Recent reading about the economy: Lanchester’s I.O.U. and Stiglitz’s Freefall
Mar/100
I’ve been trying to educate myself on the recent economic slide, and was given for my birthday two books that have received a lot of notice: John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay [amazon], and Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy [amazon]. Both came out at the beginning of 2010.
I’m no economist, but I am (I hope) a non-stupid reader of the news and someone who tries to pay attention. So as an everyday educated reader, I think I can plausibly assess these books for other similar readers. Basically, I can recommend Lanchester’s I.O.U., and I have a couple of things to say about Stiglitz, but can’t really recommend it.
Lanchester’s also a novelist, and boy can he tell a story. Each chapter has villians (mostly) and heroes (some), and a bit of a plot, especially in the first half and the last chapter (the middle sections flag a bit). The best parts of the book come in the first half where Lanchester provides humble parables that get to what such instruments as “credit default swaps” are all about. Here and there are little gaffes (I remember a mistake about statistics somewhere in there), but for the most part, it’s compelling. Having read around in Stiglitz (who is a Nobel winner), who has a similar account but more aimed at policy, it would seem that for the most part Lanchester is telling the truth. His overall conclusion about the state of the economy is extremely dire, and in the last chapter he goes a bit berserk, explaining our doom. Basically as a society we Americans have shot our credit cards. Now we have to pay. And it’s going to take decades. Sorry. Now really is the time to move to Canada.
Stiglitz’s book is more about policy, with a heavy dose of “I told you so.” It is highly repetitive. The basic message seems to be that the rewards structure in the American/European economies massively over-rewards finance, and especially short-term gain. Stiglitz firmly believe that the way out is to make massive investment in people via the educational system and other mechanisms. He likes to point out that for all of the praise of market-self-regulation and privatization, all of the best universities and colleges in the United States are not-for-profit. He uses this fact as a counter-argument about the merits of unfettered profit-driven capitalism.
Here’s the bit I want to pick out: One interesting aspect of the book is that for Stiglitz, a real culprit in the overall imbalance in capitalistic rewards is the underpricing of natural resources. Infuriatingly, this point does not seem to be broken out as a separate section, and the book has no index (!). But here’s a representative bit:
[We need a new economic model] — sustainability will require less emphasis on material goods for those who are overconsuming and a shift in the direction of innovative activity. At a global level, too much of the world’s innovation has been directed at saving labor and too little at saving natural resources and protecting the environment — hardly surprising given that prices do not reflect the scarcity of these natural resources. There has been so much success at saving labor that in much of the world there is a problem of persistent unemployment. But there has been so little success at saving natural resources that we are risking environmental collapse. (p. 192)
The other place where this comes up is in a remarkable section called “What You Measure is What You Value, and Vice Versa” (pp. 283-285) which takes square aim at the inability of GDP to measure what is really important about the health of economies (in Stiglitz’s view, it would be a measure of sustainability or even “happiness”). Here he talks more about the depletion of the natural resources, but the point about prices is to say that GDP is too high because the real costs of energy aren’t taken into consideration.
I would love to read a review of Stiglitz that breaks out his position on energy more schematically.
Heilemann and Halperin, Game Change (Book Review)
Feb/100
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. [Amazon]
I paid attention to the Presidential primary and general elections like everyone else, and even drove up to New Hampshire to see one candidate in person. I kept up enough to know that during one period, Hillary Clinton was said to be a “sure thing,” while later, it was rumored that her campaign was totally disorganized.
This book sorts all that stuff out, with significant “deep background” quotes from almost all of the players. It’s a good read. At Amazon, there are a lot of complaints that the book is slanted towards Obama, but I don’t think that’s really the case. If anything, there’s not enough about Sarah Palin.
By far, the most compelling chapter is the one on John and Elizabeth Edwards. It’s even more shocking and depressing that what you might have read in reviews. If even 25% of it is true, they are both do for some serious psychological counseling.
The book reminded me how much promise there was for these candidates.
Dave Thompson, London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Frontlines of Punk, 1976-1977 (Book Review)
Dec/090
Dave Thompson, London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977 (2009). $18.95. [Amazon]
The history of UK punk has been told so many times, and so well, that it’s hard to believe that the story can be told again. But it can. Dave Thompson’s London’s Burning is a recollection of his mid to late teenage years, when he saw all of the groups in their earliest gigs: The Sex Pistols, of course, but also those a bit more afield, such as the Adverts, and the ones you haven’t heard of who were in the orbit of punk but didn’t get much attention — such as Masterswitch.
