Economics as science (sigh) again

Economists, as a rule, are highly defensive about being "scientists". By this, they don't mean that they are part of the general social sciences set - a subset of sociology, in fact. No, they mean that they are like physics.
They aren't at all like physics, of course, starting at the ground level. While physicists can start with atoms because atoms are entirely defined by mass and motion, economics has no equivalent. Individuals are not simply defined by mass and motion. Economists have attempted to define them as the atoms of economics, but the arguments for this range from poor to unbelievable. This is even conceded, and got over by pretending that the motion of the individual is wholly defined by the desire to get more. 
Since the very meaning of getting more is not really definable without the system of values defining more, there's really no atomic level to work up from. 
But economists still somehow consider that, since they do hard mathematical work, they must be scientists. And since, at a certain point as undergraduates, they read Friedman's methodological paper about prediction, that science is defined by predicting things. 
So, lately, we've had a round of economists bitching that non-experts are pitching into macro-economics. It started with Scott Sumner here, went to Noah Smith there, and now I'm going to talk about it.

I get tired of the idea that science is entirely defined by the ability to predict things, which is like defining a car as the ability to go 70 miles per hour. Many other things than cars possess this ability, from hurricanes to peregrine falcons. But it is into the prediction hole that the whole incredibly badly formed debate around economics turns. Did economists predict the 2008 downturn or not? and then we are off to the races. 
But I'll bite on this for at least a second and ask what I think are more pertinent questions. 
-- what economist in the seventies or eighties predicted that the medium American wage would effectively stagnate for the next thirty or more years? 
-Which predicted that household debt would begin to equal household wealth for the medium household? 
-Who predicted that, even with the advent of IRAs, mutual funds, and 401ks, the shape of the ownership of all financial instruments would essentially remain the same in 2014 as it was in 1979? 
- Who predicted that the last American trade surplus would be in 1976?
My questions are all invidious. They are all about trends. The prediction biz, as defined by economists, is a pretty narrow thing about particular events. The local downfall, the inflation figure for the next quarter. But it is long term  long term trends, which are the meat and drink of the prediction biz of the natural sciences. The prediction of the course of a single atom isn't in it. The trend, going back billions of years, is. 
What seems evident to me is that economics, as a branch of sociology, can produce ideal models of various economies (not just capitalist ones) and capture broad trends within them. But it isn't very good, even so, at predicting long term trends at any middle distance - and as for up close, no way. Marx's prediction of the inevitable fall of the rate of profit, founded on classical economics, is a good instance of the use of trends - the ideal model of capitalism he constructed would seem to require it. One can see how the physical limitations inhering on labor time would even make it, at some point, true. But it has turned out to be only a factor, and a reversible one, in capitalist business cycles. Or perhaps I should say, a factor with varying weight.  

The creeps

It is hard to predict the political result of the EU's attempt to crush democracy in Greece. The big Creeps, as one could call the austerity group, would welcome a solution a l'egypte, with a complacent military government. And perhaps they will get their wish. But it might be that the anti-creep forces in Spain, Italy, Ireland and even France will be charged by the evident anti-democratic animus that now rules in Europe. Usually, when a movement is crushed, its moment goes out. When the soviets sent tanks into Prague, that effectively ended any chance for any future socialism with a human face. The equivalent, the sending of debt collectors to Athens to make sure the level of starvation is just so, might crush the notion of EU with a human face. My hope, of course, is a mobilization of movements that will drive the incumbent parties out of office all over Europe. But, alas, I'd bet against it. If the creeps - faux socialists in France and Spain and the UK, the faux democrats in the Northern countries - succeed, their overthrow will probably be from the right. It is a rather ghastly prospect.

