Victoria III

Victoria and her grandfather have just departed for England. I may not hear much about Victoria in the future, so I'll attempt to sum up my thoughts about her now. I think that at heart Victoria is a relatively normal 17-year-old girl and that all of her aberrant behavior can be attributed to environmental factors. Her shyness, which is a common characteristic among English people, especially when compared to Americans, makes her weak points stand out more than they might otherwise, but it does not in itself signify any sort of pathology or disability.

According to the standards of educated people in developed countries, Victoria has been poorly raised. Within her household, there are no family discussions, people eat in separate groups, and most of the time spent at home is spent privately by each family member. Apparently the family never socializes in the sense of having visitors whom the family greets collectively or social occasions during which the family visits as a group. As far as I am able to determine, the only family activities, other than occasional visits to close relatives, are family vacations, which are planned by Victoria's mother without any discussion. This seems to explain why Victoria is unable to engage in the kind of sustained social conversation that most of the people I know consider obligatory. People who don't engage in it are rude, dysfunctional or ignorant, and the latter seems to be the case with Victoria.

What we noticed about Victoria is that if someone persists in pursuing her on various topics, she will simply ignore anything that doesn't interest her but become slightly responsive when something does interest her. Thus it takes a great deal of trial-and-error to connect with her at all. Then, after an initial connection is made, she has almost none of the follow-through that might put people at ease in the sense of acknowledging that some minimal level of communication has in fact been reached.

It is second nature to me, and I think to many people, to have a story line about yourself and your interests when engaging socially. It is also de rigueur to display some inquisitiveness about others, particularly when they are your hosts. Victoria was a complete blank in these two important aspects of social life. To say that she had no story line would be an understatement. We still don't know why she visited after spending hours trying to extract information from her. All of the activities that we planned for her were based on speculation about what we thought she might like, not on what she said she would like. During the visit, she did not express any curiosity about any aspect of the U.S. or any of the people whom she met here. Her cousin, Christian, was the most energetic in entertaining her and at least got her to participate in some outdoor activities. Otherwise she would probably have stayed inside all day without even looking out of a window.

Another part of the puzzle, which I alluded to earlier, is the world of electronic communication. On the surface, people of Victoria's age have simply found new ways to remain in touch with their friends on a more continuous basis than was possible in the past. However, I believe that an unintended consequence of this new technology is to draw people inward, not in a spiritual sense, but in an environmental sense. Their consciousnesses are less attuned to their physical surroundings than was the case for people of previous generations, and their sense of reality has been permanently altered. The danger here is that developing minds that are not looking beyond the soothing confirmations of a like-minded, immature peer group will be inhibited from gaining the broader experience that has historically been obtained through direct contact with the unmediated world.

At this stage in Victoria's development, on first glance it seems probable that she will follow a trajectory similar to that of her sister, Elizabeth. Her critical thinking skills may have been inhibited by her upbringing and her narrow social network. Based on her current demeanor, she would have little chance of success at anything that required an interview, from college admissions to jobs. Nevertheless, although it is hard for anyone to escape their background, there is hope for Victoria. She seems to have been a favorite in her family, which may have given her some self-confidence. She is also the third of three children, which means that she may eventually become more rebellious and less conventional than her siblings (read Born to Rebel, by Frank Sulloway). And one can still hope that by the time she has absorbed her experiences from this trip her horizons will have broadened a little.

Victoria II

Having spent a few more days with Victoria, this time in the presence of her cousins, I now have a somewhat better sense of her nature. She has behaved more normally with her cousin, Christian, with whom she had corresponded previously, and with whom she seems to have developed a slight rapport. I am tentatively ruling out a genetic connection related to the Asperger's-like symptoms, which are obvious in her cousins, as an explanation of her behavior. However, with Victoria's food preferences, Asperger's can't be eliminated entirely. All three of them are highly successful academically, but her cousins are more technically oriented, concentrating on computer science and mathematics. Victoria is competent in all areas and is currently interested in art, but that could change. I won't go into detail here, but Victoria strikes me as conventionally heterosexual, whereas her cousins are not.

The picture I have now is that Victoria has been isolated by living in a slightly disconnected part of England in a family with poorly educated parents and financial constraints. She has been further isolated by the texting technology that allows her to communicate constantly with her two close friends in England as if she were still at home. In a way, her texting world may be more real to her than the physical world or the broader social world that lies beyond her experience. On top of this lies an inherent shyness that inhibits exploration.

Victoria is the baby of the family and has probably been treated differently from her brother and sister since birth. She seems defensive of her mother, who clearly has significant psychiatric issues, whereas her sister was less so when she visited. I don't detect any of the anger that her sister displayed.

One thing that makes this difficult to think about is that Victoria is very young and isn't fully formed; her identity seems to be taking shape in real time. If I look back to when I was 17, although I was ostensibly the same person, my knowledge and outlook were completely different. I was vulnerable in the same way that Victoria is now, and then proceeded to make a series of mistakes, if you want to call them that, that shaped me as a person and contributed significantly to my current worldview.

We are concerned that Victoria will make mistakes in her academic and career choices. The English system is oddly barbaric in the sense that students are required to make irreversible choices well before they are likely to have sufficient judgment to make them. My partner ended up in law after someone told her that archaeology was out of the question. She became a lawyer without ever caring for the profession. Elizabeth, Victoria's sister, liked to write as a child and chose English, and she now has a temporary position as a schoolteacher. To say the least, these are not optimal outcomes for Cambridge graduates. Although Victoria is good in all subjects, she was told at school to "do what you love" and chose art. Now, although she is still in high school, the possibility of changing to a science is severely restricted. We would hate to see her bumble along based on misinformation when she has so many opportunities. Academic options in American universities are comparatively flexible, and we have mentioned this to her.

I am reminded again of the random elements that dominate lives. To a very large extent, they have the greatest impact on people of Victoria's age. Especially in the U.S., how you prepare for college and where you attend college set the tone for the rest of your life. This may influence what career you have, who you meet and marry, where you live, and your socioeconomic status during the remainder of your life. There is a small window during which the choices seem overwhelming. Yet it can be argued that the model student with the model life is often, broadly speaking, no better off than many others whose lives were less well planned. Lots of helicopter parents may be hovering over their children to no avail.

Victoria I

This is the first installment in what may become a minor inquiry. It relates to the topics of shyness, intergenerational changes, adolescent females, isolated subcultures, mental illness and inadequate parenting. Victoria is 17 and the daughter of my partner's brother, Martin. Like my partner, Victoria is growing up in Hoyland, South Yorkshire. I have been intrigued for several years by the apparent otherness of Hoyland, because my partner, who was born in 1954, has often seemed culturally like someone who was born closer to 1940. Except for some late exposure to contemporary culture while she was an undergraduate, my partner somehow managed to miss the 1960's and early 1970's entirely. As a child she hardly knew anything about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones and was never aware who Bob Dylan was or that he performed in nearby Sheffield in 1965 and 1966. She probably did not hear about him until the 1970's. I was attracted to my partner in part because, not only was she completely unlike educated American women of my age group, who often seem to possess a narcissistic sense of entitlement, but because she represented a kind of puzzle to me.

For someone who is about to apply to universities, apparently with excellent credentials, there are some things about Victoria that are quite odd. It is difficult to pry out any opinions from her, and her food requirements seem bizarre. From what I can gather, her mother is obsessive-compulsive, cleans constantly, and prepares an unimaginably narrow menu for her family. Victoria has never eaten the skin of a potato. The only green vegetable that she will eat is peas. She will eat unflavored chicken but dislikes turkey, meat and fish. For someone who has led an isolated life, this is not necessarily unusual, but I am struck by her almost complete unwillingness to experiment. By 17 one would expect the beginnings of individuation and a desire to diverge from the habits of one's parents. Her elder sister, Elizabeth, who visited us a few years ago at about the same age, at least recognized that there were limitations to the quality of her upbringing. Elizabeth's favorite poem then was This Be The Verse, by Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Victoria is one of the most passive people I've ever met and only reacts when something that she dislikes is proposed. If asked a question, she typically replies "I don't know." When pressed, she will offer only the most basic information and not elaborate. My partner, my sister, my brother-in-law and I have all tried to help her, but she doesn't seem to know that she needs help or that we might be able to help her. This weighs heavily on my partner, who above all is a helper.

One of the most surprising things to me about Victoria is that she has no questions about anything. Apparently she was confused about the air conditioner in her room in Connecticut but never brought it up at the time. I only found this out later when I asked her whether she had been hot. She did not provide any input into the itinerary that I proposed, and she had no questions and made almost no comments about any of the places that we visited.

Usually when we arrive at a house, Victoria will go to her room without saying anything and remain there until someone gets her. Some of that time may be spent texting her friends in England, but, if so, I have no idea what she writes about. I initiated all of the conversations with her in the car and was not once satisfied by her response. On the way back I gave up and there was complete silence. Victoria is now spending some time with her cousins here, but overall her behavior is not noticeably different.

