Tuesday, January 01, 2002

Remora


We admire The Economist. Hell, we've written for The Economist. And since we venerate the great media ancestors - the Smart Set Crowd, the Blackwoods writers, Ford Maddox Ford's transition, Dwight McDonald's politics -- we of course find the fullblooded Tory history of the Economist cause for awe and bending of the knees. It is in the pantheon.

But even so... in the Christmas edition's article about the Bridget Jones economy -- the political economy of affluent singlehood that is shaping urban culture -- we are bugged. Bugged by the writing.

Now, Limited Inc isn't so snobbish as to think that trendspotting articles are automatically idiotic. And this one is about a genuine trend. A NY Magazine article of recent memory, the one about single Japanese girls with beaucoup disposable income in Tokyo, also spotted this trend, which means that it is a trend -- the relationship between trend and spotting being one of those performative truths.

Well, we expect gravitas and wit in the Economist. Unfortunately, what we get in this article are the worst vices of the trend article. We get the bogus analogy. We get the uncontextualized, and thus dubious, statistics. We get the exaggeration. We get the feeling that the trend has probably secretly peaked behind the writer's back -- for writing so clueless implies a writer on whom no trend makes an impression until it is pointed out to him by an editor. And as we know, editors live in sealed glass capsules, meaning that when the editor becomes conscious of a trend, it has long passed. Here are two grafs in the middle of the article. This kind of writing is surely making the ghost of Walter Bagehot think seriously about visiting Bill Emmott, the current editor, for one of those Marley to Scrooge talks spirits so love during the holiday season:



"What explains the trend? The key seems to be the higher education of women. In most rich countries, more women than men now go to university; in particular, women make up more than half the students taking professional qualifications in subjects such as law and medicine. As new job opportunities unfold, they often earn as much as similarly qualified men. They find work is fun and it pays well, so they put off marriage. Husbands and babies can wait. �Today, people know that they are going to be married till they are 80. So 40 is the new 30,� says Marcus Matthews of Kaagan Research, a market-research firm.

[Stop the presses for a second, gentle reader. Let's think about this. Is 40 the new 30, or the new 271/2? And notice that Marcus Matthews is ignoring that pesky thing, divorce. Which means that most people don't know that they are going to be married until they are 80. Or at least they don't know if they are going to be married to the people they are marrying. This makes, hmm, a lot of difference. Then there is the "they find work is fun and it pays well..." Is this Ally McBeal, or is it real life? In real life, fun is a word which can cover things like, work 12 hours a day, stay in traffic 2 hours a day, no time for anything else a day. So that what explains the trend might be -- the compensation from all that sensual deprivation. Marcuse, not Faith Popcorn, is the reference here. And do new job opportunities "unfold?" Unfold is such a nice, organic word -- here's the tree of job opportunities, and here's the unfolding jobs, in 'fun' professions, such as law and medicine. And speaking of "fun" - there's another little statistic which has popped up more and more in the literature about medicine: the number of doctors who are dissatisfied with doctoring. The question, would you become a doctor if you had it to do over again has increasingly been answered in the negative by new doctors, who, Lacoon-like among the HMO red tape, might not be aware they are in a "fun" profession]


"Up to now, that has been a strategy that makes sense. More people marry today�at least once�than ever before. Thus fewer than 7% of Americans in their early 50s have never married. Compare that, says Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, with America in the late 19th century. Then, the marriage market was far less efficient and 20-25% of women never married. The result, he says, has been a sort of democratisation of marriage and motherhood, where almost all women marry and most have at least one child."

Can one say enough about the jargon in this graf, or shall we maintain an embarrassed silence? The democratisation of marriage? Democratisation has automatically come to mean: "more people do." If more people eat chocolate sundaes, it is the democratisation of chocolate sundaes. If do it yourself enema boxes are mass marketed in Walmarts, it means the democratisation of enemas. Democratisation, here, can't debauch itself any more. Jargon, like counterfeit money, finds its own value on the market -- under its own guise, it is equivalent to zero.

As for (shudder) "the marriage market was far less efficient..."
Well:
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
As for our lyres, we hung them up �
on the willows that grow in that land.

For there our captors asked for a song,
our tormentors called for mirth: �
'Sing us one of the songs of Zion.'
How shall we sing the Lord's song �
in a strange land?

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