Journey to the Past

When Daniel Smail (On Deep History and the Brain) was last here giving a lecture, he led off with a discussion of Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life.  It sounded like an intriguing book—economics combined with Deep history.  What can we learn about economic behavior from the prehistory of Man?  How have economic institutions evolved?  The publisher blurbs added to the aura—here is a book which uses biology and history and anthropology to look at a wide array of economics institutions.  A grand integration of economics with, well, everything.  What could be more interesting?

How does the book measure up to my expectations about the book?  Sigh.

Seabright means well.  He really does.  But, the book suffers from the same problem I keep seeing in all the Deep History stuff—all tantalizing prospects, no payoff.  There is remarkably little in the book about ancient history.  Instead, the book rapidly becomes an exercise in showing that economic institutions evolve.  Shocking, that.  I lost all patience with the book when I hit the chapter on what caused the financial crises of 2008.  Really now.  A book promising a Darwinian history devolving into a pop analysis of the events of 2008.  Disappointing to say the least.

I assigned this book in my introduction to microeconomics class.  A few students liked it.  A few hated it.  I think the rest didn’t get past the first chapter. 

The book is not without virtues, though.  It really is interesting, as the title suggests, that humans engage in a large number of interactions with complete strangers.  That is a very bizarre fact from an evolutionary standpoint.  No other creature routinely engages in exchange with strangers.  How did that happen?  It’s hard to know—the history of that evolutionary movement predates written records—and so the book is at its best when thinking about how it might have happened.  The answer is a very Smithian (as in Adam Smith) tale of specialization and the desire to have trading partners.  It’s rather interesting to discover that Smith’s argument is actually supported by the historical record.  On the other hand, since Deep History is one part history and one part Just So story, it is impossible to eliminate a lingering fear that maybe Seabright is finding this specialization and trade in history because Smith suggested it was there.    

Of course, we could just learn about the evolution of economic institutions by watching the video record.  (By the way, I was scared, seriously terrified, of that show when I was a child.  I was excited when it started, but then in episode 2, when the Sleestak arrived, I was so frightened, I could never watch it again.  A few years back, I decided to confront my childhood fears by getting the show from Netflix.  I watched it (with the lights on) with my kids.  They have not yet stopped mocking me for being afraid of the Sleestak.  If you are feeling very brave, you can see the terrifying portion of that show here; but don't say I didn't warn you about how seriously terrifying the Sleestak are.)

Go Ask Alice

1. a) Sometimes being an economist is terribly annoying.  When you are in a meeting and people can’t seem to grasp the idea that any given idea will have costs and benefits, being an economist means being annoyed.  I’ve had a few meetings like that in the last week. 

b) Fortunately the Nobel committee came along, and in a bit of a surprise, gave the Prize to Sargent and Sims—two economists whose real claim to fame is the advancement of technique.  Not the study of the economy itself—neither one is associated with any particular results—both simply worked out new ways to use mathematics in economics.  A refreshing Noble. 

c) And speaking of the economy, for anyone who cares what I have to say about the current state of things, you can read it here.

2.  Clara is turning 12 next week.  This is my last teenager-free year for quite some time.  Have pity on me.

3.  No, really, Clara is a sweet kid.  So is Lily.  Emma doesn’t live at home any more so I am not sure if I am supposed to include her in my Offspring Reports.

4.  As you can tell, I really have no point here.  I am trying to avoid paperwork by pretending that writing a blog post is a necessary and productive use of time.  I’m not doing a good job of convincing myself of that fact.

5. A book review will help. Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland was a very curious book.  Indeed the longer I read it the curioser it got.  I’m not even sure to what category of book it belongs.  It’s kind of like a comic book, but not really.  It might be  graphic novel, but it isn't really a novel.  It’s sort of fiction, but mostly non-fiction.  There are pictures, lots of Photoshop involved, but also lots of drawings.  I can’t even figure out how to convey the sense of what it is.  It is one part biography of Lewis Carroll, one part history of the city of Sunderland, one part History of Britain, one part history of the Alice books, one part comic book tale of an artist writing a book, one part travel guide to Sunderland, one part story of a theater, and one part into which we can throw all the other parts that it is isn’t worth spending the time to list in detail.  The book roams all over.  There are comic books within the comic book.  There are self-referential nods in which there is a character who is the author of the book we are reading.  It is part dream, but maybe not.  There are ghosts of other people who may or may not be real or dreams or, I don’t know.  And through it all, I have to say I enjoyed this ridiculously quirky book.  I learned a lot about Lewis Carroll, for example—that was interesting.  I also learned a lot about Sunderland—which was interesting to read even though it shouldn’t have been interesting since I had never heard of the city before and will probably never hear about again, and so was, in the end, perfectly useless material, but strangely interesting at the time I was learning it.  So, if you want to read a very odd book, which I enjoyed but I cannot even begin to figure out why I enjoyed it, then this a good choice.  I’ll undoubtedly read it again sometime, and I have no idea why I will read it again, but I am virtually certain that this book will somehow draw me back in.  Maybe it’s like Wonderland itself—I just can’t resist heading back into a thoroughly bizarre little world of its own in which all the rules of books are routinely and brazenly violated.

