No discussion of Steve Jobs? Nada?
I'm teaching three 1 1/2 hour classes today, with meetings where my breaks should be.
My god... that's going to be, what, six straight hours of work? In a single day?
I've thaught, believe you me, 1 1/2 hour classes that felt an awful lot like a full day's work.
On OWS, I'll repost this from the other thread, where it got no traction not, I'll choose to believe, because it was uninteresting, but because the thread had moved on:
Back on the OWS thing, this is pretty goddamn rich: the Tea Party has taken to distinguishing themselves from OWS by complaining that is too white, too disorganized and that their supposedly grassroots origin is just a front for their high-powered backers. (In this telling, the people behind the curtain are not the labor unions, but Van Jones and Al Gore).
That's what you call chutzpah.
1: In the Sugru thread.
satisfying sequential careers, what would they be?
Editor of High Times magazine, kept man, lottery winner.
If you could have satisfying sequential careers, what would they be?
I'm not sure what this means, but I think it's what I'm doing.
I sometimes wish I'd gone into applied statistics.
That's a good way to get thousands of people to know your name. Just invent something like Geebie Test of nonequivalent distributions for data collected on a Thursday and people will be citing Geebie's G for years.
6: Right. Now call it a plan and you're done.
I've slept through 1 1/2 hour lectures and woke up feeling like I slept a whole night.
Some kind of social science -- sociology, econ with a sociology bent. That was what I wanted to do back in high school, until I was horrified by the low standard of what was publishable in my first job as a research assistant. In retrospect, probably the wrong lesson to have drawn from that.
On the other hand, everything I hear from you people about academia makes me think that I'm glad I'm not in that world. So I don't know.
Whoa, 6 hours of work per day. Don't put too much time in or you'll be a candidate for workman's comp.
So far web dude -> more programmer than web dude -> college student -> sciencey programmer dude -> sciencey grad student has been a fun sequence. The weird interlude in real estate was weird, but just because it's sequential it doesn't have to be linear.
Oh, I missed 2, am glad I'm not the only bitter lawyer.
11: tell me you're not doing that thing. N.B. law-talkin'-guy six hours of teaching doesn't mean six hours of work. And you missed the whole "meetings in between" part totally, I think.
Oh, I missed urple doing that thing, too. Really? Still?
11 to 10. I actually dropped out of grad school, what was I thinking.
I don't know what sequential careers means. Is it something that people do, or a fantasyland?
I've started wondering why I didn't try to go to medical school. It must have just been because everyone I knew who went to medical school was a Type A personality who worked out all the time, and I was afraid of not fitting in.
I suppose I really haven't had sequential careers because I keep doing more or less the same type of work, but in very different fields. But, I didn't go to law school and become insufferable.
My god... that's going to be, what, six straight hours of work? In a single day?
When was the last time you spent 4.5 hours doing a combination of public speaking on advanced topics and intensive engagement of 19-year-olds?
Clearly the whole "professors only work 10 hours a week!" thing is a trolling classic, but come on dude.
Teaching high school isn't the same as teaching college, but I don't think I ever taught more than six hours of classroom standup time in a day, and my easiest teaching day was more work than my hardest lawyering day. (Is the last clause hyperbolic? Maybe. But not very.)
I've thought about being a male prostitute who specializes in serving female athletes and dancers, women who have difficulty finding satisfaction, because most men don't have the strength and stamina for them.
On a more practical level, I've fantasized about teaching mathematics instead of philosophy, because the problems have clear answers with practical utility. I'd feel more confident in the value of my work.
These would make a nice sequence, although at least one of them would require some retraining on my part.
N.B. law-talkin'-guy six hours of teaching doesn't mean six hours of work. And you missed the whole "meetings in between" part totally, I think.
It's 4.5 hours of teaching, mathboy, and I was just guessing at the length of the meetings, so, sure, we could be talking about 7 or 8 straight hours of work, and, while generally it's true that classroom hours most definitely are not the same thing as total hours that teachers work, they (plus the meetings) probably are in this case, for heebie, today, which is all I was talking about. I doubt she's going to need a lot of prep time, after all.
21.2: Philosophy is obviously useless, but wouldn't that make it a better job so far as not causing stress for you.
This isn't the best time for me to have this conversation. spent the past three days in trial for seven hours, plus working at least 7 additional hours on top of that, plus rats in the kitchen, so, yeah, not in a mood to feel sorry on the "overwork" vector for the few hours of teaching per week plus endless time to research and write obscure research paper crowd. I don't understand why academics don't just admit it and celebrate the fact that they've got a lot of time; I guess it's because of a fear their colleagues will find them lazy.
I doubt she's going to need a lot of prep time, after all.
Right! She knows the math already!
It's like Halford hasn't read any of Heebie's posts about the meetings and advising and recommendation letters and book-groups and off-campus lecture crap she has to do with students.
22: really? She doesn't have anything else to do but class time and meetings? No grading, or preparing for meetings, or office hours, or emailing? No prep at all?
I want to be a lawyer, man. Spend a couple hours a week in court, maybe meet with clients for an hour or two, and the rest is gravy. That shit is cushy. Not liker being a programmer. Then you have to actually do real work, all day.
25: it's not that she knows the math already, it's that she knows her lesson plans already, and is already prepped for the classes. You think she's planning to do all that today?
24: so you only had to do 28 hours of work this week? What a life!
Halford's clearly been driven mad by the rats.
plus rats in the kitchen
Did you fix that already?
No, I've read them and I'm not saying that Heebie doesn't work hard. But compared to literally almost any other career academics have it good on this particular front, whatever the other problems with academia. You just do have a much more flexible schedule and more free time.
my easiest teaching day was more work than my hardest lawyering day
This is very nearly the opposite of my experience.
More flexible schedule, yes. I'm really not getting the 'more free time' bit.
33: If you've done both, and you liked teaching that much better, how'd you end up in law school? (I suppose 'didn't realize how bad lawyering was going to be' is a fair answer.)
I'm really not getting the 'more free time' bit.
What about it don't you get?
29 -- wait, aren't you supposed to be the one who knows Math? How does 14*3=28, even assuming I took the rest of the week off?
Not liker being a programmer. Then you have to actually do real work, all day.
Plus, sometimes you have to walk all the way to the vending machine.
37: I think he thought you meant 7 hours in trial each day, plus seven total additional hours. Which, hah.
I recognize that standing in front of students is difficult work. It is hard being "on" all the time. Judges often have the same complaint.
But, lawyering is much more soul-sucking than teaching. On average.
Teachers/professors earn every bit of their time off, but it simply isnt as much work.
37: seven hours per day in court, plus seven additional hours of work per day, then? I think the problem is less my not knowing math than you not doing terribly well with english.
I'm trying desperately to find the comment where urple estimated the amount of time he spent working compared to time spent on the internet, and his then-supervisor's description of his output (high quality, but late). Trying, but failing.
36: the part where it isn't true.
You just do have a much more flexible schedule and more free time.
More free time to... grade!
I don't feel I have a career, and would happily jump ship to anything sufficiently well-paid and interesting. However, I would really fancy being a cinematographer.
Oh my god the whining from the lawyers in this thread is astounding (LB mostly excepted).
36: Prepping for classes takes a shitload of time -- I was teaching high school math, so stuff I knew cold. Prepping it into a lesson is still laborious. Grading takes a shitload of time. Research takes literally as much time as you're conscientious -- it may be possible to fuck off and not do much work on it, but I've heard tell that lawyers can do that sort of thing too.
Academics have much more autonomy over how they do their work than employed (rather than solo practitioner) lawyers, but that doesn't mean they're not working long hours.
I am not really interested in this debate as most high school and middle school teachers I know work their asses off.
The college and Law school professors that I see regularly are not working so hard.
41: While I'm generally on your side of this argument, that bit of confusion was all you.
Prepping for classes takes a shitload of time
From what I heard about law school teaching standards there may be a reason so few lawyers think prep takes time.
I would believe that law professors specifically have it pretty sweet.
2. In an ideal world with an ideal government, what role would charities play? I often get annoyed that government ought to be doing a lot of things that charities are currently covering, or failing to cover, or scrambling to cover.
Stuff that's can't be easily quantified and/or done with money alone, especially at the local level. Food banks are no substitute for welfare, but people who are low on money are also often low on time and the life skills for shopping for decent nutrition, I'd assume. Local charities, or local chapters of national charities, can give individual attention to people in need. Likewise for present drives around the holiday season, and things like Heifer International.
3. If you could have satisfying sequential careers, what would they be? I sometimes wish I'd gone into applied statistics. Other times I think I should have become a dermatologists assistant.
My dad has been a high school social studies teacher, a lawyer, an insurance agent, CEO of an industrial-recycling-related company (startup didn't get off the ground), high school principal and finally school district superintendent, so he seems to be what you're talking about. Personally, I've never seriously considered anything outside writing or publishing in some form.
If you've done both, and you liked teaching that much better, how'd you end up in law school? (I suppose 'didn't realize how bad lawyering was going to be' is a fair answer.)
Well, there's that, yes, and also the not wanting to go through grad school part, on account of there not necessarily being a job at the other end (among other factors), and there are also pay differentials.
Look, I have experience in both worlds. It's just not even remotely true that academics, at least in the humanities area where I was, work as much as the lawyers I know, in average. It is true that academics have long term projects hanging over their heads and a notion that they should be working more, but in terms of total hours worked it's just not comparable IME. Maybe it's different in the sciences or math but I doubt it.
51:
I should have limited my comment to law professors. They are slackers. I only know a couple college professors irl and I cant really make much of a judgment about them.
It is certainly possible to be a tenured professor who doesn't do a terribly large amount of work. It is almost certainly also possible to be a senior partner at a large law firm who doesn't do a terribly large amount of work. The idea that most academics fit into the former category is every bit as silly as the idea the most lawyers fit into the latter category.
We can solve this issue but using the post count for the lawyers v. the post count for the academics.
Unfogged threads where, during a weekday, people argue about how overworked they are: awesome.
54: Yes, but the academic has to do original thinking and the lawyer just has to find the right past action to cut and paste from.
54: I didn't know you were a law-school refugee from academia. What did you teach?
No discussion of Steve Jobs? Nada?
Fixed.
I have some friends who have recently transitioned from being humanities academics to being trial lawyers [i.e. barristers]. I think all of them would laugh at the idea that they were doing more work before the transition. At least one of them is doing insane hours these days. However, they were still working pretty bloody hard before they swapped over. Certainly many more hours than the average school teacher works, or the average person in a standard office job.
49: I believe Tweety was using a literal reading of Halford's comment to highlight the absurdity of him assuming that Heebie's time working was limited to the duties mentioned.
I was a grad student in a different region of the Dutch Cookie's field for a while.
CA routinely works 10-12 hr days. I just deleted a laundry list of how he spends his day, but the whole "face it! academics don't work very hard! summer!" thing is too boring.
I'm sympathetic to Dr. Katz's son Ben, who tells his father that there's no work available in his chosen field.
"Daredevil, Ben? There are no opportunities for daredevils, is what you're telling me?"
I wrote 64 in the few minutes I have not devoted to Standpipe's blog.
Does it really have to be stated that, regardless of profession, nobody who comments here regularly during the day is exactly working their ass off?
Y'all lawyers be crazy. If you're miserable, then you're making a ton of money. Quit complaining. If you're not making a ton of money, then you're probably not miserable, and life is good.
Lawyers love to complain, though, no matter what they do. I'm probably the only lawyer I know who is happy. Maybe law just sucks as a profession, I don't know. But I work probably 45-50 hours a week on average. Some weeks its a lot more. Some weeks I spend an entire afternoon screwing around on the web and doing mindless things like closing my cases in our databases.
Do I sometimes stay at work until 7, go home, eat dinner, and start working again until 2 am? And do the same thing again the next day? Yes. But do I sometimes sneak out at 3:00 pm because there's nothing I absolutely HAVE to get done (although there are always things to do) and I feel like it? Yes. Am I usually ineffectual for the rest of the day after a victory? Yes.
Do I work hard? Yes. But I also have a job that is way more interesting, satisfying, challenging, and fun than a lot of people. Plus I get to go to court and win. Winning is the best thing in the world. If you don't hugely get off on winning, I don't know how you stand being a lawyer.
Ok I'll stop bragging now.
spent the past three days in trial for seven hours, plus working at least 7 additional hours on top of that, plus rats in the kitchen,
I so have Halford beat.
Tuesday and Wednesday I was on campus until 10:30 and 8 pm, respectively. Plus tests to grade. Plus a tenure package to put together. Plus several non-generic reference letters (ie other people's 3rd year and tenure reviews.) Plus a conference abstract due tomorrow. Plus coming in Sunday to be the speaker at an induction ceremony for some Alpha Chi Honors Society.
I knew I should have hit the Pwnview button before posting that.
Plus writing the damn speech for Sunday.
73: Ooh, Unfogged could carry that load for ya.
The way that people work in academia varies quite a bit by field. My impression is that lab scientists would give lawyers a run for their money in the "time spent at work category."
I've always been someone who valued my free time, and I worked way fewer hours than most people in college and I'd work fewer hours than most people no matter what job I was in.
But it's really hard to compare apples to apples because I'm just as likely to be doing math at 11pm as at 11am. I work as much on weekends as I do on weekdays. There's more flexibility, but there's less time that's literally free from demands.
63: Yeah, I wouldn't be committed to the proposition that academics generally work the same hours as high-pressured lawyers. But not all lawyering jobs are high pressure (most lawyering jobs are more than 9-5, but you can't take a senior associate/junior partner at Cravath as a typical lawyer), and the argument I'm reacting to is more that academia is an unusually low-pressure/low-hours profession. It's high autonomy, and it may be somewhat lower hours than lawyering on average, but not wildly so.
I want to be an astronaut. seeing the earth from orbit is something I really want to do before I die. because I'll never get to find out the rest of the story! do we kill ourselves like a bunch of morons? fall prey to the slavers everyone else is sensibly hiding from while we merrily advertise our tasty crunchy location along every spectrum possible? what?
also, I had a friend who did algebraic topology. I seriously never understood even what the fuck it was. I mean, set theory, OK, I can't do it or anything but when my set-theory grad student friend explained what he was doing in general terms it was ok. more like logic I guess. what the fuck is algebraic topology even about? heebie doesn't have to answer this because she's busy.
I should note that, as a grad student, I don't actually believe I'm working terribly hard. But we're not talking about grad students.
It's just like regular algebra, but instead of letters they use things like donuts and coffee cups.
When was the last time you spent 4.5 hours doing a combination of public speaking on advanced topics and intensive engagement of 19-year-olds?
Ten days ago. Actually I got up at 5 in the morning, ran eight miles, then spent 10 straight hours doing the public speaking/intensive engagement thing, then stopped and had some food, and then did 3 hours more, then got I think about four or five hours of sleep, then did seven hours more, then drove home. And that was my weekend. The day after that was Monday and I started a week of doing my real full-time job.
I'm going to help prove that academics work hard by not participating any more in this thread.
I wouldn't mind being a photographer, or musician, or record producer. But since actually talented people doing those things are struggling to make enough money to feed themselves, I think I'm shit out of luck.
do we kill ourselves like a bunch of morons?
I'd give better odds on that than the Singularity or even going out in a blaze of thermonuclear glory.
58, 69: I'll admit it: I don't work all that hard. Even during the busier periods at my job (like, say, for the past several months off and on) I work an average of 40-hour weeks and still have the free time to goof off with things like this.
That being said, I'm neither a lawyer or an academic. I have the job security of a McDonald's takeout window attendant (hyperbole, but in theory) and my job is dead-end. (I could advance to the position of one of my managers, but judging by what she goes through I wouldn't take that job at twice the salary.) And my job is mind-numbingly pointless. I mean, arguing about skills on a rubric sounds incredibly fascinating compared to commas.
But you know, I'm off to an office picnic right now after which I probably won't be expected to return to work, so I can't complain too much.
I so have Halford beat.
He probably has the worse commute, though. Aside from the hawk landings, that is.
Based on overall thread trajectory and comment 80 in particular, I predict we will surpass Python's Four Yorkshiremen about comment 137.
re: 84
Me neither. I probably do 30 - 35 hours a week at my desk, plus maybe another half dozen or so from home or elsewhere. I'd guess I might average out at somewhere between 36 and 38 hours a week, most weeks, although when the shit hits the fan it can be a lot more.
I wanna be a billionaire, so, so bad.
Because then I could afford to do all the other cool stuff like being an astronaut in my spare time.
I might work for the kind of charity that would need to exist even with a government so perfect - note the smart segue there - that all natural disaster relief was covered off and it didn't speak to any other state which had political prisoners (except when they also had a natural disaster). I'm thinking of things like the Erasmus Darwin museum we visited recently, where they'd bought the house owned by Darwin and filled it with his stuff/stuff about him and planted a medical garden full of period plant remedies outside. It would be insane to charge that kind of activity to the government, even in a perfect world, but if the money can be raised, it's still worth doing.
Topology = the coarsest way to study spaces. That is, you've forgotten things like angles, lines, distances, and only care about the way the space itself is connected up. E.g. the surface of a basketball is the same topologically as an american football.
Algebra = collections with operations like adding, multiplying, or composing.
Algebraic topology = Studying topology by using algebra.
The simplest example here is that if you have a topological space you can look at the collection of loops from some point in that space back to itself, and you can "compose" these by doing different loops in sequence.
For example, on a circle the possible loops are going around the circle some number of times each way. Letting n mean counterclockwise n turns, and -n mean clockwise n turns, you can see that composition is just adding. (If you go around counterclockwise twice then clockwise once, over all you've gone 2-1 = 1 turn counterclockwise.)
So you can start with the circle, look at paths on the circle, and get the usual integers under addition. That's going from topology to algebra, and hence "algebraic topology."
I'm only supposed to work 37.5 hours a week. That doesn't include lunch, but I assume I'm supposed to take breaks.
85: And the hawk can help him with the rat problem. (Also, it was really rats? Not mice?[, she asked hopefully.] Shiver.)
I don't want to be an astronaut; I just want to live long enough and make enough money to experience space tourism. Specifically, while I'm still young enough to have everything in proper functioning order for teh zero-gravity sex.
My impression is that lab scientists would give lawyers a run for their money in the "time spent at work category."
My brother-in-law works a hell of a lot. He's probably in the lab 12+ hours a day six days a week in ordinary circumstances, and more when it's busy.
83: yeah, setting up a stupid climate change feedback loop by mistake and end up extinguishing all life. that would be lame. I do think it's likely my children will live in better health significantly longer than I will.
I have my own business plus my decorating sideline. I work a lot, but not a stupid lot. my partner wants me to learn the sad lesson that ID is a giant pain in the ass and involves endless re-choices and mistakes and hand-holding difficult clients. like custom work (which we have abandoned) but endlessly. I still think it could be a profitable sideline to our store. we can make people's apartments look cool and eclectic with vintage industrial furniture, no one else in town can. does she object because she feels it's "my" thing, and potentially sapping the energy of our business, and is jealous? but we would work together to do it and split the profits 50 to me 50 to the firm? what's not to like?
I do think that teaching is genuinely more exhausting than most job-related activities. For lawyers the best analogue would be time where you're actually on your feet cross-examining someone. But there at least you generally alternate. If a lawyer told me they had an 8 hour day in court with 3 different hour-and-a-half long cross-examinations, they would have a ton of sympathy from me that day.
To M Leblanc, I actually like what I do. And I also don't mean this to b a pissing contest; one of the better things about academia is, as UPETGI says, you can be just as likely to be working at 11 am as 11 pm, based on what suits you, and I'm also not trying to say that academia isn't high pressured; of course it is, in it's way. But just go ahead and celebrate the time that you have! You have a job that let's you think about interesting things and go for a two hour bike ride on a Tuesday, if you want, so do that!
*I could expand on the sob story of hard work to list the actual time this week and conclusively "beat" Heebie but who cares.
I would like to levitate and also to be able to make a living blowing glass every third year without fucking my actual work life. Consulting on setting up poorly-funded professional colleagues in interesting places would be gratifying in a slightly changed world. Except that I know that the impediments are mostly political, stemming usually from turf wars over jobs that are neither fish not fowl.
I also don't mean this to b a pissing contest
If I were going to be a professional athlete, that's probably the sport I'd choose.
Consulting on setting up poorly-funded professional colleagues in interesting places would be gratifying in a slightly changed world.
Does that mean pimping?
setting up a stupid climate change feedback loop by mistake and end up extinguishing all life. that would be lame.
The last person on earth can comfort themselves that the cockroaches will probably be OK.
I will say that there is literally no comparison between teaching and being in trial. None. Trial is way way way harder. But of course almost no lawyers are in trial for as Lon as most college professors are teaching.
33 notwithstanding, I can't realy complain about the amount of work I do overall (although I'd like to do less), or the actual work itself (most of which is interesting although I don't like all of it), but I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate billing my time in six minute increments, and would give about anything to figure some way out of it. I'm convinced that it's destroying my soul. Not that this has anything to do with the rest of the thread, exactly.
I should have said than most white-collar job related activities. Of course, physical labor is way more exhausting. But teaching is closer to physical labor than almost anything else classified as white collar.
what the fuck is algebraic topology even about?
