zombies and totems in economics

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is one of John Quiggins Zombie ideas – intellectually discredited, yet still alive. And yet, this doesn’t mean that Quiggins is right about EMH, because he deals with it as though it were a model developed in a laboratory, which is the way economists regularly see themselves. I would state the case much differently. EMH – the idea that at any moment, the market collectively embodies more information than any one subject within it could have, and so is ultimately unriggable by any one subject – or, as it is more commonly put, the market can’t be beat -  is actually the belated justification for the speculative structure that sprang up in the financial community after the progressive wave at the beginning of the twentieth century ebbed. The ebbing of that wave was too bad. Roosevelt Republicans - partly just to bedevil Taft, but partly driven by the brain trust that had helped design the income tax and the laws governing interstate commerce - put up an agenda that would have: centralized the incorporation of interstate companies with the Commerce Department (still a vital reform - one of the great drivers of regulatory laxity in the U.S. is the ability of corporations to, in effect, choose their jurisdictions and rules, thus carving out practical 'offshore' havens in the U.S. (notoriously, Delaware); and put strict controls on stock trading by making it impossible to water stocks (a phrase that has now become antique, since it describes our entire speculative structure nowadays), again giving the Commerce department the power to order companies to reduce exaggerated market valuation - in essence, the market valuation should be at parity with the Commerce Department determined real value of the company. The best account that I know of is given in Lawrence Mitchel's The Speculation Economy, in the chapter entitled Transcendental Value. Modern speculation began as a commercial practice, not an economic model - and when models were finally found to 'explain' and justify it, it was already established, on the foundation of the defeat of the progressive movement. As is mostly the case, an economic model is not a prescription for how to do things, but an adjunct to the struggle between practices already in play. Whether you accept EMH or behaviorialist accounts, it doesn't really matter. The model is an epiphenomena. If economists had existed in pharaonic times, they would surely have produced efficiency and behavioral models of pyramid building. Putting to death EMH is like striking the totem resemblence of an animal instead of the animal itself. It doesn't really matter until you buy into the system of magic of which it is a part

Liberated by robots

At the beginning of capitalism stands the beast – as in all social orders – and at its limit stands the robot. The robot is one of those fascinating border objects. Generated within capitalism as a commodity to produce commodities, the robot – even more than the proletariat – digs the grave of capitalism, to use Marx’s phrase. 

Paul Krugman is quoted  in a recent New Yorker piece on our dark robotic future  as saying: “Smart machines may make higher G.D.P. possible, but also reduce the demand for people—including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.”  Which gives us a definition of us mortals that transcends biology and mechanics – it is ownership that lords it over things and people. Robots can’t own, in this scenario – just as the computers that are now programmed to plunge into the market and out of the market in microseconds, seeking micro-point differences on which to make profits, generously allow their owners to take all the spoils. And yet, in a society of robot provided abundance,  the justification for owning is – behind the backs of the owners = practically abolished. Each dollar we hold is, in part, staked on scarcity. And scarcity is the mother of capital  – out of its belly capital bursts, greedy little ringer, to make the system of exchange work. But the system of exchange, as economists always forget, is not the purpose of the economic system. That purpose is to serve the  needs of humanity. With the ultimate robot world, we can cast the system behind us, slough it off, bury it. The system would finally have generated its own obsolescence. Economists, however, work for the man, and the obsolescence of the man is outside of their program. Better a nation of slaves than a nation without the wealthy.

Gary Marcus, the man who wrote the New Yorker piece, mentions Oscar Wilde, butnot Karl Marx. However, both Wilde and Marx had their eyes on the prize, as far as what the economy was ultimately for. Marcus even daringly explores an aspect of automation that is rarely mentioned: substituting the computer for white collar jobs.

Secretaries have been replaced by word processors and accountants by QuickBooks. As John Markoff explained last year, in an article entitled “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” blue-collar and white-collar jobs are both threatened. Even new-fangled information-economy jobs like I.T. departments are now endangered by systems like Amazon’s back-end A.W.S. infrastructure, which provides one-stop cloud-based solutions where a team of on-site computer wizards were once needed. With advances in both hardware and software, the time between the invention of a job and its automated replacement is getting shorter.

