My speculation is that, over time, it became less possible to live in "genteel poverty" -- to live without much money and still be able to participate in the common social life.
Ellen Willis wrote a pretty good essay, "Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity", about this trend.
I can't find it online, though.
Genuine question is selling out less of a thing or are we just old enough that we don't see the kids who are attached to the idea of not selling out?
My ancient boyfriend is from the DC and Boston hardcore scenes and talks a lot about how bad selling out was to them but anyway they all either od'd or live in the Catskills and are consultants now.
It's often been commented upon that there are far fewer representations of working class people and life in popular culture than their used to be. I wonder, could Trump's performance as a populist billionaire have worked if actual working class people were more visible.
I suspect this depends very heavily on your definition of "working class".
If it just means "working for a living rather than living off wealth" then it's rubbish. Looking at the top 10 TV shows in the US, they're all about working-class people in that respect. Everyone in "Grey's Anatomy" works for a living.
If it means "people without a university education" then it may well be true - but, then again, there are also a lot fewer of them around in the real world than there used to be.
If it means "people who are from traditionally working class backgrounds"... well, maybe, but then you get into a bit of a circular reasoning problem. What does that mean, after all? Doctor Sheldon Cooper is from a traditionally working class background.
I feel like I simultaneously watch a lot of TV and have no idea what any popular TV shows are about. On broadcast, at least.
Doesn't non-Kardashian reality TV largely feature working class people?
Re "selling out" -- the thing I've noticed is the norm in rock has changed completely -- it used to be that if you wanted to be taken seriously as an "artist" you wouldn't sell your music to be used in commercials. Those that did got a lot of grief. But now it seems if an alternative artist is lucky enough to get a hit song, they jump on every opportunity to get their song in commercials as much as possible.
6 Now's my chance to complain once again how hearing "London Calling" in a fucking Jaguar commercial bent me out of shape, and how I was unable to feel much when Joe Strummer died some 6 months later. A fucking Jaguar commercial.
3.1: This show played on the class aspect of nurses v doctors. I didn't watch it, but mention it because I predicted within 3 minutes of stumbling on it that it would cancelled after 1 season. Which it was. I don't think there's any market for class consciousness. On the other hand of course Breaking Bad, but that wasn't working class, it was the immiserated middle class.
Is there some sort of objective study out there on the first point? Because I'm not sure I'd buy it. (I'm not much of a consumer of pop culture now, but was several decades ago, and this doesn't strike me).
The point on selling out, it just sounds like 80s nostalgia. Has anyone over 30 actually taken "selling out" seriously since, well, ever? Or 1982, anyway.
On Clinton, you remember Obama calling him the explainer in chief in 2012? A uniquely talented guy, who can get people to listen while he talks about details. (I suppose one might say he uses this superpower for ill when some young woman catches his eye.) IHMB a fundraiser he spoke at in 2000, for my friend running for governor of Montana: brilliant and extemporaneous. At least that's how it seemed live.
The Kardashians represent the future of labor: ironically rootless, alienatedly cosmopolitan, surviving on the fickle dialectic ebb and flow of particulate approval and disapproval.
9.1: And what counts as 'depiction'? Most of the characters on Friends were supposedly working class, but were somehow living in zillion-dollar loft in Manhattan. Likewise every cop show I can think of offhand.
You guys, the Netflix One day at a Time is quite good and very political in the ways I think you're talking about. Nia and I are enjoying it, though we haven't gotten to the episode where I'm going to have to explain threesomes.
Selling out is no longer a thing because the ideological world it came from no longer exists. Any vision of a society not dominated from top to bottom by "the market" has now been eradicated from the anglo-saxon imagination. The whole idea of selling out presumes there's an alternative.
14 The bleak neoliberal truth.
Take that, Halford.
15 Though I'll admit that bleak late capitalist truth works better.
I miss Tigre.
Late capitalist videos for you in the other thread, Barry.
16.1: "Late capitalist" -- is it optimism that make people refer to this stage as late capitalism?
How do we know that in a few hundred years this era will be known as middle capitalism or maybe even early capitalism?
Or is it pessimism - this is late capitalism because human civilization will be ending soon?
12: I was pretty puzzled when I heard about that. I remember watching the original show as a kid. What caused someone, in 2016, to say "You know what's crying out for a revival? A forgotten sitcom that ended in the early 80s!"
Since I have a Netflix subscription, maybe I should check it out.
