by Melanie Friedrichs

Nearly every economist who has written about money, from David Hume to Milton Friedman, has disagreed about its role in the economy and its influence on real economic growth. Underlying each argument is the same question, asked but never answered: is money causal? Today it seems like everyone’s got a different idea about what money is and where it’s going. The bond sharks fear deflation and depression, the gold bugs fear hyperinflation, and governments fear excess in either direction but disagree about how to keep the economy under control. Yet most college freshman learn that money is “long- term neutral” in economics 101. If money doesn’t matter, why are we worrying? Perhaps because despite the theory that argues otherwise, we know that the glass condos built in Baltimore and houses standing empty post-mortgage market slump are very real and were built because of money. In this post I propose a different way to conceptualize the money’s causal role, derived not from data, but from a comparison and reconciliation of the views of classical theorists.

A Short History of the Theory of Money

The first economists writing in the late 18th century used a thought problem to conclude that money has a causal effect on prices, but no causal effect on output. If suddenly the supply of money in a nation doubled, prices would double as well, and but would produce only a nominal change; real output would remain the same in the long run. However, David Hume also observed that silver arriving from the new world seemed to stimulate industry as European merchants and craftsman scrambled to produce for Spain’s new wealth. Adam Smith lauded the introduction of fractional reserve banking in Glasgow as a significant reason behind the city’s economic development. Both positions seem to suggest that money causes more than a nominal change. Indeed, outside of the academic economics, popular history nearly always paints finance as causal, with increasing bullion facilitating trade in markets near and far, fledgling banks financing the first factories of the industrial revolution, and the Bank of England’s gold standard leading to a century of prosperity and peace. This dichotomy between the received wisdom and the popular legend remained intact into the 20th Century, until the collapse of the gold standard and the deflation of the Great Depression prompted new thought on the role of money.

Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

I first met Alfred nine years ago, shortly after moving into my current home. I was brand new to the neighborhood and had only been there a week when Baltimore was blanketed with a fresh coat of snow eight inches deep. Around here, that’s well more than enough to shutter schools and keep most people out of work.

I was barely awake, walking around the livingroom in jeans with no shirt or socks when I heard a tremendous rumble and thump outside the window. My primal, territorial instincts took over. The rage began to well up inside me as I prepared to defend my new holding, even if it was a rental. Who dare invade my domain!

I peeled back the curtain to see kids roaming through the streets, engaged in a massive snow ball fight free-for-all. “Alright, Reinhardt,” I said to myself quietly, “you’re only thirty-five. Don’t become a grumpy old man just yet.”

Children of all ages were streaming everywhere. A rather large one had come cascading over a short wall and onto my porch, then onto yet another, clumsily flopping across the connected rowhomes, and thereby creating the most immediate ruckus.

I got on some clothes, went outside, and started firing snowy projectiles. Sensing the opportunity to act out every kid’s fantasy by safely attacking an adult with impunity, the juvenile chaos coalesced into a children’s army. I held them off for a while, relying on a rapid fire release and some bear-like growling. But in the end their numbers were too large. They drove me back into my yard and up the stairs to my rear porch. In the end, it was all I could do to close the latch to the back gate as a fusillade misshapen snowballs reigned down upon me.

All in all, it had been a successful introduction to the neighborhood.

Read more »

I'd like to have my own Super PAC
That on my behalf could attack
Of course any sign of collusion
Would be just an illusion
I wouldn't tell them how to act

I know that no contact's allowed
But what's the harm if I just say out loud
“It would so make my day
If your ads were to say
That only I stand out in the crowd”

Oh, the money you'll all want to raise
To make sure you can heap me with praise
And will you please read my mind
Where you'll happen to find
The names of those I'd like to faze

The PAC's name's no concern of mine
Whatever you choose will be fine
But if I had a voice
And was given a choice
I might suggest “Sarah's Divine!”

But of course, it's all up to you
My friends won't be on your crew
We won't speak and won't meet
I'll be just shocked when you tweet
Some of the slander and lies that you'll spew

So I guess that what I need right now
Is to find someone rich I can wow
I mean, really rich
Then I'll make my pitch
But all connivance I'll disavow

by Vivek Menezes

This Saturday night, I attended one of the best concerts in my life.

I’m trying to avoid all hyperbole here, honest. Also it’s not like I haven’t been around – my 3-decade concert resume includes Jobim in Rio, Springsteen in New Jersey, Aida in Luxor, and – some of you might recall – Lou Majaw in his hometown Shillong.

