The Real Economy

Jonathan Levy in Phenomenal World:

No discipline in the humanities or social sciences today has a convincing theory of the economy. Long preoccupied with honing methods, the core of the discipline of economics has abandoned investigation into what the economy really is. Preoccupied with either appropriating or criticizing the methods of economics, other disciplines have failed to articulate any alternative conceptions of the economy.

A conspicuous absence of a convincing theory is what prevails today, but it was not always the case. In the period stretching from 1890 to 1930, when the modern discipline of economics was formed, fierce debates raged, as many different “visions” of the economy, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter once put it, circulated and competed with one another. This period—after Marx made the last great contribution to “political economy” but before the triumph of “neoclassical” economics—was a moment of “methodological pluralism.” For figures like Schumpeter, the subject of economics was by no means obvious. Rather, the very task of positing an economic problem, he wrote, would require that, “we should first have to visualize a distinct set of coherent phenomena as a worthwhile object of our analytic efforts.”

In my encounter with these “years of high theory,” as one chronicler characterized them, the economics of Keynes and Veblen have loomed the largest. Veblen and Keynes were economic theorists writing before neoclassicals transformed economic theory into an entirely mathematical affair, and both preferred verbal exposition (Veblen nearly exclusively). Keynes entitled his most important books Treatise on Money and The General Theory, and Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. While these texts stand today as the most notable from the period, the economic visions of a great many twentieth-century economic theorists also crossed diverse institutionalist, post-Keynesian, Marxist, Austrian, French Regulation, and even neoclassical traditions—from Irving Fisher to John Hicks, Joseph Schumpeter, Frank Knight, Joan Robinson, Albert Hirschman, Nicholas Kaldor, and others. If in different ways, all first cultivated or sought to carry forward the rich legacies of pre-World War II economic theory.

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The Industrial Party

Jacob Dreyer in The Ideas Letter:

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs… These are products of human industry; natural material––transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse

Washington, DC, February 2025—Here is the heart of empire, convulsing. Cop cars stopped at every intersection, helicopters swept through the night. The city reminded me of nothing so much as Beijing in 2012, when Bo Xilai had been thrown in jail on the eve of Xi Jinping’s arrival to power. The city was locked up tightly, it felt that the displays of armed police were intended as a warning to any would-be coup plotters. Today, the police forces on the streets of DC telegraph fear on the part of our new president and his friends that assassins are lurking. A revolution is underway in America, and it’s one that the Chinese have been waiting for, hidden under vague terms like “a change not seen in one hundred years.” We are all focused on political changes, but what if those changes are merely reflections of technological change, attempts on the part of the political structure to catch up with a society that is different than the one that our institutions were designed for? Technology became culture became politics, and the politics, only a symptom or after-effect, is what I saw on the streets of the capital.

The Industrial Party, a generic ideological structure of techno-nationalism which can be adjusted for the nation it transpires in, has seized control of America; it’s been in charge of China for quite some time. We’re in the throes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will bulldoze political and cultural structures at home as well as abroad. The new politics are certainly not conservative, nor are they liberal. They see technology, rather than political structures, as the apparatus which will bring us into the future. Factory labor will be automated; much white collar labor will be replaced by AI; and perhaps capital will finally throw off the chains of labor. Very little of the society we’re used to will be conserved, and certainly not the political structures called liberal democracy. We might see Trumpism as a political revolution; but in many ways, it is just the expression in political form of a social change that predates it.

More here.

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American Destiny?

Anders Stephanson in Sidecar:

When Donald Trump invoked ‘manifest destiny’ in his inaugural address, it was in its oldest meaning as territorial expansion: the predestined, God-given American right to claim and acquire new land – more extravagantly than ever in this case, by putting an American flag on Mars (a sop to Elon Musk). The term in this sense was coined in the hyper-expansionist 1840s, when the Union was poised to swallow up the territory from Texas to California in the southwest and Oregon in the northwest, the manifest destiny being ‘to overspread the continent’. Trump also pictured the nation restored under his leadership as brimming with ‘exceptionalism’, indeed ‘far more exceptional than ever before’. America, down in the dumps, would become even more of an American America, making it brilliantly adequate to its concept. His State of the Union peroration to Congress six weeks later predicted a glorious future for ‘the most dominant civilization in history’, now that ‘the unstoppable power of the American spirit’ had been recaptured.