Most of the characters on Friends were supposedly working class, but were somehow living in zillion-dollar loft in Manhattan
But this is just a suspension-of-disbelief thing. The TV medium demands large rooms as sets, because normal-sized rooms look very cramped on screen and don't work with the demands of filming in front of a live audience. It's like how no main character in a combat scene (modern or mediaeval) ever wears a helmet - so you can tell who is who. And no one in a scene set supposedly in extreme cold ever wears a hat. And space suits always have big transparent visors and frequently lights inside the helmet so the actor's face is well lit. All this is almost certainly on TV Tropes.
The characters in Friends, IIRC, were not supposed to be financially secure.
19: To understand our cultural product, you first have to realize no one has had an original idea since those two Jewish comedians thought it might to be funny to make a show about nothing.
The older Simon Frith book Art Into Pop 1987 has a lot on this, and may have a specific section on bohemia, but he makes the point that authenticity became ironic when it became pretty easy to make a good living at it. And then that got ironized. And then...
The book is as theoretical as its publishing date might indicate, and quotes Baudrillard
Baudrillard's McLuhanesque semiotic determinism is, in effect, a new account of the high/low culture collapse, another assertion that once artistic 'autonomy' is denied by market forces then artistic experience is impossible. In becoming part of mass communication, aesthetic goods are drained of their meaning. What in high art terms is the highest form of consumption - the attribution of transcendent values to an object, the work of art - becomes within mass culture a form of madness. The consumer's purchase or possession of 'useless' goods is now just a moment of regulated exchange, its rules of meaning or, rather, conditions of meaninglessness, determined by a semiotic system beyond our control....and this is the introduction
Brilliant book, his own favorite, veddy British, starts with the arts schools in the early 50s and ends, well, 1987. Stones, Who, Bryan Ferry, Sex Pistols
19: I mean, it's a cheesy sitcom with people in the audience laughing. But they don't use subtitles and the sexual identity stuff (for all the characters) has what seems to me to be unusual nuance. I'm liking it much more than when I watched Gilmore Girls with Nia and it's much more relevant to our life and parent-child dynamic too, which is the point of having special tv time.
7. Strummer agreed to the Jaguar ad because he felt the band ought to get something out of having existed, even if 20 years late. They didn't get all that rich. As far as I know it was the only one they ever did agree to, unlike Iggy, who sells insurance live.
You'll never hear the Doors on an ad while John Densmore is alive, but if Krieger survives him expect the deluge.
Is there some sort of objective study out there on the first point? Because I'm not sure I'd buy it.
I should add, the OP is genuinely speculative. I'm not completely confident in any of the suppositions. But I will try to have a longer response later, when I have time.
20: All true, but there are still choices to be made, eg. the apartments in Seinfeld looked far less spacious than on Friends; the apartments on Girls look tiny and shitty. And the choices made tend toward making things look far more comfortable for 'working class' characters than they're likely in fact to be.
Looking for the good, I kinda always hate to quote the last graphs of a book the author has spent 200 pages working towards, but Simon Frith:
There's nothing here to surprise mass culture critics - co-option has always been the name of the commodity game, and the socialist search for the incorruptible artist or artefact has always been doomed - what, in the end, was 'subversive' about Pink Floyd or punk, Sade or skiffle? For a while the impossibility of high art subversion - the end of the avant-garde - meant socialists looking to the streets for whatever pockets of cultural resistance to capitalism remain, but if post-modern culture describes anything it describes a situation in which the streets have no more 'autonomy' than the art galleries - the skinhead hairstyle is no more or less 'fashionable' than David Bowie's.What this suggests to us is not that we are all now colonized by advertisers' fantasies, but that the interplay of artifice and authenticity is central to everyone's lives in consumer capitalism. In looking at the shifting ways in which the love-hate relationship of the artist and society has been worked out in pop, we simply find the dialectic in graphic outline. The art pop story, in short, is not just a chronicle of defeats, but reveals how the terms of resistance and recuperation keep changing. Sixties art musicians' critique of pop commerce - the counter-culture - was thus recuperated through the rock star system, the musicians' creative authority sold to their fans as their own. Seventies art musicians' critique of the resulting rock commerce - pop situationism - was recuperated through the celebration of their commodity status itself. In both cases the Romantic urge to be different fuelled market mechanisms which ensured that everyone stayed the same, but in both cases the urge remained all powerful - for music-makers and consumers alike.
There is nothing, within you or without you, that is not neoliberal capitalism.
In fairness, equipment today can be far more compact than 20 years ago.