I am hoping to come across new information about Victoria that will allow me to put to rest some of the ideas that are whirling around in my head. Does Victoria represent a rare case of shyness of a magnitude that I've never witnessed before? Is living in Hoyland like being brought up on a Neolithic island? Is Victoria an abuse victim? Have Victoria's parents' worldviews made her completely unadapted to modern life? Is Victoria mentally ill? Will Victoria suddenly grow up and radically change her behavior? There is so much uncertainty here that I am bothered and will continue to work on it. I'll keep you posted on any news, new theories or conclusions.

Manhattan

Next week I'll be away in Connecticut and New York showing around my partner's niece, who is visiting from England. We'll be taking the train from Westport to Grand Central Station on three days. Her niece, Victoria, is 17 and has never been to the U.S. before.

I'm not sure how well the trip will go, because Victoria is not exactly the bold and adventurous type. She exemplifies the kind of English timidity and insularity that I have come to find tiresome over the years, primarily as a result of exposure to my partner's father, with whom I spend several weeks every year. In addition, she seems to be afflicted with the gadget addiction that young people have these days. My impression is that they are unable to see and appreciate the world around them because their consciousnesses have been channeled into alternate cyber-realities. In general, they find the natural world unfamiliar and scary. Victoria also displays a food-pickiness that did not exist in my generation but seems common in hers. She will eat a banana sandwich but balks at anything green or unfamiliar. She is young and naive, so I'm cutting her some slack. My partner's family is very brainy academically, and I'm hoping that that will kick in at some point.

Manhattan is one of my favorite destinations. From a cultural standpoint it is easily the best place in the U.S. Growing up nearby, I became interested in science at the American Museum of Natural History and art at the Metropolitan Museum. As a teenager I loved walking along Fifth Avenue between Central Park and Washington Square. During two summers, in 1968 and 1969, I had a job on Wall Street, and my family moved to East 58th Street from 1969 to 1971. However, since then I've only been back twice, in 1986 and 2003.

If one were a billionaire with multiple dwellings, keeping an apartment in Manhattan might be an attractive option. On a permanent basis I prefer to live here in the country.

Soccer

Although I have always been somewhat athletic and played soccer in high school, by the time I was 18 I had completely lost interest in all sports. Practice and exercise were boring, athletes tended to be uninteresting, and I had a low need for affiliation or popularity. Nevertheless, I am still susceptible to some of the hysteria associated with sports. I happened to be living in Terre Haute when Larry Bird, "The Hick from French Lick," led Indiana State to the final game of the NCAA basketball playoffs. I lived in Bloomington, Indiana when coach Bobby Knight won and in Louisville, Kentucky when they won. It's all quite stupid, really, but one can't escape being human.

As it happens, I've been watching parts of the World Cup this year, and have comparisons to make between American football and soccer, which, while perhaps obvious, don't seem to get much attention. The first thing that I notice about international soccer players is that they are extremely fit, agile, skilled and attractive to the eye. In comparison, American football players seem oversized, slow, muscular, dull and visually unappealing. Each soccer player needs a variety of skills, whereas football players tend to be more specialized, and in many cases their main attributes are physical bulk and the ability to move it in the right direction at the right time.

Beyond these superficial differences, soccer and football reflect broad cultural divergences. World Cup soccer highlights the strengths of individual players who combine their talents in order to represent their countries. Football, in contrast, is not an international sport, and it is permeated by the corporate mentality that dominates American thinking. Individual football players have less noticeable personas for multiple reasons. You can't see them well under their uniforms, they each have limited functions, and their behavior often seems predictable and scripted. The coach and quarterback resemble corporate managers who issue instructions, allowing little opportunity for the players to improvise. Soccer coaches have comparatively less influence over the game while it is in progress, and each player must be hyper-alert at all times in order to respond instantly to moment-by-moment developments.

There are several ways in which football seems more corporate than soccer. While in both games scoring goals and preventing the opponent's goals are the objectives, football is structured more like a planned campaign to systematically move the ball down the field, relying on consultations and specialists at each stage, and the process for scoring tends to be slow and mechanical, with fewer surprises than in soccer, in which the ball can crisscross the field several times before a goal is suddenly scored. Moreover, football has numerous time-outs and pauses that permit advertisements. Advertising plays a less obtrusive role in soccer. I might add that football is specifically designed to minimize delayed gratification for its viewers compared to soccer, because goals occur with greater frequency.

Our interest in team sports represents a primitive drive to belong to a group that succeeds against competing groups. As a species, we have already out-competed several other Homo species, which are now extinct. Group competition seems deeply ingrained in our nature. For the purposes of this post, I am interested in how American sports culture differs somewhat from that of other countries. On the face of it, soccer is a more inclusive game than football, because one need not be unusually large or tall to play it well. The basic equipment needed is inexpensive, thus almost anyone can afford it. Football, on the other hand, requires special equipment reminiscent of armor used in military campaigns. If you take football as a metaphor for American culture, it is telling that Americans prefer it to soccer. One might say that Americans are gratified by organizing into technologically superior groups that systematically obliterate opponents, and they are unappreciative of the spontaneity and individual talent that one might encounter in soccer. Stretching the metaphor to its limits, Americans understand conformity, militarism and brute force better than they understand spontaneity, individuality and artistry.

Automated Government

On several occasions I've mentioned that I think in the long run some sort of automated government should replace existing governments. This requires further explanation. The immediate goal in terms of the current geopolitical state of affairs would be to eliminate government domination by special interests and to minimize the detrimental effects of poor choices made by the voters in democracies. The idea would be to reduce government actions or inactions that increase inequality, waste or misdirect resources and damage the environment. What I have in mind would be something resembling communism, but far better managed than has historically been the case. Obviously there would be enormous obstacles in transitioning to such a system.

One difficulty would be convincing people that it would be in their best interest to switch to such a system. As long as capitalism exists in its current form, people are likely to believe that they must control their own destinies by competing in free markets. For this reason, capitalism might have to go first. Another problem would be gaining public acceptance of automating major processes with artificial intelligence. In order to gain that confidence, technology that is superior to what we have at present would be necessary, and the standard of living would probably have to be relatively high for nearly everyone in order to assuage their skepticism.

Extrapolating from the present to the future, which is guesswork at best, conditions could arise that would allow this to come about. Let's say capitalism continues to grow and becomes the universal ideology worldwide. Corporations continue to increase efficiency and provide goods and services that are in demand. Under this scenario, which corresponds with Thomas Piketty's views, the rich will get richer and the majority will tread water indefinitely. Over a long period, good jobs will not be available to most people. Sharing capitalist ideologies, nations may cooperate more than they did in the past and wars could become a rarity. If you take the positive view, it is possible that existing governments will gradually evolve towards more socialistic models in order to limit social unrest. Assuming that the technology exists, there may literally be no reason for most people to work, and governments may become their default source of support. It is certainly possible that at some point, barring major setbacks, computers and robots will be able to do everything.

On a cautionary note, it is also perfectly conceivable that a different sequence of events could occur. In a worst case scenario, the ultra-rich might abandon their fellow humans and use proprietary technology to dominate them unfairly. They might enhance themselves genetically and physically, essentially turning themselves into a superior species that takes no responsibility for us.

I began thinking about this topic when it became obvious to me that the U.S. government does not function in a manner that produces outcomes that are desirable for Americans, humanity in general or the planet as a whole. Because of the fundamental imbalances of power that are created by rampant capitalism, sooner or later most of us may be at the mercy of the ultra-rich, and we don't know for certain what course of action they might choose. My thinking is that some sort of hedge is needed against the possibility of world domination by a minority that is indifferent to the welfare of mankind. In this light, capitalism and democracy can be seen as dangerous, uncontrolled processes. On the one hand, capitalism provides a wealth advantage to a minority, and, on the other hand, democratic processes are diverted from their original intent through the influence of money. Who, if anyone, is addressing this problem?

Confirmation Bias

When I engage in activities such as this blog, because of my nature, I am usually conducting experiments in the back of my mind. One of those experiments relates to studying the Internet for its possibilities as a useful entity. Since I started the blog, I have been looking at websites that I hadn't seen before. I now believe that earlier I was inappropriately fixated on the NYRB and its blog, and that I had been laboring under some illusions regarding the NYRB's nature and intellectual integrity. Probably because it was one of the few places where one could find in-depth, well-written articles on a variety of topics, and because writers whom I respected such as Tony Judt and Freeman Dyson were contributors, I lulled myself into a false sense of its quality and openness. After examining a variety of websites, I now think that the NYRB is a limited organization that caters to a narrow group, and that most of the ideas that you find there are predictable, because they are the views that their readers want confirmed. There is nothing whatsoever about it that might be construed as cutting-edge.

