the conquest of scurvy and a lesson for economists

There’s an incident from medical history, recounted by David Wootton in his book, Bad Medicine, that seems to me to tell us a lot about modern economics. In the early 17^th century, Dutch and Portugese seamen discovered that scurvy could be cured or warded off by using lemons or oranges/ They did not know the underlying cause, but they did see the results. Scurvy, according to Wooton, was a major killer. To give an example: “During the Seven Years War, 184,899 sailors served in the British fleet (many of them press-ganged into service); 133,708 died from disease, mostly scurvy; 1,512 were killed in action.”

The Seven Years war was fought in the 1750s, almost a hundred and fifty years after the Dutch and Portugese discovery. Why, then, was there any scurvy in 1750?

Wooton’s story is incredible. Although English sea captains started giving their men fruit, this remedy was countermanded by the medical establishment. They persuaded the captains that fruit couldn’t work – it was simply an old wife’s tale. Why? Because obviously, scurvy was caused by a disbalance of humors – as was every other disease. And thus, fruit would not cure it. Wooton has dug up documents to show this:

“Ships’ captains had an effective way of preventing scurvy, but the doctors and the ships’ surgeons persuaded the captains that they did not know what they were doing, and that the doctors and surgeons (who were quite incapable of preventing scurvy) knew better. Bad knowledge drove out good. We can actually see this happening. There is no letter from a ship’s surgeon to his captain telling him to leave the lemons on the dock, but we do know that the Admiralty formally asked the College of Physicians for advice on how to combat scurvy. In 1740 they recommended vinegar, which is completely ineffectual, but now became standard issue on navy ships. In 1753 Ward’s Drop and Pill also became standard issue.”

Medical history, which is written to glorify rather than study medicine, has credited a doctor named Lind with being the first one to advise fruit to cure scurvy. As Wooton shows, this is a myth. Indeed, Lind did experiment with serving fresh fruit to scurvy patients, which did cure them. But then he decided to test the fruit, and he boiled lemon juice in the process, thus straining out the vitamin C. After a while, he decided fruit was useless against the disease, which he still attributed to various humoral causes.

I think that the equilibrium models of economics are much like the humoral models that controlled established medical thought up through the mid nineteenth century. There is the same crazy blindness regarding the real economy – and the same class distinctions that prevent economists from adopting economic policies that would benefit the workers more than the bosses. Austerity economics has been compared to bleeding – but I would say the same thing is true for neo-liberal policies in general. The neo-liberal economists have a tendency to pat themselves on the back for bringing down world poverty over the last thirty years, but what they really mean is that nations like China adopted clearly dirigiste policies to guide capitalism in their countries, and used heavy tariffs on imports to create vast surpluses from exports. This is just what they do – reproducing not the economics of Milton Friedman, but the economics of the New Deal, stripped of its liberal aspect. That is, stripped of the social security net that kept the workers from falling into misery. The latter could occur because the workers were even more immiserated in the past – but as that past becomes a memory, it is a good bet that New Deal economics will generate social nets in these countries.

Economists, though, go through a rigorous training to make them blind to these facts. And they especially learn no economic history, which is economics in the wild, free from the models of their ideal economic spaces. It is as if doctors still learned about the human body from the theory of the four humors.

the memory dream

In my experience, memory has two directions. That is, when I remember, the direction memory seems to take is either straight, direct, or lateral. In the former case, I am like a fisherman casting a line – I cast my mind back and hook my object, that thing or event in the past. Or I don’t. When I don’t, it means I have either forgotten it or it didn’t exist. Psychologists have shown that it is a rather simple matter to create fake memories, in which case what was never there is remembered anyway. But regardless of whether the object is absent, non-existant, or forged, the direction of memory, here, is direct. It is analogous to double book accounting, where the column with the object and the column with the memory are on one plane, side by side. Lateral memory, however, is a different thing. It is about connotations and associations. Memory here is something that emerges without, at times, my having made any effort to remember. I will, instead, suddenly remember. This suddenness has something of the character of waking up – it speaks of two very different states of consciousness. And yet, just as I can wake up feebly, and fall back to sleep, so too I can suddenly recall a thing and then it will slip away. I will forget what I just remembered, or rather, the memory that was forced upon me. If it was something that I wanted to note down, or something that I remember in the moment of remembering that I was supposed to remember, I’ll mentally rummage around. The direct method here fails me, because though I can directly remember the event of suddenly remembering, the object here, the event, is wrapped around something I’ve forgotten. To find that content, I often resort to association – to trying to construct what I was doing when the sudden memory hit me. Or, having a sense of what the content of this sudden memory was – having it on the tip of my tongue – I’ll try to find associates with it – I’ll play a sort of guessing game.