6 and 13 both seem true, even though they superficially contradict each other.
6-7: I remember watching a Bob Dylan Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler just after Pete Seeger died.
I don't begrudge the kids nowadays their willingness to be in commercials. That's how you make a living now. But the economics of the music industry are/were such that I think Dylan is a disgrace.
As for selling out, I blame social media. I mean, Facebook is a multi-billion-dollar platform that began as a college student's way to get in touch with his personal clique, or something like that. Same for most social networks modulo their size. The best way for a band (individual singer, comedian, whatever) keep it real and stay close to their roots, and the best way for fandom to engage with each other, is also the best way to go viral and make it big, and those platforms were created by people who didn't care about selling out in an artistic sense to begin with. Fans can't tell what is in which stage of the process until it's too late.
But what do I know. I've never been much of a music fan to begin with.
My semi-facetious answer: "selling out" stopped being a thing on 9/11/2001, the end of the 90s.
From an email I wrote a while ago, apropos of an interview with Barbara Manning (who among you knew this name without googling?): "I think it's just that there was at some point a scenario where you make $30K a year doing clerical work [in San Francisco] and gigging at night until you manage to make $30K a year making music, and it's still a bit shabby and taxing but that's success of a kind. Now you make $90K in a professional job, rent is $3500 a month, and you are never in a million years going to make $30K as a musician."
A couple (off the top of my head) points.
1) There just isn't a lot of 'working' on tv except shows that focus on a workplace. So you get police and doctors, and 'general office' (The Office, Parks and Rec), but none of those are typically 'working class'. Weirdly there are no teacher-based tv shows. The lack of working would explain the lack of 'working class' on tv - if your teachers are living in big, shoot-friendly, lofts (The New Girl), their actual job description doesn't make as much difference (although now that I think of it, that specific show did have some plot lines about the precariousness of working class life as a teacher/bartender).
2) The working on tv is found in the reality tv context, and much of it is focused on blue collar workers. Personally, I love this kind of reality tv but I seem to be uncommon in my political/social group (according to stats). Dirty Jobs was/is the only representation of what a lot of my field work was like. I watched Deadliest Catch from a larval fish sampling trip.
WRT to selling out, I feel like I should be of the generation that looks down on selling out but I keep thinking 'Selling out from what?'. Like how do people make money without selling out? The only people who I can see making snide comments about selling out are the folks with family money/support. Or boys in high school who only liked early Dylan and judged my music choices constantly.
This was what I took away from Patti Smith's memoir - the available space for pissing around was so much greater. It's no surprise that so much creativity goes into digital culture, because the Internet is like the last bastion of pissing around with a vague artistic purpose at the same time as it's an exquisitely crafted instrument of commerce and a chaotic nest of spies.
20,27:
Even though the trend is general, Friends was always a bit of a standout. One of the first thing people commented on, back when the show first aired, was that it must have been some sort of inside joke among the writers to give such palatial Manhattan apartments to people supposedly working in junior level positions at normal jobs.
33 cont'd: That is, the claim about 9/11 itself is completely facetious. The general moment, +/- a year, stands out in my head because it tanked the economy right before I graduated (belatedly) from college, and after that semi-recovery trends that actually do have relevance (media changes, urban hyper-gentrification) accelerated.
So you get police and doctors, and 'general office' (The Office, Parks and Rec), but none of those are typically 'working class'.
Come on, surely the police are typically working class. As is generic office work. Or do you have to be in the manufacturing sector to count as working class?
Actually, The Office was even set in the manufacturing sector, now I think about it: Wernham Hogg (and Dunder Mifflin) made stationery products.
This "typical working class" is just getting smaller and smaller. No wonder it doesn't show up on TV much.
38: Eh, I guess police are typically working class but most of the shows are of the CSI/Law and Order* bent which are not working class. Besides, the clothes on CSI/L&O are not working class, but are the equivalent to the apartments on Friends.
*I forgot the lawyer shows.
most of the shows are of the CSI/Law and Order* bent which are not working class
Why not? Again, what exactly are we talking about when we say "working class"?
The white working class aren't well represented in anime or shows about wizards who open portals to other worlds I can tell you.
I tell you who is under-represented, except on reality TV: rural people. But then that's always been the case , except, I suppose, back in the day of Bonanza etc.
The answer to 2) is the late nineties when it comes to music. 1998-ish. The grunge/indie/riot girl scenes cared about selling out, and dance music and hardcore hiphop at the same time. The shift wasn't that gradual.