Marcus doesn’t mention management. Upper management. CEO level management. But of course those jobs are also easy to routinize and automate. And yet, the literature on this is sparse. The reason, of course, is the strong streak of servility in our current American culture that dare not dream of knocking the boss off his pedestal. The boss, after all, is a genius!

Everyman's Marx on the Internet Archive

I've put the Everyman's Marx book up at this link on the Internet Archive.
And I've put an account of this fiasco up at Amazon.com as a review of this always forthcoming and never to be published book. Hey, I have to have my fun.

A guide to self-scabbing

After I put up my post about being ripped off by that feeble excuse for a press, Mark Batty Publishers, I received the following comment:

“New to publishing? Sounds like it. The net is filled with thousands of books that will never see the light of day. Sales forces force that shit for pre-ordering.

Take them to small claims if you're really upset.

Otherwise you just sound like a bitchy child.”

Now, my response to this  was the common-sensical remark, "stuff it up your asshole, fool". Sufficient to the provocation was the jibe thereof.  But I further thought that this comment deserved more philosophical reflection, as it was a useful window into the world we live in - the world oof self-scabbing. 

First, however, like good old Marxists, we have to place the phenomenon of self-scabbing in the larger system under which we all live and rot. I’d define the current world system by the fact that it is dominated in many ways by the class that owns the means of circulation.  At one time, the means of circulation – roughly defined as the instruments of speculation and marketing – was ultimately subordinate to the means of production, but this relationship has long been reversed in the developed economies.

This change of regime brings with it, of course, a whole mental technology – a program of norms, so to speak. I would outline it in broad, cartoonists strokes as follows: we can divide the mental class system in the U.S.A right now approximately as follows: we have a gated community class, a class of scabs and self-scabbers, and a large class of the lost. Lost is close to “loser” – but the lost aren’t all failures in the system. Far from it. They are, however, lost – that is, they feel opposed to the order of things in their bones, but helpless to either comprehend how this system was constructed or how to take it down without losing everything. Thus, the lost stretch from those who are living in such poverty that they are going down into the psychodynamic pits to those who live in an incredible affluence and can’t stand not only their own lives, but the entire cultural shift around them. The lost can be far right or far left – but this merely describes the language in which they express a more primary lostness.

The scabs and self-scabbers, on the other hand, are not lost. They are, however, exhausted. They are exhausted with their daily round of eating shit. My commenter is a typical member of this band. To eat the shit of the bosses, one has to begin by an act of faith and surrender. That act we can call, roughly, eating your own shit. There are more polite phrases for it, of course. I recently read a completely dreadful article in the New Yorker about “Twenty somethings” by Nathan Heller in which eating your own shit is called “keeping up with your cohort.” Heller’s article reads like some strange manifesto gone wrong – a manifesto calling for more conformism and better C.V. writing. It is a bizarre document, but it contains plums for those who can spot em, such as the neutral quotes from various tomes of pop sociology on Heller’s supposed generation that are about keeping up with your “peers”.

Keeping up with your peers.  I would like to create a voice arch enough, mocking enough, sarcastic enough, to simply repeat that phrase until it self-destructs from all the inner rottenness it contains. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/01/14/130114crat_atlarge_heller

However, I think Heller’s article is a product of the self-scabber culture, which it is now my duty and pleasure to define for you on this very stage, for the first time!

According to Smith’s Household Words, “scab” began to branch off (or should one say peel off?) from its mainstream English use to refer to the crust on the skin of clotted blood over a scratch, wound or infection in the sixteenth century. But it didn’t acquire the meaning of strikebreaker until the 19^th century. In 1806, the word turns up in a court case involving striking shoemakers with its current meaning.

The scab was driven by poverty and those intra-labor class exclusions that turned the milk and honey of solidarity rancid – the usual racial, ethnic, religious hate. But in the world created by the dominance of circulation, it is not enough that the strikebreaker perform a service for a lower price to the company – now he or she must absorb a sort of strikebreaker’s credo about the self. In essence, the self-scab  breaks the self’s perpetual strike – its utopian demand for depth, broadness, fairness, the ability of each to develop to the full the capacity for unhappiness and happiness – by inserting a boss’s self – by becoming a little delegate from the gated community, policing the range of the permissible, with one eye on the credit record and the other on the C.V.