Beyond the content of the articles in a publication, one gets a sense of its readership from its blog posts. The NYRB appeals to well-educated, relatively affluent liberals who like high quality and think of themselves as having broad interests, though they actually care mainly about hot-button liberal issues and some of the humanities, particularly from an academic viewpoint. They don't care much about science or empirical arguments. This flies in the face of the NYRB's image as a paragon of the open exchange of big ideas. Other less pretentious sites, particularly 3 Quarks Daily, have broader intellectual appeal.  The latter attracts people who are interested in the sciences and philosophy, but also leaves room for virtually all of the humanities. From the standpoint of blog commenting, 3 Quarks Daily is far more open, because it allows posters to post without moderation. Like all websites, it has limitations, but by drawing from many websites, being well-managed, and placing little emphasis on image control, it is much more appealing to me than the NYRB.

Confirmation bias is a topic that has been widely discussed in recent years. I came across it in the context of economics, which now has a branch called behavioral economics, a break from the past, when most economists assumed that people always acted in rational self-interest. They've finally realized that irrationality pervades human life, and they are now rethinking some of their earlier ideas. This research focuses mainly on investor behavior, where, for example, men tend to be unrealistically confident, and women tend to be unrealistically risk-averse. There is now an entire industry based on making money from your investment mistakes. On a broader scale, confirmation bias relates to many other human behaviors, but decision-making is its focus in economics.

In a speculative, anecdotal way, I have been trying determine what kind of person, if there is such a person, would be attracted to this blog. It is hard to obtain much data on this, because very few people look at it at all, and I have access to very little information about those people. Other than a handful of regular readers, I get new readers who click on a link to this site that shows up when I make posts on other blogs. I can't always tell much about where they are located other than their country, but often I can also determine their city. As you would expect, most of the pageviews are from the U.S., since most of the websites I comment on are in the U.S. and a very large chunk of English-language Internet activity is in the U.S. What surprises me is that I seem to be more likely to be viewed in Iceland, Ukraine, Russia or China than in the northeast U.S. where I live. This makes me ask what websites the people in the northeast go to.

The answer, which I can't prove, is probably that they are going to websites that are familiar to them and that present worldviews with which they are comfortable. That would not be unlike me when I regularly went to the NYRB website. I get the impression that the Internet is relatively ghettoized, and it seems to be dominated by commercial organizations like Amazon.com and Facebook that herd people into some sort of profit model by meeting their human needs. In the context of this post, one might say that they are drawn to sites that affirm their worldviews, don't challenge them much, and make them feel good about themselves: their biases are confirmed. In theory, American viewers are more satisfied with their lives and don't feel as much need to explore as the residents of Russia or China. Of course, there are other reasons why people in Russia or China might be interested in this blog, but I'm assuming for the moment that these pageviews are not from criminal organizations or government spies.

The working hypothesis that I've arrived at is that most Americans think they already know enough and don't need to know much more: they certainly don't need to extend themselves beyond their comfort zones. Thus, when commercial organizations such as the NYRB, the New Yorker, The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and so on, beckon them, whispering "Narcissism is OK," they happily indulge. That only leaves dissatisfied people in less privileged countries who stand outside and look in through the window out of curiosity. Here in the U.S., we are easily distracted from the underlying chaos of our existence by the Murti-Bing pills* freely dispensed by the government and corporations alike.


*From The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz.

Muscle Shoals

Two days ago I watched the documentary Muscle Shoals, which I recommend highly to anyone who is interested in American culture. I get the impression that many younger people today don't understand what the music scene was like in the U.S. from the early '60s to the early '70s. There is a lot that I can say about this documentary because it relates to many of my favorite topics.

Arguably that period produced the best art in American history, and it was characteristically American because it melded vernacular art with social movements and commerce and it flourished in small, entrepreneurial enclaves. Muscle Shoals is a little town on the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama. A poor sharecropper named Rick Hall decided that he wanted to be rich and famous, and he founded Fame Studios there in the late 1950's. Against all odds, Hall put together a small backup ensemble of local white high school kids who, along with his engineering and producing skills, became a draw to several big names, including Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, early in their careers. Southern rock took off from there when Duane Allman learned the slide guitar while hanging out in the studio. As Fame's reputation spread, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and many others began to show up.

Although I am often critical of capitalism, when you look at it in this context, it seems more productive and human, and it reminds me of vegetable gardening. The small-scale entrepreneur is looking for a crop, and, to that end, ordinary business practices are of secondary importance to finding, nurturing and developing talent. Without the entrepreneurs, many of the popular artists of the period would never have seen the light of day. What makes this scenario interesting is the process in which raw talent seeks an outlet, and a good entrepreneur cultivates it like a good farmer. In these early stages, to continue the analogy, the garden is small, and agribusiness hasn't yet entered the picture. It is easy to forget that once upon a time this wasn't a corporate state.

Lacking the formal traditions of Europe, perhaps the U.S. is better at creative synthesis in the arts. Often this seems to be more about free expression than about art, and I'm not sure that Americans can tell the difference. Thus, if you write a one-paragraph essay, eliminate the punctuation and break it up into short lines, it's a poem. Formal shoddiness pervades America, while spontaneous expression often does better than elsewhere.

As Rick Hall's business grew, his backup group, The Swampers, jumped ship and formed their own company, which also did very well. The transition to long-haired groups was difficult for Hall, and he made a major mistake when he dumped Duane Allman just as he was taking off musically. In the aftermath, that innocence is probably gone, and my guess is that Muscle Shoals is now like a mini-Nashville.

Compared to the 1960's, the U.S. seems dull and decrepit these days. I haven't heard any good popular music in decades, and instead of marches on Washington we have the Tea Party and the Koch brothers. At least Vermont retains a certain 1960's aura, though New England has an anal-retentive quality, which, along with political correctness, does not provide fertile ground for the arts. Most of the best art in the U.S. seems to emanate from the South, which historically had more cultural diversity than other regions.

Thomas Piketty IV

In conclusion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an important and impressive book. Chief among its virtues is Piketty's commitment to a broad cross-disciplinary approach to his subject, economics, which he sees as a sub-discipline of the social sciences, along with history, sociology, anthropology and political science. Most people are fully justified in their lack of interest in economics, because it is usually presented as a narrow, technical field that doesn't relate directly to other subjects. In contrast, Piketty writes like an Enlightenment thinker who is concerned about important issues such as the future of mankind, not just little things such as U.S. GDP growth next year. In short, he is a big thinker, whereas Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and probably even Milton Friedman, comparatively speaking, are not.

Even so, I don't necessarily recommend that you read Capital unless you are particularly interested in policy discussions related to economics. It is a long, thorough and detailed book that touches on many topics, but the central message is quite simple. It is that the current state of the world is such that the wealthy are likely to become wealthier and the poor are likely to become poorer. As a believer in social justice and the responsibility of governments to maintain an acceptable level of equality, Piketty recommends that permanent new taxes on wealth be instituted globally. He also suggests that one-time taxes on wealth could be used to eliminate or reduce national debts. The latter would be preferable to decades of austerity, which has little effect on the wealthy but places a heavy burden on the poor.

Much of the book is devoted to showing how wealth inequality grew up until 1914, when it collapsed, and how it took off again during the recovery after 1945. His thesis, which he amply documents, is that the 1914-1945 period was a historical aberration. The wars and the Great Depression wiped out most of the prior wealth inequality, and the surge in economic growth after 1945 temporarily allowed the less-wealthy to advance economically. Now, Piketty argues, we have resumed the long-term trend in which the return on capital exceeds the return on labor. People who are wealthy now will become wealthier from their investments while the rest of society will languish indefinitely with little chance of making economic progress. Enormous wealth is accumulating in the top .1% of the population. The number of billionaires and multi-billionaires is growing, and even large private university endowments are growing faster than those of smaller universities. The largest endowments grow at the highest rates because the universities have the resources necessary for the best investment research. For example, Harvard, with an endowment of about $30 billion, spends about $100 million per year to manage its assets and gets a real return of about 10.2%, higher than that of all other universities except Yale and Princeton. In this environment, ordinary workers will never catch up with the wealthy and small, private universities will never catch up with Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

The parts of the book that I found most refreshing involved Piketty's critiques of the U.S. He debunks the idea of American exceptionalism, saying that current information suggests that social mobility is lower in the U.S. than in Europe. He attributes much of the wealth inequality in the U.S. to overpaid executives. He speculates that low top income tax rates have encouraged U.S. executives to bargain harder for higher compensation, since they can keep more of their earnings than they would otherwise. If higher top-level income tax rates were reinstituted, executives would have less incentive to demand higher pay and American wealth inequality would be reduced. Courageously, he goes on to say:
...no hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interests-and that includes economists, who currently occupy an enviable place in the US income hierarchy. Some economists have an unfortunate tendency to defend their private interest while implausibly claiming to champion the general interest. Although data on this are sparse, it also seems that US politicians of both parties are much wealthier than their European counterparts and in a totally different category from the average American, which might explain why they tend to confuse their own private interest with the general interest. Without a radical shock, it seems fairly likely that the current equilibrium will persist for some time. The egalitarian pioneer ideal has faded into oblivion, and the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century's globalized economy.