But this Saturday night on a rugged hillside overlooking the Mandovi River in Old Goa was the equal of all those experiences.

The marvelous soprano Patricia Rozario sang Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn in the lovely 500-year-old Capela do Monte, packed in tight with a hushed, intent audience. The sari-clad singer dazzled throughout, but it is when she sang in Konkani – hymns from Goa’s centuries-old tradition – that a palpable atmosphere of catharsis arrived for Rozario and her now-emotional audience.

The formidably talented and experienced singer suddenly had tears visibly welling in her eyes. All around me audience members were crying, the silver-haired lady next to me buried her face in her grandson's shoulder and sobbed quietly. My own face was wet now, we each had suddenly realized it had taken all of us – setting, singer, repertoire and audience too – five full centuries to get to this electric moment of coming together. It was inexpressably moving to be there. But we all knew it never should have taken this long.

For at least two decades, I’ve fairly diligently (but informally) surveyed scholars, musicians and music fans about “western” music in India.

In all that time, I’ve encountered barely a handful of non-professional musicologists who realize that – for example – the violin’s presence in India far predates the sitar or tabla, or even what is now called “Hindustani classical music.” It is common for boneheads to tout the credentials of this music, that emerged from post-Mughal North India, as somehow more ‘Indian’ than, say, a cello concerto. But that is totally ahistorical, and like every single North-India-generated generalization about “Indianness”, willfully ignores the history and culture of India’s Western coastline.

Read more »

by Quinn O'Neill

A sizable minority of Americans holds beliefs that have been thoroughly dispelled by science. About 40% believe in a biblical account of human origins and as many as 29% seem to think that the earth is at the center of the solar system. Public opinion is divided on the reality of global warming and some even think that the moon landing was a hoax. If there’s one thing we can be certain about, it’s that many Americans have a hard time distinguishing fact from fiction.

How could a country so scientifically and technologically advanced be awash with confusion, anti-science fanaticism, and conspiracy theories, one might wonder. Reading Canadian news this past week, I was struck by an obvious answer. The Canadian government (or the “Harper government” as the megalomaniac narcissist at the country’s helm prefers) recently teamed up with Sun TV to bring Canadians their first real dose of fake news. At the government’s request, Sun TV News, the closest thing Canada has to Fox news, staged what the Star’s Heather Mallick described as a “happy clap-clap Canadian moment” for Citizenship Week. It was a “reaffirmation” ceremony (whatever that is), in which new Canadians reaffirmed their citizenship oath. As it turned out, six of the “new Canadians” weren’t new citizens at all, but federal bureaucrats simply acting the part.

Given its fabricated and dishonest nature, the event wasn’t the sort that would make Canadians swell with pride or tear up with sentimentality. It does, however, serve as an ironic commemoration of events that took place this time last year.

Read more »

by Liam Heneghan

“He was violent?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know. What’s ‘violent’ anymore? He was a teenage guy. Then, a guy in his twenties.”

—Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

Once upon a time, there was an editor of a short-lived academic journal called Evolutiona Pathologica who was fired in disgrace. In an interview published after his dismissal, the editor, a notoriously fastidious man, reported that papers in his journal often had a pronounced impact on the field primarily because they were unsound; unsound in their conception, imperfect in their analysis, defective in their conclusions drawn from meager data, and inflated in the claims they made about their practical implications. The papers were often wide of the mark, he conceded, and even occasionally bonkers. Yet, many papers were masterpieces precisely because refuting the claims strengthened the subdiscipline of evolutionary pathology. Or so he said.

Recently, while archiving the material from the defunct journal, I reread the manuscript the publication of which resulted in the editor’s dismissal. I also discovered an internal report on the dismissal that shed light on the case..

Before reproducing the offending paper – some of you, of course, will remember it well – I’ll remind you of some of other mildly controversial pieces that appeared in the journal. For instance, in a rather famous special issue on the pathological origins and implications of bipedality, Professor J. P. X deRossa-Ellman made the celebrated claim that upright walking evolved to reduce the overstimulation of reflexology points on the hands and to intensify the quality of the massage on the feet. “As hominins shifted from an arboreal habitat,” deRossa-Ellman opined, “pressure on the hands, especially on the zones associated with the small intestines inclined Australopithecines to a frightful gassiness. In contrast, the laudatory effects of passively massaging the feet by walking on the dewy grasses of the East African savannah produced a sense of well-being that disposed our primitive forbears to recreational coitus. Those more upright proto-humans joyously copulated thus leading to increased fitness.” To the embarrassment of the journal it was later discovered that deRossa-Ellman ran a specialized massage parlor on the near North side called “Strange Beginnings/Happy Endings”. He also did a brisk business selling “genuine savannah grass”. Apparently you could also smoke the stuff.