There are a few things that really stand out in this memoir. The first is the radical importance of reggae. English music was in a dead period, and white kids needed their revolution. The music at hand in 1974 and 1975 with the revolutionary message was reggae. Each chapter starts with a list of tunes in “heavy rotation” in the author’s mind, and until we get well into the 1976, it’s dominated by reggae. The lists are very interesting as well, because it is a distinctly “street” collection of reggae tunes. I think you’d have a hard time finding all of these as downloads.
Thompson is always well aware of the circumambient economic situation. Of course, all of the other books talk about how there were no jobs and workers were miserable under Maggie. But Thompson remembers that in the late 70s, no one had a theory; they just had misery:
[F]or anybody looking to draw conclusions from the events which ultimately cause 1976 to shape the landscape of the decades to come, it is only the sweet fortunes of hindsight that sllow even a vague hypothesis to take shape. For the people on the ground, in the frontline, at the sticky end of the pointed stick, 1976 was the same as 1975 was the same as 1974 was the same as 1973 and so on ad infinitum.
There were still no more than three channels on the telly; the programming still ended around midnight with the rousing chords of the national anthem. Some shows were still being broadcast in black and white. The pubs closed at eleven . . . [However, hindsight] might view the mid-1970s through a monochrome lens, but life was not gray, it was not flat, and it was not grim. A lot of people had a lotof fun in the 1970s . . . The big difference between “then” and “now” was that people were making their own fun then, as opposed to waiting for some multimedia conglomerate to package it up and deliver it to their door. (pp. 102-103)
Thompson is also good at pinpointing how 1976 was different from 1982: In 1976, Thompson says, the situation of the miserable economy “was not merely without precedent, it seemed to be without remedy as well” (p. 98). By 1982, punks had a pattern. So . . . 1976 becomes all the more interesting because it was all improvisation and invention.
The last thing I would say about this nifty book is that it’s great on the bands that got lost: Roogalator, the Rumour (who had a great album without Graham Parker), Tom Robinson Band — they’re all here, and will compel you to dust off the old singles and LP’s, if you have them.
Tom Davis, Thirty-Nine years of Short-Term Memory Loss (Book Review)
Dec/091
Tom Davis, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who was There (2009). $24.00. [Amazon]
I read a fair number of showbiz memories (for reasons I know not), usually with a bit of a rock-and-roll cast, and this is one of the worst. Tom Davis was half of the Franken and Davis comedy team; I would guess that the publication of this book was delayed to come out after the Senate race in Minnesota was confirmed, because there is little here that would reflect very well on Franken, except, I suppose, that he managed to get sober. There are indications that Davis cleaned up, too, but not many. For the most part, he lived his teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, etc., on drugs and listening to the Grateful Dead. I had a hard time finding evidence that he had contributed much actual “funny” to Franken and Davis or to SNL.
I did learn hat Al Franken perfected his trick of drawing the outline of the 48 states long ago. I also found out that Jerry Garcia slept in a chair.
Aside from those tidbits, this is more or less just a list of hijinks and travel stories, punctuated with brief vignettes of the various people Davis knew. At the end of the book there’s a random list of books Davis read while writing his memoir, and an incongruous list of his top 50 movies. Also pathetic is that Davis conceives himself as some kind of thinker: “I had a conscious philosophy that celebrity, money, and power were ephemeral and were important only as they figured into the world of ideas in which I lived” (p. 178). Well, I couldn’t find an idea after 300-odd pages.
Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (Book Review)
Nov/090
Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (2009) $25.99. [Amazon]
Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is about a cult musician, his fans, and his legacy. Tucker Crowe recorded what fanboys seem to think is the greatest break-up album of all time, “Juliet.” Then Crowe dropped out of the music business. One of his biggest fans is a musical trainspotter in a sleepy seaside town in England. When the demos of Crowe’s great album are released as “Juliet, Naked,” the fan writes a celebratory review, motivated largely by the fact that he is one of the first to hear the CD. Then his girlfriend reviews it — and pans it — and, miraculously, the elusive Crowe begins to re-emerge from his obscurity.
All of the musical “notes” in this book are pretty much perfect, from the fake Wikipedia entries to the self-regard of the fanboy. Meanwhile, the musical Crowe is immediately recognizable as something like an early Alex Chilton; after his “retirement” from music, Hornby takes the character a little further into obscurity than most cult figures go.