The self-scabbing ethos requires that any full and free kick in the pants one gives, if only verbally, to the powers that be be mediated, deviated and hallucinated. Such kicks must come from children, bitches, savages – in general from the lost. The self-scab secretly feels lost, and is all the more angry when the lost self is called up within his shaky spiritual framework.

And meanwhile, the self-scab is marked down. He even knows it. He can feel his price dropping. To which the response is to self-scab even harder.

Such is the current state of play in the U.S. Someday, the lost will get a clue, a map, and the self-scabbers will have had enough with eating shit. And something will change. At the moment, though, self-scabbing has developed a powerful claim on being the norm of this age – the Age of the Shiteater.

Everyman's Marx: the ripoff

Three years ago, I was contacted out of the blue by  Mark Batty Publishers to do a small book on Marx.  It was part of something called the Everyman series. I thought that this was a terrific idea, although I had never heard of the series or of Mark Batty. So I signed a contract that specified my schedule – I was to do the book in two months time – and that guaranteed me a thousand dollar advance when I completed the book and two thousand dollars when it was published, plus royalty rights. If they didn’t publish it I was to get a spike reward of one thousand dollars.

Well, I did at least get the advance. I have no hope that I will get the kill fee, any more than I have hope that Mark Batty, or his associate, Buzz Poole, will answer my emails. I suppose the fact that this guy calls himself "Buzz" should have been a warning. The one time I talked to Mark Batty, the man told me about horse racing. That should have been another warning. I have never dealt with a gambler and not been ripped off.  Anyway,  I finished the book and sent it off to the black hole that is Mark Batty Publishers. My book designer, Jake Davis, finally sent me a letter yesterday explaining that Mark Batty is a curious kind of fraud – it seems to be more incompetent than dishonesty driven. Or rather, its incompetence drives its dishonesty.

Now, I don’t know whether this was an entirely bad experience, even though I see my name all over the Net attached to a book that has not appeared, and will apparently never appear. This, in one way, makes me look like a fool. But, in another way, I am a fool, no bones about it.

I do have a pdf of a galley of the book. I’ll send it off free to anyone who asks. My email is rgathman@netzero.net.

The Prisoner of Cool 1

I’ve always believed that you will only see a culture in its totality, see it thoroughly, sees its wonders and damage, when you go through the cracks.

I don’t know where this belief comes from. Perhaps it is a vestige of the New Testament I was taught in Sunday School. It severely underestimates the effects of going through the cracks – this I know from experience. Most often, instead of trying to understand the culture you spend that experience counting your pennies and looking for cheap intoxicants,  Going through the cracks is terrifying, and terror is not conducive to collecting the forces of your spirit and understanding the mechanics of the great wheel of fortune that is crushing your bones. Splinter and crack, splinter and crack.

Nevertheless, the theory is not wholly flawed. A culture’s vision of itself is manufactured by those paid to manufacture such visions – follow the money and you will soon find that the mass of our images and understandings attach to the advertisement for reality these people manufacture, often in all sincerity. This is the vision from the gated community, from the Eloi and their children. I only began really paying attention to it in the 00s, the low Bush decade, when it was stuffed down my Morlock throat good and proper.

Politically, we are supposed to believe that these issues can be understood by a simple dualism between left and right. I lost that illusion in the 00s, at least. To understand the culture when you are going through the cracks, your best guide is to follow your instinct and think of the culture as a many-splendored thing, for which you have to make up categories in your own home or hole.

What struck me then, and what continues to strike me in the Bush-lite era of the 10s, is how, instead of a left opposition, in America, you have an opposition that is the prisoner of cool.  Cool has taken the place of ‘respectability’ as the ‘moral civilization’ in which all move in lockstep, even those who have some contempt for the images projected by the Eloi.

It is a long, strange trip for cool. At one point, in the fifties, cool came in a binary: its opposite was square. Square, now, is one of those words that can only be quoted, never said straight. It is all too reference laden with a certain ersatz Hollywood swinging culture – a culture that seems more improbable than the culture of Edwardian England or the fictional Mad Max cultures of the apocalypse.

