for his life but for the new country.
For example, in one letter sent while working in the Continental Congress in 1775, Adams acknowledged that his judgment about national affairs was clouded by his hometown pride in New England—a bias that he admitted was partly irrational. (Adams did argue, though, that New England was in fact better than other places, in part because it had “purer English blood,” less mixed with Irish and other less-desirable ethnicities.)

Many of the letters that the Adams sent each other contained far more about their circumstances, hopes, and fears than could be captured in many text messages.

In fact, before the cost of communications dropped to almost nothing, a single piece of correspondence could easily provide the sole basis of a major life decision.

My great-grandmother, the daughter of Irish immigrants, was working as a nurse on the frontier in Saskatchewan when she received word that her sister in Boston was sick. She made the 2,000-plus mile journey by horseback, at one point getting caught in a blizzard outside Cleveland and knocking on random doors for shelter. She met my great-grandfather in Boston, and my dad’s side of the family has been there since.

In comparison, I’ll exchange 50 group texts with my siblings and we’ll discuss … nothing in particular.

Not that those messages or snaps or whatever are not meaningful, or that long-form letters are the only way to honestly describe what’s going on in your life.

But maybe we need to start either writing letters or find other ways to hold ourselves accountable.

For me, maybe this column could be a start.

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Debunking Utopia by Nima Sanandaji

9/5/2016

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Debunking Utopia: Exposing the Myth of Nordic Socialism
By Nima Sanandaji

Debunking Utopia is a compact argument that there is not a “Nordic Model” that the U.S. could follow to reduce inequality and increase prosperity, and that the apparent success of Nordic countries is mostly attributable to Nordic culture rather than to government institutions.

Written at a very basic level, the book is a helpful datapoint weighing in favor of the “culture” side in the ongoing “culture vs. institutions” debate in economics, in which MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Chicago’s James Robinson take the other side.

The author, Nima Sanandaji, would appear to be a great example of the success of the Nordic model. He is a Kurdish-Iranian immigrant to Sweden, who grew up in poverty but was given assistance to educate himself and become an economist. Yet he believes that he is an exception rather than an example.

There are a few worthwhile takeways from this book:

Nordic “success” -- high output per capita, low inequality -- predated the institutions of generous welfare states in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.
Nords just culturally value hard work and achievement, and that quality is measurable in a number of ways. For example, they are highly caffeinated.
Nordic-Americans appear to have living standards about 50 percent higher than those of Nords in Nordic countries.

Just how to interpret that difference is a tricky question. Cross-country living standards are difficult to measure and Sanandaji doesn’t seem to have presented an exhaustive run-down of the different statistics that could be chosen. Furthermore, it’s possible and likely that Nordic immigrants to the U.S. were “positively selected,” meaning that the U.S. effectively poached successful people from their home countries. Nevertheless -- 50 percent is a lot.

One additional note: Sanandaji doesn’t go into the differences in health care outcomes. But in many cases discussions about the size and scope of the welfare states in Nordic countries versus the U.S. boil down to the fact that they have health care benefits paid out of taxes. My understanding is that Nordic-Americans have better health outcomes than Nords in Nordic countries.

4. Sweden is struggling to integrate Muslim immigrants.

This is both a point against the “institutions” explanation of economic growth and against the idea that Nordic government policies are themselves the root of Nordic success. The newest immigrants to Sweden are not easily finding work and embracing a Swedish way of life, and instead are secluding themselves and committing crime at high rates. Sanandaji concludes that generous welfare benefits are part of the problem, although his argument is a little underdeveloped.

5. Nordic countries have been moving toward embracing free-market policies.

As the prime minister of Denmark pointed out while visiting the U.S. in 2015, his country is now not a social democracy. In some respects, it is more free-market than the U.S.

