Stylized Facts

"Why Nonexistent People Do Not Have Zero Well-Being but Rather No Well-Being".

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 12:13:19 +0000

At this year's conference, in October, nearly 500 aspiring law professors turned up for interviews with 165 law schools. Like the draft of every professional sport, there are superstars here and for two days they were hotly pursued. At the top of the pile were former Supreme Court clerks. Just under them were candidates with both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in another discipline. Law schools, especially those in the upper echelons, have been smitten by Ph.D.-J.D.'s for more than a decade.

Ori J. Herstein, who studied philosophy in grad school and is a doctor in the science of law, says that "an economics Ph.D. is the most valuable," and that "the further away you get from the humanities the better."

Mr. Herstein was sitting in the Marriott lobby between interviews. Israeli-born and cheerful in a boyishly wonky way, he has a résumé that seems custom-built to tantalize law school recruiters. He has two degrees from Columbia, which, along with a handful of other elite schools -- most notably Yale -- has become a farm team for the credential-obsessed legal academy. He has already published a handful of law review articles with promisingly esoteric titles ("Historic Injustice and the Non-Identity Problem: The Limitations of the Subsequent-Wrong Solution and Towards a New Solution") and has submitted another that sounds perfectly inscrutable ("Why Nonexistent People Do Not Have Zero Well-Being but Rather No Well-Being").

Less stupid or just less photographed ? The AWL pushes credulity .

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:27:07 +0000

In On Photography, Sontag refers to the technique used by Arbus, famed documenter of New York's marginalized (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists etc.): "Instead of trying to coax her subjects into natural or typical position, they are encouraged to be awkward, that is, to pose. Thereby, the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd, askew. Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images of themselves." In a similar way to Arbus' subjects--whose real selves are undermined by the images the photographer wishes to present of them--Depp subverts his own persona and projects that of the various fashion photographers who shoot him for magazines. In this way Depp maintains the Hollywood illusion of himself as poster boy for celebrity eccentricity.

The photographer's power lies not only in determining how his or her subject poses, but also in how the image is ultimately produced (cropping, editing, Photoshopping, etc.); as Sontag put it, "in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects." Small wonder that Julia Roberts could tell American Photo in 2004 that she feels "stupid," "goofy," and "nervous"--like Depp--when being photographed and, in the same breath, say that when she handles a camera (as in the film Closer, in which she played a professional photographer), it "instantly makes you the coolest person in the room."

Johhny Depp

Johnny Depp took his reputation for eccentricity a little too far last week. Interviewed in the November issue of Vanity Fair, the actor appeared to let his guard down when discussing photo shoots with writer Nick Tosches, a long-time friend and a godparent to one of Depp's kids. "Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow," the actor said. "Raped. The whole thing. It feels like a kind of weird--just weird, man. Weird. Like you meet people and they say, 'Can I have a picture with you!' And that's great. That's fine. That's not a problem. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like--you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid."

The answer is clearly not provided on the big screen. On the contrary. Interestingly, Depp uses the term "stupid" at least a couple other times in the interview. One of them comes when he's describing his opposition to a staged cockfight in the upcoming film, The Rum Diary. Though the cockfighting scene reportedly looks real, the roosters were protected from killing each other with pieces of invisible monofilament (in accordance with American Humane Association regulations), a precaution he appeared to think detracted from the viscerality of Hunter S. Thompson's original scene. "I think it was stupid," he told Tosches. Extrapolating from that comment, Depp use of the term "stupid" suggests his aversion to false representation. Given his stated pleasure at being photographed by fans in his everyday life, it's the falseness of the photo shoot and the poses associated with it that seem to bother Depp.

Kristen Stewart:

Explaining her moodiness around paparazzi, Stewart contended that the public is not often privy to what happens before the pictures are taken. "What you don't see are the cameras shoved in my face and the bizarre intrusive questions being asked, or the people falling over themselves, screaming and taunting to get a reaction," she told Elle. "All you see is an actor or a celebrity lit up by a flash. It's so... The photos are so... I feel like I'm looking at someone being raped."

In the same interview, Stewart did, however, seem to be in tune with Sontag. "Your little persona is made up of all the places that people have seen you and what has been said about you, and usually the places that I am are so overwhelming in the moment and fleeting for me--like one second where I've said something stupid, that's me, forever."

-- Soraya Roberts

The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 05:34:30 +0000

From the 1930s to the 1960s, as the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers demonstrates in his recent book, "The Age of Fracture," American public discourse was filled with references to the social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history. Over the last five decades, that discourse has changed in ways that emphasize individual choice, agency and preferences. The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.

Ideas are passee

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 16:00:38 +0000

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don't care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world -- a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can't instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock -- to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

Obama update

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 18:52:04 +0000

Mr. Obama seemed brilliant at politics when he first emerged in 2004. He understood the nation's longing for unity. We're not divided into red states and blue, he said, we're Big Purple, we can solve our problems together. Four years later he read the lay of the land perfectly--really, perfectly. The nation and the Democratic Party were tired of the Clinton machine. He came from nowhere and dismantled it. It was breathtaking. He went into the 2008 general election with a miraculously unified party and took down another machine, bundling up all the accrued resentment of eight years with one message: "You know the two losing wars and the economic collapse we've been dealing with? I won't do that. I'm not Bush."

The fact is, he's good at dismantling. He's good at critiquing. He's good at not being the last guy, the one you didn't like. But he's not good at building, creating, calling into being. He was good at summoning hope, but he's not good at directing it and turning it into something concrete that answers a broad public desire.

And so his failures in the debt ceiling fight. He wasn't serious, he was only shrewd--and shrewdness wasn't enough. He demagogued the issue--no Social Security checks--until he was called out, and then went on the hustings spouting inanities. He left conservatives scratching their heads: They could have made a better, more moving case for the liberal ideal as translated into the modern moment, than he did. He never offered a plan. In a crisis he was merely sly. And no one likes sly, no one respects it.