The disappearance of the working class in TV etc was gradual, but I think there was a marked shift from the late 80s to the mid-90s.
40: Would you accept the proposition that police procedurals rarely if ever depict working class life? They don't often even show their characters off-hours.
Was there ever a primetime show set in a factory, even in the heyday of US manufacturing? I can't think of one at least big enough to lodge in popular memory.
(Today perhaps we have Superstore.)
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Completely off-topic, but this is a really excellent story of mortifying comments.
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I've never seen it but didn't Laverne & Shirley have some factory backdrop? (I have never seen much of anything; I have no idea why I'm in this conversation.)
You know who was working class? Columbo. Now there was a show.
45: Laverne and Shirley? Beer bottling, but I don't know how much took place on factory floor.
Taxi was pretty blue-collar.
On The Fosters, the moms are a police officer and a high school vice-principal. I do think there are probably other shows about kids where there are parents who teach at the school (Some of the DeGrassi stuff, certainly; Girl Meets World) but not shows about teachers that are about and for adults.
Roseanne? I never watched it, but clearly working class, whatever her actual job was.
40: Would you accept the proposition that police procedurals rarely if ever depict working class life?
I think of Cagney of Cagney and Lacey as a memorable and identifiable working class character (I haven't watched much of the show; it would be interesting to see how it holds up).
Was there ever a primetime show set in a factory, even in the heyday of US manufacturing?
"I Love Lucy" had that one episode in a chocolate factory?
I think the main reason is probably that it's difficult to film something set in a factory. Building an office set is cheap and easy and the characters are able to move around and talk and interact freely. Building a set for an assembly line would be far more expensive, and assembly line workers are much less able to move around. Not to mention that, for obvious reasons, it would have to be set in an unrealistically quiet factory.
Would you accept the proposition that police procedurals rarely if ever depict working class life?
No, not really. Again, what's your definition of working class? What shows would you say actually do depict working class life, in the workplace or out of it?
48 reminds me of how much I love this tweet
https://twitter.com/BBW_BFF/status/668855792343191557
52: Right. Roseanne was certainly being hailed as the Great Working Class Sitcom back when it was on.
Which is to say that I recall reading at least 2 published essays in the 90s arguing that it was.
I do think there are probably other shows about kids where there are parents who teach at the school (Some of the DeGrassi stuff, certainly; Girl Meets World) but not shows about teachers that are about and for adults.
Certainly true in the UK. There were several kids' shows set in schools in which teachers were among the lead characters - and the show covered their interactions with each other, not just with the kids - but I can't think of any aimed at adults. Except that one series of The Wire.
Is The Middle still on? Unlike Parks & Rec, that was really and truly an authentically Indiana show. Mom was working at a car dealership, dad in a quarry (shift leadership rather than manual labor I think) when I last saw it many years ago.
But are we looking for working-class shows aimed at discerning viewers or something? Prestige television and whatnot?
I'm now picturing a brutal spinoff where Lisa Simpson finally goes off to an Ivy League college with various other TV characters at Ivy League colleges, and gets treated like shit for being awkward, overly earnest, broke, and not remotely hott enough. Someone could write it to be caustic but lighthearted. NOT ME.
Cheers seemed to be peopled with actual working class people. Frasier for that matter.
Black-ish. Fresh Off The Boat. Brooklyn Nine Nine. (All of which are great (in decreasing order)).
I tell you who is under-represented, except on reality TV: rural people. But then that's always been the case , except, I suppose, back in the day of Bonanza etc.
Emmerdale? Last Of The Summer Wine? I don't watch it, but I imagine the Great British Bake Off has a decent rural contestant contingent. As may do X Factor and all that lot.
There were several kids' shows set in schools in which teachers were among the lead characters - and the show covered their interactions with each other, not just with the kids - but I can't think of any aimed at adults. Except that one series of The Wire.
Um, Teachers?
Does Oxford count as rural? If so, Inspector Morse, and, presumably, Lewis.
Does Oxford count as rural?
Ah, the younger generation! I remember when Oxford was a car manufacturing city.
There's some new Canadian show featuring rural Canadian rednecks (Letterkenny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rSBmOgpcDE) which isn't available on normal channels so I have to stream illegally and I'm trying to decide how much I want to watch it.
Also for working class, Canada has a lot - Little Mosque on the Prairie, Corner Gas, Trailer Park Boys, the Degrassies, (ugh) Republic of Doyle. Now I'm wondering if Canada can even make a non-working-class show?