In full disclosure, I must say that I have some sympathies with wealth inequality. Historically, extreme wealth has often led to good art as a result of attempts by the wealthy to differentiate themselves. When the Italians were wealthy we got Botticelli, Michelangelo and Titian. When the Dutch were wealthy we got Bruegel, Vermeer and Rembrandt. When the French were wealthy we got Flaubert, the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, Debussy and Proust. The arts tend to flourish when there are rich people throwing money around. On the other hand, I can't say that wealthy Americans have much to show for their artistic interests unless you include bad taste (The Queen of Versailles comes to mind). Secondarily, also on the positive side, although I'm not rich, I'm wealthy enough that the book affirms that if I manage my investments properly, not only am I unlikely to experience financial difficulties, but my wealth will probably increase during the remainder of my life, thanks to the backward political process here and the absence in the U.S. of useful public intellectuals like Piketty.

At the conceptual level, I consider Piketty to be the responsible adult that few Americans seem able to be. Why didn't an American economist write this book? As Piketty politely refrains from saying, this is a narrow-minded, materialistic culture all the way up through the intellectual ranks. The policies he recommends should already be under consideration, but whatever headway they make will meet tremendous opposition at each step. It is possible that by following Piketty's guide and publicly debating the issues discussed in his book the state of society could be improved significantly. To me, this is a more serious approach than what has been brought up by either liberals or conservatives in recent decades. I wish Piketty's ideas the best of luck, but still hold fast to the view that humans ultimately are not sufficiently rational to organize themselves in an equitable and sustainable fashion. As I have said earlier, I don't believe that either capitalism or democracy is essential to human life, and this book does not look that far into the future.

Noam Chomsky

When I was growing up, I had little cause to be political about anything. I was a white Anglo-Saxon male living in prosperous suburbs, and my parents and grandparents had never been persecuted. Though my great-grandparents on my mother's side were more or less forced out of Turkey because they were Armenian, that was never discussed at home. My mother spent her life pretending not to be Armenian and identified herself as Greek. We had never seen a black person in England, and when we moved to the U.S. in 1957 my mother explained to us that if we saw one we shouldn't call him a "nigger," which was the first time I heard that word.

During the 1960's, the antiwar and civil rights movements seemed legitimate to me. I agreed with them in principle, but thought that since they were obviously right there wasn't much to say about them. I did not feel any of the "white guilt" that many well-off white American liberals felt, because I wasn't well-off or American. The absurdity of guilt-stricken American liberals became apparent to me when I arrived at college in 1968.

I recently saw an amateur documentary made by a college acquaintance in 1969. It features several other college acquaintances as they plan and execute a confrontation with the college president about the small number of black students on campus. It is painful to watch. They are naive and ideological, the black students want nothing to do with them, and the president squirms under pressure to take actions that he probably can't. Later on, when the U.S. invaded Cambodia in 1970, two students burned down the R.O.T.C. building and were caught because they burnt themselves in the process and went to the local hospital for treatment. In this sort of environment it was hard for me to take campus activism seriously. Even so, by the time I was a senior I had begun to see the college as a corporate entity that stayed afloat by preying on students who aren't substantively different from ordinary consumers. This led me to small acts of terrorism, but I wouldn't call them political.

Over the years my political awareness has increased somewhat, but I still have difficulty voting, because politics, politicians and political activists seem stupid to me. However, along the lines of insidious corporate activity, I began to think more about political brainwashing during the Gulf War (1990-1991). I was then living in Dixon, Illinois, Ronald Reagan's hometown. Up to that point I had thought of the Dixon natives as relaxed, likable and slightly agrarian; they were poorly-educated and unimaginative, but reasonable and pacifistic. I was surprised to learn, through their enthusiastic support of the war, that underneath they were conservative Republican war hawks. Further investigation showed that pretty much the entire state of Illinois is like that once you get outside of Chicago and college towns.

I have never read any of Noam Chomsky's books, but because he is widely considered to be one of the leading public intellectuals in the world, I've watched documentaries about him and seen him on TV. What interests me at the moment is that even though I'm not political and don't follow this stuff closely, I've generally come to the exact same conclusions that Chomsky reached decades ago on my own: governments and corporations manipulate the public in order for private entities to enrich themselves or secure their positions, and democracy is ignored in the process. Frequently, as a result, populations at home and abroad are criminally abused. In particular, Chomsky is highly critical of the actions of American presidents: "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged." The funny thing is that he is not a fanatic and has ample facts and examples to back up everything he says.

One of the reasons why I'm discussing this is that it highlights points I've made earlier about conventional wisdom and conformity. Many important issues are swept under the rug by the media, and as a consequence few people think about them or react. Chomsky also makes criticisms of intellectuals similar to ones I've made. I am intrigued by the fact that he used to appear in the NYRB but no longer does. I wouldn't be surprised if he has been banned there because he calls out intellectual charlatans when he sees them: that is what they are at the NYRB. I might add that Chomsky is another classic "smart Jewish guy from Brooklyn," though he actually grew up in Philadelphia.

With the limited exposure I've had to Chomsky, there are only a couple of criticisms that I can think of. First, he is not an effective communicator. He is not concise, and therefore has little chance of winning over most people. He writes book after book and can talk for hour after hour on whatever topic he chooses, always in a low, unmodulated voice. Second, he identifies himself as a libertarian socialist or anarchist, neither of which I consider to be an adequate substitute for the current system of capitalism and nominal democracy. What kind of government can be against authority?

I'm not interested enough to explore Chomsky's political goals in detail, but from what I know they do not seem plausible. I suspect that he is an idealist regarding human nature, which is where I part company with him. The impression I have is that he thinks free speech and public awareness can create an environment in which authorities will be forced to work for the public good rather than for special interests. If you have read my earlier posts, you will know that I am far less sanguine about human nature. That is why I advocate an authoritarian system of governance that is immune to attempts at manipulation by individuals or special interests. I don't think that, given the nature of our species, a functional democracy is possible. Individual freedoms must be impartially curtailed according to a rational program. My ideal political party might be called the Zookeepers. How popular do you think that would be?

Literary Preferences

One of conflicts that arise for me occasionally on the Internet is disagreement over the merits of a particular author. Everyone seems to have favorites, and I can never find a way of convincing them that their pet author is seriously lacking in some important quality. In my case, there are a few novelists whom I think are better than most, but even then I see their limitations. Sometimes the defects are related to the historical epoch and the state of the novel when they wrote. Thus, while Emily Brontë is a supremely talented novelist of the romantic period, she wrote before realism or modernism had become prominent, and therefore those elements are beyond her purview. One also might say that more recent novelists are trapped by the fact that they are writing after realism reached a peak in the nineteenth century, and if they are adventurous - and wish to sell their work - they may be reluctant to dredge up that style again.  Since realism is my favorite form, I have more or less given up on reading contemporary novels, which I usually find lacking.

Because I prefer realism, I place a lot of emphasis on how penetrating the author's gaze is and how he or she sizes up the state of affairs. Very few novelists of any style do this well. Middlemarch was written before modern psychology had entered popular fiction, but in other respects it is a nearly perfect synthesis of life in the English Midlands of the 1830's. I attribute much of the success of the novel to the fact that George Eliot knew her subject intimately from firsthand experience. Of course, she also had a fine mind and had been at the forefront of the English literary world as the editor of The Westminster Review.

I've had disagreements about Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady wasn't bad, though it seemed derivative, and I thought The Aspern Papers was pretty good, perhaps because it was based on real people who had interesting lives. Everything he wrote that I read is tedious to read, and The Wings of the Dove put me to sleep. There is a plodding, unobservant, internalized quality to the work of Henry James that has been recast by some literary critics as masterful. My guess is that James had an inherent inability to excel at realism because he never lived. If he was heterosexual, he never married; if he was gay, so far as we know, he never had homosexual relationships. A writer without life experiences is of little value to me. He came from an eccentric wealthy American family, and by my standards he never figured anything out.

Another writer who irritates me is Lorrie Moore. In this case what bothers me is the professionalization of literary fiction, and the underlying delusion bordering on dishonesty that pervades the field. To be sure, I think she exhibited a talent at the beginning of her career, but what followed is of greater interest sociologically than literarily. She received an M.F.A. degree from Cornell, got a job at the University of Wisconsin in 1984, and published the short story collection, Self-Help, comprised mostly of her M.F.A. work, in 1985. Self-Help, I think, contains one good short story, and the rest is at best precocious adolescent writing, but the book was enough to launch her career. She became a darling of M.F.A. students, some of whom refer to her as a "goddess."  Through the 1990's she used a formula in which the protagonist was an unhappy, introverted woman who had a relationship problem. The nature of the problem was never explored, and the stories usually ended on a down note, with the protagonist depressed and sometimes suicidal. Then, perhaps based in part on a real-life experience with her adoptive son, she wrote a popular story about child cancer that won her the O. Henry Award in 1998. On the whole I have found her short stories formulaic and unperceptive. Her novels are poorly constructed, badly edited and of little interest to serious readers. Her work is issued in the tiniest of trickles, and even then seems injudiciously released.