on hiding

Hiding, as Aristotle might say, is said of two different class of actions. One class is uniquely aboout hinding oneself. The other group is about hiding other things, which can include other people, or, more often, semi-people: the stuffed Mickey Mouse, the stuffed ant-eater, the plastic giraffe.
Adam is now old enough to recognize that we cut down the wildernesses, lay the railroads, plot the land, pave the roads, and build the houses in order to create congeries of hiding places. His two favorite places are in the space between the wall and the refrigerator, in the kitchen, and pappa’s closet, a storage area next to our real closet that has been carved into the wall space about three feet above the floor. The latter has a real negative, in that to hide there, Adam has to ask to be lifted up to it. This broadly signals that one is hiding. On the plus side, it it s perfect cubby, with an odd interior angle to it – this storage space was definitely a Los Angeles after thought – and a door – oh heaven – the closing of which you can impress upon your parent is a very important matter that has to be seen to right now. The door has several advantages. For one, the cubby becomes all dark. Dark is the color of hiding, For another thing, the world outside the hiding place becomes another sort of hiding place. This accomplishes, in a semi-quasi way, the second class of hiding. 
Once established in one’s hiding place, one faces a choice: either signal that one is hiding – which creates a game – or not. Adam is not quite old enough for the second, more contemplative form of hiding. The latter kind of hiding was once my favorite type, because it allowed for either spying or contemplating the world, the sky, a tree, a bird, a book, or some errant ramification of the usual scene. Spying, of course, requires a particular kind of hidey hole, or sometimes just quiet trailing, with the ocassional sudden ducking behind a bush or a tree to avoid detection. In reality, it was the ducking that one spied for – otherwise, it got rather dull. 
Adam’s version is to crack open the door. Sometimes, he finds, as he expects, his mom or dad standing there. Sometimes, though, they are hiding, or at least doing something else. Usually Adam can’t hold out and says something like Adam’s here, or I see you.
The kitchen hiding place is more of a getaway. The kitchen was forbidden territory. But, just as those settlers who cleared the wilderness drifted into territory forbidden to them by the state or native powers regardless, so, too, Adam has so often disobeyed the law of staying out of the kitchen that the powers that be have given up. So far, he has not completely wedged himself into the space between the wall and the fridge, but he’s come close. After a while, he’ll withdraw and just sit in front of the passage. Here is where he takes loot – from some disgusting object he has illicitly taken from the garbage can he is not supposed to look into to an odd fragment broken from some toy. I’m not sure what he does, communing with these things, but I think it has to do with inventing science.

who killed cock robin

When I grew up in the suburbs, the nights, at least during the school season, were quiet. You’d hear, outside the window, in your bed, maybe the slur of a car leaving or entering a driveway. No voices. In the summer, when the nights were long and people were out in their lawn chairs, then there’d be voices.

In the city, this changed. When I lived in a dubious section of New Haven, there were days when very threatening loud people would be going down the street. In Austin, in the parking lot that was right beneath the window of my cheap efficiency, sometimes there would be fights, or the sound of broken glass. Also, since the highway was near by, the sound of traffic. Not very insistent. In Paris, we can hear the sounds of cafes, sometimes singing. Singing! Cafes! Paris! This is real.

Here in Santa Monica, there is the perpetual late night hobo drama – someone is always pissed off, screaming, exhausted by a life without shelter. There are people parking in the street, the sound of doors closing. On weekends, there’s the sound of groups going to bars, talking, laughing. For the last six months, next door, they have been tearing down the old pet store and erecting a glassy office for Charles Schwab. This has meant a lot of heavy machinery starting up at six in the morning, and weird sounds in the evening, as though some late night crewe was out there. Before they tore down the pet store, its parking lot was another hobo junction. It is right below Adam’s window. Adam got an earful of fuck! Shit! And all the commonplace filler words  that make up the excited conversation of people who are semi-inebriated, whether they are out on the street or twenty something frat boys.

When we go back to Paris, Adam will hear the café songs. And the ocassional drunk.

What I can’t remember hearing, but must have, is bird song. Two nights ago, we heard, marvelously, the chirping of some song birds up to eleven at night. I am hearing a bird singing right now. Now, I know, intellectually, that we are living in the age of who killed cock Robin – the petrochemical insecticide age, the age of vast environmental distruction, the end of the Holocene, that is forcing song birds to the wall. I am not sure that Adam will know those songs when he is my age. When I was a boy, our subdivision was not completely built out. There was still a small pond and a marsh near us. We put up a purple martin house and the martins came. Blue jays were plentiful. Robins, warblers, wrens, chickadees, cardinals, grosbeaks, swallows. I know things are quieter now. The Audubon society published a survey taken from a massive scan of birder notes over forty years – starting in 1967 – and they found this:

“Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent; some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.”

As we usher out the Holocene and humanity continues to take its century long spree on the planet, we are probably talking about passenger pigeon time for the bobwhite and the meadowlark and the lark.