These were occasions for rhetorical excess, to which Trump is inclined anyway. But I was nonetheless surprised by the reference. I didn’t have him down as much of an exceptionalist or for that matter a destinarian. To put the question in that way may indeed impute a coherence and depth to Trump’s politics that it doesn’t have. Scratch the surface and the ideological essence seems to be the person of Donald Trump himself. Whims, lies, cheats, illegalities, egocentrism, revenge, brutality, boundless cynicism and a whole slew of appalling prejudices – does this add up to a ‘position’? Scarcely so – it appears. And yet. . .

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Sunday Poem

Etymology of Borders

BORDER, from the Middle English bordure, meaning “the decorative band
surrounding a shield,” a heraldic device intended to identify
possession — this flag flies over that land, & so this land belongs
to… But before belong became “to be the property of,”
there was no belongingbelong simply meant “to go along with,”
as if to be told a joke that goes on too long. Both long belong
derive from the Old English langian — “to yearn after, grieve for,
be pained, lengthen” as hours & distance do, both stretching
long past where borders mark their end. Borders are only
a device, after all, & device comes from the French
devis, meaning “an expressed intent or desire; a plan or design,”
design indicating not art but intentions, which we find
in the Latin divido, “to divide.” A continent is divided
into countries — country coming from the Latin contra,
“opposite, against,” as if to be of one place is to be
against another, or perhaps against all others,
property & possession of the flag whose shadow stretches
long across its land. Which side of the border you’re born on
defines where it is you belong, what devis & designs
are allowed to you, in which direction you yearn.
In which direction do you yearn? Does your country’s flag
wrap around you like an embrace or a shroud?
Decorate or divide you? There are only ever two options —
where you are or somewhere else —
but the border’s blade between slices them into infinite
cruelties, so thin you can see straight through
to the other side.

by Jaz Sufi
from Split This Rock

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Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?

Jessica Laser in The Paris Review:

Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and became a farmer, the sleeping-in kind, since he wrote at night. He didn’t publish a book of poems until he was thirty-nine, but went on to win four Pulitzers. By the end of his life, he could fill a stadium for a reading. Frost is still well known, occasionally even beloved, but is significantly more known than he is read. When he is included in a university poetry course, it is often as an example of the conservative poetics from which his more provocative, difficult modernist contemporaries (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound) sought to depart. A few years ago, I set out to write a dissertation on Frost, hoping that sustained focus on his work might allow me to discover a critical language for talking about accessible poems, the kind anybody could read. My research kept turning up interpretations of Frost’s poems that were smart, even beautiful, but were missing something. It was not until I found the journalist Adam Plunkett’s work that I was able to see what that was. “We misunderstand him,” Plunkett wrote of Frost in a 2014 piece for The New Republic, “when, in studying him, we disregard our unstudied reactions.”

More here.

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Rest Easy. I can’t. Can you?

Joseph Epstein in Commentary:

The Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov once said of writers, “And to write and write, like a wheel or a machine, tomorrow, the day after, on holidays; summer will come—and he must still be writing. When is he to stop and rest? Unfortunate man?” Goncharov was born in 1812 and died in 1891, so I am clearly not the model for the writer he was talking about—even though, my prolificacy having often been commented upon, I could otherwise well be. The eponymous hero of his novel Oblomov feels the same way about another character in the book who loves travel, and a second one who enjoys a lively social life, and a third who works hard in the hope of promotion. All of them are viewed by Oblomov as absurdly out of synch with life’s real purpose. This purpose, as Oblomov sees it, is to lie abed doing nothing all the days of one’s life. If rest may be said to have a champion, it is Oblomov, a gentleman by birth for whom “life was divided, in his opinion, into two halves: one consisted of work and boredom—these words were for him synonymous—the other of rest and peaceful good-humor.” Rest, unrelenting rest, is the name of Oblomov’s game.