What irks me is that, although Lorrie Moore is ostensibly a failed writer, she is at the top of her game in the alternate reality of contemporary American literary fiction, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it. She is basking in adoration and doors are opening to her everywhere, when by all rights she should have given up and found another job in a different field. If I bring up any criticisms of her on the Internet, I am instantly rebuffed by people who are incapable of articulating why I should change my mind. I must be silenced immediately.

These and similar experiences incline me to refrain from discussing literature on the Internet. Unless you happen to be communicating with a like-minded person, discussion is invariably a waste of time. You can write it off as human nature, but on some topics I simply conclude that I have better taste than many others do. In the case of Lorrie Moore, it's obvious to me that her admirers are brainwashed literary fiction junkies or an undiscerning general readership that has been sold a bill of goods. You can't talk to people like that.

Conventional Wisdom

The painting at the masthead of the blog, in case you're unfamiliar with it, is The Parable of the Blind, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which references the Bible. As the title of the blog also suggests, I am skeptical of the beliefs that many people hold. This may have originated with a slightly contrarian attitude that I've had ever since childhood, but it is also related to facts such as my parents' different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities and my history of living in the U.K. and culturally diverse parts of the U.S. Because of these experiences I did not develop an identity in conjunction with the norms of any one place, and I tend to be an outside observer wherever I go.

Seeing the world in this way has both disadvantages and advantages. On the negative side, I don't fit in well anywhere, people can be suspicious of me without cause, and it is difficult for locals to understand me. Internally, I often experience a certain cognitive dissonance because of differences in the ways other people process information in relation to the way I do. On the positive side, I am unimpeded by local prejudices and habits, and, with a broader range of experience than many, I am rarely surprised or upset by turns of events. Above all, I am free to theorize about the world without the constraints of received wisdom.

Living my life this way, and now retired and facing no obligation to please employers or anyone, I increasingly find what might be called "consensus reality" quite odd. As I mentioned in an earlier post, everyone is essentially winging it. I think the way human society is organized is somewhat arbitrary now and could be quite different if people only thought differently. Something like this occurred to me after I graduated from college. For about a year I lived with my dysfunctional family - all five of us under one roof for the last time. My father was then making little money and consuming vast quantities of alcohol, but everyone else was working and our household income was more than adequate. We lived in a large Victorian rental house in a tree-filled neighborhood in Connecticut overlooking a river and not far from Long Island Sound. Although there were several forces in play that caused this state of affairs to end, with a slightly different model the situation could have become stable and pleasant. As a family we could have saved money, made daily living more desirable, dried out my father, etc. Of course, that never happened, and before long I moved away and my father was dead.

I mention this because it is often the case that people are trapped by the paradigms under which they operate. This has been examined by Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he coined the now famous phrase "paradigm shift." The change from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system is a prime example. I find that paradigms are adopted by all people, and they are usually defended and clung to even when there is evidence that better paradigms exist.

It is possible that we are in the very early stages of a broad paradigm shift now. Whatever anyone thinks of Piketty's book, Capital, it has triggered a great deal of discussion. There was already a lot of rumbling and discontent before Piketty came along, but he seems to some extent to have become a lightning rod. The financial crisis of 2008, the weak U.S. recovery, America's failure in world leadership, etc., along with Piketty's book, have helped elevate inequality as a major issue at the U.S. policy level. Of course, I am delighted, because people, though currently only a minority, are also beginning to raise the question of whether capitalism and democracy are suitable models for mankind. I don't think they are, as will also be evident from previous posts.

Often, when people think of democracy, they conjure images of Thomas Jefferson, the visionary who freed Americans from British tyranny. In fact, Jefferson's vision is now obsolete. He sought to free America from commercial oppression by England and religious oppression by churches. But he also relished living the life of a country squire supported by slaves, who, along with women, had no voting rights. While for his time he may have accurately assessed the dangers of extended voting privileges, he apparently believed that equality pertained only to white male landowners. The Founding Fathers cannot have thought deeply about inequality. Contemporary Americans, other than bigoted conservatives with a pro-slavery mentality, are deluding themselves if they think of the Constitution as a document that reflects timeless wisdom.

I consider capitalism even more insidious than democracy, because it has a greater effect on how people think about their lives and how in fact they end up living their lives. Especially in the U.S., personal worth is closely tied to both the status level of one's job and the associated level of pay. This is a hard road to travel for hunter-gatherers, myself included. It channels people's behavior according to the requirements of commercial ventures, often making liars out of them. These days, even what passes for art has become a lie. As Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman, "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."

Thomas Piketty III

I am now about halfway through Capital, and, though economics is hard to get excited about (or read at all), I have to applaud Piketty for, at a minimum, opening the economic dialogue far more effectively than any American economist has been able to for at least thirty years. Conservative economists are lining up to take potshots at him, but, historically speaking, they've already lost the battle in that they have been forced to address his arguments: without him they would have been left to restate their distorted version of reality ad nauseum.

Since at least one of my readers is literary, today I'll write about Balzac. As it happens, I've read Le Pere Goriot, which Piketty uses extensively to make his point about economic life in developed countries during the early nineteenth century. I don't consider Balzac to be one of the greatest writers, because there is a comic book quality to many of his characters. This was particularly apparent in La Cousine Bette, but I didn't notice it as much in Le Pere Goriot. As a reader who enjoys realism, Le Pere Goriot is one of my favorites by Balzac. I should also mention that Balzac clearly was a major influence on Dostoevsky, who was similarly long-winded but is reasonably credited with introducing the inner life of characters to novels.

Piketty describes in detail the plot of Le Pere Goriot in order to show how becoming wealthy was far easier through marriage or inheritance than through hard work. The criminal Vautrin explains to the young Rastignac that he would be more successful at obtaining a good life by marrying into wealth than by becoming a lawyer and working diligently for many years:
By the age of thirty, you will be a judge making 1,200 francs a year, if you haven't yet tossed away your robes. When you reach forty, you will marry a miller's daughter with an income of around 6,000 livres. Thank you very much. If you're lucky enough to find a patron, you will become a royal prosecutor at thirty, with compensation of a thousand ecus [5,000 francs], and you will marry the mayor's daughter. If you're willing to do a little political dirty work, you will be a prosecutor-general by the time you're forty....It is my privilege to point out to you, however, that there are only twenty prosecutors-general in France, while 20,000 of you aspire to the position, and among them are a few clowns who would sell their families to move up a rung. If this profession disgusts you, consider another. Would Baron de Rastignac like to be a lawyer? Very well then! You will need to suffer ten years of misery, spend a thousand francs a month, acquire a library and an office, frequent society, kiss the hem of a clerk to get cases, and lick the courthouse floor with your tongue. If the profession led anywhere, I wouldn't advise you against it. But can you name five lawyers in Paris who earn more than 50,000 francs a year at age fifty?

Vautrin then goes on to suggest that Rastignac marry into money in order to obtain an income of 50,000 francs at age twenty. He has a candidate lined up and will assist Rastignac by killing her brother in order to expedite her inheritance.

Although the point of Piketty's reference is to make his ideas intelligible in a non-technical way, I find Vautrin's calculations interesting in their own right. His schemes are hardly any different from those made by people everywhere, if only more extreme, but they are rarely discussed with such candor. Literature like this has given rise to a prejudice within English-speaking countries suggesting that the French are morally bankrupt. However, I see the same phenomenon in America, with the thoughts hidden, sometimes by self-delusion. Thus, American businessmen crave vast wealth and rationalize their behavior by thinking that they are "job creators" or that they are "creating value" or that they are engaging in the "creative destruction" of inefficient companies. Or they are reinforcing America's economic and military might in order to withstand the evils of terrorism, communism, totalitarianism or whatever. One of the most bizarre aspects of American ideology has been its convoluted linkage of Christian values to the virtues of the wealthy. In my view, today's ruling class contains a hidden element of Vautrin, and many wealthy people in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere are sociopaths in disguise.

Literature is not a Profession

In a review of The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession, by Richard Salmon, Rosemary Ashton writes in The Times Literary Supplement, "Literature was once the pursuit of rich amateurs, writers with aristocratic patrons, and scurrilous penny-a-liners scraping a living in 'Grub Street'. How did that situation change, as experts generally agree it did, in the early-to-mid nineteenth century?" Thomas Carlyle hoped to provide financial assistance to struggling writers comparable to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns, and he suggested an "Organization of the Literary Guild" similar to medieval craft guilds. Taking Carlyle to heart, Charles Dickens formed one with Bulwer Lytton in 1851. Their "Guild of Literature and Art" built retirement homes for literary people in 1865, but the homes were not well-received, and the Guild disbanded in 1897.