So, enjoy the birdsong now.  We killed cock robin…

nightwood

When Djuna Barnes read the manuscript of Nightwood to her ex lover, Thelma Wood (who was depicted in it somewhat as the character Robin Vote), Wood expressed her criticism of the book by throwing a cup at Barnes and then landing a right and a left to her face. Apparently, she didn't like it. Since then, a lot of people haven't liked Nightwood for its decadence, obscurity, modernism, or whatever. Lately, I've been reading it and finding the reading slow, which is what Barnes, I think, intends. The danger of slow reading is that the reader will give up. What keeps one going is the truly amazing, even if maddening, prose, the sort of thing Edward Gibbon would have produced if he'd taken acid: it has the glazed, marmoreal finish of some imperial decline and fall while accelerating and decelerating to the barbarian clangor of to a quite non-Gibbonesque fever dream. Plus the famous, skewed aphorisms that stud the thing: "I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say "Love" and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog" - which is surely equal to Lautreamont.

Our gags

Gag is a strangely ugly word. Its repetition of the g seems to enact the throttling that is the meaning accorded to it primitively by the lexicographers. In fact, until the late eighteenth century, the nominal and verbal forms of gag all referred to the notion of some foreign matter either in the mouth and throat (and the physiological reaction thereto) or some matter barring the mouth. When Anthony Wood tells us about the punishment accorded to the Leveler, John Lilburne, for insubordinant speech, he tells us he was whipped while being dragged down a London street at the hind end of a cart, and then put in the pillory in a courtyard, where he continued to rail at the authorities until he was “gagged”. The association of gagging with speaking was clear in law and practice. In Pope’s Dunciad, the triumph of dullness would not be complete without the display of the tortures undergone by her victims:

Beneath her footstool, science groans in chains

And Wit dreads exile, penalties and pains;

There foamed rebellious logic, gagged and bound

There stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the ground

The question for an ardent believer in speech magic – the invisible leaps and bounds that act out and incorporate the intellectual history of a language – is how we go from this sense of gagging to the idea of the gag as either hoax or joke. A quick look at slang lexicographers gives us, with the telegraphic obscurity that this tribe deals in, some clues – Partridge, for instance, thinks that gagging some victim of a robbery produces first the outraged gurgle of the victim and “hence” the notion of nonsense, which passes itself on to its associate, the hoax. A more solid clue is given by the citation of Lockhart in the English Dialect Dictionary (1900).

Lockhart is known today, if at all, as the biographer of Walter Scott. In his day, though, Lockhart was the boy. According to his biographer, Andrew Lang, he was definitely a rankin’ Scots intellectual, mentioned in the same breath with Carlyle. In 1819, Lockhart, like Carlyle with Sartor Resartus, decided to publish a thing that was not a collection of essays and not a fiction, but a crossover, a halfbreed. I am partial myself to the halfbreeds of literature, but it is true that they are not exactly domesticable in the classroom the way a poem, essay or story is.In one of the letters, Lockhart, an Edinburg man, holds forth on the state of wit in Glasgow. Lockhart claimed – and all these claims are under the cloud of exaggeration, for as his biographer admitted, Lockhart had a waspish tonge and a Tory disposition – thawt in every party in Glasgow, after a certain number of drinks had been downed, the guests would start to pun: “ for punning seems to be the sine qua non of every Glasgow definition of wit.”

It is under this fug of drinks and puns that the primary meaning of gag meets the angel of language, that player of long games, who put his hand on the word and moved it. Lockhart  writes of the “jocular vocabulary of the place”, which is how he places the term “gagging” – which “signifiesm as its name may lead you to suspect, noting more than the thrusting of absurdities, wholesale and retail, down the throat of some too credulous gaper.” A gag could be the kind of doublesided compliment that makes a crowd laugh.  Or it could involve some “wonderful story … evidently involving some sheer impossibility. “ He writes of the “joke” of the matter – thus twinning the hoax and the joke.  Thus it is, in an atmoshere of imbibing liquids (the well known effect of which, if overdone, is spewing them out with interest), that ‘gag’ is turned.

As the psychoanalytically inclined have long observed, the double function of the mouth, which emits sounds and swallows matter, has long been a common object of reflection and unconscious desire and dread. Freud speaks of the transition from the matter of sounds to the abstractions of sense in his essay on Narcisisism, and is followed by Klein and, in his own deviant way, Deleuze in Logic of Sense – who engages with the word/matter distinction throughout his intricate flight.