Oversimplifying in a way that algebraic topologists would be unhappy with: it's about classifying shapes and relationships between shapes by decomposing them into simpler pieces and explaining how those pieces fit together. For instance, suppose you want to study different kinds of surfaces. One way to do that is to relate them to simpler shapes, like circles that you can draw on the surface. The rule is that you only count circles you can't somehow squish into each other. On the surface of a donut, there are two "circles" that can't be squished into each other: the first goes around the donut hole, and the second wraps around (imagine holding the donut with your fingers circling it -- that's the second circle).
With more complicated objects, like three-dimension volumes instead of two-dimension surfaces, you can ask not just about how they contain circles, but how they contain spheres.
It turns out (for reasons I can't really explain in a comment box) that once you've distilled a shape down to this kind of information about circles and spheres and other simple subshapes, you can start to apply algebra to explain the relationships among the different subshapes. Then you can apply a whole toolbox of techniques from algebra to answer questions about geometry.
(On preview, I see Upetgi already tried to explain, and gave more of a hint of why algebra matters.)
Why does the iPhone autocorrect "long" to "Lon"? Do I have a Khmer phone?
I seemed to be on track for a pretty decent sequential career there for awhile, but somehow I got side-tracked into this non-profit arts scene nonsense. I'm allowed to work a maximum of 25 hours a week right now, plus a little consulting on the side, so I have nothing to complain about, really.
They're nicely complimentary answers though. You explained more why it's interesting, while I tried to explain why it involves algebra (but using a relatively uninteresting example).
106: You know that makes no sense at all, right?
And being in trial isn't one thing. I haven't done many trials at all (and never as first chair), but one of them (I was a very junior member of a huge team) had me living in a hotel next to the courthouse and our temporary trial space for five weeks because I was working such long hours that it wasn't practical to commute an hour to get home. Another other was a one witness, dozen document, two day thing that wasn't a significantly bigger deal than arguing a motion.
104: That is why this is the best lawyering job I've ever had. Billing in tenth-hour increments was going to make me suicidal.
those khmer are wily, man. you can so so busy at work law-talking you don't notice them till their right up on you with a doughnut, making some point about algebraic topology.
I was mostly just trying to make the point that standing in front of a room talking loudly for an hour is really really tiring. Obviously, time in trial is higher stakes and thus more stressful, and on the whole requires paying closer attention. But my experience is that the level of exhaustion is more closely related to the amount of time on my feet talking, and much less related to the level of stress (e.g. talking at a conference vs. talking in calculus class) or the amount of intellectual effort (e.g. teaching a harder class vs. an easier class, or a class I've taught before).
But maybe I'm just a wimp and for other people time on their feet talking is less exhausting and other aspects are more exhausting
115: In my second-hand experience, lawyers aren't allowed to stand during trial.
111 is true, but even the shortest "trial" on mostly stipulated facts was way harder, for me, than a day's teaching. I would say that for me a deposition is much harder than teaching -- it takes more prep and is way more intense while you're doing it. And of course you can't just repeat the same lesson plan; every time is very very different. Maybe I was just a lousy teacher, but I put a lot of time into that, too.
and go for a two hour bike ride on a Tuesday, if you want
You're not going to believe me, but it really doesn't work this way for a lot of people. In grad school maybe, if you're lucky.
And I swear that's the last I'm going to say about this, because 66.last.
I actually like what I do 70 percent of the time. Often though, it doesnt feel enjoyable because I am dealing with someone who is going through a really difficult time. As a result, I spend a lot of time telling people to stop being such aholes.
"STOP! You cannot do that!" - commonly made statement by me.
But, afterwards, I feel a sense of reward. So, not entirely soul sucking.
Anyone have any tips for staying productive at a job you find boring and are leaving in a month while waiting for your long-distance girlfriend to finally break up with you?
(Beat THAT!)
way harder, for me, than a day's teaching
What did you teach?
re: 120
Why would you worry about being productive?
Prep time is a totally separate issue. Calculus for me is about half an hour of prep for every hour in class, while an upper level undergrad class that I know well is an hour prep for an hour in class, and a seminar talk could be as many as 10 hours of prep for every hour in class. But all of those leave me the same amount of exhausted on the day I actually do the teaching. It's the standing, talking, being on stage, and trying to keep people's attention that does it.
121 -- answered, semi-cryptically, up thread.
In imitation of Sifu's layout, I've gone
Classics Student -> Classics graduate student + TA -> heart not in it Classics graduate student + CS undergrad -> Classics grad dropout + CS undergrad -> self-doubting CS graduate student + part-time programmer -> dreading being a CS grad dropout + full-time developer.
Except for all the 'wtf am I doing' moments, it's been fun and interesting!
106: You know that makes no sense at all, right?
Oh well. I tried. Have a donut.
I'd have to walk four blocks to get a donut.
120: No, but you should find somebody there to sneak off and have lunchtime hanky-spanky with for the remaining month.
I fully intend to be able to randomly take off two hours on a tuesday when I want to, and indeed that's one of the best parts of my job.
On the whole being a mathematician is a great job. (With the caveat that I think being a postdoc is too stressful.) But nonetheless, I have a lot of sympathy for someone who has to teach all day! That's hard fucking work!
OT: In this press conference, Obama seems tired and frustrated. Understandably, but probably not the best face to put on television.
Clearly the whole "professors only work 10 hours a week!" thing is a trolling classic, but come on dude.
It's up there with "Teacher must never go to the bathroom or eat because I don't see it. Teacher must be a robot."
I don't think I work as hard as a lawyer, but they a) get paid more and b) seem to be generally miserable as a class, so, um, that looks like a win from my perspective. Totally cool with not winning the SWPL misery Olympics.
But it would be nice if people didn't confuse contact hours with total hours worked, or an absurdly high degree of autonomy over one's daily time with no work getting done, or actually liking the research aspect of one's job with it not being part of the job.
Teacher must never go to the bathroom or eat because I don't see it.
Always wear dark pants when you teach.
I used to think my next career could be another type of lawyer, like a family law lawyer, but I suspect that since I don't like talking to people I should remain a patent lawyer. If I were a billionaire, I'd get a PhD in something fun like art history and run an art gallery.
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Uh oh, this talk is starting out with something very suspiciously like a trolley problem.
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In defense of the oppressed class of transactional lawyers in large firms, I once billed 3000 hours in a year, during which (i) I frequently mused about either killing myself or quitting to work in a used book store and (ii) my friends and family, I learned later, had a number of concerned discussions behind my back about how hunched and crazy I seemed.
I used to work for a corporate IT guy who said for years that when he turned 50 he'd quit and build dry stone walls for the rest of his working life. And when he was 48 he died.
I assume the practical use of topology is that it can tell you which spaces can be mapped onto which others?
Obama seems tired and frustrated
Is that like tired and emotional?
In math the practical uses often end up not being related to the motivation for the subject in the first place. For example, one recent application of algebraic topology is in analyzing very large data sets by turning them into a 1-parameter family of topological spaces and analyzing the algebraic topology of that space as the parameter changes. This is somewhat strange, and certainly not in the first 1000 things you'd think about when doing algebraic topology, but it seems to have some interesting applications.
141: I doubt it. His speech is the usual 3-4 word burst telegraph-operator rhythm.
143: That sounds ... intriguing. Link?
136: Yikes. Those stone walls are super cool though, even if I am more familiar with the New England iteration. They're everywhere! Still standing!
1-parameter family of topological spaces
How can you have a 1 parameter space? 1 paremeter is a point, 2 make a line, three define a space, and with four or more you get eggroll.
A "paremeter" is "parameter" in Dutch.
I'd like to think the guy in 136 got killed by invading Mongols. Shouldn't have procrastinated, dude.
You're off by one, 1-parameter makes a 1-dimensional thing, 2-parameters make a 2-dimensional thing, etc. For example, consider the 1-parameter curve f(t) = (cos t, sin t).
A 1-parameter family of whatzits means that for each value of the single parameter you have a whatzit (and furthermore that nearby points have nearby whatzits). So in the above example you have a 1-parameter family of points tracing out a curve. In the example I was referring to, you have a 1-parameter family of giant crazy topological spaces. So that attached to each point is some crazy high-dimensional topological object.
Operation vermin extermination seems to be proceeding nicely. Query: do I need a new dishwasher (it functions, but the rats were nesting behind it)?
151: Halford, really truly rats? Yes, you do need a new dishwasher.
I think rats in a house might make me move. Roaches and mice don't bother me, because in the end I know I can take them in a fight. But a rat? That's a whole different fight.
150: I guess I'm thinking from statistics. You can't really do a one parameter curve or line because you can't assume a starting point.
151: Why? Unless you wash the dishes behind the dishwasher.
151: You do not need a new dishwasher, you just need to get rid of the rats and do a little cleaning of the nest area. Get a cat to prevent a recurrence. Or a big snake. I think monitor lizards also eat rats.
151: What would H.P. Lovecraft do?
Yes, rats, as discussed in the other thread. Most of them now are former rats, though there may be others. don't think the rat were getting inside the dishwasher with the dishes, though? This may be more hope than reality. Do I really need a whole new dishwasher?
On second thought, look very closely at any wires or pipes that are external. If those are gnawed or something, you may want a new dishwasher.
If the dishwasher doesn't have obvious gnaw holes, I wouldn't worry about it. I would get a cat, though -- go to the pound and pick up someone lean and hungry looking, preferably with facial scars.
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Hah, now they're talking about the strong argument in favor of consensual sibling incest.
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More importantly, you need to look for the hole where the rats got in.
I do like the idea of the rats in the dishwasher, though. Do you think they had little loofahs to scrub themselves with?
I really doubt the rats were able to get inside the dishwasher, or else you'd have had serious water damage from water going out their access point.
160: And, as Nathan Lane says in Mouse Hunt, "preferably with a history of mental illness."
143: Is that basically a type of dimension reduction?
162: They will fight harder if you block their line of retreat.
The usual notion of dimensional reduction comes from linear algebra, this is quite different mathematically and measures different aspects of the data. Of course, in both cases your goal is to boil down some information about a large dimensional data space into data that's human understandable (and thus in some sense small dimensional). I don't know much about it, but the name is "persistent homology" if you want to find more.
160: pick up someone lean and hungry looking, preferably with facial scars.
Er, I thought that thread had been redacted.
...the name is "persistent homology" if you want to find more.
Not that somebody should be trying to cure it.
Ok, the lines on the dishwasher look OK. Thanks Moby. I think I will go out and adopt a cute pussycat/avenging angel of death this weekend. An older cat, right?
And two gnawed little holes right from where the dishwasher is out to the backyard. The little fuckers.
173: For a temporary fix, you can use steel wool. Caulk or putty will do nothing but slow them down. IIRC, you'd mentioned a semi-derelict garage. You have to do something about that or they'll find another way in.
I think older is the way to bet if you want a hunter. On the other hand, I got Harley the Terror Kitten when her eyes were barely open, and she just had a knack for the ratting. So you can't tell.
Yeah, the garage is detached and pretty far from the main house, but they could totally be living in there.
The fact that the first comment in this thread was to complain about no mention of Steve Jobs made me want to punch somebody. Every goddamn site on the internet is now about him. Fuck Steve Jobs.
175: My dad said the best rat killer they ever had was a little yip-style dog. Probably worked on the "boy named Sue" theory of toughness building.
We can't do that, Walt, we're not even allowed to masturbate to him any more.
Walt Someguy, how much you have to learn. Do you not love Pixar? Do you not love beauty? Do you not love THE INTERNET, created by TIM BERNERS-LEE using a NEXT WORKSTATION?
Unfoggetarian, I'd love links or search terms. Weirdly, I was thinking about simplicial complexes and information theory as I tried to fall asleep last night.
178: Not surprising at all -- that's what terriers were bred for. A Jack Russell would be your next best anti-rat option after a good cat.
I love nothing. I'm using Windows and IE right now to better sharpen my hatred to a sharp point that will someday pierce the heart of the world.
182: I'd forgotten that. Dad said the cats would kill to eat and stop when they were full (they were farm cats and only given enough food to keep them from leaving). The dog was in it for the sport.
They're obsessive little maniacs. A friend had a Jack Russell who was so fetch-crazed that you couldn't say 'ball' without sending him into an obnoxiously extended frenzy. If you wanted to talk about a ball but weren't planning to play fetch right then, you had to circumlocute -- refer to the 'sphere' or the 'orb'.
136: building dry stone walls sounds so, so cool.
satisfying sequential careers, what would they be?
Lecturer, water project troubleshooter, cafe owner.
Those of you who are interested in space tourism should know that my cousin is working on (parts of) Spaceship 1. He's very conscientious, in case you want reassurance.
186: you can do it competitively, you know. They have dyking contests at Highland shows sometimes.
I wish I could do it competitively. Chris y's co-worker had the right idea.
Aside from the dying young bit, which I think was ill-considered.
Unfortunately I don't know anything about persistent homology except the name, so I can't point you anywhere.
Do you not love THE INTERNET, created by TIM BERNERS-LEE using a NEXT WORKSTATION?
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. The internet was already there, thanks very much. And TBL would have used a PC if that was what he'd found on his desk, because platform independence was the whole point.
One of the interesting things about the interview Alex linked in the other thread is that there is NO MENTION of the internet or its antecedents. Even the visionary Jobs doesn't seem to have thought it was important. And yet Arpanet had been around for 15 years and TCP was ten years old by then.
190: There's a case to be made for that as well.
On the Halford cat-adoption front, I'd think a full-grown adult cat, anywhere from 3 years old on up, but not downright older (in the second half of life) cat would be best.
If you're getting a cat from a shelter, s/he may or may not be traumatized to whatever degree, and the older s/he is, the more likely this might be: the cat won't have enough mental or emotional space to give a shit about protecting your shared homestead. You want a cat who seems able to settle in and want to take on household responsibilities like perimeter defense.
It's not really about the killing of the rats, but the hunting and stalking them and making them afraid, so that they determine that your house is off-limits. Make sense?
One of the interesting things about the interview Alex linked in the other thread is that there is NO MENTION of the internet or its antecedents
Well, he mentions e-mail.
"Another example is that at the end of the month, the computer will go into the data base and find all the salesmen who exceeded their sales quotas by more tha 20 percent and write them a personalized letter from me and send it over the electronic mail system to them, and give me a report on who it sent the letters to each month. "
Huh, missed this thread. Sorry of this has already been linked, gonna take me a while to catch up.
Here's Kevin Gosztola over at FDL on the ongoing attempts to co-opt and neutralize OWS, and the attempt to make OWS an arm of the Obama re-election campaign.
Sorry, OWS folks, you are going to have make Obama and the liberal establishment your open aggressive enemies or you will be eaten alive.
One of the interesting things about the interview Alex linked in the other thread is that there is NO MENTION of the internet or its antecedents
Jobs: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network.
Oh.
2. Zero role for private charity in my ideal world. The needful belong to us all, even those who don't want them, or like to feed their egos by picking and choosing which needful is more deserving.
To each according to their needs.
My impression is that lab scientists would give lawyers a run for their money in the "time spent at work category."
Pre-tenure lab scientists work ALL THE TIME. And so do their poor students. Not just lawyerly all the time (3000 hours per year--routinely, and for several years running).
198. OK, I missed that. But even with that the interview is still about a future of the computer
as ding an sich, rather than as a node in a greater whole, which is how we tend to think of them now.
To each according to their needs.
Give me a call, communist laydeez.
You have nothing to lose but your pants.
Pre-tenure lab scientists work ALL THE TIME. And so do their poor students. Not just lawyerly all the time (3000 hours per year--routinely, and for several years running).
That's definitely a lot, and way more than the IME humanities grad students and junior profs were working. It's probably pretty similar to junior lawyer hours at large firms; billing 2500 hours a year probably means at least 3000 hours a year actually at work, and for several years running.
In the teaching versus lawyering pissing match, can we at least be sure to distinguish between college teachers and high school/grammar school ones? As a couple of people have mentioned upthread.
My friend who teaches 5th grade (previously 4th grade) works his ass off: daily, up no later than 5 a.m. to prep, finish with the teaching day around 3 p.m., and staff meetings / running the school's chess club / grading and administrative paperwork until 6 or so. Then further prep and paperwork from home in the evening. By a couple of months into the school year he's utterly stressed out, hunched and crazy and sometimes a little tearful, or sneery, or hyper.
It's the pressure of dealing with kids who are, right in front of his face, clearly in the process of sorting themselves into society's losers and semi-winners. It's his job to support, ever to support and keep on their feet both the kids *and* the parents (lots of parent meetings, buying supplies for the kids out of his own pocket, etc.). It never stops, for 9 months anyway. During the summer he's a union rep and takes classes, and continues to run the chess club, when he's not slightly falling on his face and saying that he might not be able to do it any more.
Bleh.
a. Garbage man for resort )that also hired over 100 single women, w/in 2 years of my age, based on looks and adventurousness).
b. Maintanance man for slopeside hotel at ski area.
c. Surveyor for Forest Service.
d. Doughmaker and over-the-road truckdriver for Dominoes.
e. Loader of trucks for UPS Deutschland.
f. Bureaucrat for state water agency.
g. Associate and then partner in AmLaw100 firm.
h. Small town solo practitioner.
I don't think I ever whined much about any of them, although the boss in (a) gave good cause. I could be talked into (c) again, or maybe even (f), but the others' time has passed.
Two things make trial time particularly stressful, and therefore exhausting: (1) the opponent, an adult of equal status, doing everything possible to ensure your failure; and (2) the client, who is with you all the time in court, during meal and other breaks, and at least half the time in the bathroom. God it's great when, after dinner, and some more planing, you can send them to bed at 9:30 and get some work done for the next day. It's all worth it because even if you don't win, you had a shot at winning.
Matt Stoller on OWS
I don't want to say much about OWS. The country may not be ready to admit we have problems that won't be solved by electoral politics. But I think we might be ready by election time.
That's definitely a lot, and way more than the IME humanities grad students and junior profs were working. It's probably pretty similar to junior lawyer hours at large firms; billing 2500 hours a year probably means at least 3000 hours a year actually at work, and for several years running.
There you go. Other hazards of that profession sometimes include: boiling acids or bases, teratogenic chemicals, and socks with sandals.
and socks with sandals
If people would only read the materials data sheet, they wouldn't wear those things.
It's probably pretty similar to junior lawyer hours at large firms; billing 2500 hours a year probably means at least 3000 hours a year actually at work, and for several years running.
Even for junior lawyer hours at big firms, 3000 hours in the office is high. Not completely out of the ordinary, but I'm pretty sure from my BigLaw years that most associates aren't in the office that many hours most years.
Know what's easy work? Grading. I could do this all day. And with some good TV and a glass of wine it would even be kinda fun.
I've recently developed the following theory. Teaching calculus is a battle wherein you try to get the students to learn, and they try to pass the class *without learning anything*. I don't think it's actually just laziness, I think that the average calculus student would rather do more work that doesn't involve learning than less work that does involve learning. There's a strange hostility to the truth.
211: Are you serious? That seems lowish to me. I'd think 3,000-3,500 would be typical. 3,500 is 14*5*50. There's plenty of associates well above that.
What's even easier? Affixing post-it arrow thingies to documents for client signatures. Also photocopying.
214: Huh. I was just estimating a typical week (I billed low, but I didn't spend that much less time in the office than people who billed much more -- ask me again why I resented BigLaw), and maybe I am underestimating. Five fourteen hour days seemed long, but of course no one who's working those hours doesn't work at all on the weekends.
I'd think of a typical week for a hardworking associate being something like two ten hour days, two twelve hour days, one late night, say fifteen, and a short day on the weekend, maybe five. You'd have harder weeks and less hard, but that feels about right for a typical week. And that does get you over 3000 if you do fifty of them.
Okay, I was wrong.
Are you counting meals as work in that count?
I've recently developed the following theory. Teaching calculus is a battle wherein you try to get the students to learn, and they try to pass the class *without learning anything*. I don't think it's actually just laziness, I think that the average calculus student would rather do more work that doesn't involve learning than less work that does involve learning. There's a strange hostility to the truth.
In my experience as a calculus student it was something like that, but really it's a refusal to memorize anything, because there must be SOME way that SOME of this stuff will become intuitive, like all the math you learn before calculus is. But no, it's never intuitive. You have to memorize it like the steps of the Friedels-Crafts Reaction.
The lawyers win! It's practically like roofing for a living!
207: Charley makes a good point. Forget art history. I want to be a park ranger or do some other outdoorsey job for the Forest Service. When it hits winter here, I sometimes want to take a six month sabbatical to go count birds in Central America.
No, that's the opposite of my experience. The average calculus student would actually rather memorize something than think about why it's true. (It sounds to me like you weren't the average calculus student, if you thought math before calculus made sense. Most of my students don't understand math before calculus, they've just memorized a bunch of rules for symbol manipulation.)
214 -- My old firm's not that good an example, I'm sure. But I did have access to and a need to review the data from 2003 through 2008: out of 200+ associates, we'd never have more than 2 or 3 people billing more than 2500, and probably no more than 10 others over 2300. Our CFO was/is a terrific analyzer of the various stats made possible by so fairly effective data gathering, and we relentlessly compared ourselves to other firms of our size (500 ish) -- we maybe have been 10% down from industry averages on associate hours billed some years, but never more than that.
For example, almost all of them think that x is positive and -x is negative. None of them have ever thought about why long division works. And they don't understand fractions.
In this thread, rather than discuss OWS, American workers compete with each other to see who is most miserable.
Forget art history.
The Mona Lisa was painted by the cop-dad from that show with Urkel. Done.
222: those numbers seem oddly low, but, regardless, you're talking about billables.