Square, of course, stood in for the respectable back in the early era of cool – which would make cool its negation. And it is in this vein that the change from respectability was actually interpreted. Robert Erwin, in a 1983 essay, What Happened to Respectability, assessed the changes of the 60s and 70s in terms of a wholesale decline in the forms of the culture that used to add up to respectability, and the triumph of the informal – a dialectic that he captures by contrasting Nixon and Saturday Night Live. Incredibly enough, in 1983 Erwin could plausibly present  the rather pallid vaudeville of Saturday Night Live as a sort of revolutionary symbol of a change in mass behavior.

|”The degree to which the ideal [of respectability] was internalized also indicates its strength. Richard Nixon
seems classic as well as villainous when he wears a suit, pressed and buttoned, to board a private airplane. Elliott Gould seems only show-biz carbonated when, smiling sweetly and wearing a ratty football jersey, he tells a national television audience that he is glad to host  “Saturday Night Live” because the progam, in his words, “has balls.” You cannot imagine, Class of 1975, what a fright, embarrassment and hostility Gould’s breaking of a taboo would have triggered in the heyday of respectability. Millions upon millions of ‘dent’ people in 1860 or 1960 went from one year to the next rarely speaking, hearing or reading such words in the open.”

Erwin, I think, mistakes a shifting of exterior symbols for a change in substance. What he was watching, I think, was the absorption of cool into a new domain of servitude – the servitude inherent in the service economy – rather than a true Bastille moment. Gould’s audience, perhaps, could not imagine a figure like Father Coughlin, in the 30s, casually talking down Jews on national radio time, or the kind of dialect humor that was omnipresent in the Gilded Age and right up to the 1950s. This is not to say that the shifting of terms was insignificant – it is merely to say that in the shift from formal to informal, from an ideal of respectability to an ideal of cool, the contradiction traversed was shallow.

The American Adam

We have to get up at 7 and get down to the American embassy by 9:30. I, naturally, have insomnia, and sleep less than Adam, who has become one of those babies who sleep richly – it is the pure mother’s milk of sleep he will bathe in, his little fists balled, sometimes held up from his chest as though he were boxing. At other times he will make these little shrieking noises in his sleep, and you look at him, and he is laughing. What could he be dreaming about that is funny? Perhaps it is the whole “why is there something rather than nothing” thing that bothers metaphysicians. But myself, I am up at two, swallowing melatonin, trying to talk my brain back into some hypnagogic goggle.  At six, Adam does wake up, and he always wakes up crying with hunger, like a neglected wolf cub. Then it is a bottle and soothing murmers from one of his half asleep parents, in either English or French. I must say, French is the language for comforting babies – English clomps around a bit, and though we have sh words in abundance, and I’ve always thought that the sh words fall slushily down and pile up like snow around a sleeper, what is missing is a certain slant of the tongue, a certain musicality that pulls you irresistibly into sleep.  

At seven, then, there is a general awakening of the pod in our household. Coffee, tea, and milk are the beverages favored, then the anxious count of the documents – do we have the passports? – and Adam is stowed, to his astonishment and momentary resistance, in the carrier seat, and off we go in search of a bus to take us to Place de Concorde, where the huge American complex sits, with all its guards. Time for Adam to get recognized officially by Uncle Sam.

First, however, we have to go through security procedures. They are standard airport fare save for one thing – the guard has Antonia taste the formula powder and the water which we’ve stocked in case we have to feed the baby.

The embassy waiting room is full of babies, but the architecture is stroller unfriendly – there are stairs to get up. Another architectural feature Antonia notices is the door – it is, she says, an ur-American door. In Paris! They had to import it! And it is true, it opens the wrong way, and it has the kind of handle that you see all over America and never here. Anyway, we sit and wait our turn to be called up and hand in our papers. The first woman we see is French. I am determined not to speak French inside the embassy, so Antonia does the communicating. After the forms we have filled out are checked, we are directed down to the cashier, where we pay 200 bucks for Adam to join the U.S. club. Then we go back to another window where a young American with a much different attitude (“first, congratulations! Is the baby letting you all sleep?”) has us take a pledge that we haven’t lied, and then affixes the appropriate stamps.

Adam even as I write this is getting tagged with an American social security and passport number. So he is more of a cosmopolitan figure than I am.  I’m jealous. He, meanwhile, slept like an angel all through it.