Rosanne, The Simpsons, Married with Children, Malcolm in the Middle. Early Simpsons in particular was very heavy on those themes. Today, Justified portrays rural working class folks. I think there's maybe two characters on that show with a degree, one of whom is uppity and sly.
I can remember when Oxford was all about oxen crossing rivers.
All in the Family and The Honeymooners, obviously.
I was in Oxford a few years ago. Went to Faulkner's house. Not exactly Green Acres but rural enough.
Deadwood was about working class life. Among the squareheads and dirt-worshippers.
Eh? I didn't think Oxford could have been described as rural for at least the last thousand years...
Well, for some time in the 60's rural was The Thing, especially on CBS. And then...
re: 60
Teachers which had a good cast (Andrew Lincoln, etc) and was, in the first couple of series, pretty decent. (Pwned by GY)
re: 74
You'd be in proper countryside with farmers within walking distance of central Oxford. I lived about 2 miles out of central Oxford and along the more populated, rather than less populated axis, and there was common grazing land with cows and sheep at the end of my street, and a gigantic forest at the other end of it.
78: When I lived there, there were grazing cattle literally outside my window, but five minutes in the other direction there was real, proper city. It's a bit idiosyncratic, but in the places where it's urban, it's definitely urban.
I might posit that the great age of the Western, 1955-65, was the time of mythic form of the working class and settlerism. Why was the Western at its peak when the working class and unions also peaked?
Sit-coms are about relationships. Dramas are about narratives. A succcessful tv drama needs to be a frame for the guest narratives to flow through. Justified is a pretty good example, but had arcs so long that it may be more useful as contrast.
What was the attraction of radically episodic tv in the 1960s, and why do we prefer long-form now?
It depends on the hat the man in charge of the cattle wears.
78.2 Two things about that: first off, the "centre" of Oxford is massively skewed to the west of the city; also if you lived in Barton or the Leys you'd still be in walking distance of farmland, but you wouldn't feel rural at all. The simple proximity of green grass and cw shit doesn't of itself make the neighbouring concrete wastland any less urban.
re: 79
Yeah, industrial, too. Car factories, etc.
re: 82
Well, yes. Where I grew up in Scotland was the same. I grew up on a council estate and most people there worked in industrial or 'pink collar' jobs because there was an iron foundry, sawmill, and a large hospital close by. But ... horses and cows in fields that backed right up to the edge of the estate.
It's urban, but not urban in the way that someone living in central London, or Glasgow or Manchester is going to recognise. More like lots of towns in the industrial north where there's countryside nearby, agriculture happening, but agriculture isn't the main employer and hasn't been for centuries.
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For anyone looking for more in the vein of "Bless your heart."
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Well, the rural purge might be connected to the death of the Western
Deadwood is a partial example of what they were like.
The Western might be about moving, building, creating communities and the obstacles and impediments, like always outlaws.
The urban dramas, lawyers, cops, doctors might be about assimilating, preserving, protecting an existing community.
Believe it or not, the move to the urban a conservative move to match the ever more conservative times.
Rural Along with Justified, there's an OK police show Longmire. It's foreign, so maybe not relevant, but Bohdan Slama's Country Teacher is fantastic. I would very much like to see Heimat, but no reasonable way to get it.
selling out depends on how explicitly evil the opposing force is, relevant examples of people who maintained the idea of not selling out as adults mostly do not come from the US. Maybe we will learn in the next four years. James Hansen is an example of an American adult who presumably maintains a sense of not selling out. So is CCarp.
I can't believe no one's mentioned Green Acres yet.
85: Thanks. I'd never seen those before.
My admittedly vague memory of Morse is that it didn't focus too much on Cowley/Blackbird Leys.
Gomez Addams was independently wealthy while Herman Munster worked in a funeral home.
So The Addams Family = not working class, The Munsters = working class.
There was the one about the murdered programmer called "Morse Code."
re: 90
Amazing wormhole geography, too. In a door at one college, out the other side of it at another 2 miles away, etc.
The thing I remember about Morse is that always dated either a witness or a suspect. Which, I would think, would be frowned on much more than his drinking on the job. Anyway, if you are a woman who meets Morse and he doesn't try to sleep with you, you can rest assured that you won't be murdered or a murderer.
None of the Scooby-Doo cast seemed to have steady jobs. And yet they could afford to drive round the place in that van. Clearly not working class. Trustafarian?