Read more »

Alarm

Wake up as much as possible
before you sleep
………………… catch
your breath while the sun’s up
when
……….in February after a snow
everything’s so soaked with light
sleep
……… is impossible
and all that’s left is to catch a day
by an hour
………………. and dance
.. ….in incandescence

forget
……….. about sleep and dreams
forget
……….. the doldrums and
wake
……….. to what the crows caw
cackling over road kill
……………… ……… wake
to the wind's insistence that
moving-on
……………….. is the way
the world works
…………….………….wake
to its
……….. alarm

.
by Jim Culleny
1/28/12

by Misha Lepetic

“If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings”
~ Jeff Mulgan

Recently I had the good fortune to catch “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” at the IFC Center here in New York. The docuementary is a fascinating corrective to the perception that when we talk about failed public housing, we are talking about failed architectural design. The documentary makes liberal use of the above 1972 picture and footage, which has become visual shorthand for, as Alexander von Hoffmann writes:

…an icon of failure. Liberals perceive it as exemplifying the government’s appalling treatment of the poor. Architectural critics cite it as proof of the failure of high-rise public housing for families with children. One critic even asserted that its destruction signaled the end of the modern style of architecture.

There is much to be said about the story of Pruitt-Igoe. Its history, and the narratives and ideologies that are woven around that history, constitute a microcosm of how we choose to perceive many aspects of architecture, urban planning and public policy during the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, such a grand flameout was bound to attract grand pronouncements, since there was something for everyone to cherry-pick for his or her own agenda.

The genesis of a housing development as large as Pruitt-Igoe was made possible by the United States Housing Act of 1949, but flight to the St Louis suburbs was already in motion. Postwar migration from the South, in the form of the Second Great Migration, re-filled that urban core with poor families that could not afford much better than the tenant buildings run by slumlords. However, even this migration was not sufficient to re-inflate the population of the City of St Louis, which would peak at 857,000 in the 1950 census. Currently standing at 319,000, the 63% loss in population has left the city at roughly the same size as during the 1870 census. Even more remarkably, the St Louis Metropolitan area – the destination of urban flight – saw its population grow from 400,000 to well over a million in the same 60-year span.

Read more »

by Hartosh Singh Bal

Lost to history, a number of cities of classical antiquity once existed along the banks of the river Narmada in central India. Many of these cities date back to the 3^rd century BC, to the time of the emperor Ashoka, who united the subcontinent into an empire whose extent was never again to be matched in the history of India. The emperor ruled from Patliputra (modern day Patna) in the heart of Magadh in the Indo-Gangetic plain but the spread of his empire made it inevitable that there would be other centers of administration. It was carved into four provinces, after Magadh the most important of these was Avanti with its capital Ujjain. Along the highway connecting the two capitals a number of cities came up and prospered, including some on the banks of the Narmada.

A coup by a Brahmin commander-in-chief who in all likelihood could not tolerate the ascendance of Buddhism brought down the Mauryan Empire. In the aftermath Patliputra could no longer exercise control over the unwieldy empire, the cities soon went their own way. One of the most important of these was Mahismati. Despite several references that crop up in classical Sanskrit literature, today it is difficult to pin down its exact location. This has given rise to a host of claimants along the Narmada, residents of modern day towns such as Mandla and Maheshwar still wage a fevered battle – leaving nothing aside, myths, fanciful notions, borrowings from questionable sources, notions that historians of repute would never touch.

There remains one authentic source for delving into the history of these cities. Coins dating back as far as the third century BC have been recovered in such abundance from the Narmada valley that the subject now forms a separate field of study. Borrowing symbols used on coins once struck at the Ujjain mint, we can guess at the existence of cities such as Bhagila, Kurara and Madavika only through the markings on their coins.

The coins do not differ much in size from the modern coin, though square shapes seemed to have been preferred. They are often crowded with symbols. A single square coin, no larger than the modern 25paisa coin, could accommodate as many as five symbols on each face. Some of these symbols were in use across the subcontinent, such as the swastika; others such as the Ujjain symbol resembling the iron cross demarcated a region.