Overall, an interesting survey of some of the relevant comparisons between the U.S. and smaller Nordic countries. On the one hand, it is obvious that the U.S. could not adopt Nordic-style social benefits and have them work the way they seem to work there, and this book makes that point well. On the other hand, such comparison are difficult and I’m sure there are ways the data could be presented differently to make Sanandaji’s case less compelling -- I’d be interested to read that book too.

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The Money Problem, by Morgan Ricks

7/24/2016

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The Money Problem, released this March, is in my opinion indispensable in understanding the current debates around financial reform, and is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in money and banking.

This book is especially timely given the long-running argument this past year between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over how to move beyond Dodd-Frank in regulating the financial system. Sanders staked out the claim that it is necessary to break up the big banks, while Clinton hedged by saying that the priority should be imposing new rules on “shadow banks” outside the regulated banking system, that themselves can and have been the center of panics.

There’s been a lot of confusion about this. Which strategy is better, from the perspective of decreasing risks to the financial system, is a question that cannot really be answered using the normal vocabulary used to talk about finance and banking.

In this book, Vanderbilt law professor Morgan Ricks provides the concepts needed to resolve that and a number other live debates surrounding financial regulation and monetary policy. It’s not an easy read and is intended at an academic/policy audience, but it’s a must-read for those groups.

The basic thesis of the book is that financial problems -- namely panics -- are fundamentally issues of monetary design. The fragility of a financial system, no matter what its structure or the extent of financial regulation or oversight, is really a function of the underlying monetary system.

“The failure to specify a functional legal definition of what constitutes a monetary instrument is the original sin of banking law, and it is the main source of our current regulatory troubles,” Ricks writes.

Basically, the problem is that the banking system can fail when people, as a group, freak out about the possibility that their claims for money won’t be honored. In that scenario, banks can undergo It’s a Wonderful Life-style panics, and shadow banks can do the same, as the 2008 crisis and the panic surrounding the Reserve Primary Fund money market mutual fund showed.

Yet the government has failed to design a monetary system that ensures the availability of money when it’s needed, to prevent panics, and allowed inherently unstable forms of money creation -- such as the shadow banking sector.

The government issues and regulates cash, but, crucially, the private sector creates other forms of money that are are unregulated in ways that leads to confusion, miscalculation, and ultimately instability.

Of course, there’s endless confusion about what money is.

In Ricks’ book, money is simply a reliable store of nominal value.

Currency, such as paper dollar bills, are money. Bank deposits are money, even though private companies are able to create such money at will. So are all short-term cash-like instruments that everyone can be assured will be accepted as payment and doesn’t have a risk of losing value, relative to cash.

(Just as an inside: That definition is where Ricks adds to Gary Gorton, the Yale economist and former AIG consultant who has written his own explanation of the financial crisis that itself was highly valuable. Gorton described the problem as a failure of “safe assets.” People came to regard certain financial instruments, namely AAA-rate mortgage-backed securities, as functionally as safe as government-backed currency, meaning that they didn’t have to worry about the specific characteristics of the securities or their issuers. But when the housing bubble burst, suddenly they discovered that those securities were actually highly sensitive to changing information about, for example, the underlying value of mortgages. Ricks’ extends this analysis by explaining that moneyness has to do with short-term debt, whereas Gorton’s information sensitive/insensitive distinction applies to debts of all maturities, including long-term bonds that are clearly not money.)

Ricks’ solution is to prohibit money creation outside of a government-chartered banking system. No other firms could issue debt instruments that would be redeemable on demand for government-backed money. The chartered banks would operate in a public-private partnership with the government, subject to capital and portfolio regulations and paying the government a fee for the seignorage rights.

The system sounds a little complex, but Ricks suggests it wouldn’t be too big of an adjustment for banks that current receive FDIC insurance and are assessed fees for it.

Whether or not the solution is plausible, however, the bigger contribution of the book is to diagnose the problems facing the financial system today.