Freud, however, was preceded in some ways by the Church fathers, whose meditations on the meaning of Jesus’s speech at the last supper – this is my body, take eat; this is my blood, take, drink – understood the dualism as shaped, in its center, by a miraculous divine intervention.

The reason I’ve been pursuing the gag down the rabbit hole is that I feel it is an underused concept. When discussing fiction, reviewers tend to dwell on plot, but in most fiction worth the reading, the plot is the servant of the gags. I’ve been reading a lot of high modernism lately – Djuna Barnes, for instance – and the displacement of plot by gag is a lot of what that modernism was about.

My ambition is to write some perfect gags by the time I lay down my burdens. 

the ownership society - now with fifty percent more autism!

“The state doesn’t own your children,” Paul told CNBC’sClosing Bell. “Parents own thechildren, and it is an issue of freedom and public health.”

Rand Paul, who likes to rush in where even Palins fear to tread, has been mocked for this conjunction of “own” and children. Or I should say some have mocked it, while most have let it pass as mere flotsam on the ocean of cretinism in which we all, as Americans, daily float.

However, the word “own” there is doing so much business, stands out so much like a sore thumb, or maybe a freakish fist of sore thumbs, that I have to buzz around it and find a place to bite, like a mosquito whose maxillary palp organs have been rubbed the right way by the delicious aroma of human sweat gland.

One of the many recent bits marked down for deletion in the collective American memory was the glorious slogan, “ownership society”, under which so many financial products were deregulated in the interest of the common man.  Here’s a bit of a flashback from a site run by a rightwing aparatchik named Jim Glassman (who I happened to work for when I was in college, and before he took his jackassery to new levels):

“The greatest political and demographic shift over the past twenty years was not the number of new Spanish speaking residents, but rather the number of individuals who owned shares of stock. In the 1996 elections, pundits spoke of soccer moms as the key demographic. This time around, the 2004 elections will be decided by America's growing investor class.

With this in mind, President Bush spoke directly to the burgeoning investor class at the Republican National Convention by announcing his vision for America becoming an "ownership society." Bush's speech called for a new paradigm in which government policies empower, not inhibit, individuals, so that each person has more choices and control over his healthcare and retirement. Included in the vision are Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Lifetime and Retirement Savings Accounts (LSAs/RSAs), Comp/Flex time, and Social Security Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs). All of these plans have one important theme in common: individual ownership.”

We all like to remember that George Bush was elected in 2000 while losing the popular vote, and we all like to forget that he was authentically elected (no Supreme Court helping) by a healthy margin in 2004. What’s more, he told us exactly what he was going to do.

What did ownership mean? Well, for those of us who combine Marx’s notion that ideology has the quality of reversing the true arrangement of social relations with St. Paul’s maxim that we must read what happens in the World as in a mirror, the meaning was obvious: the ownership society was about appropriating the few assets of the wage class and replacing them with debt. This is exactly what happened. In contrast to Glassman’s claim, the bottom 80 percent of the income scale owns approximately 5 percent of the financial wealth, according to Wolff, an economist who specializes in the composition of wealth in America. In 2007, the median household had assets of around 150 thousand dollars, of which the vast majority, 100, 000 dollars, was invested in a house. Ah, the house! That centerpiece of the ownership society. In 1989, the collected debt of the average household equaled 89 percent of average income – and by 2007, it equaled 141 percent. Now this kind of trend, if put in another situation, say the Soviet Union, would show the total level of expropriation had gone sky high – but in the United States, ownership means that your percentage of what you really own goes sliding merrily down the slope, as you vote for your creditors to turn the screws and call it – freedom.

This, of course, is one shot at the prize of understanding the metastasis of ownership in the American discourse. The idea that the most private and intimate relationship between two humans is one of ownership extends well beyond this, of course. It is a recent and alarming development in public craziness – a severe form of social autism, which is, coincidentally, one of the fears that drives the anti-vaxxers. We watch the social norm become autistic, and we naturally grow fearful for our children – even as we work, in every way, to normalize that autistic way of thinking and speaking.

There’s so much more to say! I’ll stop, here. I apologize for the paradox mongering, which is as easy as skipping stones, I gotta admit. But fun!