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Friday, March 21, 2025

The Limits of Professional-Class Liberalism

Simon Torracinta in the Boston Review:

On February 18, in his inaugural memo as newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin was candid in his diagnosis. “When I talk about the state of the Democratic Party,” he wrote, “I often speak about the impact of perceptions—what voters see, feel, and sense. I believe the canary in the coal mine for what happened on November 5 was the recent showing that, for the first time in modern history, Americans now see the Republicans as the party of the working class and the Democrats as the party of the elites.” He continued: “We have to take seriously the job of repairing and restoring the perceptions of our party and our brand. It’s time to remind working Americans—and also show them every day—that the Democratic Party always has been and always will be the party of the worker.”

But is this just a matter of mistaken perceptions? And is the work of repair just a matter of rebranding? In Mastery and Drift, edited by historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer, the contributors suggest that the matter runs far deeper. On their collective read, the fate of the contemporary Democratic Party and the broader web of institutions in which it’s embedded is tied up in a much longer term and more fundamental emergence and transformation of what they call “professional-class liberalism” since the 1960s.

More here.

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‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture

Joseph Howlett in Quanta:

Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You might twirl the pencil about its middle, tracing out a circle. But if you slide it in clever ways, you can do much better.

“It’s just a problem about how straight lines can intersect one another,” said Jonathan Hickman(opens a new tab), a mathematician at the University of Edinburgh. “But there’s such an incredible richness encoded in it — an incredible array of connections to other problems.”

For five decades, mathematicians have sought the best possible solution to the three-dimensional version of this challenge: Hold a pencil in midair, then point it in every direction while minimizing the volume of space it moves through. This straightforward problem has eluded some of the greatest living mathematicians, and it lurks beneath a host of open problems.

Now, the hunt for a solution appears to be over.

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John Berryman on the Three Demons of Creative Work

Maria Popova at Marginalia:

Early one morning in the pit of his fifty-eighth winter — having won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a $10,000 grant from the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts, having dined with the President at the White House, having nurtured the dreams of a generation of poets as a teacher and mentor and unabashed lavisher with praise, and having finally quit drinking — John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis to his death, slain by the meaning confluence of biochemistry and trauma that can leave even the strongest of minds “so undone.”

Several months earlier, Berryman had written a long letter to his former teacher Mark Van Doren, who had emboldened him to make a life in poetry and who would lovingly remember him as “an overflowing man, a man who was never self-contained, a man who would have been multitudes had there been time and world enough for such a miracle.” Despite reporting a routine of astonishing vitality — studying theology before breakfast, keeping up “a fancy exercise-programme” in the afternoon, reading a canon of medical lectures as research for a novel he was writing, responding to a dozen letters a day, and “and supporting with vivacity & plus-strokes & money various people, various causes” — Berryman placed at the center of the letter a self-flagellating lament about his “lifelong failure to finish anything,” which he attributed to his twenty four years of alcoholism.

more here.

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How Bauhaus Became the House We Live In

Eric Paul Mumford in The Common Reader:

This is a highly readable biography of the Berlin architect who founded the Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s, by a British design historian. The Bauhaus was arguably the most significant innovation in design education since the Renaissance, as it replaced the then-standard imitation of classical and other historical forms in architecture with the now universal idea that design should be based on function and the economical provision of everyday needs. Although often considered dangerously radical in Germany in the 1920s, after World War II, Bauhaus design approaches spread widely, until they again began to be questioned by postmodernists in the 1970s. By the 1980s, architectural tastes had begun to shift toward an expensive neo-traditionalism. This biography does not address the low opinion many had of Gropius in that era, and it probably will not change some widespread perceptions of Gropius and modern architecture that have taken hold since his death in 1969. It does offer a readable and largely sympathetic account of the complicated personal history of this centrally important modern design educator and mentor.

More here.