That in turn raises the question of why a law professor, and not a monetary economist, is the one to shed light on the realities of the monetary system and its interactions with the financial architecture of the country. The apparent answer is that these are considerations that have been thought through before, by figures as diverse as John Maynard Keynes, Alexander Hamilton, and Irving Fisher. But it seems they’ve been forgotten in part because the past mistakes made in monetary system design -- for example, placing a false dichotomy between physical currency and bank deposits -- became baked into the academic and policy consciousness.

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Ella Fitzgerald for the $10 bill

3/29/2016

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Carl Van Vechten via the Library of Congress

Ella Fitzgerald is the clear choice for the woman to be put on the redesigned $10 bill.

Ella was one of the greatest Americans of all time, and one of the most talented musicians ever.

Ella's singing immediately uplifts and transports anyone who hears it. That’s as true of the people like my grandmother who were fortunate enough to have heard her perform live as it is young people who have discovered her performances through records, tapes, CDs, and now digital recordings. Ella and Louis has brightened so many lives.

Not only that, but she represents jazz -- the quintessential American art form and America’s greatest artistic contribution to the world.

I’ve heard so many people independently mention Ella as one of their very favorite musicians.

I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard anyone, anywhere volunteer Eleanor Roosevelt as their favorite anything. I’m not sure she’s ever come up in conversation ever in my life except in relation to her husband, despite her accomplishments.

Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, two of the other names that have come up in other polls regarding the $10 bill -- OK, fine. And there are other great American women in political history. And of course there’s always Molly Pitcher, a personal favorite.

But politics is overrated.

The United Kingdom was able to get past this problem. Next year, they will publish new £10 notes featuring Jane Austen.

The British people have not had a problem with it. In fact, the more you think about it it, the bigger a no-brainer it is. If the U.K. can break out of this mental box, so can we.

Ella is our version of Jane Austen. My vote may count for nothing at the Treasury, but at least I can say it just to have it on the record: Ella belongs on the $10 bill.

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Twilight of the Elites, by Christopher Hayes

3/13/2016

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Written four years ago, this short book from MSNBC host Chris Hayes is more timely now with the rise of Trump and Sanders than it was when it was published.

Twilight of the Elites is a look at the single overarching trend that, from Hayes’ left-of-center viewpoint, is driving all of the dissatisfaction and discord within the political arena and culture today: A loss of faith in authority.

The power elite, Hayes argues, lost the trust of the public with a series of generation-defining errors: The war in Iraq, the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and more.

Hayes depicts the U.S. elite as self-referential, insular, lacking moral bearings, and unduly influenced by the pressures of intra-elite inequality, rather than a sense of obligation to others.

Twilight of the Elites is helpful in explaining why there are so few figures today capable of speaking with authority on any given topic. The lack of credible figures in positions of influence and power goes a long way in explaining why the U.S. is increasingly divided in terms of politics, culture, and religion, and why right now there are many people who favor anti-establishment candidates like Sanders and Trump merely because they are anti-establishment.

It is broadly in keeping with the argument that the U.S. is undergoing repatrimonialization, meaning that the country’s institutions, more and more, are set up for self-dealing rather than maintaining order and promoting the common good.

Yet where the book could have offered more, in my opinion, is in the definition of the elites, and which specific people should be held accountable for the public trust.

At times, Hayes’ supposition is that the elite are the people involved in running important institutions, such as political offices, the media, religious organizations, and schools.

That make sense to me, but Hayes runs into a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem in stating what the responsibilities of those people should be. For instance, he uses his own high school, the exclusive but public Hunter College High School in New York, as an example of elite failure, because the school is admitting fewer children from certain socioeconomic and ethnic groups, and more from advantaged white and Asian families. In my opinion, Hayes did not clearly sort out whether the purpose of elite schools like Hunter is to prepare the best students for public service and to act as responsible elites, or to itself promote equality along socioeconomic lines. There is a tension in those aims that could have been explored more in the book.