Read more »

by Namit Arora

Some travel impressions prompted by the living and the dead of Varanasi, India.

In early 2006, I was on a train to Varanasi when my mother called from Jaipur. Terrorists had just hit Varanasi with explosions at multiple sites, including at the train station; many had died. Since I was going there as a tourist, she urged me to postpone the trip and get off earlier. I was traveling with my partner and two white American friends, both on their first visit to India. They seemed rattled enough and I worried about their safety. What if Hindu-Muslim riots broke out? We were ten nighttime hours away from Varanasi, so we had to decide fast.

The reality of the event sunk in further when an NDTV reporter and her camera crew got on the train. With time to kill, she began quizzing tired and bemused passengers about their take on the news. And she did so in an overexcited style that seemed to dominate live reporting in India. When she thrust the mic at me, I could only mutter something about my worry for my companions.

I persuaded my fellow travelers to continue. The terrorists had already done their deed; Varanasi was likely the safest place to visit now. Worst case, we could stay holed up in our hotel. Truth be told, I was also drawn to this unbidden frisson of travel. When we arrived in the morning, we found a part of the train station cordoned off by the police. I could see blotches of red on the ground. The driver of the taxi we took into town had witnessed the explosions: flying body parts, screams, the ensuing melee. He had helped take the injured to the hospital. But our decision to not abort our journey turned out to be a good one—the city remained calm and we moved around freely. I felt proud of my fellow citizens for being so mature about the situation. It was my first time in Varanasi as an adult, and the place did not disappoint.

Read more »

Geography

Where are you from? I’m often asked.
Kashmir, I answer.

Is that where wool comes from?
Sometimes, I play it straight: 1-95

Exit 16. Hang a left. In the Himalayas
My roads diverged.

Outsider in a land of outsiders
Occupy all. Not, where are you from

But, where are we going
Together?

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3QD.

by Omar Ali

The Ahmediya movement was started in Punjab in 19th century British India, by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadiyan. He seems to have been a somewhat stereotypical prophet; a quiet, religious loner who brooded about the challenges faced by his faith and his people. The decisive military and economic superiority of Western civilization over the Islamicate world had produced a variety of efforts at reform and revitalization. They ranged from the Wahabi-influenced puritanical Jihadism of Syed Ahmed Barelvi (who led an extremely fanatical jihadist movement in what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwah, until he was defeated by superior Sikh firepower and a reaction to his extreme views among the local Muslims) to the anglophile reformism of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (founder of Aligarh Muslim University). Mirza Ghulam Ahmed’s response was to start a movement of religious revival that was built around his own charismatic claims. Though he contradicted some mainstream Islamist claims about the finality of prophet-hood and the absolute necessity of military Jihad (military jihad as a Muslim duty is now so widely downplayed that it is hard for Westerners and even Westernized Muslims to figure out why his claim was considered so controversial), his movement was socially conservative and even puritanical. He found some support among modestly educated middle class Punjabi Muslims (including Islamist icon Allama Mohammed Iqbal, who either flirted with joining the movement or actually joined for a few years, depending on what version you believe). As his movement (and his claims regarding his own status as prophet or messiah) grew, it drew more and more orthodox opposition, especially from the dominant Sufi-oriented Barelvi Sunni sect. Ironically this branch of local Islam enjoyed some American (and world media) attention as “moderate and tolerant Muslims” in contrast to their Deobandi/Wahhabi brethren in the aftermath of 9-11 (though this attempt to fight Wahabi/Deobandi fire with Sufi-Barelvi water seems to have run into some trouble recently).

Read more »

by Mara Jebson

My stepfather had always wanted twins. In his culture, having twins was lucky, and a sign of more luck to come. In parts of Togo it is customary to give both twins names beginning with the same letter. One would hear about Afi and Abla, Joseph and Jonathan, or Elise and Esmee.

Although my stepfather never did have twins, he gave the three children he had with my mother names beginning with the letter “V”. He never explained about the “V”. A disciplined man, rigid in his habits, he was weird about names. Family lore holds that he was once charged with taking his baby brother’s birth certificate to the official bureau for naming. Along the dusty road he must have gotten inspired. In any case, most people in Togo have French or Togolese names, but his youngest brother would go through life as Martino, the O courtesy of his brother.