6.  Here is the Obvious Music Video.

Al Davis, RIP

Ever since I can remember, I’ve said that Captain Kirk was my hero.  But, having a fictional character as one’s hero is cheating.  So, if pressed to reveal which actual, living person was my hero, it has never really been in doubt.  Al Davis has been my hero sine I was junior high age.  Al died on Saturday.  And, life seems a bit emptier.

I miss Al.  Seriously, I miss him.  The Raiders won on Sunday, and it was really a bit sad to think that Al wasn’t there to see it.  It’s really sad to think that Al won’t see any more games, that he will never see another Super Bowl win.  And I will never again see him in a press conference, with that arrogant, devil-may-care attitude.  I love the Raiders.  And the Raiders are simply the personification of Al.

“Just win, baby.”  That is without a doubt the most perfect expression of the proper ethos of sports.  It doesn’t matter how you win; you don’t get points for style.  You win or you lose.  And if you aren’t playing to win, then what’s the point of playing at all?  It’s a game, and the point of a game is to win.  You don’t break the rules, but you never pass up the chance to get an edge.

“We don’t take what the defense gives us.  We take what we want.” 

“Commitment to Excellence”

“Pride and Poise”

“You don’t adjust.  You just dominate.”

Al was fundamentally Nietzschean:  the “Will to Win” is what mattered.  If you don’t have that Will, you don’t Win.

Al embodied that spirit.  He never cared what anyone thought about him.  He cared about winning.  He made mistakes.  Lots of them.  But, he also made some utterly brilliant decisions which the timid types would have never had the courage to make.  That’s Al:  he did what he wanted in the way he wanted to do it.

Silver and Black.  That color scheme is as recognizable as any in professional sports.  There is something about it that simply speaks to my soul.  Black has always been my favorite color—ever since I was very little.  If an organization can embody a color scheme, the Raiders, and Davis, embody Silver and Black.

We’ll never see his like again.  And it will be a real test for the organization he loved so much—how long can it stay true to Al?  And how long before I can watch the Raiders again without that tinge of sadness, that feeling that I really wish Al was watching the game too?  Mourning the death of a hero is an odd feeling.  I never met Al, and yet I still feel like a part of my life died on Saturday.

Al Davis, RIP

Southern Man

I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners (that is the listed author, by the way—the book has 12 essays written by different people, and rather than listing the book by the name of an editor, the book is listed as being authored by Twelve Southerners—I can’t think of any other book with a listed author like that) was the book we read for my tutorial this week.  The book was published in 1930 as an attempt to articulate what is distinctive and important about the traditional Southern culture.  As such, it is largely a response to observations (by Mencken, for example) that the South was a cultural wasteland.  The general thesis is that Southern culture is marked by its Agrarianism, that an agricultural society is not only an important part often South, but the defining feature of the South, and that the culture born in the South is both superior to and threatened, probably fatally (and actually fatally as it turns out), by Northern Industrialism.  The book preaches the virtues of a simple agricultural life, with no ambitions for progress or increasing wealth, but a life in tune with Nature, and the rhythms of the seasons.  (“A farm is not a place to grow wealthy; it is a place to grow corn” (Lytle).) It’s a slow life in the South, and the Twelve Southerners liked it that way.