To a certain extent, the ambiguity surrounding the literary profession hasn't changed much since Carlyle's lectures of 1840. Many of today's journalists are reminiscent of Grub Street writers, paid by the article. The authors of bestsellers operate more like independent businesses than members of a guild. What is new is literature as an academic subject, along with writing programs and writers' workshops. As far as I am able to tell, these recent developments have done little to improve the quality of writing or the lot of good writers.

In the nineteenth century, not many people wrote for a living or wanted to. That would have made sifting through budding writers far easier than it is today.  Now, every year millions of students take courses in literature and creative writing, and regardless of their talent many of them come to define themselves as writers, if only because the creation of literature is seen as high-status work. Increasingly, universities have become degree mills, not unlike manufacturing plants, but selling diplomas instead of cars. It is difficult to imagine Thomas Carlyle or Charles Dickens condoning the writing produced by the students in M.F.A. programs and writers' workshops. What they referred to as literature has largely been co-opted by universities and publishers.

In my view, though there is usually good reason to transform practical vocations such as medicine, law and engineering into professions, because standardization and competency levels improve them, the same cannot be said of the arts. Thus, in the case of writing, the public is force-fed whatever the writing programs and literary publishers put forward, even when there is a blatant conflict of interest. The income of writing programs and publishers depends on the success of their authors. This partially explains why literary fiction has become a niche product that is of little appeal to most readers.

Although in theory I would want to support a talented writer like Rousseau, I doubt that he could have written as well as he did if he had arrived at being a writer by means of a comfortable education followed by formal university certification of his writing skills. In a capitalist economy no less than in a communist economy, the arts, with few exceptions, don't lend themselves to professionalization.

The Singularity

I'm about a third of the way through Capital and will eventually make at least one more post on it. Today I'll write about the singularity.

In earlier posts I suggested that government could be automated and that capitalism could be brought to an end if the right technology existed and were put into effect. This view generally fits within a gradualist framework under which new technology becomes incorporated into our lives without any major shocks, setbacks or unexpected turns of events. Alternatively, there are scenarios in which technological developments could suddenly cause radical shifts either for better or for worse.

The singularity, if you haven't heard of it, is the theoretical moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, with unpredictable effects that could change Homo sapiens forever. Some proponents, such as inventor Ray Kurzweil, take this seriously and are planning their lives accordingly. Kurzweil is hoping to remain healthy and live as long as possible in order to benefit from coming technology that will make him immortal. Some experts think that Kurzweil is unrealistic regarding the biology of human longevity and the capabilities of technology. Others, such as physicist Max Tegmark, are more cautious regarding the singularity. His approach is that we don't know for certain that it will occur or what would happen if it did. Tegmark suggests that we discuss it ahead of time rather than wait and see.

I am not well-informed on artificial intelligence or biology, but I think a singularity is likely to occur, though I'm not sure when or what the results will be. Since I don't believe that there is anything special about human intelligence, I see no reason why supercomputers couldn't dramatically outthink humans in the not-too-distant future. They are already better at chess and Jeopardy. Certainly computers could have much larger memories and far greater processing capabilities than any human. Once they can be taught to learn, which does not seem to be an insurmountable task and already goes on at a rudimentary level, why couldn't they outperform us?

Among the positive potential outcomes, humans might live much as they do now, but without having to work, and with increased longevity. There could be a benign merger between humans and machines that would create a new species without eradicating what we now think of as human nature. Conflicts might be resolved peaceably, the ecosystem could be managed better, and in theory everyone could be happy.

One negative outcome would be an uncontrolled rampage by supercomputers that don't act in the interests of humans. This has been a subject of science fiction for many years. It could probably be prevented but would require advance planning.

Another negative outcome, and perhaps more likely, would be the use of supercomputers to benefit one group of people but not others. Under this scenario, a small group of wealthy technocrats might rule the world, neutralizing or eliminating their opponents and accelerating their own evolution while excluding others. Or this could occur at a national level, in which case the supercomputers would simply represent the most advanced weaponry.

At present this may all appear too speculative, but I think one of these outcomes is possible. Keep in mind that the type of supercomputer I'm talking about here might be capable of making improved versions of itself, anticipating all human behavior, developing new energy sources that we have been unable to, designing and making weapons beyond our comprehension and obviating the need for human labor of any description. It might even write better novels, short stories, poems - and blog posts - than humans.

Films

Since our main form of entertainment during the evening is watching films on Netflix, I thought I'd say something about films for a change. Actually, I got burnt out on them, because when you watch several per week they become a blur. The fact is that in any given year there are only going to be a couple of new films that I consider to be of any value beyond simple entertainment. The better films become less memorable when crammed in between others. In some ways films were more effective when you only went out to see them a few times a year.

Two that we watched recently were Nebraska and August: Osage County. You could probably classify both of them as black comedies, though they are not as black or as imaginative as Dr. Strangelove, my all-time favorite. Nebraska is about an old drunk living in Montana who, based on junk mail he received, thinks he won a sweepstakes for a million dollars and wants to go to Lincoln, Nebraska to pick it up. To a casual observer, this would be the less interesting of the two films, because the characters are ordinary and unglamorous. However, the characters and dialogue, plain as they are, are perfect, and this may well be Bruce Dern's best acting performance ever. August: Osage County started as a play and is about a dysfunctional family living in Oklahoma. The mother is a pill addict with oral cancer and the father is an alcoholic poet. Things end badly. It reminded me a little of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which I found to have more interesting dialogue. The family dynamics are explored, but predictably, as you would expect in an American theatrical production. The only revelation of any value that I noticed was that the women were stronger than the men: Meryl Streep, in one of her better performances as the mother, and Julia Roberts, as the eldest daughter, in perhaps her best performance ever. The alcoholic father is played by Sam Shepard, whose brief appearance is good, but I have to say that his involvement in any production is a warning sign to me because of his relentless pursuit of false Americana.

Nebraska is more faithful to the way Americans think and feel, and it captures how they live in the Great Plains and Midwest without satirizing or sentimentalizing them. There is little of the distortion and condescension and none of the surrealism that one might expect in a Coen brothers film. The screenplay is unadorned and straightforward, but uncannily precise. The same cannot be said of August: Osage County, in which everything feels derivative. Overall, I didn't find that the characters added up. They were an intelligent group of people who for unknown reasons elected to live in a cultural backwater with high temperatures and no air conditioning. The men were weak and the women were strong: so what. I think the constraints that are placed on American theatrical productions significantly narrow the scope of their subject matter. I sense a formula here: family dysfunction is in; snarky dialogue is in; failed poet is in; down-home country living is out. August: Osage County, in sum, is a product contrived to suit the tastes of well-heeled urban American theatergoers.

Thomas Piketty II

I'm slowly working my way through Capital and will make a few more comments. What has interested me the most so far is Piketty's account of the economic conditions under which people have lived over very long historical periods. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, wealth was based mainly on land ownership, there was little economic growth or inflation, and people lived to about age forty. Since 1700, the value of agricultural land has plummeted as a percent of national income. Foreign capital owned by Britain and France peaked around 1900 and crashed starting around 1914. Domestic capital, i.e. financial assets and the value of businesses, declined up to World War I but was offset by increases in foreign capital. Then the two World Wars devastated the world economy. From that time onward, foreign capital and agricultural land have been insignificant in value, domestic capital (as a percent of national income) has returned to 1700's levels, and housing has skyrocketed to become the largest component of national wealth in Britain and France.

Piketty's analysis is highly detailed, and the above is just one small part of it. He seems to be moving in a direction that will show that the Industrial Revolution was a one-time event that is unlikely to be replicated, and that a peak of wealth inequality occurred just before World War I, corresponding with the Belle Epoque in France. This seems like an appropriate benchmark to me, because I have long seen that period in France as a flowering in the arts that could never have occurred without phenomenal wealth. Somehow the Eiffel Tower, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, modern art, Proust, Debussy and countless other artists emerged during that period. Reading Proust, it is obvious that his contemporaries were swimming in money.

One of Piketty's theses is that wealth would have continued to accumulate at the top, and inequality would have continued to increase were it not for the World Wars, which inadvertently reduced wealth inequality. He thinks that, even though the world economy has been significantly restructured since the wars, wealth has resumed accumulation at the top, returning us to a state of increasing inequality. Furthermore, although he has not gone into detail as far as I have read, most of the economic growth since the wars was a natural rebound that occurred regardless of economic strategy. Europe, for example, recovered with strong central governments, while the U.S. thinks it recovered by emphasizing entrepreneurial activity in the private sector. Thus, Piketty seems to have an underlying theme saying that America's free enterprise dogma has little support in economic history. I believe that later in the book his recommendation will be to address this problem by instituting higher taxation on wealth.