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The Exploration Of Sly Stone’s Genius

Tracey Thorn at The New Statesman:

Sly and the Family Stone achieved unprecedented success in the late Sixties, with number one records, a star turn at Woodstock, a cover on Rolling Stone magazine. Sly was not just a musical genius but a progressive mastermind, insisting that the band be multi-racial and made up of both men and women. Everything about them embodied the notion of inclusivity, of reaching towards a better world in which – without wanting to sound too blandly idealistic – all people could get along together. In a song like “Everyday People”, he made the impossible sound easy.

Perhaps overwhelmed by his own success, and threatened by the demands it placed on him, from the Seventies onwards he spiralled downwards into such heavy drug usage and unreliable behaviour that his work, and the very existence of the band, was undermined. The film paints an unflinching portrait of how this happened.

More here.

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We should be living in the golden age of hobbies. What happened?

Jenny Singer in The Washington Post:

It’s a first date. The drink in your hand is mostly ice. You’ve talked about your jobs, your days, your dogs. The conversation lulls, and you can feel the question coming. “So,” the person across the table asks, “what do you do for fun?”

The answer should be easy. We are supposed to be living in the golden age of hobbies. Great thinkers of the 20th century believed that innovations in technology would make work so efficient that leisure would eclipse labor. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted 15-hour workweeks by 2030. This would leave people the opportunity to “cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself.” This would include hobbies, activities that Benjamin Hunnicutt, an emeritus professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Iowa, calls “pursuits that are their own reward.” The opportunity to pursue joyful and meaningful activities was once “sort of the definition of human progress,” Hunnicutt said.

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Severance versus Science: The Neuroscience of Split-Brain Syndrome

Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

If the world of Severance was real, your “innie” would be reading this article at work, oblivious to the fact that your “outie” intends to spend the evening scouring the internet for these very answers. While the Severance procedure—surgical implantation of a chip into the brain to create separate conscious agents with access to separate streams of memory and experience—is purely fictional at present, another brain-splitting surgical procedure, called a corpus callosotomy, is entirely real and has been in use since the 1940s. Instead of separating work life and personal life, this procedure separates the right and left hemispheres of the brain by severing the major line of communication between them, a thick bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum.1 This surgery was used to treat severe and refractory epilepsy; in many patients, it helped control seizures by preventing aberrant neural activity from spreading between the hemispheres.

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Thursday, March 20, 2025

Marco Roth: Lisbon Dispatch

Marco Roth at The Feckless Bellelettrist:

I had been on my way out for a smoke, and had stopped to hold the heavy bronzed steel and glass door for a woman whose long gray ponytail and colorful mismatched knitwear looked pleasingly hippie-ish.

Our third was a construction engineer from the ongoing renovations next to the entrance: reflective safety vest, button down plaid shirt, muddy work boots. The woman popped open a large purple umbrella, looked at me, and patted it. She was offering to share.

I explained that I was just there to smoke and return to the library. We wished each other good afternoon. Next, she invited the foreman. He was only on his way to get a coffee and check on his crew, he said, but he accepted, put away the phone, then said something that made her laugh. They linked arms and set off up over the slick mossy brick path like lovers.

I tried remembering the last time I’d seen such a spontaneous act of random generosity—also accompanied by playful good humor—between two people from such different walks of life, strangers to each other. This kind of solidarity—even against the relatively mild elements—would be unimaginable now in my former city, at, say, the crowded side entrance to the New York Public Library on 42nd street, or at a Brooklyn subway station.

Cities have energies and those energies can change, curdle, or waste away.

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Digital Therapists Get Stressed Too, Study Finds

Alexander Nazaryan in the New York Times:

Even chatbots get the blues. According to a new study, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT shows signs of anxiety when its users share “traumatic narratives” about crime, war or car accidents. And when chatbots get stressed out, they are less likely to be useful in therapeutic settings with people.

The bot’s anxiety levels can be brought down, however, with the same mindfulness exercises that have been shown to work on humans.

Increasingly, people are trying chatbots for talk therapy. The researchers said the trend is bound to accelerate, with flesh-and-blood therapists in high demand but short supply. As the chatbots become more popular, they argued, they should be built with enough resilience to deal with difficult emotional situations.

More here.

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