However, this kind of lateral memory, with its suddenness and its frustrations, is only one aspect of  lateral memory. The other aspect relates memory to the daydream – it is the memory dream. In fact, in the 1990s, I tried to write a book using the memory dream as a methodological principle. Take an object or event – a humble spoon, or looking out the window – and specify its real instances.  That is, touch in your present, mentally touch, the spoon or the looking in its stark and naked particularity.  Say the spoon is a measuring spoon, part of a set of measuring spoons made of some cheap pewter like material and bound together with a ring, with measurements imprinted on the handle: 2 oz, 5 0z, etc. Or take the window that you looked out of in your ground apartment in Austin on 45^th street, decades ago. That view was really a nonview, comprising a sidewalk, some raggedy bamboo plants, and a large dull brown fence that was evidently erected to keep the residents in the cheap apartment house that I was living in – marginals all – from peering at the apartment complex next to us, where it was all swimming pools and nice cars and barbecue on the patio. Here, the logician’s great tool – quantification – breaks down, since it really isn’t clear what divides one looking out from the other. The turn of the head? The mental act of attention? Is looking even defined by consecutive looking, or is the lookings out the window that are divided by other events unified by the intention to look out the window – I say, for instance, I wazs looking out the window, waiting for the landlord. Quantification is, however, a way to get into the memory game – because the fun in the game is to pose these questions so that gradually you broaden the memory dream, you remember, unexpectedly, the waxed paper into which your mother poured the flour mix for the cupcakes, you remember where it was kept in the cabinet, you remember the other things in the cabinet and the smell of vanilla, etc. In a sense, instead of fishing around in memory, here we are treating it as a jigsaw puzzle. And one that is not, it should be noted, played on one horizontal plane – for the connotation of looking out the window can lead you backwards and forwards in time to other lookings out of other windows. The goal is to cut through the cloud of essences in which the particulars in our life have been wrapped. The routines, which excavate the particularity of an event and substitute a likeness of that event – I remember the window not as it looked, smudged, the yellowing curtain in suspense above it, on some particular moment of some particular day, but I remember the essence of looking out the window, a composite of watchings.

Happy days, wiling away my time in the memory dream!

It is said that the Emperor Rudolph of Bohemia, who had one of the largest collections of curiosities in Europe, possessed a vial in which was held the dust from which the Lord made Adam. This is a curiosity indeed, maybe the Ur-curiosity. There’s a number of paradoxes involved in this object. Was this dust the remnant, the leftovers, of the dust from which Adam was made – or did Adam have two bodies, one of human flesh, the other of dust. Memory seems to give us a parallel paradox. We, too, contain the motes of which we are made, the instances that memory represents. Yet the container, here, is identical to the sum of those motes – just as Adam was both that dust and a divine animal. The artist in me would like to collect every mote, every jot. An impossible grab and snatch expedition, granted, but one I am eternally tempted to launch, to lose myself in, finding that lost, interior Eldorado.

public sanity, private insanity

I’m working on a job at the moment, translating a lecture by Didi-Huberman on Aby Warburg. Warburg fascinates me. He tempts my romantic side, my Gnostic side. Warburg was the son of a very rich banker who decided to go into anthropology and art history – who traveled to Taos in the 1890s to observe Pueblo rituals and who traveled to Florence in the 1900s to study Renaissance art. Already his work is disturbed by a strange spirit, a spirit that drove him into a five year stay in the insane asylum in the 1920s. He hallucinated that bits of the flesh of his family were mixed in among his food. And he also hallucinated that the Jews were going to be annihilated. Yes, among the flotsam and jetsam of symptoms, there was that one, that prophetic craziness, spilling out in his sessions with Dr. Binswanger. And I think that there is something about the voice of the most sane, our governors, about how they speak and think, that one has to go a bit crazy to hear. For it is something that isn’t sane at all, it is a mechanical grating, a noise from the underworld.