I find it refreshing to read Piketty, because he is not a one-dimensional economist. For example, he cites the novels of Balzac and Jane Austen to show how differently people thought about meeting their living expenses in the early 19th century compared to now. To some extent, the variation in income from land was negligible and inflation did not exist, so it was much simpler to judge a person's financial status in those days. The economic structure of society was far more stable. Piketty seems to have a breadth of knowledge that makes most American economists look like narrow academic specialists and a far cry from genuine public intellectuals. Over the last few years I have come to dislike Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for their inability to create an economic narrative that would effectively demolish the absurd and self-serving narrative that has been successfully advanced by American conservatives for more than thirty years.

Thomas Piketty I

For many years I've had an interest in investing, which sprang from my desire to retire. I would have retired at age 30 if I could have afforded to, because I never much liked any of my jobs or considered them a meaningful use of time. Investing is related to economics, which did not interest me until recently. As an undergraduate, it seemed to me that the people who studied economics were conventional, unimaginative and materialistic: they were conforming to their parents' expectations and only wanted high-paying jobs when they graduated.

My academic path provided little intersection with economics majors. By nature I'm an empiricist, but I am also interested in aesthetic matters, which meant that I was not a perfect fit for either science or the arts. I ended up majoring in Philosophy, which in many ways is a compromise field that lies somewhere between art and science. Looking back, Philosophy was not a particularly good fit for me either. Part of that may have had to do with the fact that the course offerings at my college were limited. The relevant department was the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and several of its members had received divinity degrees prior to receiving their PhDs. The coverage of continental philosophy in the department was weakened when the one professor specializing in it left for an administrative position elsewhere. In hindsight, I was in a state of ignorance and denial as to my fit with Philosophy. I was exposed to British and American analytic philosophy, which I didn't enjoy much, find relevant to anything or consider to be of much intellectual importance. These days, philosophy departments are fighting to avoid being labeled obsolete, and, given their syllabuses, I'm not surprised.

When I later entered business school (an even worse fit, though I liked some of the courses and completed an MBA), I took two semesters of economics. It was hard for me to relate to the subject, because from the start I noticed that economists made assumptions about the world and proceeded from there even though the assumptions seemed highly dubious. My attention to economics increased in 2004, when I began to manage my mother's assets because of her Alzheimer's disease. For investors, some knowledge of market cycles has become crucial in recent years. My interest heightened after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the Great Recession. I followed Paul Krugman closely and read This Time is Different, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which is the first major empirical study of financial crises. The fact that This Time is Different was published in 2009, after the crisis had begun, and that no comparable studies had ever been made, confirmed to me that economics as practiced in academia has an agenda that is largely disconnected from reality in a manner not entirely unlike that of academic philosophy.

Over the last few years, there has been a constant battle between liberals and conservatives over the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and the appropriate governmental response. I have found this disappointing, because the economists involved rarely cite any convincing studies, and the two camps go on their merry ways without addressing any fundamental issues. Finally we have a significant study, which has just been published in the U.S. It is Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty. I believe this book has the potential to change the debate for the better by infusing it with empirical data and a theoretical approach that exceeds the limited scope of American economics.

Piketty is a precocious French economist who completed his PhD at age 22 and then taught at M.I.T. However, he became frustrated with the way economics is studied in the U.S. and returned to France after two years:
To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.

The central thesis of Capital is that the rate of return from wealth usually surpasses the rate of return from labor, meaning that the rich usually become richer, gaining ground over the ordinary workers who make up most of the labor force. Simply put, investments provide a higher return than employees can obtain in the form of wages. We are seeing this today especially in the U.S., where the wealthy are becoming exceedingly wealthy and the middle class is just treading water. As obvious as this may be even to a casual observer, it is not a view accepted by many economists, policy makers or politicians. Piketty documents his claims with carefully compiled data covering longer historical periods than have been studied by other economists.

At a glance, this may not sound particularly exciting, but I think it may prove to be the most important publication on policy issues in several decades. Moreover, it seems doubtful that conservatives will be able to quickly whip up a counter-study, since this one took many years to complete and is unlikely to contain serious flaws. My hope, then, is that it will have a positive influence on political discussion and put to rest some of the myths that have been lingering from the Reagan-Thatcher era.

I've only just started to read the book and will probably have more to say about it later.

Frankenstein

I finally got around to finishing Frankenstein and can't recommend it. The main interest for me was in comparing the novel to the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff, which is how everyone thinks of the Frankenstein monster. The plot is changed dramatically in the film, making the original monster unrecognizable. In the film, the monster is accidentally given a criminal's brain, but not so in the novel. Rather, the monster is curious and intelligent and learns to speak articulately, imploring Frankenstein to help him:
I am thy creature, and I will even be mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather a fallen angel, whom thy drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.

In the novel, Frankenstein makes the monster for no particular reason and immediately abandons it, taking no responsibility for its existence. The first victim of the monster is killed accidentally, Frankenstein continues to rebuff it, and it then becomes vengeful because of Frankenstein's intransigence. I suppose one might argue that this is a parable about man's abandonment by God, but that seems like a stretch. Alternatively, there may be a conscious or unconscious allusion to Mary's half-sister, Fanny, who was abandoned by her American father, Gilbert Imlay. Fanny committed suicide just as Frankenstein was being written. At the end of the novel, the monster plans his suicide. Fanny's suicide note says:
I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as.... 

Mary Shelley was under a lot of pressure to write. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an important figure of the Enlightenment, her father, William Godwin, was a well-known journalist and thinker, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was one of the best poets ever in the English language. From Mary Shelley's account, this novel was never intended to be great literature, and it should not be treated as such.

Reality is Stranger than Fiction

I'm back from my trip, which involved 2700 miles of driving on the Southern route through western Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana to southern Missouri, and would like to record some of my thoughts. There was snow in the yard here when I left, while the redbuds were blooming down south. The lakes in Vermont were still ice-covered when I returned.

One of my interests has always been to know and understand the people and dynamics of families over multiple generations. This is a far more challenging subject than you might expect, because not only do most people not discuss their families in depth, but they also don't know or understand their families as well as you might like. However, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, families have been going through dramatic changes, and I find them to be of greater interest in understanding changing human lives than the individuals of which they are comprised. Without actually making a study of it in which you go out and formally interview people, the only information you get is likely to accrue slowly over many years as you come to learn about your own family and at most the families of a handful of friends.

I have known Greg since college. At the time we weren't friends at all, because he was so obviously dysfunctional. He didn't want to be there, but his parents had forced him to go, partly because they knew that he would need a college education and partly because that was where they had met. He didn't take studying seriously and became a hell-raiser in the dorm where he lived. He became known for his "hawker-catching" contests, in which someone would spit from high up in a stairwell and someone below would attempt to catch it in his mouth. Besides his rowdy behavior and unkempt appearance, he was born without a thumb on his left hand. Somehow, with a lot of pleading, he managed to graduate, and he soon after became a professional baby photographer.

Greg's talents gradually emerged. He got a state job in Missouri and, because of his innate talent at organization, he rose through the ranks and eventually was placed in charge of the state Medicaid program, which had the largest budget in the state. He went on to study at Harvard to enhance his skills. The same talent was demonstrated in his organization of events at his family's farm, where I came to know him better starting in 1977.

The farm is a tract of about 200 acres that was settled in the 1800's and at its peak included at least two houses, a barn and a schoolhouse. Greg's father's father was a mechanic at Coca-Cola in St. Louis and bought it many years ago. He used the property to hold large parties for the union drivers who delivered Coke. He built a dance floor and bused in people to the site. He also seems to have used the farm as a dumping site for various Coke refuse. The grounds have old trailers full of rusted Coke signs, pipes and all sorts of things. Over the years, the farm has been a family retreat for Greg's family. It is mostly overgrown with trees, and all but one building and two outhouses have collapsed.

Greg is the oldest of four children and has three sisters. He seems to be a throwback to his two grandfathers, who both kept shotguns at their bedsides. Greg's father chose to become bookish and took no interest in mechanical objects or hunting, which caused a large, permanent rift between himself and his father. Greg took up the slack by becoming his grandfather's student on all matters related to the farm. As a boy he learned how to do roof repairs and all kinds of maintenance chores. The oldest sister, Chris, is a tomboy in the extreme. She was deeply impressed by her early experiences at the farm and now loves to operate heavy equipment and take care of three horses. When the company that she worked for in Iowa was bought out and she was fired, she moved to the farm and married her Iowa boyfriend, who sells funeral insurance. Chris is a lot like Greg, only she is louder and rowdier and a fanatic about everything she does. In private, Greg bemoans her lack of actual mechanical skill. The next sister, Andrea, also has many masculine characteristics, but, unlike Chris, is gay. Despite being loud and enthusiastic at times, Andrea has a less obvious sensitive side. Her main vocation is that of a visual artist, and she supports herself by delivering mail as a postal worker. Her recent partner, who is ten years older, was diagnosed with dementia and now lives in assisted living. The youngest sister, Hilary, by all appearances comes from a different family. She lives in Philadelphia, takes no interest in the farm and always looks and acts polished. Comparatively speaking, she is an East Coast snob, and her siblings are country bumpkins who just fell off a turnip truck.