220 -- Liz, you won't need to wait to get to my age before you can concoct a viable gig (not unlike mine), that gives you all the time you want to count birds.
226: Those numbers sound perfectly plausible to me for billables, not low at all, but of course billables aren't time in the office.
226 -- Yes I am. And a greatly diminished (over the course of the 90s) culture of face time. That said, Urple, it wouldn't completely shock me if self-reporting you've heard from biglaw friends over the years is like that HS class (it was you, right, and it was HS?) where you screwed yourself by being honest.
What management actually cares about, of course, is collections. Which we tracked separately in a zillion different ways.
I don't mean to suggest, at all, that our friend Idealist exaggerates. Someone has to be out at the tail of the distribution, and he appears to be pretty far out there.
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The radio just replayed a Steve Jobs speech from 2005 given at Stanford. It was pretty good, about life and death and not settling.
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Someone has to be out at the tail of the distribution...
Not really. You can model all different types of distributions, many of which don't have tails.
No more than ~1% of associates billing over 2500 hours, and no more than ~5% of associates billing over 2300, in any given year? What was the average?
At my old firm, I billed more than 3000 hours two hears in a row, and got close in the others, but that included travel time when I was traveling a lot. Without including travel time I wouldn't have been close.
229.1: One might think that the people working the hardest would be the least likely to exaggerate how hard they work, but IME the opposite is true.
Oh, Idealist was generally recognized as scary by Cravath standards. (Scary in the 'highly respected' sense, of course.) Probably not unique, but unusual. But billing over 3K is very different from being in the office over 3K, and when I look at what I'd think of as a typical biglaw week for an ordinarily hardworking associate, it does get over 3K pretty easily.
I'd guess in most large firms there's more like 5-10% over 2500 in a year (not necessarily the same people year after year), and 15-25% over 2300. Obviously, I don't have access to the same data you had, but, uh, there's lots of data on this out there. (Not that I have any of it in front of me at the moment.) The average is usually somewhere around 2100ish or so, and there's a lot of variance.
Unless there was something big going on, like our intelligent design case, or a death penalty case, or a collapse of a practice area (for various reasons) it wasn't as if people were doing any more than about 15-25% extra record-able time, and the people over 2300 weren't doing much of it at all. That's pro bono, articles, seminars, preparing and giving pitches, and the like. And the people experiencing the exceptions above weren't typically turning in 2000 billable either.
Goofing around on the internet, grousing at the water cooler, flirting with staff: the the extent this is taking office time, I'm not worried about counting it.
Shit, trying again: 2050-2150ish, depending on firm (with plenty above that, especially in NYC). IIRC.
224: In this thread, rather than discuss OWS, American workers compete with each other to see who is most miserable.
Seriously. American upper-income workers, in fact. It's a little embarrassing. People should be embarrassed. They probably won't be.
I am happy to say that I have been way more lucky and have had a way way easier life at all points of my legal career than someone doing roofing. Does that satisfy you, Parsi?
I've never tried to argue that I'm overworked like a lawyer (nor that I'd want to be). All I've been trying to say is that teaching all day is hard work, and it's a totally different kind of hard work than billing some obscene number of hours.
They probably won't be.
Good call, parsi.
Teaching people with personality disorders how to function in a job environment without saying, "Hell, no, I'm not doing this shit" is hard. I've spent 90 minutes with one of my clients who yelled at me and told me I was just like her abusive mother in front of my supervisor--though she never raised the issue with me.
It took more than 2 hours to recover.
245: That's really got to be hard.
237 -- I think that depends of how narrowly you want to define your data set. Top 15 firms is going to look way different from top 100. The latter of which, I think, had averages in the 1800s mid-decade -- this might be collected, rather than billed. Or maybe not, I don't remember. It wasn't publicly available self-reported data, but had been made 'real' through some processes. The kind of thing no one rally wants to talk about, since it makes people working 2500 feel like chumps.
234 -- I've rarely been able to bill travel. One reason I absolutely hated having cases in the USVI.
224, 241 -- I don't see urple, halford, elbee, or me claiming to be miserable in this thread. Our discussion is mostly about facts. The academics don't claim to be miserable either.
I think that the average calculus student would rather do more work that doesn't involve learning than less work that does involve learning. There's a strange hostility to the truth
I'm sorry, but I think you aren't able to grasp that some people just aren't that smart.
(for example, me).
248.2 -- yes, it was related to the somewhat odd compensation structure of my old firm. I was regularly flying cross country once a week -- add in time to the airport and that's 15-18 hours/wk right there, some of which was spent asleep (though business travel is a giant pain in the ass and I would never, ever live like that again given a choice).*
*obligatory Parsi disclaimer: this was not the worst job in the world and I was very lucky to be doing it in many ways.
People should be embarrassed.
Oh for crying out loud. This is a blog frequented by smart, often witty, easily distracted people. It is not the freaking misery Olympics. People who make good money actually do get worn down when the work grueling hours. People who get worn down sometimes gripe about how tired they are. It's not actually embarrassing or shameful to say that you've had a really tough month at work when you've had a really tough month at work. Even if you are getting paid well for it.
Teaching calculus is a battle wherein you try to get the students to learn, and they try to pass the class *without learning anything*.
This describes a subset of students who are really great at computations and have their ego on the line.
But I also think that for most math teachers, when they talk about why something is true, they talk much too fast for their students to follow. As in, student recall of vocabulary is slow, and if there are too many fancy words close together, it becomes gibberish.
So the students whose ego is on the line sort of huffs themselves up, and focuses on the computation and memorization, and really wants to believe they're getting the heart of the class.
When the explanations of why things work are given (excrutiatingly) slowly, most of the students really buy in and start to enjoy the material.
And then when on about how I yelled at her about her budget when it was all because of her panic disorder. Or how she was going to go home and dissociate.
253: The vocabulary thing is a good point. I've been working hard to break myself of the habit of ever abbreviating anything ever. Any abbreviation of any word immediately loses half the class (even if you say the word, because half the class isn't listening to what you say anyway, they're just taking notes).
Or how she was going to go home and dissociate.
I kind of love this as a threat, though you may need some cool down time from your ordeal, BG, before you fully appreciate it.
252: Oh for crying out loud. This is a blog frequented by smart, often witty, easily distracted people. It is not the freaking misery Olympics.
Are you sure?
I have a friend who recently got a promotion that's meant he's been basically commuting cross country; he's been working on the east coast and then flying back to California for weekends. I think he's been doing side trips from the east coast location, too. That sounds entirely miserable.
I know somebody else who made a rule that she wouldn't go farther than Chicago (she lives in Boston) for a trip where she was returning the same day. Sweet christ that sounds miserable to me.
The salary isn't great in this job but the four tens with an hour paid lunch is awesome. Actual work load varies with weather, day of the week, how many people wig out and make you beat their ass and jail them, etc.
Pretty sure my wife has it worse. Two preps for six science classes of eight and ninth graders in a school primarily made up of low income hispanic kids. I think she only has one or two classes with fewer than 30 students. She'll make about 36k this year.
Parent teacher conferences last night and tonight, which adds several hours to those days. Parts of those conferences definitely not enjoyable, such as the mom of one of my wife's students telling her how his grades are low this year because his dad/her husband just keeled over and died at age 48. Oh yes, he can come in after school for extra help but next week is bad because they'll be picking out a headstone. Did I mention the student is sitting next to his mom holding his face in his hands during this conversation? Good times.
I used to have a job. But then Radio Shack fired me. :(
The good news is, though, that I get to spend that much more with you guys. THE BEST!
257: Yes, Parsi, I am sure. But no doubt your efforts to shame upper-income workers for having the audacity to complain about long hours is making the world a better place.
224 was appropriate in any case. I have no objection, obviously, to people complaining about a grueling or distressing week at work or life, but we are operating in a wider society, and every once in a while, it wouldn't be a bad idea to cast one's gaze a little more widely and find the inclination to navel-gaze just a tad distasteful.
264 is kind of hilariously horrible. What was my co-blogger's term? Like freebasing schoolmarm.
The only Friedel reactions worth watching
265, in turn, is really quite excellent.
parsimon, I'm not completely sure, but I think 224 was meant as a joke, roughly parallel to 58. It's sort of hilarious that you're taking it to be a Very Important Message.
It also wouldn't be a bad idea to quit bothering with the specks you perceive in everyone else's eyes and just worry about the plank in your own...
I understand what gswift is describing in 260, from the things my friend the teacher says.
I bet some of you fuckers have the audacity to occasionally be depressed.
It is better for a poor man to drive a plank through his neighbor's eye than for a rich camel to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
249: 224, 241 -- I don't see urple, halford, elbee, or me claiming to be miserable in this thread. Our discussion is mostly about facts. The academics don't claim to be miserable either.
FWIW, 224 wasn't meant to especially critical. I just thought the juxtaposition was funny. (Sorry, in other words, for trolling the internets.)
On the substance of the discussion, I flirted with academia briefly before going into law (but never BigLaw). I don't think I could have handled academia, because it seemed so open-ended: your research could always be more extensive, and your writing could always be better, and you could always be publishing a more. I never felt like I wasn't working.
In litigation, at least, every project eventually reaches a point where you can put it down, because it's Good Enough (if only because it has to be).
Mostly just when someone bravely points out how blind to other people's misery I am when I focus on my own petty problems. But then I go back to the coke and hookers and feel better.
In litigation, at least, every project eventually reaches a point where you can put it down, because it's Good Enough (if only because it has to be).
Can you please explain this to my boss?
268: I hadn't noticed the parallel to 58. I'll back off now, in any case.
Perhaps have a cup of tea and think about things.
In litigation, at least, every project eventually reaches a point where you can put it down, because it's Good Enough
That was exactly -- exactly! -- my thinking as to why being a litigator would be better than being an academic. There are other pluses and minuses, of course.
279.last: the socks and sandals thing, right?
In litigation, at least, every project eventually reaches a point where you can put it down, because it's Good Enough
Something that I mostly like and occasionally hate about my job is that if I do something that has errors or doesn't work correctly I will see it again.
It's a good lesson on the value of doing things right the first time, but there are times when I wish I could just pass it off somebody else.
This proposed charity thing looks like it should be private initiative, even in a decent state.
Americans report going to church every Sunday at much, much higher rates than Europeans, but when other, indirect methods are used to determine church attendance, it turns out that people don't go to church nearly as often as they say. In fact, Americans don't spend any more time in church than those godless Europeans. (This research was written up in Slate a while back.)
I suspect that we do something similar with work on this side of the pond, and for similar reasons. For the most part, we don't work any harder than the French, but we are deathly afraid that someone might find out.
I am not claiming that anyone on this thread was doing this. In fact, I specifically want to move this from a discussion about culture in general, rather than people here.
I think americans actually do objectively spend a lot more time *at work* than French people. (Differences in vacation policy alone are enough to make a huge difference.) Whether that amounts to more time *working* is a separate question.
Re 276: Can you please explain this to my boss?
Just tell your boss, "pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked;" I'm sure their reaction will be reasonable.
I think overreporting happens, but that there's also a culture of unnecessarily and unproductively long hours in a fair number of jobs. The law firms I worked at, there wasn't a culture of "Get the work done and get home", people spent a lot of unproductive time at work. So, I'd guess that we do work quite a bit longer than people in other countries, but not necessarily all that much harder.
Or what UPETGI said. And with the vacation bit -- not only do we get less vacation, we're less likely to use it.
284, 286: You don't think that for the bulk of workers, who tend to be more regimented workplaces, that productivity is roughly proportional to hours worked?
And while I'm at it, delete a that.
This is why I never reread my own comments.
288: The people I know in non-officey jobs -- the sort of thing I think you're talking about with more regimented workplaces -- don't tend to work very long hours (possibly because they'd have to be paid overtime). For someone who's working long hours in a regimented workplace, you're right, but the culture I'm thinking of is an office-drone culture.
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Dude. Home mortgage interest rates have dropped to 3.5%. If you are upright on your mortgate, you should probably give your lender a call about re-financing. I thought I would never re-finance again when I got the 4.875% interest rate, and yet.
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Parsi, you should be sure to point out my privilege to me in a sanctimonious way. I might have missed it. Some people don't even have houses.
They may not work long hours compared to the office-drones, but compared to their overseas peers they get longer hours and less vacation.
parsimon gets to work with books every single day. Using my rose colored glasses, that job appears to be the best job in the entire world.
294: I used to think that working with books while wearing rose-colored glasses was the best thing ever. Then I found a book with rose-colored type.
The law firms I worked at, there wasn't a culture of "Get the work done and get home"
I am very happy to report that the company that I work for does have such a culture.
The law firms I worked at, there wasn't a culture of "Get the work done and get home"
But when you're billing by the hour, that wouldn't even conceptually make sense. If you can manage to "get the work done" in half a day, that just means you need twice as much work. What you're selling is your time, and in large firms, to a first approximation, you're expected to sell all of it.
I've probably mentioned before that while a law student I had an interview at S&C. Last guy was one of the senior-most. In some scheduling connection, it came up that I had to pick up my 4 year old daughter in day care, and he went became surprisingly emotional, talking about how he'd missed his kids' childhoods. My interest in taking a job there dropped pretty precipitously.
His had a great view of the White House. A ton of money. And what looked like a full house in misery poker.
I really don't think I could handle a job where I was being paid for my time. I like my time, and you can't pay me enough to own it!
(Which is, incidentally, most of what I hate so much about billing by the hour. I'm much more productive in 3-4 bursts of intense effort and large periods of distraction than I am trying to grind out productive output six-mintues after six-mintues after six-mintues after six-mintues after six-mintues all day long.)
298 -- It was you, wasn't it, with the index cards?
301: Well, me too. I was always billing terribly low, but apparently getting about as much done output-wise as most people; my per-day work product is pretty close to average, but that's made up of short periods of intensity and a whole lot of goofing off. Which is hell to bill honestly.
His had a great view of the White House. A ton of money. And what looked like a full house in misery poker.
Speaking of privilege: I was reading some of Next Stop, Reloville and one of the things that struck me was how little, from my perspective, many of the people were getting paid to put up with that life-style. 120K would be multiples of what I make now, but that wouldn't be close to enough to make up for a job that required me to move every couple of years.
302: It's really mean to make fun of Urple's eating habits.
Our lawyers dont live at the office. If you have work, then work. If you want to go play, go play.
304: Path dependency explains a lot. If you get promoted into a job that requires that kind of travel, and you don't have a clear path into a different kind of job, fear of unemployment can keep you in an unpleasant situation for a long time.
298: The way this should work is that the price per hour should vary based on the productiveness of the lawyer. People who are more productive per hour should bill more money per hour.
I am definitely learning the difference in lifestyle between an appellate lawyer and a trial lawyer. Or at least a trial lawyer who is imminently going out to trial.
In theory they do; that's why partners bill more than associates.
Furthermore, people should be allowed to work fewer hours in exchange for less compensation. You need to include benefits in that calculation (which means working 10% less means making 20% less or something) and you'd probably want to institute a floor. But there's simply no good reason not to let people be more productive in a shorter amount of time, bill more per hour, and work fewer hours rather than the same number of hours making more money.
306: index cards about homework problems, urple. Try to keep up.
312: This sort of evaluation is really really hard to do fairly.
Right. It's not as if lawyers produce widgets and can just be given an objective quota for the day. How much you've accomplished is sort of subjective.
Right. It's not as if lawyers produce widgets and can just be given an objective quota for the day. How much you've accomplished is sort of subjective.
Prior to the invention of the billable hour, weren't lawyers' fees in fact based on what specific things they had done?
In general, it would be nice if people would stop fetishizing quantity of work over quality of work.
It's better to try to measure the thing you want to measure, then it is to very accurately measure something different and pretend that it's the thing you wanted to measure.
Surely there are *some* measures of productivity for lawyers which don't just come down to hours.
Although: fixed fee arrangements do work well to solve this problem. If "extra hours" doesn't "equal revenue", and all that matters is getting the work done with sufficient quality and timeliness to make the client happy, then feel free to sodomize the day away, as they say.
Isn't law zero-sum anyway? Why can't both sides in a case make an agreement not to try too hard?
317: I think math is moderately good on this front. I've definitely talked to people who claim that their algorithm for evaluating potential hires basically ignores papers not in the top say 30 journals.
Prior to the invention of the billable hour, weren't lawyers' fees in fact based on what specific things they had done?
Prior to the invention of the billable hour, the modern large-law-firm business model (highly leveraged with associates) did not exist.
319: feel free to sodomize the day away, as they say
Who says that? Peaches?
I for one am sad that my comment 2 basically completely derailed this thread. I would much rather have talked about OWS. People should have paid attention to comment 4 instead.
Los Angeles likes their Occupy Wall Street protestors!
City News Service says the office of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa distributed 100 rain ponchos to the demonstrators on Wednesday while seven of the 15 councilmembers voted in favor of a resolution in support of the Occupy LA protest.
I've asked you guys this before, but I don't remember the answer. All I know about Villaraigosa is that he let the Port of Long Beach unionize and now he's pro-protestor. Is there any reason I shouldn't think he's great?
Late to the thread, my sequence is bookstore clerk->library worker->intern at small arts org->office temp->grad student->grad student in other field->social worker. And I don't work very hard and am very much fine with that. I'm bored to the point of madness, but not because I don't work very hard. I'm bored because my work is repetitive. Working hard has never for a minute been a goal of mine. Oh and also I'm bored because tiredness/boredom are how I express other things like frustration and burnout and hopelessness about what my job actually does.
I actually just had more or less this conversation with someone by email and concluded by saying it would have made sense to plan better 15 years ago but I didn't and now, measured against some standard of success I intuit but haven't really thought through, with apologies to Beckett, I'm sort of failing ok. Could fail better, could fail worse.
The Stiller piece bob linked brought back memories.
The whole business about whether they have or should have specific demands is pretty interesting to me. I can see a city officials, or whoever is being inconvenienced, asking: what exactly would get these people to stop doing what they are doing. Someone with real power might ask him or herself, what can I do to get these people to stop (in terms of meeting demands). The formal answer seems, at the moment, to not only be 'nothing in your power' but 'nothing at all- we like doing this.' If this persists, then I suppose either the Natilo Scenario plays out (some goddamn liberal shows up and makes a deal on behalf of people he doesn't represent) or it gets ended with sticks rather than carrots.
We'll see how patient people remain.
299: I once interviewed for a BigLaw patent firm where the partner proudly informed me that he managed to bill 360 hours in one month and spend four whole afternoons with his four-year old daughters. Way to go man, that's some work/life balance right there!
I'm sort of failing.
I hate the word "fail" and all of its variants. And I don't mean because I hate to fail or anything like that. I hate the idea of judging oneself or judging someone else as a "failure." As I put it to someone recently, failure is a destination, an end point. You can take a hundred wrong turns, but if you keep on slogging forward (or backward, or down a detour) then you haven't reached your destination yet and you haven't failed.
//steps off soapbox
CCCarp
I read this as Civilian Conservation Carp.
Have I told the interview story about the senior partner whose wife was sitting in a rocking chair in his spacious office, knitting, throughout the course of the interview, which she said is what she did most afternoons, since she wouldn't ever see him otherwise? That's sort of nice, in a way. Except she said, "no, really, EVER", as if she really meant it.
245: That's really got to be hard.
Made me laugh, for reasons you may recall, LB.
I read it as CCCarP. I'm on to you, pinko commie bastard!
Since this thread was talking about books anyway, I need advice on what to pick up from the library today. For a sense of what I'm looking for, I just read Joe Lansdale's The Bottoms, and another of his books, and am thinking about continuing on that kick, but that's partially for a lack of other appealing ideas. Also making my way through Postwar, so other big non-fiction is right out.
332 -- why didn't the senior partner just wear a T-Shirt with the slogan "this job has driven me and my family insane." At least you can't accuse that firm of failing to provide truth in advertising.
The most I've worked in actual in office hours was during my very short non-career in journalism: ~50 hours/wk plus some weekend and night work when there were newsworthy things going on. It's not clear to me that that was worse than being able to "control" my schedule. I haven't always liked the actual jobs I've had (admittedly, not many) but I have liked having a pretty clear line between work and not work.
Would I want to do high-houred lawyer work? No fucking way. But if I do get work, I'd like it to be recognized as work.
330: Yeah, I know. [Long, livejournally thing deleted. Shorter it: I'm just sometimes discontent and full of doubt.]
I started to post about what I would be doing for a living in a perfect world but it made me sad. Festival of Deletion at Smearcase's place and you're all
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OWS just got loud -- all of a sudden I can hear the drumming 24 stories up with the windows closed facing the other direction. It must be deafening at street level.
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Nah, I'm just about to have to leave work to pick up my daughter from her extremely expensive swim team in the ritzy neighborhood. I don't have time to participate in spontaneous political action.
You don't need to say anything, Pars. I loathe myself enough already.
332 -- Kind of inconvenient how he had to keep sending her out whenever there was a client, a phone call, or another lawyer in to discuss a matter. You know, to preserve confidentiality.
Or maybe she was a paralegal.
342: Oddly enough, absurdly overprivileged kids seem to end up with at least as good an awesome to asshole ratio as most other groups of kids.
The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.
- William Blake
Of course, he was thought to be mad....
Maybe they had some kind of bell-jar arrangement they could drop over her? Like a Cone of Silence.
343: I was under the very strong impression that she didn't leave for calls or office visits from other lawyers in the firm. I would expect that client visits and visits from attorneys outside the firm were generally conducted in the firm's conference rooms, not in the lawyer's office. (Isn't that how most lawyers handle things? My office is way to messy, always, to meet with a client.)