santa monica

The psychogeographer who comes aground in Santa Monica may be shown the ocean – it’s a mighty fine ocean – and the famous pier – it’s an awfully crowded pier – and perhaps 3^rd street, an outdoor street mall on European lines, if, that is, Mickey Mouse had designed Europe. But the guide is unlikely to take him to Main street and point out an office building that looks as bland and as soulless as any other office building. Which is a shame, because the psychogeographer, if he is any good, must have felt his fingers burning since he came ashore. Goethe said he wrote the Sorrows of Young Werther with burning fingers, for its only with burning fingers that one can catch hold of the signs and wonders of the age. And as psychogeography is all about intersigns, omens, Gnostic connections, this bland building in a sense towers over the city. Because this is the headquarters of Rand corporation – research and development corporation – that was founded by the Air Force almost in the flicker of the fires of Hiroshima. This is the second Rand building, remodeling the first, where the classic Randites of the forties and fifties gathered. It is Rand that made Santa Monica one of the minor capitals of the apocalypse. The one that never happened. In Anaheim, Disney was busy creating a vector into the child consciousness with which to stuff in Winnie the Pooh and commodity fetishism, preparing us all for our adult life. In Santa Monica, Rand was working another seam. Rand, in a sense, shaped the American sense of vulnerability, and definitely gave it a vocabulary. Counterforce. Second Strike. Deterrence. Mutually Assured Destruction. Failsafe. All terms that came out of the Rand think tank. It was a thinker at Rand who came up with the ICBM, a huge advance in the “delicate balance of terror” – another Rand phrase. And, in the sixties,  it was a Rand contractor who came up with the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. The old death squads, for instance in Indonesia, were sloppy. Here, death squads were targeted and kill ratios were calculated. In a sense, Rand gave birth to the contemporary death squad – from the Argentine generals with their mini-concentration camps in schools and factories to the 2005-2007 American effort in Iraq. A bit of village or urban quartier torture, rape, and massacre, and voila – pacification!

So the properly informed psychogeographer will walk through the streets of Santa Monica and dream of Kenneth Arrow, who invented rational choice at RAND (and haven’t we all lived under the thumb of rational choice since?), or think of Albert Wohlstetter, he of the delicate balance of terror, who would come down from his ace pad on Laurel Canyon of a weekday morning. It was Wohlstetter who mentored Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

And in the haze of this past, perhaps our intersigning flycatcher will jot down the prophecies of the graybearded black guy at Seven Eleven or the tourette’s illuminee at the corner of 9^th and Wilshire. It takes a maladjusted mind to know the heart of the heart of it all.

adam and the law

I’m not one of life’s naysayers. This is funny, because I have a very negative attitude – or at least I often have a negative attitude – but something about the word “no” is difficult for me. This was pointed out  to me in a recent discussion about Adam’s anarchic urge to suck on electric chords and put his mouth up to electric outlets. It is I understand not uncommon in babies. Also, I have a vague memory of how, at one point when I was a small kid, I liked to bite down on a penny because I sort of liked/didn’t like the coppery taste in my mouth – it was the way liking would go to disliking and back, it was an unbalanced taste – and I also liked the way it carried a sort of electric charge to the teeth that made me cringe a bit. However, I don’t think Adam is at that point yet. Still, here he is, our eleven month old, charging at electrical outlets, and what I do is I catch him and say, oh, you thought you were going to pull a fast one. And things like that. Instead of saying no, no, no!

What is it with no? I’d like to think that it is dialectically difficult, but maybe it is that I’m a natural enabler. A weak soul with a wobbly moral code.