His own name, Kodjo, was really quite boring. In the years after Colonialism, there were a few Africanist measures taken to try to revolt against the pervasive French influence. Togolese citizens christened with European names were required to go re-name themselves with African names. These names were easy to choose, as all Ewe also have the name that is determined by the weekday of their birth. Kodjo merely means, “born on a Monday.”

When my mother met Kodjo in graduate school in America, he used this official name, and it was his American name. When we three, along with my new sister, left Philadelphia to move to Togo in the early nineties, among the many astonishments we had in store was the fact that no one else called him Kodjo. In Togo he went by “Johnny.”

Read more »

by Randolyn Zinn

Last week on a cold afternoon in New York City, Helen Schulman and I met at a café for a bracing talk about her new book. You may have seen that The New York Times chose This Beautiful Life as one of their Notable Books of 2011 or perhaps you've read her other novels, which include A Day at the Beach, P. S., The Revisionist, and Out of Time, as well as the short story collection Not a Free Show. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review. She is also an associate professor of writing at The New School.

RZ: Could you give 3QD readers a brief summary of This Beautiful Life?

Helen Schulman: Sure. It’s the story of a family that’s come newly to New York from a place where they were happy. Father has come for a new job opportunity and the two kids are placed in a fancy private school. One night the teenage boy goes to an unchaperoned party and hooks up with a younger girl, who wants to take the relationship further, but he says no. When he gets home, he finds a video in his in-box that the girl has made of herself performing a sexual act and it’s so white hot, before he thinks twice, he presses forward and send, flinging it to his friend. His friend looks at it, presses forward and send, the video goes viral, and the family’s world explodes.

RZ: It’s a gutsy story lyrically told. I couldn’t put it down.

Here’s actor Allen McCullough reading a passage from Richard’s point of view.

Richard

HS: I didn’t want to write a story about a scandal. And I know there are people who take it that way and buy the book for this reason and are disappointed sometimes. I was trying to capture a moment in history. With my last couple of books, I looked at a large societal shift or cultural moment through the lens of an individual or a couple or a family in order to take in something very big in the world through a very small prism. In The Revisionist, it was the Holocaust and Holocaust denial. In A Day At the Beach, it was 9/11 and the hinge moment in the culture between then and now; what we could do and what we didn’t do.

With This Beautiful Life, it’s the Internet, which is changing everything about the way we live. When I was in grad school, I supported myself working as a neurological research assistant at Bellevue for a family friend, who was writing about brain death and brain birth. So I spent two years learning about neurology, and what’s so interesting is that the way we use computers is literally reshaping the structure of our brains: how we surf the net and shift attention constantly actually changes the physical structure of the brain. For good or for ill, I don’t know, but it’s an evolutionary shift that’s taking place about how we think and how we study and how we use time. It’s changing everything.

Read more »

by Jen Paton

There are, according to Randall Henderson, founding editor of Desert Magazine (1937-1985), two deserts in the American imagination. One is full of “venomous reptiles and unbearable heat…it is the desert visualized by those children of luxury to whom any environment is unbearable which does not provide all of the comforts and services of a pampering civilization.” This is “fostered by fiction writers who dramatize the tragedies of the Desert for [their own] profit.” By contrast, the real desert, as Henderson saw it, “offers rare gifts: health giving sunshine — a sky studded by diamonds — a breeze that bears no poison” to those who come “in friendliness and understanding.”

There is, of course, only one desert, equally full of comfort and danger, plenty and lack. Its gifts – that diamond sky is real – are for everyone, but its history shows all America's small scars.

Back in 1936, Henderson saw an opportunity to serve the culturally under-served citizens of the American Southwest. The people of the desert deserved a magazine of their own, he wrote in his first editor’s note – a note that reflects the cultural nervousness and occasional defensiveness that infects the Western mind:

Henderson hoped his magazine would “preserve a culture of arid…but virile…America.” An ad from the December 1964 issue describes the ways to enjoy the desert: as collector, traveller, adventurer, history buff, or nature lover.

Read more »

As dust and gas swirls around the black hole
matter compresses causing it to glow.
Scientists can only see the outline of the black
hole, also called its shadow. –Physorg.com
.

Seeing a Black Hole or Bouquet of Altroemeria

First you must know
that shadows glow

Circling the shade of nada
(the thing that can’t be seen)
the stuff of anything will gleam
incandescent as a candle
round the outline
of a vase upon a table

whose cache of blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
are shades of shadows cast
which cast of blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
are not the stuff that lasts
which passing blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
will not be fastened fast
.

by Jim Culleny
1/17/12