Because I've been trying to watch more tv shows and because I have a lot of sewing to do, I got through Hinterland/Y Gwyll in the last week. Netflix has the version with barely any Welsh, which seems like a total waste. It's good for landscapes and broodiness and there's a lot of mostly subtextual urban/rural and class-related stuff.
Anyway, living where I live I wonder about how unachievable genteel poverty is or whether it just isn't achievable where the people dreaming about it want to live. What happened to everyone who moved to Detroit to do art? If I didn't have three kids, I could be at a cultural event every night or at a bar with very good boulevardiers for $2.50 each or more likely home sewing and messing around on the internet or even more likely not living here. But the friend my brother lives with is getting by doing artistic taxidermy and living frugally. I'm not sure to what extent my other brother who moved to LA to avoid winters and make music and wear cutoffs feels he's succeeding with that life and the bartending/waiting that finances it, but his friends there seem to be in similar boats. Though not literal boats, which I suspect would be too pricey.
95/96: Fred is trustafarian, maybe Daphne too. Shaggy is dealing or just bumming off the others. Velma is presumably a grad student at a very lax institution.
I don't know why I feel the need, but:
On Friends, it was really just the one apartment that was palatial, and there was an explicit explanation: it was the grandmother's rent-controlled place, handed down, which is an old NYC story. But, at the beginning, Ross lives in a crummy little apartment that's only a bit bigger than ones my actual friends (struggling actors!) moved into in NYC in the mid-'90s. The Chandler/Joey apartment is bigger, but A. not palatial*, and B. Chandler is always portrayed as having a lucrative office job and subsidizing Joey's acting ambitions.
IIRC Phoebe initially shares an (outer borough?) apartment with her grandma, and ends up in a nice-not-huge apartment in later seasons.
*I'm not saying it was a typical NYC apartment, just that it's not really comparable to the one across the hall, which is like 50% bigger, at least wrt public space
Also everybody says Rachel's the pretty one, but that's really not fair, because they're all so pretty. Also remember when it was raining and they played U2 and Ross and Rachel put their hands on opposite sides of the glass door and looked so sad?
It was sad, but given the time, playing U2 was inevitable.
Well, they couldn't live with or without each other, so it was appropriate. Either that or the streets didn't have names; can't remember. Or maybe they were bleeding on Sunday.
Surprised Ben & Jerry's haven't made a "Sundae, Bloody Sundae" yet.
The George Lopez show was set in a factory.
I just binge-watched The OA this weekend (holy cow it was so terrible). It was interesting -- most of the people didn't have a lot of money, but the show wasn't aligned with any kind of working-class or lower-middle-class identity. Instead, the kids' financial precarity served to underscore their independence, because they were dependent on their parents for money or support or supervision.
I'm pretty sure Rachel was deliberately trying to drive Ross to kill himself.
105 -- s/b "not dependent on their parents"
So it must have been a Sunday, then.
104: Probably because Bono can't figure out the right combination of tax shelter/charitable front for it.
Also everybody says Rachel's the pretty one, but that's really not fair, because they're all so pretty.
Agreed! And they ALWAYS do this. Like, why is Kelly Kapowski the pretty one when obviously Lisa and Jessie are just as beautiful?
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My health insurance is an ongoing drama so I decided to just put my meds on a credit card. The pharmacist insisted I download the goodrx app and use a coupon code. The price went from over $1000 to $65.45 Just figured that anyone else out there paying out of pocket for meds might like to know.
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Kelly Kapowski is married to my friend's cousin and so frequents hick towns in central Texas whenever she absolutely can't avoid family functions. Apparently it's a lot harder to be the woman that 30-something men imprinted on in rural Texas than in celebrity-ridden LA.
111: I never heard of that. It's not directly applicable to me, but that is very good to know.
16: WTF. I'm the one who wanted to resurrect the term late capitalism, not Halford.
Under neoliberalism, linguistic credit is distributed to those who control the IP laws.
Re: 86
A plausible explanation here is that we tend to set our dramas in dramatic (i.e. potentially dangerous or contested), which became increasingly urban as the city started to look scarier. This framing highlights the contrast of shows like justified, which I do think stand out.
Comedies, by contrast, are more readily set in mundane contexts, which might be why they show up disproportionately when she go looking for depictions of work.
I was reading the book "the outsiders" by sociologist Howard Becker and one thing that it pointed out is that selling out was a very real concern in the 50s for Jazz musicians. And, because the music was improvisatory all of the musicians could sell out. Drummers could sell out.