A couple of days ago, we were up in Adam’s room and he spotted the electric outlet at the far end of the room and made a fast crawl in its direction, and I tried the no. No, Adam, I said. Unexpectedly, this caused Adam to nearly die with laughter. Nope, Adam, I said, and again the laugh – Adam has a very good laugh, an infectious laugh, he makes you want to make him laugh. He’d laugh, watching me, and then turn back to the electric outlet, and I’d say no, and he’d almost flip with how funny it was that Da was saying no.

Now, perhaps an eleven month old is not an oracle, but there was something here, something happening here, that was … well, a little unheimlich to yours truly. Could I be seen through so easily?

Jesus, of course, issues the classic judgment: “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” Jesus was not generally close to the Stoics, but here I see their trace. This may be the most un-Socratic of his sayings. On the other hand (the enabler’s great phrase!) one can see the reason for it as a rule of prudence. And yet, the saying comes in the great chapter 5 of Matthew, the chapter of the beatitudes, where the yea and nay logic is, to say the least, strained. On the one hand, there the law and the prophets is to be fulfilled, in the person of the Christ, and on the other hand, various laws, including the most important, the law of talion – eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth – are negated. Jesus seems to duck and weave among the inevitable ironies of rules and language. As who does not? For I say unto you, pulling up my socks and getting on my heels, even yea and nay have their infinite varieties. The rest – that about which we cannot speak – is exactly what we all speak about.

Which may be why Adam found me so hilarious in the role of lawgiver. Wait until I tell him about the law and the prophets!

Nudgery liberalism and its discontents

I read the review of This Town, the supposed expose of D.C.’s indealing establishment, by Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books, and I had to laugh. Like Ezra Klein, Tomasky, a “liberal”, is offended that the book ignores, as he puts it in his last graf: “… a city where everything isn’t a game, where everyone isn’t just in it for the money and the parties, and where many thousands of people do interesting work but don’t come within a whisper of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. They shape this town, too.”

In other words, what about the crew of neoliberal policymakers and think tankers and aides who work so hard.

I have to laugh. Granted some of them might not be in it just for the money – but what one really has to ask is why they are such abysmal failures. For the majority of  people in the U.S., life in 2013, in Obama’s second term, is worse on every quality of life category that counts than life was in 2000, or 2005. And life wasn’t so good then to begin with.

The era of the nudgery liberals seals, in a sense, the conservative dominance – the ice age – that has sucked out all our air since Reagan’s time. The trick has not been about the scale of the government – the trick has been about the retreat of the government to a private enterprise heaven of intermediaries, making government ‘more efficient’ with the full approval and seal of the Dems. Having responded to the fall of socialist heaven with the idea that government can play the role of sugar daddy to big business but direct that business, by a whole bag of treats, to give the working class a break has been an outstanding joke. But the D.C. libs don’t get the punch line.

To illustrate: There was a post in the Washington Post’s wonkblog the other day showing that, according to a Pew Research poll, the uninsured are about evenly divided in their support for or opposition to  Obamacare. Sarah Kliff, the writer, is concerned that Americans are very very confused about Obamacare. This may be so – it is a massively confusing substitute for single payer state run healthcare, such as Medicare. What else could one expect from a program that had its roots in Romneycare and its design in proposals made by Newt Gingrich in the 90s? But one thing that isn’t touched on in the polls or the article is at the real heart of the uninsured’s unease: you really can’t trust the government. Supposedly, the uninsured are going to be subsidized by the federal government so that they can fulfill the mandatory insurance provision. But the uninsured can read the paper. They can remember things. Things like Obama trying to cut back Social Security and Medicare as part of his grand bargain. Perhaps they can even remember the evisceration of welfare under Clinton. So the question is: if those subsidies are on the chopping block one day, would the Dems protect them? If the answer is no – and there is every reason to think that Obama’s grand bargain is the real Dem template – than what we would be left with is an inadequate subsidy and a real mandate requirement. It is quite easy to envision a Dem congress or president deciding that a little out of pocket money from the working class to keep their nifty hodgepodge of crappy private insurance companies going would be a small sacrifice.

Neoliberals in D.C., in other words, have undermined any confidence one might have in the supposedly liberal programs they support and devise. This is why the plea for the “thousands of people doing interesting work” falls, at least in my case, on deaf ears. Fuck em.