Where the book is pretty weak is around the relationships. Hornby can lay down a nice streak of almost weepy sentimentality. The book practically ends in a group hug. I liked the book, but, really, the music bits are the best bits. Even a brief appearance by a couple of the last Northern Soul fanatics has more life than some of the romance material.
My New Yorker subscription . . . and the paper it’s printed on
Nov/092
I own a Kindle. After I bought it, I vowed to buy books only on Kindle; and then when not available on the Kindle, buy sparingly in print, or go to the library. The idea is to reduce the amount of waste and clutter I generate. I’ve been very successful. So far.
But now I have to renew my subscription to the New Yorker.
The New Yorker is available on the Kindle, but it’s pretty gross. And I like the reading experience of the printed version.
What to do!?
Lazy web, does anyone have counsel for me?
Michelle Wildgen, But Not For Long (Book Review)
Nov/090
Michelle Wildgen, But Not For Long (2009). $24.99. [Amazon]
I’m a sucker for a good “end times” novel (see my review of World Made by Hand). This book is about three housemates in a funky Madison, Wisconsin co-op dedicated to localism (as in local foods). 30-something Hal leads the house, with the help of 20-something Karen. Meanwhile, 30-something Greta has moved in, trying to escape her alcoholic husband Will. The thing is, though, that gas prices have shot up, and there have been power outages. Part-way through the book, a lengthy power-outage kicks in that seems like it might be the permanent one. Hinted at is a general ecological decline: yield from community farms is low, chicken eggs from a farm have malformed shells. All is not right in the world.
All of these ecological aspects of the novel are soft-pedaled. In fact, no one really knows why the power has been going off. It is noted briefly that there is still a war going on, so perhaps power is expensive because of that. I would guess that Wildgen’s point is that this is the problem with people nowadays: No one really knows why our engagement with the natural world is in such decline; even those of us who try to use fewer resources and think locally, she would seem to claim, can’t really get beyond our personal issues.
Towards the end of the novel, the alcoholic Will emerges as a central character. It would seem that Wildgen is drawing a very broad parallel between society’s drunkenness on taken-for-granted resources, and Will’s grotesquely selfish boozing. (Indeed, if this is a so-so ecological novel, it’s a fine novel of alcoholism.) This makes me think that the novel is something of a parable. Having said that, the parabolic nature of the story is so light that it is hard to really care. There are some characters who have managed to escape: Hal’s father lives in a cabin in northern Wisconsin, and allows that if the power went out up there, nothing much would change. Karin has a lovely episode visiting a boutique cheese maker (chapter 9), but it doesn’t motivate her to get out of Madison. That seems to be the case for all of the characters: They’re too frail to break their own habits, and, like Will, their addiction is strangely what keeps them (barely) alive.
If you must rescue Exception . . .
Oct/090
Sometimes you see Ruby code that rescue an exception at the top of the hierarchy:
rescue Exception => e
If you must do that, how about providing a means to control-C, by putting this in the method with the rescue:
trap("INT") do
puts "Terminating . . . "
return # or maybe exit
end
Good example of antiquity of some Core Ruby classes
Sep/090
A common pattern in Ruby is to call .to_s on an object when you want a String, even if the object itself might be a String. So, e.g., if you are getting NoMethodErrors on nils when you need a String, you might call .to_s to convert that nil into a String (”).
Well, you might want to do the same thing to convert Floats to BigDecimals. But guess what? BigDecimal doesn’t include a .to_d method! Oops. The BigDecimal class must be so old that this idiom hadn’t evolved.
Ruby inherited callback runs before subclass is loaded
Sep/090
Harrumph.
I wanted to call a class method on a subclass when the base class’s inherited callback is triggered.
But it doesn’t work, because the subclass isn’t loaded when this callback is triggered.
So the following doesn’t work (’boo’ prints instead of ‘foo’):
class Base
def self.permalink
'boo'
end
def self.inherited(c)
puts "permalink: #{c.permalink}"
end
end
class C < Base
def self.permalink
'foo'
end
end
You may be able to get what you want by forcing the class to load with Class.new:
class Base
def self.permalink
'boo'
end
def self.inherited(c)
puts "permalink: #{c.permalink}"
end
end
C = Class.new(Base) do
def self.permalink
'foo'
end
end