I'm kind of picturing the mother from Psycho, here.
Madame DeFarge - knitting, knitting....
348: Someone is going to be murdered, that much is clear. I can't say who without more information.
"My husband isn't one of those bad lawyers. He wouldn't even hurt a fly."
I take it nobody wants to talk about Halford's cat-interviewing procedures.
So it appears this guy has more hijinks left in him.
A UTA officer says he caught Borgogna without a ticket at the Trolley Square stop. He tried to get away, and allegedly screamed that he would bite the officer and give him AIDS. Tests have confirmed that he is HIV positive.
352: Somebody at work just rescued the cutest kitten. They want somebody to take it so they don't have to take it to a shelter.
If I could find a coffee can or something, I could mail it to wherever.
356: Agreed, but what's with the ethics complaint? It looks like something boneheaded they assumed without checking, and that's a "material misrepresentation"?
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Boston bleg: What quiet coffee shop would you go to if you wanted to have a telephone conversation with a job coach. Suggestions for JP are particularly welcome, but the Back Bay or places near Ruggles T stop also work.
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If you want to hold a telephone conversation, I suggest not doing it in a cafe at all.
359: Well, I would agree with you ordinarily. Where would you go, if someone could schedule a phone call at 5PM at the latest and there was no private space near your office? I can't get home in time.
If I belonged to a private club, I could go there, but I don't so.
Well, I would say at the very least the outdoor part of a cafe with sidewalk seating (or a patio in back or the like).
In the past I've just stood outdoors. If you're not on a busy street, that can work fine.
I thought Teo was the one who knew urban planning.
Hotel lobbies or spaces near them. You walk right in, have your phone conversation, and leave. I've done phone interviews for jobs that way.
Parks are nice when it's not raining or freezing. There isn't anything near my office other than the Sam Adams Brewery.
I sometimes use hotel lobbies for the bathrooms. Some are easier to sneak into than others. I like the Marriot at Kendall for that purpose. The Charles in Harvard Square is harder. Liberty's not bad. The Lenox is quite pleasant too.
You have to sneak into hotel lobbies?
I sometimes use hotel lobbies for the bathrooms.
It's sentences like that which remind me of the importance of articles in the English language.
I've done paperwork in a quiet corner of a hospital lobby, because they have wifi, and I thought about doing that.
The Charles in Harvard Square is harder.
Really? But it is also the bathroom for all those restaurants and bars there. How would anyone ever know that you weren't coming from one of those?
There are also public restrooms in the Holyoke Center.
My strategy when it comes to hotels is usually to walk in and ask the people at the desk where the bathroom is.
366: No. I just have strong memories from a high school trip to France where we were told sternly not to use restrooms in cafes without buying something first. So, I always feel that it's wrong to go in to use a space without being a paying customer.
The more solicitous the high-end hotel people are the worse I feel, because I always feel like I should be tipping the door man or something. So, if I can just walk in without having someone open the door for me, I feel better.
Just found out I'm being sent to Berlin for a business trip, anything I should be sure to do there? Aside from not pissing in the lobby?
369: I usually go to Henrietta's table when I'm there. This usually happens when I'm coming home from work. I carry a huge backpack, because I need to carry a laptop and all of my papers with me, so I look like I'm a student and not someone who belongs in a fancy hotel when i go in.
Is the Holyoke center open after 7:30PM?
You know where had an awesome lobby bathroom? The old Ritz. And perfectly located for your Public Garden / Newbury Street outings! I haven't been in it since it changed to the Taj.
OT but I agree with Pinker on this:
http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
LEDA COSMIDES: Right, I think that's the claim. But the real question I had was about the cosmopolitanism, because I'm puzzled by that in a certain sense. It almost sounds, like "come be an undergraduate and everything is going to be okay." I'm wondering if that is a real factor that's contributing to this. It must be driven a lot by popular culture because you don't have massive numbers of people reading Proust and etc.
STEVEN PINKER: It's a rising tide that lifts all the boats. It sounds elitist to say this, but attitudes toward women, homosexuals, and racial minorities, and the tolerant attitudes that we celebrate of not beating up your kids, tend to start among the most educated strata, and you can see the rest of the country being dragged behind. With a lot of these statistics, the red states today have attitudes that the blue states had 30 years ago--toward women, towards spanking, towards homosexuals, towards animal rights, and so on.
What starts out at the universities and the pundits can trickle down and become conventional wisdom. That probably happens worldwide as well. This is another thing I'll probably get flak for saying, but very roughly you can see a continuum in the world in a lot of variables related to the decline of violence: Western Europe, then the American blue states, then the American red states, then Latin America and Asian democracies, and the Islamic world and Africa pulling up the rear. We can look, say, at the criminalization of homosexuality in Africa, or human trafficking, and say the world is in a terrible state, which of course it is. But the historical trend is that the other parts of the world eventually catch up. Slavery is a concrete example: just fifty years ago, slavery was still legal in Saudi Arabia.
Berlin for a business trip
How long will you be there? When?
Sunday-Wed of Thanksgiving week. Advising some EU organization that does the equivalent of what we do in the US.
375: I don't, particularly. Or at least I think he misses the point, in a very Lexus and the Olive Tree kind of way.
What the hell is Edge.org? It's always full of godawful web design and inane comments from crackpots and a handful of people I kind-of-know who are becoming more famous for being famous than for anything worthwhile they ever did.
Their About page says "Edge is a Conversation". So that's one answer.
375:Wow, he actually uses the words "trickle down" without blushing.
The elites circa 1900 also though that incredible progress was being made, and also condescendingly wanted to uplift those backward masses. This attitude is directly, causally related to the events of the next 50 years. Tuchman's High Tower.
Like then, what this is is elites benefiting from new technologies that generate better exploitation and surplus, and imagining it to be an moral achievement. They have the power to temporarily sculpt superficial society in their image, and consider it an human evolutionary change. Unbelievable innocence and arrogance.
You are as safe as the fin-de-siecle Viennese, but nowhere near as smart.
Like "Duality and World Piece" -- is that a typo? A joke? He pacifies Bronx bullies with the word "dual"? I don't know what's going on here.
Or maybe, like, time isn't real, dude. And isn't "This sentence is false" like, totally deep?
Yeah, it's a conversation -- a conversation in a dorm room at 3 AM, apparently.
372/377 Berlin recommendations:
If you want to see Berlin Wall stuff, the Bernauer Straße memorial is very informative. They've got a block-sized section of the double wall that you can see from above, with the death strip in between. The Checkpoint Charlie museum is more famous and more centrally located, but it's super cheezy and pretty dated.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (just south of the Brandenburg Gate) is a phenomenal piece of public art. (I'm not sure how well it functions as a memorial, but that's a different issue.) If you want more Holocaust content, the underground museum there really is quite good, and just the right size (i.e., not so large that it is overwhelming). (I mean, potentially overwhelming content-wise. But not because of the sheer amount of stuff.)
Museum-wise:
• The Neues Museum is the most recent of the Museumsinsel museums to re-open (the last in a more-than-a-decade reorganization) and was redone in a way that incorporates the damage into the rennovations in interesting ways. Even if you don't go into any of the museums, wandering around the Museum Island is cool.
• The Bauhaus museum is awesome, if you're into that kind of thing. Cool building, nice exhibit.
• Neue Nationalgalerie is in an awesome Mies van der Rohe building, but they won't have up their amazing collection of Expressionists & friends while you're there.
The area around the Kotbusser Tor subway station is lively and good for going out in. Würgeengel is a nice bar, and Roses on Oranienstraße is laid back and hilariously over the top. (Fur walls?!)
Thanks Blume, hopefully I have some free time- looks like Sunday is free from arrival until dinner but I'll be jetlagged, and Tuesday meetings don't start until 11am. Apparently there aren't direct flights from Boston to Berlin, only to Munich.
Re: OWS, seriously, though. They're demonstrating a lot of innovative thinking about how to generate a radically democratic movement on the fly, they've got by and large the right enemies in their sights, they've managed to get the unions and some D politicos on board without, thus far at least, succombing to cooptation, and they're really generating a national profile (easily 6000 in Portland today). It freaks me out a little bit that no one here is evincing much interest, because I think the next couple of weeks are going to be determinative of whether it blossoms into a serious mass movement or fizzles.
It's not just that Natilop hasn't cowed you all via leftier-than-thou, is it? What gives? (& I do want to hear bob's take!)
120K seems like enough to move every 2 years. I guess not if it made my kids miserable. I did that and my childhood wasn't...uh, fuck this line of thought. my business needs to become more successful and then I can live in the style to which I have become accustomed without eating my trust fund seed corn. though it's somewhat ok, because I found out this year I am the beneficiary (1 of 3) of a trust fund I didn't know existed. that will pay for my kids' expensive private school starting now, because I bothered to ask. only 1.7m but a persons got to start somewhere.*
*this all-true information, which I was otherwise reticent about, provided just for parsimon.
385: It's the only hopeful sign I've seen since Wisconsin, so.
386: I would like to be the beneficiary of a trust fund that I didn't know existed. Make it happen, al.
385: Have I been particularly leftier-than-thou here? I didn't think there was much debate around here that what happened in Wisconsin was pretty much a failure, from the perspective of achieving its goals. Is that not the case?
So, all I'm saying, is that the business unions and the Dems are always looking for opportunities to coopt movements, and they've been putting plenty of resources into just that strategy recently. Ergo, I'm thinking it's not even particularly cynical to predict a fizzle for OWS. I'd like to be wrong, and I'm certainly going to support the OccupyMN stuff to the best of my ability, but realistically I just don't think this is it. Yet.
That was kind of unfair on my part--I don't at all discount your viewpoint, though I do think the OWS movement may benefit from its timing if it can avoid getting swallowed. Mostly just trying to prod at others, curious as to why people don't seem to have much to say.
Because we're so privileged, clark, that we're too busy fireproofing our shit to comment at the moment. My Bentley isn't going to encase itself in asbestos, is it?
& one other point: I think one thing people miss on the whole "well what are there demands" front is the way in which this really curtailed the Wisc. protests: once it became a question of, can we stop the Walker bills, which a disciplined Rep. caucus could easily deflect, the movement deflated. The two things that make me hopeful about this OWS thing is that it's not clear what would count as a decisive defeat, and its general thrust is one that potentially has a huge "silent majority" appeal. A lot of cops, drivers, and office workers with their thumbs up in Portland today, at least.
People have said their bit in other threads, mostly, is probably the story. And it really is too early to tell if this is going to have some kind of consequence beyond the experience of the people doing it.
Well, wasn't the cause of the WI thing the Walker bills? And while the bills may have gotten through, I wonder if you can't say that the movement failed in limiting the damage to just that.
392 -- What do you hope is accomplished?
Chinese real estate developers hire some Germans to build a 'German town' outside of Shanghai. The expect fachwerk and other such old timey stuff. Germans decide that what would really work would be a copy of a generic postwar small town. Strangely enough, nobody wants to live there.
395: Fair question. I suppose my hierarchy of potential positive results, order according to realism, is:
a) a new generation of activists gets sufficient experience in mobilizing people and thinking about policy questions from numerous directions that, five or six years after the double dip, a significant left grass-roots movement emerges that pushes the government into enacting popular relief measures;
b) a significant left grass-roots movement emerges that scares Congress enough into enacting some new stimulus measures, or shifts the 2012 election enough to enable that then;
c) a significant left grass-roots movement emerges that scares Congress and the President enough into enacting the Tobin tax, comprehensive debt relief, single-payer health care, and maybe even a guaranteed basic income;
d) the end of capitalism! freedom and ponies!
There's no reason not to dream big, I guess.
Regarding academic jobs I think it is worth noting that they vary widely in terms of the amount of work required. Professors at the top universities generally have a lot lighter teaching load than at lower tier schools (like heebie U). Theoretically this is so you can do more research but once you have tenure you can blow the research off if you want in which case the job is pretty cushy.
And I have some sympathy for parsimon's view that it is a little off for people with high status jobs to be whining about the hours.
396 is very funny. Reminds me slightly of the friend of mine who wanted to run Guaranteed Authentic Second World War Re-Enactment Weekends. You'd turn up on the Friday night, be given your replica uniform, and get into the back of a three-tonner. For the next two days you would be driven randomly all over the south of England, stopping every so often to brew a cup of tea. At the end of it we would wheel out an authentic veteran who would say "yep, that's basically what I spent most of the war doing."
LOL. my sister does WWII reenactments. clearly they spend a disproportionate amount of time fighting (with blanks). though, as I've mentioned, in a fit of authenticity a soviet nkvd guy came up and arrested like 8% of the soldiers for treason, and was going to keep them out of the fight in an imaginary gulag. but they told him to fuck off. the best part is the parties where everyone is wearing their uniforms/period-appropriate dresses. my sister has 1940s undergarments! she's a soviet sniper usually. I think approximately 99% of the other reenactors are currently nursing a crush on her. but she attracts heavily armed stalkers, so tedious. I think it's a genetic thing.
this is the one who beat up the German re-enactor who then tried to get her kicked out, right? Great story.
There's a few people who are interested in historical martial arts who slide over into the reenactment and steampunk scenes and who sometimes crop up on the fringes of the thing I do. I have to admit to finding them a bit mysterious/confusing/annoying.
But at least they're easy to spot from a distance by the waxed moustaches.
re: 404
There is that [not really kidding, much]. Also, bitchily, by their really really terrible technique. Which they'll extol, at great length.
re: 407
The very thing. Seriously.
I have a canned rant on this topic, but it's not very interesting for people who don't do that kind of thing.
I agree with Natilo. The "left" establishment was able to coopt the Wisconsin protests into a pure "inside the system" strategy to elect more Democrats, which sucked all of the energy out of it. I don't know what the alternative is, though.
I should probably stop by and ask about what the need is for food donations. I talked Mom into bringing by banana bread and granola bars, but some Indian takeout would probably be usefully vegan-friendly.
On the larger political issues around OWS, I roughly approve, but I'm not sure what, other than bringing food, to say about it.
Which they'll extol, at great length
Isnt that required by every form of martial arts? (The i should really be moved to the left.)
re: 413
They do attract a lot of blowhards, yeah.
Does 413 even need the word "martial"? Art of any kinds makes people use too many words.
401
... I think it's a genetic thing.
So do I.
I agree with Natilo. The "left" establishment was able to coopt the Wisconsin protests into a pure "inside the system" strategy to elect more Democrats, which sucked all of the energy out of it. I don't know what the alternative is, though.
Natilo tells us that Wisconsin failed because it failed to meet its stated objectives, which is factually accurate, but I think overlooks the bigger picture.
In any event, I don't understand how that failure can be blamed on cooptation. The stated objective of the protest was to roll back a public policy decision - that's an inside-the-system objective. Had their stated objective been to burn shit down and the evil liberals persuaded them to vote instead, then you could talk about them being coopted.
417: You shame those thrill-seeking sloots! Shame them good!
410
I agree with Natilo. The "left" establishment was able to coopt the Wisconsin protests into a pure "inside the system" strategy to elect more Democrats, which sucked all of the energy out of it. I don't know what the alternative is, though.
This seems to be expected in the Wisconsin case, the protests were triggered by something the Republican legislators did, were directed at them and were encouraged by the Democrats. So they were never very far from Democratic party rallies. And of course it is difficult to sustain enthusiasm over longer periods of time.
Integrating the schools was an inside-the-system objective. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was an inside-the-system outcome. Ending the Vietnam War was an inside-the-system objective. Gay marriage is an inside-the-system objective. None of these were achieved by electing politicians alone.
419
You shame those thrill-seeking sloots! Shame them good!
Shaming is generally considered a more appropriate response to traits that aren't genetic.
If James agrees with me, I must be right!
I'll go on to say that the Wisconsin folks won a few otherwise unscheduled elections, and put the fear of the Lord into their elected representatives. These are good things even if they fall short of "victory."
And one more thing on co-optation: the real radicals in this narrative, the extremists who got the ball rolling, were what Walt calls in scare-quotes the "left" establishment - the elected representatives who fled the fucking state because nothing less radical would have served.
I detect in Walt, and perhaps Natilo, a reflexive distrust of electoral politics that is understandable but inappropriate in this case.
None of these were achieved by electing politicians alone.
Granted. But none were achieved without electing politicians either (including politicians who select a judiciary).
413-415: People in aikido seem refreshingly mellow in that respect.
Building a side can be a more important achievement than winning individual battles. I suspect that the number of people at the OWS protests is larger than it would have been without the example and momentum built by the Wisconsin protests.
And that, even though they lost the battle in Wisconsin, the union movement came out of that loss with far more active support from non-unionized people than it had going into it.
And the politics of the civil rights struggle had a strange and unique aspect. Northern Republican liberals/moderates could support civil rights legislation not only because their base voters (and financial backers) were ok with it, but also confident in the knowledge that it would, and did, kill southern Dem politicians.
To the extent that OWS wants things that require legislation, it has to either convince Kantor, Boehner, and McConnell that their agendas overlap, that enough people in those politicians' constituencies think so, or replace them. We'll see if they're able to find a way to do any of these things.
To the extent they want things that don't require legislation, it's a very different ballgame.
421, 424: I am fairly sure that ending the Vietnam War was achieved by the North Vietnamese winning it but I appreciate that this is a minority position.
429 -- Is it a minority view that the perception that the US wasn't ever going to win was a big part of the public turning against the thing?
To the extent that the Wisconsin protests helped build a side, it was despite the established leadership, not because of it. As long as it was restricted to narrow goals it was doomed to end in disappointment, since preventing the bill's passage was a long-shot. They should have aimed bigger.
421
Integrating the schools was an inside-the-system objective. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was an inside-the-system outcome. Ending the Vietnam War was an inside-the-system objective. Gay marriage is an inside-the-system objective. None of these were achieved by electing politicians alone.
These are all concrete specific objectives. The problem with the economy is that no one really has a clue about how to fix it. So the rallies are sort of like rallies against cancer, it is unclear how they can be expected to achieve anything.
re: 425
I'm not really talking about mellow versus not mellow, more 'have historically anachronistic theories about practice that they can't back up either with sound historical scholarship or actual practical demonstration'.* In my experience people who do 'soft' arts are just as (if not more) prone to bullshitting as anyone else, even if they aren't as aggressive or confrontational about it.
* in the case of the steampunky types this means reading 100 year old documents through an anachronistic lens that they think of as historical (but which, in fact, seems largely to come out of contemporary debates sparked by MMA), and then presuming this qualifies them to tell people who've been practicing something for decades that they 'aren't doing it right'.
430: not at all. I'm sure that was one of the big reasons why the US public turned against it. But the US public turning against it wasn't really the reason why the North Vietnamese won. They would have won anyway because they had more troops and they were better at that sort of war.
The problem with the economy is that no one really has a clue about how to fix it.
Provably false.
They should have aimed bigger.
Like what?
432: I know how to fix the economy.
They should have aimed bigger.
The bill was an example of the other side aiming bigger. Which is why it provoked the kind of reaction it did. But if you don't have control of the system, you can't use it to destroy your opponents. And if you don't have a blocking position, you can't stop them from using it to destroy you.
I'm really not understanding what you think should have happened, Walt. I'm surely wrong that you're advancing underpants gnome logic -- underpants issues are in the other thread anyway -- but I'm not seeing the dot connection.
They would have won anyway because they had more troops and they were better at that sort of war.
We had an unlimited material capacity to keep shooting and bombing them, for as long as we wanted to keep the war going.
Ten years ago today, we intervened in the Afghan civil war. I think we might have won it in 02/03. Might. I don't think we can win it now, and I don't think anyone in Washington believes we can either. I think they do think, though, that it can be 'not [finally] lost on my watch.'
436: A specific movement-building objective. For example, something like "Every single worker in America should be collective bargaining. Let's start with Wisconsin," and then set out to unionize every single workplace in Wisconsin. This would have been a quixotic quest, but it would have contributed to a more permanent movement.
The lesson the right has learned is that whenever they overreach, there's a reaction, but the reaction never manages to completely overturn their achievements. So the fear of God that pf mentions is simply that if you're in a marginal seat you might lose, which is true at all times, not just when you overreach. If the right fears that when they overreach they might cause a backlash that more than reverses their gains, they might be less eager to overreach.
The mid-decade Texas redistricting is another example. It looked like a clear overreach, and our heroes took the pf-approved radical step of fleeing the state, but the long-term consequences were pretty small. Only world-historical failure on the order of the Bush administration leads to the tiniest amount of lost ground for the right.
I think we might have won it in 02/03.
I still don't really see what counts as "winning" in Afghanistan.
438: I'm not sure what you're not understanding. They build a protest around a small-scale tactical goal that they had very little chance of achieving. When they didn't achieve it, the movement withered, and everyone went home. The goal should have been to pick something that people could do even after they lost the fight they were going to lose anyway.
To a certain extent, the fear of "underwear gnomes" logic is left-wing problem. The right is more entrepreneurial than the left, so they try all kinds of random shit, some of which works.
441: The Afghans voluntarily build a one-hundred foot golden statue of George W. Bush in the middle of Kabul that rotates to always face the sun.
441 -- Our great victory in Iraq was installing a regime sympathetic, if not subservient, to Iran. Exactly the goal of the Iranian architects of the policy. In a narrower US-centered sense, though, you can say we did win something: the Baath party is delegitimized to the point that it's very unlikely to rule Iraq in the foreseeable future. OK, we were able to win this because our Persian overlords wanted it as well, but win it we did.