At other points in the book, however, Hayes appears to lean toward the definition of “elite” as tied up in money, and particularly in the 1 percent or 0.1 percent that seems to be enjoying greater economic success than other segments of society. This definition of elite is at work in his discussion of “fractal inequality,” the separations between the merely well-off and the wealthy, and the wealthy and the plutocrats, that generates a keep-up-with-the-joneses dynamic that causes the elite to lose sight of their obligations to normal people. It’s also apparent in his concluding chapter, when he recommends taxation on high incomes as part of the antidote to the problems he diagnoses.

Those arguments may make sense on their own. But it seems like a stretch to attribute the failures of the Catholic hierarchy or the media to high-level inequality. Whatever advantages Catholic bishops might have, for example, massive incomes are not among them. We still expect a certain standard of conduct from them all the same.

And do the ultra-wealthy appear to be more self-interested and self-dealing than in times past? That is not obvious to me. For example, Bill Gates seems, to me at least, to be a public-spirited and generous person interested in addressing some of the big problems facing the country and world, even if I might not love everything about the way he made his money or the particular causes he supports.

Furthermore, the best evidence seems to indicate that the separation within society is as much about the divergence between the upper middle class -- the people with education, good jobs, intact families, and some wealth -- and everyone else as it is about globalization’s winners. This even-handed overview from the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeve’s gets at some of the underlying trends.

By the way, an analysis of Forbes billionaires’ list performed by the University of Chicago’s Steven Kaplan suggests that it’s the upper-middle class, not the plutocracy, that yields the most new billionaires. That is something to consider when assessing the duties and responsibilities of what Thomas Piketty calls the “petits rentiers.”

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Terry Pratchett: Men at Arms, Guards! Guards!

6/13/2015

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Guards! Guards!
and
Men at Arms
Terry Pratchett

I picked up a few Terry Pratchett books after hearing that he was struggling with terminal illness. RIP.

Pratchett was similar in so many ways to Douglas Adams: Beloved, prolific atheist British authors born around 1950 known for comic fantasy.

Americans may not be as familiar with Pratchett’s Discworld, a series spanning dozens of books, as they are with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But it is a hugely successful franchise, and Pratchett deserves to be in the conservation with Adams when it comes to comedy writing.

In addition to the obvious demographic similarities between the two writers, they both wrote as if they were failed philosophers or sociologists who turned to satire after giving up on making sense of the world.

Pratchett’s books, like Hitchhiker’s guide, are light reading.

But he slips a number of big ideas into the plot that he obviously stewed over his whole life.

One strain of commentary running throughout his books, and especially Men at Arms, is the idea that the city and the economy are shaped by market forces, class, and tradition in ways that no one person can understand but that somehow work out in the end.

It’s thought express by two characters in particular: The city’s non-king ruler, Havelock Vetinari -- or simply “the patrician,” and Sam Vimes, the down-to-earth, commoner sergeant of the Night Watch who observes the people of the city at the street level.

The Patrician is good at dealing with and manipulating individual people. But actual developments in the city, Ankh-Morpork are beyond his control -- a running theme in the books. Conversely, Vimes is street-smart and and dogged, but he can only respond to problems when the natural state of affairs is disturbed, not shape events.

Both realize that the safety and health of the city, and the direction that society takes, are beyond anyone’s control. The city has a logic of its own. That logic is manifested in guilds that arose over time, such as the Assassin’s Guild, to fulfill needs.

But it goes beyond the economics of the city and the market. Pratchett often includes vignettes or subplots that touch on why rich and poor live alongside each other without revolution, why so many of the city’s poor people have a strong sense of honor even though they have nothing else, and how sketchy, alcoholic, or despised minority people find a way to make their way through the world.

Here’s a small example:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

That is one of the more explicit examples of Vimes playing the role of Pratchett thinking through some big issues. Not didactic or moralistic -- you wouldn't notice it interrupting the plot in context. Like police in real life, Vimes sees all the different areas of the city and all walks of life in a way few others do, and is a great vehicle for such asides.

Pratchett is hilarious light reading, perfect for falling asleep. But sometimes I end up thinking about the stories long after I’ve finished them.

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