Moving to the rock era, can drummers still sell out? The auteurs of the band can. But drummers? Maybe that started the decline of "selling out" as a concern in music.
sell out, with me oh yea, sell out, with me tonight
record company's gonna give me lots of money
and everything's gonna be (all right).
I'm on my phone, but has nobody mentioned Roseanne? That was working class. Until the final season which was bizarre. (They won the lottery.)
For a long time Roseanne worked in a factory.
That was from 1996, the year "selling out lost its edge."
113: the epi-pen people have been offering coupons, because everyone has $300 co-pays. There are generics coming out -even one from Mylan, the actual maker of the brand name, but it's a giant mess for now.
Instead, the kids' financial precarity served to underscore their independence, because they were [not] dependent on their parents for money or support or supervision.
How's that? I thought they were mostly just schoolkids in their parents' houses, just sneaking around dirtbaggishly in the afternoon/evening, so as dependent as anyone.
I was captivated by The OA at first but it went downhill slowly in the middle and rapidly in the final episode.
Out of the four kids in The OA, two of them functionally have no parents -- French has to take care of himself and his two siblings because his mom is a trainwreck, and the stoner kid with the blunt-cut bangs has no parents at all. I noticed kind of the same thing with Stranger Things -- Winona Ryder is poor, but mostly just to underscore her helplessness in all things, and the fact that her older son has to function as a grown-up.
The OA was ridiculous, and I was getting really tired of the enormous plot-holes and how nonsensically everyone behaved at all times, but I actually kind of liked the final episode. It's one thing for the show to be dumb and lazily written (which it was), but I was impressed that it was willing to go full-on bonkers at the end.
Also, it really annoyed me that I was driven to watch the show by multiple people who had seen it and refused to explain to me what "The OA" meant, like it was some big mystery and they would spoil a fascinating discovery if they told me. Well, SPOILER ALERT, it turns out to be really dumb.
It's a terrible tv show, on Netflix. No need to watch.
Oh yeah? Well, I've never even seen Star Wars.
You know what put a lot of money into bohemian scenes in such a way as to undercut a preexisting cultural predilection to eschew working/hustling for lots of money? Tattoos and piercings. It was like, overnight around here, everybody went from ramen and falafel to being foodies who buy fresh seafood and eat in whatever the hip new restaurant for yuppies is. And it was all because of the folx making money hand-over-fist from poking people with needles. Or maybe that was heroin. Whichever.
45: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(TV_series)
Napster killed selling out?
Quite possibly. It did change the entire music distribution model, after all. Post-Napster, musical success was no longer centered on impressing the gatekeepers (i.e., selling out), and instead the focus moved to building a relationship with your fan base. Under the new context, the concept of selling out doesn't have much meaning anymore.
Nothing has any meaning any more except the anger of older white men.
Everyone wants to be rich now. I mean sure, they always did, but in the second half of the 20th century there was the also the contradictory impulse to romanticize poverty or working-class life. I think a lot of it has to do with hip hop becoming the predominant style-setter for kids, rather than punk or rock and roll -- as heebie and others have pointed out, musical culture in the 90s and 2000s started to really celebrate wealth and status, rather than how hood you were, or how punk rock or whatever.
But paradoxically it's also because everyone -- even older, mainstream adults -- have now embraced what was previously working-class or lower-class youth culture. This is kind of related to what Natilo says in 130 -- everyone I know has tattoos, and they're all middle-aged lawyers who eat at expensive sushi restaurants. If you can have all the external markings of cool youth culture, but *also* be rich and drive a nice car, why would you want to be a poor punk, or a poor ghetto kid?
I would prefer not to be rich, although also not poor. Rich just seems like it would be stressful. Plus I have a tattoo and bailed in fury by the third episode of The OA. I contain stereotypical multitudes.
I've spoken to very few people who are both happy and worth over a million dollars. Greed is a sickness. Too many people forget it at their peril.
Post-Napster, musical success was no longer centered on impressing the gatekeepers (i.e., selling out), and instead the focus moved to building a relationship with your fan base.
About as old as I am, ref Simon Frith which I guess I didn't explain adequately, or nobody read the quotes.
Umm, the record executives were not superexcited with Pink Floyd doing Ummagumma or Atom Heart Mother. Where's the single? And Pink Floyd was commercial compared to other prog of the early 70s. Pop => art
That is what I meant by "selling authenticity." The point wasn't that the artists were attracting an audience, it was that there was an audience that viewed themselves as not listening to pop. That starts in the late 50s with jazz clubs.