Could this same kind of delegitimization have taken place wrt the Taliban? A tougher row, certainly, given the demographics. But we really did have the wind at our backs for a while there, and, I think there was a shot.
435 437
Well as the song says "We'd all love to see the plan".
Any way my real point is that there is not the same generally accepted means of achieving ends in the case of the economy that you have for things like gay marriage. Which is one reason OWS doesn't have concrete demands, they would have difficulty agreeing on them.
We had an unlimited material capacity to keep shooting and bombing them, for as long as we wanted to keep the war going.
Actually, the US economy is not infinite in size, and the cost of the Vietnam War was a significant worry. So, no; the US had a severely limited material capacity to keep bombing VN and it was running up against it.
entrepreneurial
I'd go with irrational, but you end up in the same place.
Also, by definition, the right is easier to organize.
Maybe one oddity of American professional life is a culture of presenteeism. Or maybe that's just me. I think I do this more than most people in my office... but then, I think I'm more exposed to the corporate world than most people in my office.
I loved the link in 356. This is well into "card carrying supervillain" territory. The lawyers defend mountaintop removal mining by accusing the locals of being inbred. And then misspelling it. An actual ethics complaint seems bizarre to me, but then IANAL, and for something like that I wouldn't be surprised if the mountaintop removal company had a malpractice case against them.
Well as the song says "We'd all love to see the plan".
Bloody nearly every leftwing economist in the world has been blogging continuously for the last three years about what policies should be followed to fix the economy. Only you, Shearer, could seriously suggest that the problem is a lack of policy suggestions. There is not the same generally accepted means because idiots - your idiots, the idiots you support and follow and believe in - have been in charge and have been arguing successfully in favour of things that won't work and have been shown not to work.
OT: I'm sitting outside at a coffeeshop and it's just started raining lightly. I'm under a roof, but my laptop is plugged into an outdoor -- and presumably grounded -- socket which is exposed. Am I going to get electrocuted and/or fry my power cord? (My battery is shite and lasts for maybe 20 minutes, so using it isn't really an option.)
449 -- Right. But if by the plan one means the plan to either get the idiots to do the right thing or replace them, well, that's one I haven't seen. Walt's pie-card co-optation plan looks fine to me, but then I'm soft on co-optation.
442 -- The protest started as a desperate attempt to stave off strategic defeat. I don't think you can (or organizers could have) separate the protest from its origins. Narrow focus was baked in.
449
Bloody nearly every leftwing economist in the world has been blogging continuously for the last three years about what policies should be followed to fix the economy. Only you, Shearer, could seriously suggest that the problem is a lack of policy suggestions. There is not the same generally accepted means because idiots - your idiots, the idiots you support and follow and believe in - have been in charge and have been arguing successfully in favour of things that won't work and have been shown not to work.
Ron Paul thinks he has a fix too, that doesn't mean there is any reason to believe him. Your leftwing economists can't convince anyone who doesn't share their fringe politics because their case isn't all that solid regardless of how much you and they scream about idiots.
And do you consider Krugman leftwing? He doesn't seem to have much in the way of suggestions for how to fix the Euro mess, just (perhaps justified) claims that the problems could have been avoided had people listened to him (and others) about what a bad idea the Euro was in the first place.
I am with Walt on this. If you have to look at how this transitions into something more practical, I think that one of the most promising aspects is to encourage state and local officials who have really been the most fucked over by the current political and economic climate that the public has their back. You know who really should have, but didn't get a bailout? State and local governments, who were timid even in asking for reasons expressed (IIRC) by Becks around here in 2008-2009.
More broadly, it represents a movement for "give everyone a bailout" which is exactly what economists have been talking about for years while the centrist DC democratic establishment went on 1990s autopilot mode and worried about the deficit. There are a number of factors that are waking up the DC establishment from those dogmatic slumbers, but OWS is one of them. I hope so, anyway.
Bloody nearly every leftwing economist in the world has been blogging continuously for the last three years about what policies should be followed to fix the economy.
And nearly every left-wing economist has described in detail exactly what would happen if their prescriptions weren't followed. There's really not much ambiguity at all in the economics of it. It's the politics that's the problem - hence OWS.
I mean "for fear of provoking reactions like those expressed by Becks around 2008-2009.". What I meant was that a lot of even well-meaning people on the left weren't keen on bailing out state and local governments, but the failure to do so has been a huge part of the crisis, and maybe OWS and related movements will encourage officials to ask for a bigger chunk of the pie. Our local City government has been very supportive of OWS, which makes sense because they have exactly the same interests.
449: Hard to know what to say to that, James. There are ways to tell right answers from wrong answers - but not if you are, a priori, committed to the idea that there is no method to know the truth.
Krugman has, in fact, made no suggestions about European policy if you ignore the fact that he's made extensive suggestions.
Everything you say is true, James, except for the fact that it's not.
Doesn't anyone care that I might get electrocuted?!
More important, everyone should read Ezra's blog post from Wednesday because it's not by Ezra but by Ri/ch Yes/el/son, one of my former book group friends.
Rich is extremely smart and articulate and has read -- and retained -- staggering amounts of history, politics, and sociology of social movements and how they actually work. It's not theoretical with him; he's not an academic (not that there's anything wrong with that) but a union researcher and organizer who, not incidentally, sees a major role for academics and intellectuals in the movement.
On concrete goals, he says this:
The phrase, "we are the 99 percent" nicely encapsulates the potential of OWS to become a movement of democratic extension. But right now, the precise demands of the Wall Street demonstrators include grandiose ideas like abolishing consumerism. . . .
Reworking debt should be distinguished from either "demand the impossible" notions, like abolishing consumerism, or smart lefty wonkmanship, like a financial transaction tax. I won't dispute that an FTT is good policy, but neither it nor posturing about stopping other people from buying stuff that you find tasteless changes the lives of ordinary people in a clear and measurable way. It won't affect how much they are paid and how they deal with their boss, or how they use public accommodations, or whom they choose to live happily ever after with. But lowering the crushing debt burden on millions of people in the midst of a "balance sheet" recession can do just that--it hits people where and how they live. If, as in this example, the demonstrators make proposals which have an organic connection to the pressing concerns of millions of people, they will heighten the potential of developing a movement which can leverage political change.
But you should really read the whole thing.
Particularly, 'we'd all love to see the plan' is loony. You can argue that you're unconvinced the plan on offer is right, and there's certainly no way to convince you of anything against your will, but there are certainly left of (US politics current) center economists with a plan for fixing the economy.
In case the excerpt in 458 seems too dry, there are also sentences like this: "In the end, a massive Gaullist backlash cleaned their clocks."
458.1: I'd trust the design of the outdoor outlet. If it's out in the rain, it's probably safe to use in the rain.
But you should really read the whole thing.
Or, alternatively, RTFA!
Occupy Wall Street ... said it was the police who were eager to provoke violence.
The group posted a YouTube video of a cop a block from the Stock Exchange saying Wednesday evening that he just couldn't wait to beat up demonstrators.
"My little nightstick's gonna get a workout tonight," the burly officer whose badge reads 'Rodriguez' says gleefully to a fellow cop as they wait by a metal barricade on Broad Street.
That clip was juxtaposed by protesters with video taken in the melee later on that shows a police lieutenant holding a baton in both hands and wading through a crowd indiscriminately clubbing people.
"Police officers have a right to use force and to defend themselves when they are being charged by a group trying to overwhelm them," said NYPD chief spokesman Paul Browne.
If you care to click the link, there's a link to the youtube video.
I think announcing up front that the protests were intended to be nonviolent may have been a mistake. The protests ought to be only as violent as necessary, and no more.
462: Well I thought someone else might have posted it, but I didn't check the Sullivan thread.
I second pf's brilliant recommendation!
Your leftwing economists can't convince anyone who doesn't share their fringe politics because their case isn't all that solid regardless of how much you and they scream about idiots.
Shearer, IIRC you have already admitted that you are unwilling to be persuaded of something that you find emotionally unsatisfying, regardless of the quantity of evidence presented in its support. You are not alone: and that is why leftwing (which means "everyone not on the far right" in this context btw) economists are having such a hard time.
Their "fringe politics", incidentally, such as calling for tighter bank regulation and higher top tax rates, are generally found to be shared by the majority of the US population when polls are conducted.
That is a very good post, whoever recommended it first.
Bail out ordinary debtors, not just wall street. Forgive debts for ordinary people. That's really all you need for a mass movement, and there sure are a lot of folks who would get on board. I mean debtors' revolts have basically been the core mass populist movement since, I dunno, Ancient Greece?
If we're talking forgiveness of debts, I think the right word to use is Jubilee. Sounds festive.
I've been calling for Jubilee for years. Steve Keen also calls for Jubilee,
The problem all along, folks, one I have always recognized and accepted, is that one person's debt is somebody else's asset and income stream, and the MOTU have arranged, starting with IRA's in the 1970s, that if Jubilee is called, all the pensions funds, retirement programs, and health insurance will go Poof!
That is and was the bottom line for Obama and ilk, that was his choice in 2008-09, that if he let the banks go down, the only plausible replacement for pensions and healthcare was the Federal Gov't. Total takeover of retirement and healthcare.
The banksters really did create a revolutionary moment, when the social welfare state would either take everything or die.
That was what some of us understood about Obamacare, that it was a plan to create an income stream for Wellpoint, who would let Goldman-Sachs securitize it for a healthy fee, and then G-S would sell those securities to prop up and provide life support for California and Greek pensions funds. With an aging population the ROI on future securities needs to be immense.
Or the Federal Gov't could just take over this shit, all pensions and healthcare (not health insurance) and save, like Medicare saves, all the overhead and mediation fees.
But those were, and still are, about the only choices.
Ah, Bob. Always the caramel center of a real idea surrounded by a tootsie pop of bullshit, and always about you.
This is what the banksters do, this is what is going on still today, this blackmail and game of chicken. And they are good at it.
US big banks aren't very deep into Italian and Greek bonds, but the French and Belgoium banks are, and the US banks have loaned the French banks hundreds of banks to...buy Greek gov't bonds. All highly leveraged, CDo'd and CDS's up the wazoo.
So if Greece defaults, the dominoes fall.
They are betting the politicians will make the taxpayers pay, and they are betting 3-4 trillion.
Yeselson is bullshit, still negotiating at the table at the table like other process liberals while the building collapses around him.
As Newberry says, we are in radical times facing radical enemies, and we need radical tactics and strategy. We don't get to negotiate what happens after the deluge, we can only blow up the damn. The survivors, which won't be us, get to decide how to rebuild.
A one trillion dollar stimulus would probably be a good thing, and I can imagine there's a sensible way to structure substantial parts of it as individual LMC (and lower) debt relief. Maybe even good wedge politics, especially if you can apply it to certain kinds of debt and not others.
I don't see how the kids are going to get McConnell, Kantor, and Boehner on board, but Bob is probably right that one way to do so is to get the banks to see it as a bailout of them.
Rich is extremely smart and articulate and has read -- and retained -- staggering amounts of history, politics, and sociology of social movements and how they actually work. It's not theoretical with him; he's not an academic (not that there's anything wrong with that) but a union researcher and organizer who, not incidentally, sees a major role for academics and intellectuals in the movement.
Isn't that nice for him that he will have a major role? I suppose this based on his massive achievements of the last thirty years or whatever of study and fieldwork?
OWS is just the mop-up operation for Yeselson's terrific progress.
Arrogant fucks.
I'd like to see wealth actually confiscated from the top. I'm all for a Debt Jubilee, or helicopter drops of money, but there's a big difference between getting the money for that from current hoarded wealth and getting the money for that from the future.
Not just: help the rest of us,
But also: with the money that's been extracted from us.
re: 475
Do you even bother to read what people write? Explain to us again what the fuck it is you do apart from talk shit on the internet?
Your leftwing economists can't convince anyone who doesn't share their fringe politics because their case isn't all that solid regardless of how much you and they scream about idiots.
No, it's hard to convince people because leftwing economists don't have the advertising budget that bullshit economists do.
I've seen lots of statistics on the concentration of wealth in the top 1% that set things out in percentage terms, but don't recall seeing any that used real dollar figures. How much money could we get, exactly, if we just confiscated 100% of all wealth in excess of, say, $20,000,000, held by any private individual (or related group of individuals)*?
* I understand there are a whole host of (nonpolitical) reasons this isn't really possible; I'm just trying to get some sense of the numbers.
The plan to fix the economy, from the perspective of Washington-as-a-unitary-actor or a magical genie, is really simple and uncontroversial. What to do for the next five to 10 years:
(1) Balancing the budget and paying down the deficit should not be high priorities right now. But, to the extent that they are worth working on, it should be done by raising taxes, especially on the rich, rather than by cutting spending.
(2) Likewise, preventing inflation should not be as high a priority for the Federal Reserve as it is right now. Create incentives to spend rather than save.
(3) As for what should be a priority: spend and employ people. Bring back the CCC or something like it. Public works. A stronger, wider social safety net.
(4) Higher standards for working conditions and job security, whether by direct government regulation or some other way. Simply getting higher employment as in (3) might accomplish this with the woo-woo magic of the invisible hand, but I doubt it.
(5) Something to reduce consumer debt. True, today it's lower than it was six years ago - but that's not saying much, is it? It's still really, really high. People don't have the freedom to act like the hypothetical rational economic actor when they have a ton of debt to pay off; they have to take the safe, immediate option that screws them over in the long term. Again, implementing the previous steps will help, but I doubt they will fix this completely.
But the point is, if people have money and decent jobs - then they'll have money and decent jobs, which is the whole point of a better economy; stock market prices are just a news-cycle-friendly metric rather than a goal in and of themselves. But also, if people have money and decent jobs, then they'll spend, save and invest in ways that lead to keeping an economy strong on a long-term, sustainable basis.
Now, none of this particularly controversial. I'll admit the relationship between my fourth point and the economy is more indirect than the rest, but it's there, and the rest of my plan is really unambiguous, as far as I can tell. There are no sane, literate adults who seriously doubt whether stimulating the economy would be good for it or whether 5 to 7 percent inflation would make things even worse than they already are. My plan isn't particularly complicated, either; I personally could write the legislation for four of my five points in an afternoon.
The problem is that Washington isn't a unitary actor and there are no magical genies. Insane and/or illiterate adults can vote too, and a small but influential number of people are greedy sociopaths who would prefer to have a bigger slice of a smaller pie. There are lots of choke points in our government. And so discussion of this stuff gets bogged down in the details of which half-measure would be better than nothing, and how to peel off half a dozen Congressmen from Boehner's coalition, and what would show a noticeable effect in time for the 2012 election cycle so that less-bad people can get elected to implement the next step, and whether a "burn shit down" mentality is psychologically justified. But really, what to do is the easy part.
a small but influential number of people are greedy sociopaths whoANY RATIONAL ACTOR would prefer to have a bigger slice of a smaller pie
FIXED.
481: It's listening to people like you that led Congress to approve Obama's stimulus plan, which everyone understood would be followed by a spike in inflation and interest rates.
I mean, if Obama had pumped hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars into the economy and we'd still seen no dramatic effect on inflation and interest rates, I could see your point. But as it is, what you're saying is like saying the massive stimulus of war spending pulled the U.S. out of the Depression. That's just crazy talk.
Urple, I should do real research, like Googling, but I've read recently that the top 5% of people are controlling an amount equal to 40 percent of annual GDP for the US. That's a stunning concentration of wealth.
475:I am pretty certain I read the Yeselson first. I certainly linked to it first, scroll up from pf's RTFA thread.
But Ezra Klein admired it, and Ezra Klein is a complete fucking tool. Now Weimar-Kraab gives a second recommendation, so it's settled. Opportunism, and quite open about it.
2) Matt Stoller is there at OWS, and all the Occupys have a very simple message:"Listen" Don't bring an agenda, don't try to solve the problems, just bring food and listen. It's gonna take tens of millions, and we don't have millions yet.
3) David Plouffe has shown up, and told OWS you're terrific, we hear ya, we agree, now help us get the AJA passed and Obama re-elected. You saw what Carp did to Jubilee in 474, blames Republicans and turned it into a bank bailout.
It's gonna take tens of millions to ignore the deal-makers like Carp, Plouffe, and Yeselson. They shouldn't get to be at the table.
Wikipedia has it under Distribution of Wealth. Top 1% holds 38% of the U.S. wealth.
480
How much money could we get, exactly, if we just confiscated 100% of all wealth in excess of, say, $20,000,000, held by any private individual (or related group of individuals)*?
Well, America has over 400 billionaires. (That Wikipedia page says 412 and 403 in different places, so it's badly edited at least, but judging by the number of individual pages, 400 seems a safe bet.) If we could get an additional half a billion dollars on average from each of them, that right there would be about a quarter of the 2009 stimulus package, while still leaving them with net worths greater than the amount everyone in this thread will probably make in our lifetimes, combined.
So that's not exactly what you were asking, but it's something related that proved easy for me to do the math on. And that's just billionaires, not 20-millionaires-and-up. And I'd be if anything more interested in going after corporations than individuals. So to answer your question as best I can, again putting the actual hard questions like "how" aside of course, I think the answer is, "one hell of a lot of money".
Also, 483 is mostly sarcasm, right? Sorry for asking, but I can't always tell.
Also, 483 is mostly sarcasm, right?
As Mary McCarthy might say, everything in 483 is irony, including "and" and "the."
I'm at a loss for how to talk about these things on threads where James is a contributor. I figured I'd try to live in his universe for a bit.
James and bob do make a wonderful team, don't they?
So, as I've said before, I don't think there are any policy ideas which can actually make things better. It's at least 15 years too late to do anything about the whole peak oil/global warming/ecosystem degradation problem.
But having said that, if I could enforce changes by fiat that weren't simply "anarchy!", my thought is that we've let the finance capital people pretty much set the bounds of the discourse for way too long.
What is our economy, right now? A hell of a lot of services, many of which are only necessitated by other services and so on and so on. In terms of manufacturing, we have seen tremendous benefits from automation, although of course those have not been shared equally through society. And as for food, things are pretty shaky when you consider how much petroleum has to be found, refined, transported and burned in order to get one meal onto someone's plate.
I think any serious plan to actually change things, rather than just forestalling an eventual swing backwards of the political-economic pendulum, would have to start with a directly democratic process where local communities determined what they would and would not pursue, economically. I think some of the areas to start in would be: Local food production; ending commuting as we know it; retrofitting buildings to sustainable energy technologies; community-based healthcare; and a decentralized, democratically controlled approach to education.
Even the greenest, fair tradest, most union-supporting consumer must participate in reproducing the forms of economic activity that are most detrimental to their interests, nowadays. As long as that is the case, I'm doubtful that any non-revolutionary movement can affect anything at all.
I'm not really talking about mellow versus not mellow, more 'have historically anachronistic theories about practice that they can't back up either with sound historical scholarship or actual practical demonstration'.
Aren't martial arts rather full of this sort of thing, steampunk or not?
Yves Smith calls out Paul Krugman
And it's really the job of policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details. ...PK
Aargh. What about "The elites in America are corrupt" don't you understand? ...Smith
PK responds defensively you know where to find him
The elites are corrupt, for many meanings and kinds of corruption, and that, as much as I love him, includes PK.
476:I'd like to see wealth actually confiscated from the top. I'm all for a Debt Jubilee
You need to understand PK when he talks about the zero-bound. He, and his friends, will not tolerate the re-distribution in any amount of time before Republicans stop it. A return to labor of the confiscations of the last thirty years means major-league wage-inflation (relative to capital) and you will, I hope, get a chance to see Krugman, DeLong, and Romer go all fresh-water the week wage-inflation approaches 5%. And we need 10-20% wage-inflation relative to equity prices for a decade to get power back down to workers.
The New Keynesians will stop serious redistribution dead in its tracks.
They can't be at the table.
485 -- Things are going to have to get a whole lot worse before tens of millions of people are ready to sign up for blowing up the system and letting the survivors make something from the wreckage. You think they will. Maybe you're right.
I have to assume that 484, 486 and 487 are all jokes.
Although I found the answer on the wikipedia page: total wealth is about $57 trillion, so a confiscation of only the excessive portion of the wealth held by the very tippy top of the top 1% should yield about $20,000,000,000,000 or so. That's a pretty damn big number. Get the pitchforks.
Aw, it's been so long since bob attacked me personally. Makes me downright nostalgic.
I thought our tendency to turn threads into sex and/or food threads was bad until I realized how much time we spend on the dismal science. Mumble fantasy football mumble people who don't work in places with written "Casual Friday" polo shirt policies mumble.
re: 492
It varies quite a bit, I think. But yeah. Those with a strong sporting/competitive component tend to -- with exceptions -- be somewhat less prone to some of the worst of that. Boxing, say, isn't much like Deadly Tibetan Lama Drunken Snake Claw because, at the end of the day, crap boxers get ktfo. But there are fads everywhere, and sporting/competitive styles have their own conceptual/practical problems and founding myths. So it's degrees of difference rather than differences of kind.
In this particular instance that's irritating me, there _is_ a clear (evolving) historical tradition which is relatively well documented, and also a large installed user base (for want of a better word) with a strong grounding in practice.* However, the historical recreation mob are inclined to dismiss that in favour of their own half-arsed reconstructions from 100 year old documents. So there's a bunch of people teaching 'true X, uncorrupted by sport cooties, with all the sekrit deadly techniques unexpurgated' despite being demonstrably incompetent in most of the basic techniques of X.** Which is a shame, as there is some interesting stuff buried in among the flimflam.