The book is, as one would expect in a book with twelve different authors, a mixed bag.  Some of the essays are terribly tedious, which oddly, may have been intentional—after all, if you are preaching the merits of slowing down, not rushing through everything, then what better way to do so than by writing in a thoroughly non-economical manner.  Indeed, if a point can be made in a sentence, then it may be better to make it last two pages.   The condensed version of this book—or what I suppose could be called the California version—might make it to about two dozen pages and not lose any content at all.  (The Northern version wouldn’t exist at all if the thesis of this book is correct—Northerners would have no interest in a book which argues, quite explicitly, that progress is a bad thing.  (I’m not entirely sure that the last sentence is accurate, though—being a Californian, I have never really been able to see all that much difference between Northerners and Southerners—they are all just a bunch of Easterners—though if the thesis of this book is correct, my inability to distinguish among varieties of Easterners may be due to the fact that Southerners are extinct, having been killed off by Northerners bringing their Industrialized ways to the geographical South.))

None of the students in the tutorial liked this book at all.  I tried gamely for a couple hours to convince them of the merits of the Agrarian Tradition, but I didn’t get very far.  Every one of them was convinced of the virtues of Progress and Industrialization and doing things and being busy.  I couldn’t even get any of them to entertain the idea of spending a day doing nothing but sitting in one place looking out over a lake, let alone imaging a life of deliberate slowness.  And I tried really hard.   

Of course, I have no patience for this Southern Tradition either.  Sure, the idea of being in touch with Nature is good—I find the modern inability of people to understand the source of food, for example, to be thoroughly odd.  And sometimes, I would like to spend a day at a lake—but, and this is important, only with a book in hand.  Being unproductive drives me crazy.  My definition of “productive” is quite catholic—watching football or reading mystery novels or writing meaningless ruminations on a blog all count as being productive, but daydreaming does not.  Why?  I have no idea.  It’s undoubtedly some cultural characteristic.  I also can’t stand inefficiency, and the South, as described in this book, is horribly inefficient. 

So, is I’ll Take My Stand a Great Book?  Not at all.  But it is an important book, and a book well worth reading.  Once. And Quickly.

Protest Update

For those anxiously wondering how the protest at MHC in support of the Protest on Wall Street turned out:  the big rally was on Skinner Green, which my office overlooks.  There were about three dozen students. (Size of Student body: 2200)  They had all left within a half-hour.  Apparently, lunch was more important than protesting.

For What It's Worth

Ah, to be young and delusional.  This morning my department secretary forwarded an e-mail message from some an unnamed and probably unorganized student group.  The purpose of the e-mail was to let the faculty know that students would be politely walking out of classes this week to demonstrate their solidarity with the Wall Street protestors.  In true Mount Holyoke Fashion, they plan to raise their hands first and announce that this is the reason they are leaving class. That way everyone else will know that they are protesting and not just, you know, cutting class.  From class, they will walk over to the student center and have a rally.  As the organizers explain on their Facebook page, they timed this event so that students would miss a minimum amount of class time.  After all, protesting Injustice is nice and all as long as it doesn’t hurt your grade in a course.  Oh, and you certainly want to let your professors know that you are leaving class for a Righteous Reason, lest they think you are a Bad Student or something.  And, all this is to support a larger, even more inchoate, protest against…well, nobody is at all sure what is being protested on Wall Street.  Protesting is the big thing after all.  As the e-mail I received noted, “Princeton Review has listed Mount Holyoke as one of the most politically active campuses in the nation and we would like to prove that we deserve that ranking.”  New standards in Protesting:  We Protest to Prove that We Protest.

All of this is reminds me of a book I read this Summer that I never did get around to reviewing here: White Guilt, by Shelby Steele.  I read a lot about this book when it came out in 2006, but I finally got around to reading it this summer after I saw a copy at a library book sale.  It’s better than I thought it would be.  The general thesis is that the Civil Right movements in the 1960s developed into an exercise of White Guilt, and then once that set in, the leaders of society simply lost all ability to articulate their firm belief in anything at all.  The end of white supremacy also marked the end of authority of any sort at all.  So, now protestors can protest with the certain belief that nobody will tell them they are out of order or just plain silly. 

Want proof?  Imagine if after some students walked out of my class to protest, I handed out a surprise quiz to the remaining students and did not allow any absent students to take the test at a later time.  Would the protestors feel a Righteous Pride that their protest actually had a consequence?  I doubt it.  I suspect they would complain bitterly that their protest should not affect their grade and that I had no right to hand out a surprise quiz after they left the room.  Students do not believe that college officials have the moral authority to do anything that students do not like.  And interestingly, most college administrators agree with the students on that point.

Oh, and if the organizers of the Protest are looking for a catchy tune to play at their protest, may I suggest this?