There are many paradoxes to be found in Greg's family. Chief among them is their opposing political views. Greg is a solid Democrat and once even considered running for office. Chris and her husband are solid Republicans, and for many years Chris avoided going to the farm when Greg and his friends were there because she perceived them to be too leftist. Andrea, whom you might think of as an obvious Democrat, because she is a gay artist, voted for George W. Bush. Apparently she liked his decisiveness. As for Hilary, I don't know.

Although I'm not at all like Greg or anyone in his family, I do find them interesting. I think that their family provides both a broad panorama of American life and a microscopic look into some of its oddities. In a rather oblique way, this relates to my interest, or lack thereof, in fiction. I think many writers try unsuccessfully to capture the nature of the American experience, and they usually fail miserably. A few years ago, following a recommendation, I read Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, which had won several awards. I found nothing compelling about the novel and am surprised that it was popular. It is about a dull minister in Iowa and life in his dull town. Presumably the protagonist's theological musings add a depth for readers who care about such things, but I don't find them to be of any value except as an exercise in seeing how confused people go about solving problems without understanding anything. In contrast, Greg's family story could easily be transformed into a good novel. Fiction writing has the advantage of allowing the author to fill in the gaps of unknowns by making things up that are plausible yet suit the author's whims. I am struck by how bad American fiction must be if there are so few authors writing compelling stories at least as interesting as Greg's family.

The Brutality of Life

I recently watched Life in the Undergrowth with David Attenborough (excerpt here) and Darwin in the City with Carl Zimmer here. The former, as always with Attenborough, contains beautiful cinematography and interesting information that is spooned out slowly. The latter provides an articulate and stunning presentation of how we directly cause real-time evolution in the animals and plants around us. I found Zimmer more striking, because he shows that Darwinism refers not to remote processes that emerge over long periods, but to nearby processes that are occurring right now. For this post, however, I will concentrate on Attenborough's presentation of the social insects, because it is germane to many aspects of human behavior that interest me.

The social insects, which include wasps, bees, termites and ants, at one time operated as independent individuals. By chance, some adult females began to form collective nests, and this provided an evolutionary advantage which allowed them to leave the nest in search of food while others remained at the nest to fend off intruders that endangered their offspring. This is the basic structure of eusocial behavior: cooperation makes life easier for everyone. Homo sapiens arrived at eusocial behavior through an entirely different path, but the same logic is there, and it can be instructive to examine social insects in search of human parallels.

One thing that I learned is that there are tensions within the nests of social insects, and life there isn't always harmonious. The example I liked best was that of the bumblebee. Every spring, a fertilized queen sets out to start a nest. She finds a site, often a hole in the ground, and begins to lay eggs. The queen emits chemicals that cause all of the eggs to become females that do not reach maturity. The nest then becomes a factory where the queen continues to lay eggs and her daughters tend to the eggs, find food and defend the nest. Toward the end of summer, the queen stops emitting the chemicals that control the development of her eggs and offspring. Some of her daughters mature to adulthood, and some males are born. The daughters start to lay their own eggs. Initially, the queen attempts to eat all of the eggs laid by her daughters, but eventually, her mature daughters attack and kill her. The mature daughters that have been fertilized leave the nest seeking shelter for the winter. In the spring, the process starts again.

In some of my posts I've discussed dysfunctional families. My family was dysfunctional while I was growing up, but I think it may have followed a pattern that isn't uncommon. My mother makes a good case study, because she was very much an instinctive and spontaneous person. Moreover, she was uprooted from her original family setting at age 21 when she moved from Greece to England, and then again at age 31 when she moved from England to the U.S., so she did not have the continuous immersion in one culture that would make cultural explanations for her behavior more plausible. As mentioned earlier, she was on the whole a competent parent about until the time that her children reached puberty. From that point onward, she was of little help to any of us, and in fact was often spitefully competitive with my older sister. One might say that her attitude, at an instinctive level, was that she was ready for us to leave the nest and spontaneously lost her interest in child-rearing. As stated on a previous post, I was not close to her during my adulthood, and my sisters were often in conflict with her.

When you look at fathers from a eusocial perspective, their interest in raising their offspring can range anywhere from never existing at all to starting strong and declining or ending later. In the case of bumblebees and many insects, the only important role the father plays is in the fertilizing of the eggs. I think that you can say that human couples, when they are young, are generally obsessed with mating, and the dominant culture carefully prescribes acceptable conduct in that domain. Culture plays a decisive role in defining how strong instincts that could potentially disrupt society are to be expressed. However, once children reach adulthood, the relationships between parents and children are usually less critical biologically, and cultures often allow greater flexibility from that point onward. If the children are in fact capable of fending for themselves, depending on cultural expectations, a father may push them out of the door, support them through college, or expect them to start taking care of him. There may also be a genetic predisposition encouraging parents to assume the role of grandparents, but I think there is also cultural variation here. Perhaps there is a parallel between male social insects that have performed their function and die and dissolute fathers who take to drinking and die prematurely.

In the context of my blog ramblings, there are a couple of connections that I've made. First, many children feel betrayed by one or more of their parents because they behaved in a manner that did not optimize the children's outcomes or even worsened the outcomes through negligence of one kind or another. I am an advocate of forgiving parents in most cases, especially when the perceived deficiencies can be explained by ingrained biological processes over which we have limited control. Second, this relates to what I feel is the inadequacy of current literature that intentionally excludes advances in science. Fiction that explores human relationships only within the narrow literary framework that conceptually predates contemporary scientific understanding of our behavior is relegating itself to an antiquated form of mannerism. Some may argue that, as an art, literature has no responsibility to reflect scientific knowledge, but in my view, when there is an explosion of research that provides new insights, its omission tends to make literature artificial and pointless. We know more about ourselves than we did a hundred years ago, and pretending that we don't seems delusional to me.

Aesthetic Merit

One of the spheres of conflict that I run into on the Internet from time to time is the relative merit of an artist, usually in literature, and occasionally in painting. This occurred recently in a post on willful ignorance, in which the example was given of an actor who thought very little of Shakespeare and was dismissive of him as a playwright. The author of the article claimed that it was obvious that Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers in English, and that the actor was intentionally and defiantly ignorant on the subject. Some of the commenters, myself included, argued that, while Shakespeare is clearly one of the most important writers in English, and certainly he was highly skilled in what he wrote, one can dislike his work and make a case that other authors are better writers in some respect. I mentioned Flaubert, who, I believe, wrote a more skillful depiction of a person, Emma Bovary, than any characters that I know of in Shakespeare. In fact, some of Shakespeare's comedies are so ridiculous that I'd rather watch cartoons. This is not to say that Shakespeare wasn't a great writer. Rather, he must be looked at within the context of his time and place, and the media with which he had to work. There is nothing wrong with disliking Shakespeare as long as one can make a plausible case, which in fact isn't all that difficult.

Over the years, I've had arguments about Henry James, Proust and Lorrie Moore, in which their defenders behave as if it is received wisdom that their pet author is God incarnate. To be sure, there is something good to be found in each of these authors, but one must look further than conventional wisdom if one advocates their deification. It seems as if fanhood makes people blind to the limitations of their gods, which represent, to them, a belief system that reflects their own self-worth. So, if you make a case that Henry James was a long-winded buffoon who couldn't observe his way out of a paper bag, that Proust should have gone back to school and taken a course in concision, or that Lorrie Moore needs to be kidnapped and taken to an undisclosed location where she will be deprogrammed from her delusional fixation on failed relationships and the unhappiness of life, they are far more likely to demonize you than to give the matter any serious thought.

Perhaps it is easier for me than others to find fault with icons, because I myself have never been indoctrinated by academic instruction in the arts. Moreover, there has been nothing in my experience to prevent me from thinking that the U.S. throughout most of its existence has been a cultural backwater compared to Europe, and that it is still catching up. I have questioned much of the wisdom that is fed to American students all the way through college. From a sociological standpoint, it is easy to see how conformity is molding people's thoughts.

For these reasons among others, I have become disappointed with contemporary American literature and its criticism. Literary fiction seems to be published only within the parameters set by universities and publishers. More disturbingly, the parameters for its criticism are controlled by the same universities and publishers, creating a closed loop that excludes free speech. The literary community resembles an oligopoly that is only tangentially related to art, and in which everyone is on the payroll except the consumer.

Ultimately, aesthetic merit depends on irreducible subjective judgments, but that doesn't mean that discussion is unnecessary. I get the sense that the educational and corporate systems in the U.S. have improperly relegated the arts to a private positive experience that lies beyond the purview of critical scrutiny. However, when open criticism is excluded, you are left with a system that can only be called thought control.