* not without its own flaws, bullshit and founding myths, for sure
** I'm thinking of someone who is publicly teaching the techniques of this sport/martial art whose only experience of it is a 4 week beginner's course in which he was taught _by me_. He's a decent guy, and means well. This is nerdy over enthusiasm on his part rather than outright fraud, but still, it's bullshit.
Do we have to talk about fantasy football? I don't know anything about fantasy football. (The Plain People Of The Internet: We haven't noticed that you know all that much about economics, either.)
498: I am unfamiliar with the norm for "casual Fridays" but a lawyer friend told me that even with such a policy, his firm still forbid polo shirts and jeans. So I guess you can forgo a tie and a jacket? That's it?
Mumble fantasy football mumble
I could fill pages upon pages with fantasy football minutiae, if you'd like.
501: And cotton twill or other cotton non-jean pants! Immensely more freeing than the tyranny of wool.
For women, of course, business casual is almost completely undefined. I've been wearing more dresses lately, and my boss told me yesterday that it was good, I looked 'more mature'. I now want to come in to work in pigtails.
I'm getting sad that the weather has begun to make women pack away the sundresses and open-toed shoes.
504: My male gaze: let me show you it.
For example, I have a bunch of ideas for exotic changes to the standard scoring system that I'd be more than happy to share.
504: And no more air-drying for the guys.
open-toed shoes.
I will be quoting you as a counterexample to "Men don't notice shoes," a claim I see made all too often.
508: I notice shoes! There's a pretty strong narrative that men who notice and comment on women's shoes are creepy sex perverts though, so I usually don't make a big deal of it.
Could be creepy sex perverts, could be fashiony gay men. Just saying, you've got options.
A straight man commented on my new shoes today.
What he was doing on your shoes I'll never know.
I actually didn't know that men who notice and comment on women's shoes are thought to be creepy sex perverts. Where does that stereotype come from? I never notice or comment on women's shoes, so this hasn't been an issue, but it's a good thing to keep in mind in case I ever happen to notice any.
514: I dunno, films? Sketch comedy? Cow orkers?
Right -- finding yourself noticing women's shoes should be the trigger for reporting yourself to the authorities as a danger to those around you.
(Actually, I'm not really familiar with the male-shoe-noticers as creepy sex pervert thing. Is it a thing?)
516: finding yourself noticing women's shoes should be the trigger for reporting yourself to the authorities as a danger to those around you.
I meant so I don't unthinkingly speak up, and find myself branded.
516: finding yourself noticing women's shoes should be the trigger for reporting yourself to the authorities as a danger to those around you.
I meant so I don't unthinkingly speak up, and find myself branded.
516: finding yourself noticing women's shoes should be the trigger for reporting yourself to the authorities as a danger to those around you.
I meant so I don't unthinkingly speak up, and find myself branded.
I dunno, films? Sketch comedy? Cow orkers? Unfogged comments?
I will be quoting you as a counterexample to "Men don't notice shoes," a claim I see made all too often.
I totally notice shoes. In fact, once I was accused of being particularly unsubtle in checking a woman out—but really I was just checking out her shoes. Honest! Shoes are great.
NOT FETISHIST
Triple posting isn't a sign of perversion, is it?
Now I wonder how many things I might be doing day-to-day that make people think "creepy sex pervert"?
I wasn't going to say anything, but that fist-pump routine in the bathroom kind of disturbs me.
Look, that time you pulled the floating burger out of the tank and ate it? We've just... never seen anyone do anything like that before. It scared us a little.
522: Vigorously slapping your penis against the urinal.
As with so many other things in life, moderation is the key in penis-urinal slapping.
Partly, it's from a cow orker of mine at the stock brokerage who got into a phase where "Those are really great shoes" was his standard conversational opener when talking to women at the horrid downtown meat-market we all went to after work. It was pretty embarrassing to be around.
I think that's the double-reverse-whammy pervert effect; someone doing that is commenting on the shoes precisely because he thinks it's a non-threateningly-sexual comment. "That's a beautiful sweater" implies "I'm looking at your tits," where "Nice shoes" attempts to imply "I'm not assessing you sexually at all, just complimenting your taste." But then, because it sounds phony, it comes off as "I'm not just sexually objectifying you, I'm being sneaky about it."
(This may be slightly unhinged. I just read the three Girl With The Dragon Tattoo books, and am trying to decide whether I hate men generally, just Swedish men, or just the author. Probably the last of the three, given that he's dead and therefore doesn't care.)
Even if you don't care about feet, shoes affect the positioning of . . . well, of the ass.
I just read the three Girl With The Dragon Tattoo books, and am trying to decide whether I hate men generally, just Swedish men, or just the author.
Huh?
Eh, after the whole GRRM argument on Crooked Timber the other week, I'm sort of burned out on "Boy, if you took all of the rape and torture of that book, you wouldn't have much more than a short story left!" But that was the general impression I got of the Girl books. Also, ultraviolent Manic Pixie Dream Girls are awesome, and if you, the male reader, can only manage to be one of the few men who's not a violent pedophilic rapist, grateful women will fling themselves at you constantly, to the point where your main problem in life will be managing the chafing issues.
They were fast moving and plotty -- I certainly read many worse books. Just rubbed me wrong.
529: this is why it's such a burden to be, as I am, a man of exceptional taste. It's just so hard to give compliments without people thinking you have some kind of ulterior motive, but when you discern the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as readily as I do, you naturally want to comment on it.
533: There was an article about them in the NYRB that mentioned the predominance of that element and left me wondering why they sold like such hot cakes.
535. Just print that on a business card and hand it out.
be one of the few men who's not a violent pedophilic rapist, grateful women will fling themselves at you constantly
Crap. I knew I was doing something wrong.
534 to 536: If you're reading thrillers for the thrill, lots of exciting stuff happens fast -- as what they are, they function well.
533 -- I enjoyed the first one a fair amount, who doesn't like learning about large Swedish conglomerates and 1930s Scandinavian Nazis. Then I read the second one and it retroactively suckified the first one. Haven't read the third.
533: ultraviolent Manic Pixie Dream Girls are awesome
Somehow I've never found this particular trope to be all that exciting. And through my work with the radical theater, I now count a number of MPDGs among my friends. And their lives are not so grate, akshully. Bad credit, asshole boyfriends, shitty work history, constant street harassment, inevitable infighting, constant comparisons to other MPDGs, especially the famous ones -- it all seems rather dreary, when you get to know them. I guess that's where the ultraviolence comes in for the fictional MPDGs -- so they can just beat people up to solve all of the attendant problems.
Regarding Mr. Larsson's books, the whole "I-saw-a-rape-so-now-I'm-a-feminist-who-writes-rape-porn" thing is helluva creepy. His anti-fascist work redeems him somewhat though.
Just rubbed me wrong.
Any trouble managing the chafing issues?
544: That's from some ancient comedy album making fun of Mr. Rogers, isn't it?
545: Yes! I think it was originally on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. Anyway, here's a transcript from someone who apparently owns it (and says 1977).
You know, so ancient that I was 23 when it came out. Also something, something, changing mores or comedy but actually too late for that, but there it is.
533: Weird. I had no idea. I thought they were more like Agatha Christie stories. At least, that's how I always hear them described.
(Wait a minute: I'm not actually sure I've ever even read anything by Christie. Her books aren't the same way, are they?)
No, Christie's are not like that.
Just for grins, to reveal my checkered past, I decided to give a taste of what I am staring at across the room every single moment I am at the computer. One shelf out of 12, three pb's deep, about 10 high.
Marvin Albert - Europe
Linda Barnes - Boston
Rick Boyer - Boston
Lawrence Block (I don't like him)
Paul Bishop
Jan Burke
P.M. Carlson - woman, cozies
Harlan Coben
James Lee Burke
George Chesbro
David Cross
Lindsay Davis
In most cases we are talking complete works up to 1995-2000. Average ten apiece maybe. To be honest, she made the choices, hanging around a Mystery Book store and used book stores, and I just read whatever she brought home. It ended when the Mystery Store closed and she had 500 unread paperbacks that she grew tired of organizing.
It is always a matter of taste, but I guess the above (and a lot more if you want) are recommended with reservations. They are all candy. The way it works is that if we would like a latest release, then go to used book stores and and buy the older stuff. If we didn't like the author, we would sell it.
She was also into horror, romance, comic fantasy and god knows what. A little light S-F aimed at female audiences. Up to 50 books a week for a while.
I have a shelf of Informants.
I now count a number of MPDGs among my friends. And their lives are not so grate, akshully. Bad credit, asshole boyfriends, shitty work history, constant street harassment, inevitable infighting, constant comparisons to other MPDGs, especially the famous ones -- it all seems rather dreary, when you get to know them. I guess that's where the ultraviolence comes in for the fictional MPDGs -- so they can just beat people up to solve all of the attendant problems.
The long Rolling Stone piece about Amanda Knox basically paints her as an MPDG. Random dancing, sudden hairdo changes, talking for hours with strangers she thought looked sad, that sort of thing.
Checking around, I see the alphabetization has gotten messed up.
James Crumley should be in the B's and C's
The Last Good Kiss is the perfect hard-boiled. Perfect.
James Lee Burke is overrated compared to the field. His despondency is not compensated by his prose or plotting after a half-dozen books. Dennis LeHane is not overrated.
Lots of hidden treasures. We always felt bad for Stephen Greenleaf, San Francisco. Excellent but lost his contracts when they cut the midlists.
Stuart Kaminsky was one of our favorites, all three series.
Random dancing, sudden hairdo changes, talking for hours with strangers she thought looked sad, that sort of thing.
No wonder all the women on the Internet hate her guts.
WE REALLY HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE CHANGE HAIRSTYLES.
Listened to Thomas McGuane read his recent New Yorker story last night. I could read more of his stuff.
The woman I know who most closely resembles a Manic Pixie Dream Girl moved to Minneapolis. Maybe it's MPDG Heaven?
555: I think you need to check your privilege.
Random dancing, sudden hairdo changes, talking for hours with strangers she thought looked sad, that sort of thing.
Add to that incredible naïveté, as everyone else around the murder lawyered up or left the country, while she stayed there to try to be a help to the victim's family.
[S]he stayed there to try to be a help to the victim's family.
I've heard enough. Bring back the garrotte!
Having just gotten off the phone with the Ex, it occurs to me that my sympathy for the world's Manic Pixie Dream Girls may not be entirely dispassionate and objective.
Oh dear. At least that means that when she frolicked merrily into and out of your life, she left you not only happier, but knowing a little more about people, and about yourself?
That's how the MPDG thing works as I understand it, anyway.
Are there MPDBs? What about something like the swashbuckler in romance novels?
I ask because I'm unfailingly charmed by MPDGs in movies, and I'd like to enjoy them without guilt.
563: Get a sex change operation.
I think you'd have to change not only the G but also the P.
Are there MPDBs? What about something like the swashbuckler in romance novels?
One interesting permutation is The Brothers Bloom, in which Rachel Weisz plays the world's quirkiest woman, a woman who has 500 quirky hobbies and is amazing talented at useless things while being clumsy in her daily life, but is bored all the time and doesn't want any friends. And Adrien Brody is his usual lugubrious taciturn self but somehow lights up her life and leaves her not only happier, but knowing a little more about people, and about herself.
563, 565, 567: The male equivalent of the MPDG might be something like the various 42 Longs that play opposite Katherine Heigl: Agreeable, Supportive, Not Too Sarcastic, Knows He Can't Do Better.
563: Prof. Harold Hill?
Generally, I think you're looking more for a rambler, a drifter, a man who just can't be tied down.
Google suggests as Manic Pixie Dream Guys the following:
Lloyd Dobler
Richard From Texas in Eat, Pray Love
Dicaprio's character in Titanic
That plastic-bag-loving idiot in American Beauty
563: Murray Burns (Jason Robards' character) in A Thousand Clowns and his relationship with Dr. Sandra Markowitz.
554: Huh? I thought we all defended her against a misogynist justice system that found unapologetically sexual women not just sluts, but "diabolical she-devils"? I must be off the list-serv.
A sub-trope of MPDB is the wacky half of a buddy movie. Henry Burlingame in The Sot-Weed Factor also comes to mind.
565: It's short for Morose Peregrinatory Dream Boy.
569: The Bridges of Madison County
Generally, I think you're looking more for a rambler, a drifter, a man who just can't be tied down.
Weren't we just talking about Robert Plant the other day?
572: I think the narrative has now, perhaps inevitably, proceeded to scourging her through the Internet's cobblestoned comment sections for the offense of privilege.
Pixie doesn't work with American models of masculinity after the age of 14 or so. The Manic Pixie Dream Boy gets written as the gay best friend.
A sub-trope of MPDB is the wacky half of a buddy movie.
In a similar vein, I was thinking Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited. Or maybe that was too scheduled to be manic.
Don't a lot of MPDGs die of cancer or something, leaving the fellow distraught but not so distraught that he forgets the beauty of the world that she showed him? In that line, what about what's-his-name in Titanic? He comes from a different social class, introduces Princess Princessypants to dancing, drinking, sex and ecstatic states (world, king of), then, conveniently, dies to remove the last obstacle to her self-actualization.
Rolling Stone piece about Amanda Knox
Holy shit, what a good story. How is it that I've never heard anything about this? It seems like I should have seen something in the news at some point.
Falstaff for Henry V? Neal Cassady for Kerouac?
Gotta get around to watching Black Swan Does the M Kunis character work for Portman?
Folks are not understanding or appreciating the new Zoe Deschanel tv show. I like the ads a lot.
582:Christ, I shouldn't have to be a troll.
Richard Seymour destruction of the popular press coverage of Amanda Knox
Rich white suburban girl gets sympathetic treatment in accusations of killing poor colored minority girl? Duh?
Do you guys ever question your instant reactions for privilege? Read the Seymour, or download the forensic report.
Richard Seymour, linked above
Having read the above, I invite you to download the Massei report and compare it with any number of articles making the case for Knox's innocence - the Rolling Stone article is a real peach, its author doing a word-perfect imitation of an amanuensis for Gogerty Stark Marriott.
582:Christ, I shouldn't have to be a troll.
You don't. You could always just go fuck yourself.
Falstaff for Henry V? Neal Cassady for Kerouac?
Gotta get around to watching Black Swan Does the M Kunis character work for Portman?
Folks are not understanding or appreciating the new Zoe Deschanel tv show. I like the ads a lot.
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT
My ex had a streak of MPDG, which taints my feelings about them. They are exhausting and in reality manage to live the manic pixie life by spewing externalities all over people around them, leaving others to do the shitwork that pixies can't be bothered to do, or more to the point that pixies manage to magic other people into taking on so that they can flit about doing their manic pixie things. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
JUSTICE FOR ALL, OR JUSTICE FOR NONE
ALL MUST DIE WHEN WE ARE GATHERED
Okay, so guys. The trope was originally designed to refer to women who had no discernible personalities other than collections of quirks, but nonetheless find mopey, terrible men unbelievably attractive, for reasons the script entirely fails to elucidate. Calling real-life women (especially women that you've dated, for god's sake) is kind of bracingly insulting, both to you and those women.
Neal Cassady for Kerouac?
Interesting. I can see what you're getting at, but I think when the MPDWhoever is of the same gender, there's a possibility of wanting to be that person or taking that person as a role model that ruins the inherent lopsidedness of the MPDG relationship.
Yeah, I think Morose Peripatetic Dreamy Guy is more what we're looking for as an analogue. Some examples besides Owen Wilson:
Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise
Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke and The Hustler
River Phoenix in everything he did
Lance Kerwin in James at 15
I think the distinction is that you don't want someone with enough agency to be much of a hero or an anti-hero. So vampires mostly don't make the cut. Tom Cruise, likewise, never plays anyone who can be pushed around that easily.
A friend of mine did a bizarrely self-referential musical about her relationship with another friend, where the plot was her alter ego putting on a bizarrely self-referential musical about her relationship with other friend's alter ego. There was a brilliant flashback scene where she (the actor playing the director character) meets the boyfriend character outside a local bohemian coffeeshop and tries to pick him up with the line "I loved On The Road", delivered in this jaded, world-weary tone. Oh, it was so funny. Anyway, it was totally boy-MPDG meets girl-MPDG and all the horror that resulted from that. The closing number was a version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" accompanied only by banjoes the actors were playing.
re: 534
Yeah. I didn't like them either. Or rather, I liked the first one and enjoyed it for what it was. Fast moving, etc. All the things you've said. Got a bit sour on the second one, and then didn't finish the third. It's still sitting on the shelf and I probably will read it at some point.
Speaking of books, I've been reading Georges Simenon's 'The Hatter's Ghosts'. It's the first Simenon I've read, and I don't know what I expected. Something Christie-ish, or fairly safe? But it's not that at all.
"Total Eclipse of the Heart" accompanied only by banjoes the actors were playing.
I have no comment. I just wanted to see that sentence again.
I dated a MPDG once, for a whole year. I liked her a lot. It was a lot of fun, until we got arrested.
It's interesting having an actual relationship with a MPDG -- the manic pixie qualities are always there, but then you see how they fit into a three-dimensional personality and it changes your view of the whole thing. I wonder if that movie has been made.
597: I wonder if that movie has been made.
Viridiana? That Obscure Object of Desire?
597: It's like you didn't even read 591! You didn't date a MPDG (that is, a construct from films). You dated an actual woman.
You dated an actual woman.
That explains all the powders and scented unguents, at least.
The idea of dating an actual honest-to-god manic pixie dream girl is kind of cracking me up now, though.
"Dear Believer Forum,
You'll never penthouse what happened to me..."
601: How long have you hated youth, and love, and truth, and beauty?
Yes, and at least half of the MPDG stories end with, " . . . and her quirks were actually symptoms of a much more serious mental illness that you were blind to and all the Fiery Furnaces shows in the world won't make her skip that suicide attempt that parts her from you forever."*
*Never by death. Parental interference and/or institutionalization.
It's interesting having an actual relationship with a MPDG -- the manic pixie qualities are always there, but then you see how they fit into a three-dimensional personality and it changes your view of the whole thing. I wonder if that movie has been made.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been suggested to be that movie.
You dated an actual woman.
OK, come on, that's kind of freebasing schoolmarm, to quote someone on something or another. Sure, it's a construct used to critique a particular movie cliche, but it does describe a type sometimes encountered in the real world, just as "the silent type" would (and YES I KNOW THAT ALL PEOPLE ARE INDIVIDUALS). I recognize exactly what Toggles is talking about.
605: really? You encounter women with no inner lives and personalities that can only be defined as a series of quirks who are extremely attractive and incomprehensibly drawn to fawn over tiresome mopes who show no particular interest in return?
Wait... and you live in LA... are you Zach Braff!?!?
You encounter women with no inner lives and personalities that can only be defined as a series of quirks who are extremely attractive and incomprehensibly drawn to fawn over tiresome mopes who show no particular interest in return?
I wouldn't put the type exactly that way, as it misses both the mainicness and pixieness, and would add "apparent" between "no" and "inner," and strike "and personalities," but, broadly speaking, yes.
I don't quite appreciate the hostility toward MPDGs. It isn't like the worlds real and fictional suffer acute shortages of the discouraging, disdainful, disapproving, etc.
freebasing schoolmarm
So, in this case, this is pretty much synonymous with uptight feminist, right?
At least when Natilo talked about the MPDGs in 541 it was about the dreary reality of being someone who can be fit all too easily into that type.
Man, I dunno. I went to a lot of raves, and know a lot of women who were both extremely manic (kinda went with the territory) and known to wear actual sparkly pixie wings, and some of them might have even gone to significant lengths to hide their inner lives from casual acquantainces, but... nope. Still not buying it. It's a construct of introspective emo dullards and any resemblance to actual women is either purely coincidental or depressingly reductionist.
It isn't like the worlds real and fictional suffer acute shortages of the discouraging, disdainful, disapproving, etc.
What better way to remedy all that than a girl (NB, girl, not woman) to cheer you up! With her zaniness!
I mean, do you also wise old black men with vast life experience but no evident goals who have unlimited time to hang around and help you overcome your problems?
Do you really never encounter the type? I can think of a few examples in my own life off the top of my head, particularly common in any youth culture or arts scene. Although there are few MPDGs who are practicing attorneys. I mean, there's always something reductive about identifying types, but if we're ever going to do it at all then this doesn't strike me as worse than any other categorization.
613: Don't be silly. Those don't exist.
I mean, do you also wise old black men with vast life experience but no evident goals who have unlimited time to hang around and help you overcome your problems?
OK, that one, no, but of course I'm scared of black people.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been suggested to be that movie.
This, along with There's Something about Mary, had been my referents for variants on the type, but judging from the characterizations given here -- and now from wikipedia, I see -- I didn't have quite the right idea.
612: Come to think of it, I've gotten a lot of good advice from wise old black men.
616: Tell me about it.
620: I love that episode of Venture Bros.
Given the way the conversation has gone, I feel that I should note that I spent about a hundred comments after Amanda Knox was brought up thinking we were talking about Amanda Palmer.
AND SHE GOT AWAY WITH IT, WHILE AN INNOCENT MAN ROTS IN JAIL
And then there she was, playing the ukelele at the Occupy Boston yesterday. Before which an press release about it was "leaked." Oh, Amanda.
My take on the Millennium Trilogy .