So he is losing a battle in which he had superior forces--the presidency, the U.S. Senate. In the process he revealed that his foes have given him too much mystique. He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.

-- Peggy Noonan

Brooks' Hamiltonian something for everyone

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:25:10 +0000

Republican politicians don't design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices -- as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal. Republicans have taken a pragmatic policy proposal from 1980 and sanctified it as their core purity test for 2012.

As for the Democrats, they offer practically nothing. They acknowledge huge problems like wage stagnation and then offer... light rail! Solar panels! It was telling that the Democrats offered no budget this year, even though they are supposedly running the country. That's because they too are trapped in a bygone era.

Mentally, they are living in the era of affluence, but, actually, they are living in the era of austerity. They still have these grand spending ideas, but there is no longer any money to pay for them and there won't be for decades. Democrats dream New Deal dreams, propose nothing and try to win elections by making sure nobody ever touches Medicare.

Adolescents secretly like feeling eccentric and freakish and alone, hoarding pop arcana and cultivating ever-dweebier erudition

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:11:48 +0000

Kurt Cobain once said in an interview that long before he'd heard any actual punk rock music, he studied magazine photos of punk musicians and imagined what the music sounded like. It must have sounded to him -- who knows? -- something like what would later be called grunge.

Gov. Jerry Brown. As great as Hernando Cortes ?

Sat, 21 May 2011 19:47:33 +0000

"What happens if Plan A fails? What is your Plan B?"

"I believe in the Hernando Cortes approach," he said, "When you hit the shore, burn the ships. There is no Plan B.", invoking the Spanish conqueror. California Governor Jerry Brown didn't flinch.

The lawmakers sat in disbelieving silence.

China real estate: leveraged speculation

Thu, 12 May 2011 03:58:46 +0000

Until recently, local governments would sell this land to developers for very little upfront. A firm could buy land worth 5 billion yuan with just 500m yuan ($75.9m) in working capital, says Jinsong Du of Credit Suisse. Even better, the developer could then offer that land as collateral for a loan of, say, 2.5 billion yuan from a bank. And instead of ploughing those borrowed billions into developing the site, they could use it to buy more land. Developers were not too worried about generating cash flow, because in a pinch they assumed they could always sell the land at a profit or flog as-yet-unbuilt flats to eager buyers on the back of blueprints alone.

The viability of this model depends on ever-growing demand, which often comes from speculative investors looking for a chance of quick capital gains. Some are wealthy private individuals; many are enterprises that have been diverting money from capital investment, hoping for juicier returns from property.

Careerism

Sun, 01 May 2011 07:08:15 +0000

You can't fix a systemwide problem by simply blaming or retraining individuals. When systems are broken, workers respond in counterproductive ways. They try "workarounds," as when a nurse guesses at a doctor's unreadable handwriting on a prescription because she is afraid to ask. Or they withhold information to avoid responsibility, wanting someone else to make a decision even if it is wrong. Blaming individuals can also make it harder to recruit and keep the most qualified employees. (In child welfare, talented caseworkers too often give up on investigating troubled families and gravitate to handling adoptions.)

-- Olivia A. Golden

Middle class

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:40:39 +0000

"Even when uttered by Democrats, middle class often sounds like a
mealymouthed way of saying, Us, and not them, where them includes poor
people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues."

- - Barbara Ehrenreich

.	Income	Housing	Education	Investments
$7.500,000 +	.		.	.
$1,750,000 +	.		.	.
$1,00,000 +	.		.	.
$500,000 +	.		.	.
$250,000 - $500,000 +	2		.	.
$100,000 - $250,000 +	.		.	.
$250,000 - $500,000 +	.	1	.	.

The debate over who and what are middle class will become more intense as economic programs are aimed and promoted to rescue, assist, and promote the middle class.

See references:
1. $250,000 to $500,000 income mortgage struggle.
2. New healthcare taxes on individuals earning $280,000 and up.
3. Middle class: only up to $250, 000 annual income ?
4. Under $250,000 is middle class: Obama.
5. Middle class at $150k.
6. America's middle class is ~~motorized~~ mobilized.
7. Krugman and Clinton: middle class up to $250,000 in 1993.
8. Middle class is in the middle.
9. Middle class, social security, FICA taxes.
10. Tax breaks for income over $250,000 for a family to expire ? Middle class could suffer.
11. (Upper) middle class: assets of $2 million to $15 million, "the lower end of the high end" -- divorce(e) advocate.
12. Alternative minimum tax (AMT).
13. Democrat messaging.
14. Middle class turns wealthy from $1.75 to $7.5 million -- Fidelity Investments
15. Middle class NY Times readres make $119k (2009).

Cramer 1997

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 01:42:02 +0000

A day in the life

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 06:40:16 +0000

Another library whistle blower

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 05:04:10 +0000

Nunberg is skeptical of notions of "information overload," but does admit to moments of tech-induced befuddlement. "I fancy myself a dab hand at Google, but it drives me crazy," he said. "Information is like taxis in New York: it seems to be all over the place, and then you can never find it when you need it. But the problem isn't just the raw volume; we've collapsed all these channels and categories that used to be distinct, so that nothing is where it's supposed to be. It's as if we've torn down the walls of the library, and now the reading room is full of street people."

Speak in newspaper headline

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 19:28:19 +0000

Chinese do "speak in newspaper headlines", as the saying goes, and can seem very abrupt, even rude, to Westerners. There's the joke Chinese-Western phrasebook, which translates "I'm so sorry, but I do believe our meeting is not today, but next week" as "Why you here?"

-- via Greenspun