So the plan you all have to fix the economy is to cancel all debts. From which I conclude that you haven't the slightest idea about what to do.
We're working in the best way to pee, then fixing the economy. Then we'll learn how to shit or cure malaria. It depends in how much fiber we eat.
I think of the MPDG as our generation's Tragic Mulatto, so probably she's related to the MN. (How is Eureka doing?)
ArghInk considered MPDG as a female Trickster; decided she's Trickster truncated to serve men, mostly. Also, several readers indicated they'd resent a female Trickster with adult agency.
I think of the MPDG as our generation's Tragic Mulatto, so probably she's related to the MN. (How is Eureka doing?)
ArghInk considered MPDG as a female Trickster; decided she's Trickster truncated to serve men, mostly. Also, several readers indicated they'd resent a female Trickster with adult agency.
516
(Actually, I'm not really familiar with the male-shoe-noticers as creepy sex pervert thing. Is it a thing?)
It suggests a foot fetish or worse .
Now, James. It's not a continuum. Foot fetishists can go on to great things in this country.
So the plan you all have to fix the economy is to cancel all debts. From which I conclude that you haven't the slightest idea about what to do.
Come on, James - this is silly. Cyrus covered it at 481. The underlying theory is that there is a lot of unused real productive capacity in the economy, because of a lack of aggregate demand. People prefer the safety of cash and paying down their debts to the goods and services they could be buying. The solution is to institute policies that encourage spending. This by no means requires going to the extreme of cancelling debts.
You'd normally use monetary policy - lowering interest rates that people can get for buying government debt - to accomplish this, but in the current environment conventional monetary policy is ineffective so you use fiscal policy. If there were no spare productive capacity available in the economy this would be inflationary, as more spending chases a finite amount of goods and services, but in an environment where there is spare productive capacity actual output rises in response to the increased spending, leaving the price-level unaffected.
You can disagree with this theory, but there's nothing unconventional about the idea of countercyclical economic policy, and Krugman, Delong and Yglesias have been blogging it pretty consistently and clearly for some years now.
JBS: people already do, frequently, regularly, cancel or amend debt contracts that have become impossible to honour. It is called "bankruptcy", and US federal bankruptcy law (Chapter 11) is widely considered outside the US to be so easygoing that it constitutes a state subsidy to US companies, like those airlines of yours that are constantly going bust and then popping up again. However, for some reason, this is only available to individuals for debts other than mortgages - the biggest ones individuals take out, and the ones that are at the root of the whole problem.
If you don't want enough fiscal expansion to grow out of it (for reference, you don't), and you don't want enough inflation to write down the debts (for reference, you don't), well, that just leaves cramdown.
bob: your argument is now that Amanda Knox ought to be guilty? presumably Silvio Berlusconi's prosecutor frantically wanking at the thought of teh interracial secks is now the true agent of progress? what a gem.
I share blume's feelings while wondering guiltily whether I am not, in fact, a manic pixie dream girl. I'll go ask husband x.
I read maybe 1/4 of valerie solanas' SCUM manifesto aloud for everyone, appropriately redacted for younger ears, and then we discussed the problem of whether the manic pixie dream girl was the hollow creation of a weaksauce screenwriter who has trouble with girls or, in fact, a recognizable type of person.
husband x maintains I am, in fact a manic pixie dream girl. he is concerned that the good people of unfogged will be mad at him, but has decided he can bear it. then I left the room before we got into an argument about whether valerie solanas was like weininger for chicks or dave sim for chicks, with me taking grave offense at the latter suggestion. since getting into an argument about feminism and dave sim is clearly the single stupidest idea in human history I came back up here to listen to the new pornographers while contemplating whether to cut my own hair tonight. (truly. I always cut it myself and my bangs are getting long.)
also my toenails are blue and now everyone's copying me so I have to change them. and I don't have any topcoat. I'm making my husband go buy me tampons, and glutinous rice with coconut sauce (separately obvs). I wonder if I could convince him to find me quick drying topcoat at the drugstore or if it would take him like three hours somehow because guys have been socialized to be so incapable of finding things at the store that you'll never send them again, after they come back three hours later, wet with rain, having bought the wrong thing. I have to go to the objine because the time between my periods has shortened to 2 1/2 weeks. thus it is also not my fault I'm out of tampons.
I've never understood the "pussy whipped" problem with guys buying tampons. doesn't it mean you live with/continuously hang out with some chick you're having sex with? how is that bad?
I read maybe 1/4 of valerie solanas' SCUM manifesto aloud for everyone
To what end?
So the plan you all have to fix the economy is to cancel all debts.
You claim an interest in economic matters but on this you really can't even get to Step 1, which is responding to an argument without sputtering nonsense. You're much less defensive about the racism stuff.
I was saying, if someone links to that it's a pretty good sign she's already pissed off, and husband x was all "what manifesto," and then I had to explain shit. plus it's awesome.
The occasional uses of the word 'groovy' kind of make it for me.
then I had to explain shit
Ah. I had envisioned "Gather 'round, kids! It's story time!"
no, no, it was like that. "gather round, kids, it's time to read the SCUM manifesto."
grooviness. yeah. I was tying to explain the significance to husband x of the first ever real, "no, FUCK ALL Y'ALL" version of feminism.
we can continue the discussion above, the thread will get creaky soon.
634
JBS: people already do, frequently, regularly, cancel or amend debt contracts that have become impossible to honour. It is called "bankruptcy", and US federal bankruptcy law (Chapter 11) is widely considered outside the US to be so easygoing that it constitutes a state subsidy to US companies, like those airlines of yours that are constantly going bust and then popping up again. However, for some reason, this is only available to individuals for debts other than mortgages - the biggest ones individuals take out, and the ones that are at the root of the whole problem.
Mortgage debt (unlike student loan debt) can be discharged in bankruptcy. You don't get to keep the house of course.
636
I've never understood the "pussy whipped" problem with guys buying tampons. doesn't it mean you live with/continuously hang out with some chick you're having sex with? how is that bad?
The implication is you have become so addicted to the sex that you have become her slave.
591: I'd assumed it obvious that "MPDG" was serving as shorthand for "person who at first gloss and perhaps on somewhat closer examination bears more than a passing resemblance to the characters in movies who are referred to as manic pixie dream girls" but "pwafgaposcebmtaprttcimwartampdg" is a tad clumsy.
Mmm. The objection in 591 seemed a little offbase to me for exactly that reason.
I'm aware that nobody is actually claiming somebody in their lives is a fictional character. But just like nobody is willing to describe an actual person as a magical negro, they should think hard about why they're willing to describe women as "manic pixie dream girls", a trope defined to describe characters who have a whole collection of quirks in place of a personality and who are inevitably written to be attracted to boring, mopey men for totally unexplained reasons.
633
Come on, James - this is silly. Cyrus covered it at 481. The underlying theory is that there is a lot of unused real productive capacity in the economy, because of a lack of aggregate demand. People prefer the safety of cash and paying down their debts to the goods and services they could be buying. The solution is to institute policies that encourage spending. This by no means requires going to the extreme of cancelling debts.
I mostly agree with this except in as much as it implies the lack of demand is just a response to a flight to safety during the crisis. While this certainly made things worse I think there has been an imbalance for some time. Propensity to save generally increases with income so as higher income people increased their share of total income more money was saved. This was obscured by the fact that a lot of the additional savings was lent to the lower income portion of the population and consumed keeping net savings rates low. However this was not sustainable poor people (like Greece) could not continue piling on additional debt indefinitely.
Note this surplus savings (surplus in that it exceeds the worthwhile investment opportunities available) has encouraged asset price bubbles as well as bad loans.
You'd normally use monetary policy - lowering interest rates that people can get for buying government debt - to accomplish this, but in the current environment conventional monetary policy is ineffective so you use fiscal policy. If there were no spare productive capacity available in the economy this would be inflationary, as more spending chases a finite amount of goods and services, but in an environment where there is spare productive capacity actual output rises in response to the increased spending, leaving the price-level unaffected.
I am less convinced about this part, it assume a closed system without imports. A lot of the increased spending will be on imports which won't help US output. And while the US has spare capacity a lot of it is for the wrong things (houses) or in areas where output can be increased without adding a lot of labor. And again it assumes there is some satisfactory equilibrium that the economy can be returned to (once it it is "jump started"). This requires that the large deficit spending be temporary but I am unconvinced any recovery would be robust enough to reduce the deficit to a sustainable level.
I'm aware that nobody is actually claiming somebody in their lives is a fictional character. But just like nobody is willing to describe an actual person as a magical negro, they should think hard about why they're willing to describe women as "manic pixie dream girls", a trope defined to describe characters who have a whole collection of quirks in place of a personality and who are inevitably written to be attracted to boring, mopey men for totally unexplained reasons.
I am super on board with Tweety here, very much including the "magical negro" comparison. (Snark and I then had an extended conversation over breakfast about the one or two people who are probably out there--it's a big world--who actually self-identify as magical negros. "I just find it really satisfying to help white people realize their stunted dreams!")
characters who have a whole collection of quirks in place of a personality
This reminds me of the slogan I submitted ages ago for a Threadless T-shirt: "Wearing this shirt is easier than having a personality.". I would have worn that shirt (and non-ironically, too).
It's like you didn't even read 591! You didn't date a MPDG (that is, a construct from films). You dated an actual woman.
I hadn't read 591, but regardless, I am actually EVEN MORE AWARE THAN YOU ARE that I dated an actual woman.
well, despite being a tough, shrewd, and rather pragmatic person in her way, she had her girlish qualities. Just like I have my boyish ones. I emailed her a link to the MPDG definition after our first date and she was delighted...toward the end of that date our conversation had wandered toward feeling like we were in a movie. It became a bit of a private joke after that.
I get the validity of critiques of movie stereotypes in the movie context, but surely life would be boring if we couldn't flit in and out of our various identities. There's a difference between that and being locked in them.
650: It's good to see that there's less disagreement on the substantive issues than I had imagined, but then it becomes hard to understand the intent of what I took to be your earlier assertions that non-rightwingers have no serious plan for the economy. One can of course disagree with elements of the plan, but you seem to be agreeing that it's a serious one.
As for your substantive problems with the New Keynesian analysis, I don't think it assumes that the economy is a closed system but only that despite imports increased spending has a significantly positive effect on employment via an increase in domestic output of goods and services. Whether that assumption is correct is obviously an empirical matter, but I get the impression that you're thinking mainly of production of goods, and not provision of services (which are labour intensive and far harder to import), under the rubric of "output" and that this is skewing your sense of the probabilities.
656
As for your substantive problems with the New Keynesian analysis, I don't think it assumes that the economy is a closed system but only that despite imports increased spending has a significantly positive effect on employment via an increase in domestic output of goods and services. Whether that assumption is correct is obviously an empirical matter, but I get the impression that you're thinking mainly of production of goods, and not provision of services (which are labour intensive and far harder to import), under the rubric of "output" and that this is skewing your sense of the probabilities.
It's not so much that I doubt that the government can temporarily increase employment through deficit spending it's that I doubt this is actually fixing the economy in the sense that the improvement will persist after the deficits are drawn down. At least not without other changes to deal with the structural problems. Running large deficits which just help temporarily makes the long term problem harder to solve as the increased debt to GNP ratio reduces flexibility.
This is like losing your high paying job. You can maintain your spending level by borrowing in the belief you will soon find another similar job. Which is fine if you do but a disaster if you don't. I am not sure the "good" (high employment) equilibrium that temporary deficits are supposed to push us back into actually exists. Policies that assume it does require a leap of faith that I am reluctant to make.
I'm curious to see James' 650 and 657 addressed. It's a viewpoint I've tried to express before, extremely unsuccessfully.
I'm no economist, but the standard response to 657 is that there's no reason to treat the current unemployment situation as the new normal, for which a boost in aggregate demand would provide only temporary symptomatic relief, because there's no indication that current unemployment is structurally driven.
659
I'm no economist, but the standard response to 657 is that there's no reason to treat the current unemployment situation as the new normal, for which a boost in aggregate demand would provide only temporary symptomatic relief, because there's no indication that current unemployment is structurally driven.
You are conflating 2 issues. One is how far you can increase employment by increasing demand before mismatches between the remaining idle capacity and incremental demand trigger shortages and inflation. You can argue about what the corresponding unemployment rate is but I expect Krugman is right that it is lower than the current rate (if not perhaps as low as it was before the crisis).
But the other issue is whether the demand for goods under full employment conditions is sufficient to buy all the goods the economy can produce without the added additional stimulus from substantial government deficits. If not as soon as the deficit stimulus is withdrawn demand will fail to match production and the economy will start spiraling down again. As I stated above (650) I don't think the current imbalance is just a consequence of a crisis induced loss of confidence inducing a temporary increase in the desire to save. Instead it appears to me that changes in (among other things) the distribution of income means the upper income portion of the population wants to save (even under "normal" conditions) more money than can be productively invested. This imbalance has been present for some time and has been getting worse. It was disguised for a time by diverting part of the increased savings to loans to finance consumption but this could not continue indefinitely and made the eventual crisis worse. Deficit spending is just another way of using these savings to finance consumption and one which is equally unsustainable in the long run. It is not dealing with the underlying problem and is just making the eventual crisis worse.
I should note that I have been ignoring the issue of peak oil in these comments. I think it is an extremely serious problem for the economy in the long run and one which we will have even more trouble dealing than with our present problems. Which is why I am kind of pessimistic about the future.
It's a moralistic argument with a thin veneer of evidence. There was a housing bubble, so maybe people need to move out of residential real estate and related industries. But unemployment hit all kinds of industries that are unrelated to residential real estate. (My wife and my brother both lost their jobs, and they're both in the computer industry. Shearer lost his job, and he's an applied mathematician.) This is how we know it's a problem with aggregate demand. If it was just the aftermath of the housing bubble, then industries that were starved for capital because of the bubble would now be booming.
It also doesn't make as an anti-stimulus argument. We're not talking about building more houses in the desert. We're talking about building things we're going to have to build anyway. If the future debt is big, then we can save money then by not building roads that we already built now. If you're a country, and you need to save for the future, the only way you can do it is make investments now that will save you money in the future. Instead, we're having people sit on their asses doing nothing. It would be awesome if the "sit on your ass" method of saving for the future worked, but I suspect that it doesn't.
JBS, closing some the gap by increasing taxes on the upper brackets is obviously a good idea. (IIRC, you'd have rather the whole 2001 tax cut sunset.) You point out, pretty well I think, the folly of trying to increase demand by putting money in the pockets of rich folks.
Of three short run choices: doing nothing, putting money in the hands of rich folks, and putting money in the hands of working people and the poor, it seems like we might have comity.
661 -- And if you're going to have to borrow money to fix infrastructure eventually, why not do so when interest rates are as low as they can get.
661 to 658.
If the problem is that the rich have too much money, and save too much -- which is a very classical early Keynesian position to take -- then stimulus is only a partial fix. But at least it's a partial fix.
Thinking about 660 some more, there's a simple solution (other than the obvious solution of redistribution) -- a deliberate policy of inflation. The rich want to save their money risk-free. This is a valuable service that the government currently provides basically for free. If it's so valuable, then the government should charge for it by making the risk-free interest rate negative. The only way the government can do that is by inflation, so that while the nominal interest rate is positive, the real interest rate is negative.
662
... IIRC, you'd have rather the whole 2001 tax cut sunset.)
Yes and IIRC you thought this would an economic as well as a political disaster.
Political disaster, economic detriment.
633
And if you're going to have to borrow money to fix infrastructure eventually, why not do so when interest rates are as low as they can get.
I don't see any necessity to borrow money to maintain infrastructure like roads. It should be possible to fund this with current revenue.
In any case most of the current deficit is going to finance current consumption not invest in the future. And in my view at least a lot of the current "investment" is completely wrongheaded.
Building a solar cell production facility that was predictably uncompetitive the day it was finished is pure digging holes and filling them in again territory. Even roof top solar cell installations in general make no economic sense . They just cater to the high priority liberals give to signaling they care about a problem (as opposed to actually doing something about it).
High speed trains are another total waste of money. I could go on and on but will spare you.
There are probably some long term investments that would make sense (like improving the electrical grid) but I don't how much money they amount to. I think there is a lack of attractive long term investment opportunities in the public as well as in the private sector.
668 was a reply to 663 not 633.
664
... which is a very classical early Keynesian position to take ...
Not bad company. What would the later Keynes have thought?
665
Thinking about 660 some more, there's a simple solution (other than the obvious solution of redistribution) -- a deliberate policy of inflation. The rich want to save their money risk-free. This is a valuable service that the government currently provides basically for free. If it's so valuable, then the government should charge for it by making the risk-free interest rate negative. The only way the government can do that is by inflation, so that while the nominal interest rate is positive, the real interest rate is negative.
I believe this is the sort of thing that could go badly for all sorts of unforseen reasons.
The problem is of course political as well as economic. You need solutions that you can sell politically. People who are doing ok now (which is the majority particularly in the decision making classes) and going to be reluctant to back proposals that seem to have a substantial risk of making things worse.
reluctant to back proposals that seem to have a substantial risk of making things worse for them
FTFY.
672
FTFY.
Sure people are selfish particularly when they are worried about their own situation. Incidentally when Yglesias (and others) go on about how the pain has not been evenly distributed this seems to me to contradict the idea that there aren't any structural issues.
By the way redistribution proposals that primarily move money from say the top 1% to the next 19% might have a better chance being enacted than trying to move money from say the top 20% to the bottom 80%.
What's the huge risk in the fed saying "In keeping with our dual mandate, we will aim for an inflation target similar to inflation during the 90s until unemployment comes down to a reasonable level."
Deliberate inflation sounds scary, but it can be something really mild.
Or better yet, replace during the 90s with, "Reagan era." Makes it both easier to sell and higher!
633
... and Krugman, Delong and Yglesias have been blogging it pretty consistently and clearly for some years now.
As for Krugman, Delong and Yglesias, Yglesias is the only one I read consistently. He has his virtues but I think he is a bit lacking in mature judgement and doesn't always think things through carefully. An example is his backing of a progressive consumption tax which has an obvious drawback . And his policy proposals seem influenced by his position as a recent condo purchaser (I suspect he is underwater).
Delong has written some stuff during and after the crisis that struck me as overly optimistic and in denial about the severity of the problems. He didn't seem to realize the extent to which the "good" economic performance before the crisis had been illusory and thus not a condition that could be restored. For example .
As for Krugman I don't recall finding his economic analysis all that objectionable but as I have said before I find his polemical style off-putting.
I don't see any necessity to borrow money to maintain infrastructure like roads. It should be possible to fund this with current revenue.
And if it isn't? E.g., periodic major maintenance? And why? Infrastructure facilities like roads, bridges, etc., are typically essential to the proper functioning, short- and long-term, of a governed space; borrowing to maintain them is not the same as borrowing to fund current pension obligations.
676: You discount MY's opinion b/c you suspect he's underwater on his mortgage? WTF? FWIW, he bought in CityVista before it even opened, so I suspect he's doing just fine.
As for Krugman, Delong and Yglesias . . .
There's an important point to keep in mind when considering the various proposed courses of action: they don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than the likely alternative (which, at the moment, appears to be doing nothing).
I have no doubt, whatsoever, that if you put Krugman, Delong, and Yglesias together in charge of US economic policy that they would make mistakes -- even big glaring mistakes. But I'd still put money on them doing better than the current policy direction of spending cuts and political gridlock.
674
What's the huge risk in the fed saying "In keeping with our dual mandate, we will aim for an inflation target similar to inflation during the 90s until unemployment comes down to a reasonable level."
There are a couple of risks. One is that this wouldn't be enough to do any good. Cutting the real interest rate by a couple of points doesn't magically create good investment opportunites. Why expand if you already have surplus capacity? And individuals also may not react to a modest inflation increase by increasing consumption.
The other risk is you will encounter some unexpected psychological turning point. Suppose for example such a policy led to a loss of confidence and collapse in the value of the dollar. If this meant $200 a barrel oil that certainly wouldn't do the economy any good.
677
And if it isn't? E.g., periodic major maintenance? And why? Infrastructure facilities like roads, bridges, etc., are typically essential to the proper functioning, short- and long-term, of a governed space; borrowing to maintain them is not the same as borrowing to fund current pension obligations.
This stuff doesn't all need major maintenance at the same time. So you aren't talking about a large one time expense for which borrowing might make sense, you talking about a reasonably constant and predictable ongoing expense. And the gasoline tax could easily be doubled if needed. So I don't see any convincing justification for not funding routine road maintenance out of current revenues.
It's not so much that I doubt that the government can temporarily increase employment through deficit spending it's that I doubt this is actually fixing the economy in the sense that the improvement will persist after the deficits are drawn down. At least not without other changes to deal with the structural problems.
It sure sounds here like you're saying more than that the rich prefer to save rather than spend enough to utilise the productive capacity of the economy.* Talk of "structural problems" usually involves the idea is that demand would be there if we were producing the right things in the right quantities, but that our productive capacity is being currently a capacity for producing the wrong things (due to high living and the rottenness in the system) and can't easily be redirected. So unemployment is high because many workers are unsuited to the modern economy, which is tough cheese for them. It's this analysis that Krugman was disputing.
*I ignored that claim in my response because I have no disagreement with it.
Talk of "structural problems" usually involves the idea is that demand would be there if we were producing the right things in the right quantities, but that our productive capacity is being currently a capacity for producing the wrong things (due to high living and the rottenness in the system) and can't easily be redirected.
Had a visit from my city councilman who's running for reelection -- taking me up on my offer to host a sign. He spent all day yesterday with the Occupy people, now on the courthouse lawn. The city council is not able to end capitalism, but has worked with the public works department to shut off the sprinklers on the lawn -- they would ordinarily come on at night -- and I think so long as the Occupiers take care of their trash, have no alcohol, drugs, or violence, enforcement of the city ordinance against camping is not going to be enforced.
Take that, capitalism!
OT: Watching Rex Ryan suffer is gratifying.
It was helpful union guys who thought to have the sprinklers turned off, and called the right official. He wants the Occupiers to avoid driving tent stakes through his lines.
My other city councilman is running for Congress, and spent the weekend out East hunting antelope. And did pretty well, apparently.
678
676: You discount MY's opinion b/c you suspect he's underwater on his mortgage? WTF? FWIW, he bought in CityVista before it even opened, so I suspect he's doing just fine.
I don't know anything about DC real estate but he posts like somebody trying to convince himself that he didn't make a big mistake.
According to zillow 440 L St NW UNIT 405 in City Vista sold for $595,899 on 11/20/2007 and for $553,000 on 6/29/2011. And the "Sec. 8 welcome" in the ad is not what I would consider a good sign for long term value. Some less expensive units are up a little (1-2%) since 2007 but not enough to cover sales expenses if you have to pay a real estate commission.
This stuff doesn't all need major maintenance at the same time. So you aren't talking about a large one time expense for which borrowing might make sense, you talking about a reasonably constant and predictable ongoing expense.
A lot of it actually does. Following which it should be put on the kind of schedule that results in constant and predictable ongoing expenses (the kind we haven't had it on previously, which is why our infrastructure is in its current parlous state).
644: The problem with Valerie Solanas is that her message was obscured by all the various reasons people have for wanting to stab Andy Warhol.
682
It sure sounds here like you're saying more than that the rich prefer to save rather than spend enough to utilise the productive capacity of the economy.* Talk of "structural problems" usually involves the idea is that demand would be there if we were producing the right things in the right quantities, but that our productive capacity is being currently a capacity for producing the wrong things (due to high living and the rottenness in the system) and can't easily be redirected. So unemployment is high because many workers are unsuited to the modern economy, which is tough cheese for them. It's this analysis that Krugman was disputing.
I was not intending "structural problems" to just refer to a mismatch between what people want to buy and what the economy is currently set up to produce. I was intending to also refer to a general insufficiency of demand (because of a overall desire to save in excess of what the economy can easily handle) even at full employment.
And there is no point just blaming this on the rich, the savings are also coming from pension funds and everyone with an IRA or 401k. People are constantly inundated with propaganda about the virtues of saving and how important it is to save for retirement or your children's college education. The richer you are the easier it is for you to act on this advice so the propensity to save increases with income but the excess savings is not just coming from the very rich. And public policy is also affected, there are numerous programs and tax breaks premised on the idea that the economy is short of investment capital and that people need to save more. This general confusion makes it hard to think about and adopt sensible policies.
689
A lot of it actually does. Following which it should be put on the kind of schedule that results in constant and predictable ongoing expenses (the kind we haven't had it on previously, which is why our infrastructure is in its current parlous state).
I don't agree that the current condition is all that parlous in general. Certainly not enough to justify a big spike in spending rather than just boosting regular spending. There is a lot of propaganda on this subject from people with a vested interest in more spending and I think this has led to an exaggerated view of how bad things actually are.
from people with a vested interest in more spending
aka the citizenry.
693
aka the citizenry.
No, the construction companies that would do the work. I drive a fair amount and while there are certainly things that could be improved the roads seem in ok shape in general. There seems to be a lot of repaving going on (perhaps this is stimulus spending) which is nice but doing this a few years before it is really required (the Taconic parkway near the Croton reservior was in bad shape to the extent that I didn't like driving on it but otherwise the repaving I have seen wasn't really needed yet) isn't actually a long term investment in the future.
a general insufficiency of demand (because of a overall desire to save in excess of what the economy can easily handle) even at full employment.
If it were sufficient to eliminate unemployment, that'd be good enough for me.
... while there are certainly things that could be improved the roads seem in ok shape in general. There seems to be a lot of repaving going on (perhaps this is stimulus spending) which is nice but doing this a few years before it is really required ... isn't actually a long term investment in the future.
My impression, in contrast, is that American infrastructure is pretty crappy. Certainly compared to many other developed nations.
695
If it were sufficient to eliminate unemployment, that'd be good enough for me
It would only be sufficient as long it was being propped up by large government deficits. As soon as the deficits were drawn down the lack of demand would reappear and the economy would start spiraling down again. The stimulus deficit spending plan as commonly presented is supposed to be temporary counteracting a temporary lack of demand caused by an increased desire to save caused by a loss of confidence due to the crisis. As the economy recovers and confidence and consumer spending return the deficits are supposed to go away. But this assumes there is an equilibrium point where demand and production match with full employment without the necessity for continued stimulus. But I don't think this equilibrium state actually exists (absent additional actions to deal with the underlying problem). This means large government deficits would have to continue indefinitely to maintain full employment. But this is unsustainable, at some point (perhaps abruptly) bond investors would become concerned about the debt to GNP ratio and the ability of the government to honor its debts and the government would be unable to continue borrowing cheaply. This would trigger another crisis and we would be worse off then we are now. It is like trying to cut unemployment by increasing the inflation rate by 1% point a year, this might work for a while but eventually leads to disaster.
695
My impression, in contrast, is that American infrastructure is pretty crappy. Certainly compared to many other developed nations.
The article you cite is based on a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers which is hardly a disinterested party. And the I35 bridge collapse cited in this (and other similar articles) was primarily due to a problem in the original design not poor maintenance.
It would only be sufficient as long it was being propped up by large government deficits. As soon as the deficits were drawn down the lack of demand would reappear and the economy would start spiraling down again.
Some smart people worried about this after World War II. Why were they wrong?
670: It's actually Keynes' late position, though I don't know if he still held it after WW2. (It's why he called for "euthanasia of the rentier class" in the General Theory. Keynes counts as an early Keynesian at this point. Later Keynesians have more faith in the natural equilibriating forces of the economy. Keynes had the example of the UK, which was in bad economic shape for the whole inter-war period.
696: If bond holders panic, and don't want to hold US debt anymore, where are they going to put their money? At that point, they would have no choice and actually have to find some productive investments.
There's also a long way to go before we reach that point. Japan is over 200% debt/GDP ratio, and can still borrow cheaply.
Apparently I can only have one thought every ten minutes.
If you're worried about peak oil, then there's a great deal of productive investment for the government -- invest to lower our dependence on oil. Even if you don't like supertrains, there is plenty of R&D we could fund, as well as investments in improving the energy efficiency of existing buildings.
696: I already understood that that was your view, though I don't see any evidence that the outcome you forsee is likely. I was just noting that the notion of 'insufficiency of demand ... at full employment' sounds oxymoronic. I understand that you probably meant "demand sufficient for full employment, but dependent on stimulus".
697: So we should just discount the views of an expert body whenever it makes a finding of fact that might lead to more work for its members? Seems an overly restrictive standard to me.
698
Some smart people worried about this after World War II. Why were they wrong?
It is difficult for me to answer this because I am not all that familiar with these people, their reasoning or the economic conditions at the time.
It is obvious of course that current conditions are substantially different. I am not claiming that the insufficiency of demand that I am worried about will always occur just that given our current distribution of income, tax policy and propensity to save it seems to me that is the situation that we are currently in.
If I understand you correctly, you agree that increased government spending would increase employment and stimulate economic growth -- that is, it would be better than what we're doing now. You're just unsure that it would fix everything.
So, if there's a plan out there that's better than current policy, why does it matter that it's not guaranteed to turn the US into an earthly paradise? What are you actually arguing?
It is difficult for me to answer this because I am not all that familiar with these people, their reasoning or the economic conditions at the time.
Their reasoning was very similar to yours, and the economic conditions of the time were similar to current conditions in the relevant sense.
"This time it's different" is always an argument that needs to be made with care, but not only are you unable to articulate why it's different, you don't even seem to even recognize the need to do so.
700
If bond holders panic, and don't want to hold US debt anymore, where are they going to put their money? At that point, they would have no choice and actually have to find some productive investments.
There are all sorts of things that could go wrong. They could move out of the dollar triggering (among other things) a big jump in oil prices. We could have some more asset price bubbles or some more dubious loans to finance consumer spending. As for finding productive investments plenty of people are looking hard for good things to invest in. It seems unlikely there are large numbers of good opportunities just being overlooked. Their other alternative (which would also deal with the supply demand mismatch) is to decrease their savings and increase consumption. More half billion dollar yachts and the like. Of course this is more an option for individuals than pension funds or insurance companies although I suppose corporations like Microsoft could distribute as dividends some of the cash they are hoarding.
704
If I understand you correctly, you agree that increased government spending would increase employment and stimulate economic growth -- that is, it would be better than what we're doing now. You're just unsure that it would fix everything.
So, if there's a plan out there that's better than current policy, why does it matter that it's not guaranteed to turn the US into an earthly paradise? What are you actually arguing?
Because I don't agree it is better than current policy, it is making the short term situation look better at the expense of making the long term situation worse.
The housing bubble did the same thing, it made the economy look better for a few years but it was bad policy long term. Or you can look at Iceland or Ireland or Greece all which have gotten into big trouble pursuing policies that looked good short term.
The Bush tax cuts probably helped the economy short term does that mean they were a good idea?
So you've got some argument that frontloading necessary infrastructure spending, while it might help the economy now, is going to be damaging to something down the road? I'm not seeing it.
Or you're arguing that there is no necessary infrastructure spending not being done now. At which point I don't know why people are wasting time arguing with you.
The Bush tax cuts probably helped the economy short term does that mean they were a good idea?
Actually there is no evidence that the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts had any significant effect on the economy, short-term or long-term. People saved the 2001 cuts rather than spending them. The decade 2001-2010 was pretty much a lost decade for the US economy, much worse in terms of performance than any other postwar decade. The tax cuts also, of course, increased the deficit massively (this was back in the days when eight years of a Democratic presidency had brought the country solid economic growth and a budget surplus, so there was room for a bit of vandalism).
705
... but not only are you unable to articulate why it's different ...
Of course I can articulate differences. For example according to wikipedia the top federal tax bracket marginal rate in 1946 was 91% as opposed to 35% today (and 25% in 1928-1930).
The tax cuts also, of course, increased the deficit massively (this was back in the days when eight years of a Democratic presidency had brought the country solid economic growth and a budget surplus, so there was room for a bit of vandalism).
Otherwise known as the point in the business cycle where deficit spending is not a good idea.
Otherwise known as the point in the business cycle where deficit spending is not a good idea.
That would be "under a Democratic president". Under a Republican it's just peachy-keen-terrific.
Politically, of course that's true. I was mostly pointing out that you expect deficit spending to help the economy when it's contracting. When the economy is doing okay, there's not the same kind of need or the same expected effects.
708
So you've got some argument that frontloading necessary infrastructure spending, while it might help the economy now, is going to be damaging to something down the road? I'm not seeing it.
Or you're arguing that there is no necessary infrastructure spending not being done now. At which point I don't know why people are wasting time arguing with you.
A lot of this was dealt with earlier (in 668 and other comments) but to repeat myself.
Most of the current stimulus spending is not going infrastructure necessary or otherwise, it is going to finance current consumption. The tax cut portion, the unemployment insurance extensions, most of the grants to the states is not being used on infrastructure. So it is disengenuous to pretend otherwise. This isn't even the theory behind stimulus spending which is to compensate for a fear induced drop in consumer spending to keep (or get) production and employment levels up long enough for consumers to regain confidence and begin spending at normal levels again. At which point the stimulus (and accompanying deficits) in theory will no longer be needed and can be drawn down without impairing the economy. But I doubt this "good" equilibrium exists (under current conditions).
As for infrastructure needs (which are not being met in the normal way) I doubt there are in fact all that many. There is a well financed self interested lobby arguing otherwise but I don't see any reason to accept their claims at face value. Certainly if there were lots of vital unfulfilled infrastructure needs around you would think the adminstration would have directed some of the stimulus spending to them instead of squandering it on nonsense like Solyndra or high speed trains.
Man. I'd like to argue, but I can't follow what you're saying at all. There are too many pronouns where I can't figure out the referent ("This isn't even the theory". What isn't the theory?), and too much shifting back and forth between "The left has no plan", "I don't think the plans put forth by left of center economists would work", and "The actual stimulus program put into effect by the Obama administration had identifiable flaws."
I'll jump back into this one if I can get to the point where I can follow the claims you're making well enough to disagree.
Of course I can articulate differences. For example according to wikipedia the top federal tax bracket marginal rate in 1946 was 91% as opposed to 35% today (and 25% in 1928-1930).
And the weather was somewhat cooler, too. What I mean is, you can't seem to articulate the relevant differences.
What is the point of 703, if it is not to acknowledge your lack of knowledge of the relevant differences? I'm just saying that the study of economics is important to this discussion. It's not appropriate to just make stuff up without acknowledging relevant historical precedent.
716
And the weather was somewhat cooler, too. What I mean is, you can't seem to articulate the relevant differences.
You don't think top bracket tax rates are relevant to the distribution of income and hence the savings rate? As I have pointed out repeatedly above the propensity to save increases with income. So the greater the share of income going to well off people the greater (all other things being equal) the share of income people will attempt to save and the lesser the share of income people will spend on current consumption. So the risk that the demand for consumption goods (even at full employment) will fail to match production increases as the income distribution skews towards the rich. Hence the risk is greater today with the less equal distribution of income than it was in 1946.
717: I think it's reasonable to argue that the current skew in the distribution of wealth has a negative impact on economic growth. I'm not sure I believe it, but it's reasonable, and if I disagree, it's because my view is further to the right than yours.
Still, that doesn't speak to the issue at hand: what sorts of policies are economically stimulative in a liquidity trap. What's the correct plan for this particular situation?
Certainly we can agree that any sensible stimulus plan would necessarily involve putting money in the hands of people who would spend it, and that therefore Obama's stimulus plan was too conservative compared to the needs of the country. But one can't say the liberals lack a plan if you acknowledge that the liberals not only have a plan, but that it's the correct plan. It's not clear to me what you're arguing here.
I think Shearer may be arguing that income taxes should be much more strongly redistributive than they are, but doesn't want to say it comprehensibly because he's afraid people will agree with him.
I'm certainly not sure of this, but it seems like a real possibility.
713: yes, agreed.
Certainly if there were lots of vital unfulfilled infrastructure needs around you would think the adminstration would have directed some of the stimulus spending to them instead of squandering it on nonsense like Solyndra or high speed trains.
High speed trains aren't infrastructure?
715
Man. I'd like to argue, but I can't follow what you're saying at all. There are too many pronouns where I can't figure out the referent ("This isn't even the theory". What isn't the theory?), and too much shifting back and forth between "The left has no plan", "I don't think the plans put forth by left of center economists would work", and "The actual stimulus program put into effect by the Obama administration had identifiable flaws."
There are (at least) two arguments for government deficit spending. One is that you are using the money to make long term investments in things like bridges or school buildings and if you can't afford to pay for them up front then it still makes sense to borrow the money and repay the loan over the lifetime of the asset. This rational applies to individuals and businesses as well as governments of course.
Another argument for government deficit spending is to (attempt to) smooth the natural business cycle. It has been long known (this predates Keynes) that market economies can fall into a damaging downward spiral. If (perhaps due to some external shock) people at large become uncertain and fearful about future economic prospects they may respond by attempting to save more money. This is possible individually but not collectively. One person's spending is another person's income so as people reduce their spending incomes will also fall and collective savings will not increase. But the attempt will make economic conditions worse increasing the fear and uncertainly and the desire to save. So you have a viscous cycle which can turn a minor setback into a major problem. This dynamic is readily observable in numerous busts and panics throughout the history of market economies. The idea of stimulus spending is to dampen this cycle by using government spending to keep demand and employment up until confidence returns. Thus the metaphor of "jump starting" the economy. As with a car this only works for certain types of problems.
It is of course preferable that stimulus spending be on worthwhile projects but that is not the main idea. As Keynes famously said paying people to dig holes and fill them in again would fulfill the function.
By citing needed infrastructure spending you are conflating these arguments. One issue is how much the government should be taxing people to pay for various worthwhile (in the sense that the long term benefits to society will exceeed the upfront costs) infrastructure projects like roads. Liberals and conservatives generally disagree about the costs and benefits of such projects. This has little to do with the issue of whether the government should be running temporary deficits in an attempt to smooth the business cycle.
720
High speed trains aren't infrastructure?
They aren't worthwhile infrastructure. They are like bridges to nowhere.
Exactly. High speed reliable mass transit is just like a bridge to an unpopulated island.
718
I think it's reasonable to argue that the current skew in the distribution of wealth has a negative impact on economic growth. I'm not sure I believe it, but it's reasonable, and if I disagree, it's because my view is further to the right than yours.
First I am arguing about the distribution of income not wealth (they are related but are not the same thing). And what I am arguing is that an increasing skew in the income distribution towards the wealthy increases the overall amount people are trying to save. And that this will cause problems when the desired savings amount starts to exceed the amount of worthwhile investments available. Which I think has been a problem for some time. Prior to that point increasing savings will help growth by increasing investment.
Still, that doesn't speak to the issue at hand: what sorts of policies are economically stimulative in a liquidity trap. What's the correct plan for this particular situation?
I don't claim to have a solution. My original claim was that nobody had a clue which was hyperbole of course but I think the issues are complex and the correct course of action is unclear (even putting aside the political constraints).
As for what policies should be adopted perhaps direct measures to reduce savings particularly among the rich. Such as eliminating or limiting the favorable tax treatment for IRAs and 401K and similar retirement savings accounts. Or eliminating luxury consumption taxes. Or providing more generous tax treatment of expense accounts. And I have said before I favor letting the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone.
But I also think peak oil is an even bigger problem in the long run. I think a carbon tax would be a good idea but I think it would just mitigate the forthcoming pain to some extent, I don't see an easy solution.
718
It's not clear to me what you're arguing here.
I am arguing our current problems are not simply a normal low in the business cycle (which we arguably know how to alleviate) and should be considered in that light.
723
Exactly. High speed reliable mass transit is just like a bridge to an unpopulated island.
High speed trains are not really mass transit. They don't make economic sense under current conditions or in any plausible future.
719
I think Shearer may be arguing that income taxes should be much more strongly redistributive than they are, but doesn't want to say it comprehensibly because he's afraid people will agree with him.
I favor ending the Bush tax cuts. Liberals might wish to go further but of course there are many other ways of addressing the problem some of which might be more congenial to conservatives. I would also look first at the pretax distribution of income, it is easier to redistribute income before people have come to think of it as theirs.
I would also look first at the pretax distribution of income, it is easier to redistribute income before people have come to think of it as theirs.
I can't figure out what this is trying to say. Are you saying you think we should increase required withholding rates?
I am arguing our current problems are not simply a normal low in the business cycle (which we arguably know how to alleviate) and should be considered in that light.
Well we agree that this isn't a "normal low" in the business cycle, if there even is such a thing. But that's not the same thing as saying that we don't know what to do.
We're in a liquidity trap with real interest rates highly resistant to further intervention by the Federal Reserve. This is a somewhat unusual situation, but it's well-understood by economists and nowhere near unprecedented.
I think he's saying that rather than taxing high earners, we should find some other way of getting them to be paid less. Presumably salary caps or something? Sounds a bit left-wing for my taste but there you go. It may be that it's oppressive, counterproductive and impractical enough to tick his boxes in terms of desirable government policy despite its leftish features. It's like trying to get Republicans to back health care by promising that the government will provide only medicines refined from the blood of foreigners.
Liberals might wish to go further but of course there are many other ways of addressing the problem some of which might be more congenial to conservatives.
As you no doubt realize, this depends on what one means by the word "conservative." I think you err if you believe that American conservatives are concerned about the distribution of wealth, except to the extent that they think the current situation is inappropriately biased in favor of the 99%.
I haven't been to see OWS yet, but if I go, I'll make sure to have them reserve you a bongo drum.
But I also think peak oil is an even bigger problem in the long run
So the last thing you need is better railways, clearly. I recommend this plan to my competitors, as we say on nanog.
728 (730)
I can't figure out what this is trying to say. Are you saying you think we should increase required withholding rates?
No ajay has it right. The current pretax distribution of income is not some immutable feature of a market economy but depends in part on our current structure of laws and regulations.
An example was the former failure to require that stock option grants show up immediately as a compensation expense in corporate accounts. This encouraged option grants one of the main contributors to the explosion in CEO pay.
There are numerous policy choices like this that affect the distribution of income. It is generally agreed that the financial sector is more profitable than is justified by its contribution to the economy. If so this represents a market failure and it's worth considering whether there are simple changes that would reduce the opprtunities for excess profits (which in turn encourage excess compensation). An example is the recent changes to the regulations concerning the amount banks are allowed to charge merchants for accepting a credit or debit card. The banks are whining about interference with the free market but that ship sailed when the banks got it made illegal for merchants to pass these fees on to the consumer by adding a surcharge for card use.
732
So the last thing you need is better railways, clearly ...
I have nothing against low speed trains. High speed trains are a pointless attempt to compete with planes. Futile in a cheap energy future and unnecessary in a expensive energy future as there won't be mass long distance travel.
James, you've never been sexier to me.