And then McLaren prepackages the Sex Pistols, with fashion pre-designed, to be deliberately uncommercial and not artistic or elitist, because that would sell, since the uncommercial was already selling. In other words, prog was uncool because it was making money.
Whether the audiences drove the artists or the artist created the audience is a little complicated, especially since the artists and audiences overlapped a lot, but that everybody was way self-reflective and competitive about the scenes is not.
The 80s got another level complicated, after Pink Floyd could be authentic artists (do what they want) with Dark Side and make a billion dollars, and the Pistols and Clash could be anti-art and make a million dollars, the next generation could only be ironically commercial as a way of showing authenticity. But the Who had done that already with "The Who Sell Out"
What a bummer, Ain't no way to be subversive left.
Surprised Ben & Jerry's haven't made a "Sundae, Bloody Sundae" yet.
They've chose their side when they made a Black & Tan.
|| teo, if you're still up, I'm wagging my finger at your Senator Murkowski. She's cancelled the Energy and Natural Resources Committee meeting tomorrow. "Until further notice." No explanation.
I care because my wife's 60th birthday is Friday, and we're planning the weekend. Plans are stymied, amid much side-eye, by a tentative commitment I have: there's a real chance that the convention to select a Democratic nominee for Congress will be on Sunday afternoon, which I should attend (I'm an alternate, and there are only 125 or so delegates). But the convention can't be scheduled until the governor announces a vacancy. The governor can't make the announcement until Rep. Zinke resigns. Rep. Zinke can't resign until he's confirmed. The Senate can't confirm Rep. Zinke until the committee takes a vote. They were going to vote of Perry and Zinke tomorrow.
This is probably about Perry anyway.
I've been thinking that Perry is the one guy most likely to be fired by Trump. He's not a zillionaire, and will meekly take it. |>
And who, really, would lament the loss of Perry at Energy? A single person, either in the US or Russia?
What am I, chopped liver?
145: Sorry! Should I call her or something?
As for Perry, I seriously doubt anyone whatsoever would care if he got fired from DOE, including himself. I'm actually at a DOE event today and tomorrow, and I'm sure none if the people attending would care.
And since I'm staying in a hotel room I've been watching TV, which I hardly ever do, and can therefore weigh in slightly on the OP. Lots of the programming is reality shows, almost all of which focus on clearly working-class people. Also, there's apparently a Newsmax channel, which advertises dietary supplements sold by a subsidiary of Newsmax.
In other news from my trip, I learned about a bar in Oklahoma that has 25-cent beers and (non-mechanical) bull-riding. Maybe Clytie was on to something after all.
Commenting on the OP, because time zones, and because I'm cynical sometimes, I think that "selling out" lost its edge when the author hit his early 30s.
(Now I'll go catch up with the thread and actual conversation.)
Also the case that popular music/art generally doesn't make anything like as much money for the artists as it did back in the day. Today's megastars aren't hurting, but they'll never be Beatles/Stones rich or even Michael Jackson rich.
Gah, but Corbyn is beyond useless, isn't he?
I really don't know what is to be done about Corbyn. He does have a lot of good positions among all the loopy ones, but the main problem is that he couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery. His fan club seem to be blind to this obvious fact. Also, the only currently "viable" alternative involves handing the party back to the hard line Neolibs, which isn't a thrilling prospect either.
152 is an interesting claim, and brings a couple of thoughts to mind:
a) Really? Because, for example, Sean Combs, Mariah Carey and Beyonce Knowles are very rich indeed. Maybe not as rich as Michael Jackson but they haven't been in the business as long. Reliable data seems very difficult to find though.
b) Is it really fair to use megastar wealth as a proxy for how much money popular music/art makes generally?
Re: music, if we're comparing today to the Good Old Days, it's probably worth distinguishing between the amount of money that albums made and the amount that ended up in the artist's pockets.
Not that I know much about the music industry, but there were certainly lots of stories about musicians being screwed by contracts that gave nearly everything they earned to the record companies back in the day.
152,156: Yeah, I have been thinking that overnight.
The "gatekeepers" have to an extent been gone since the late sixties, in the sense that the fronting of studio time/expense is less connected to label control. Nobody much told the Dead or NWA or Public Enemy what to put on their albums. They are given free reign, and if they fail don't get the loans again. It is of course a little more complicated than that, with distributors recommending producers, and as expenses mount and possible rewards rise, labels will work with artists more. Mariah Carey or Bowie had more restraints than an indie band.
152b: No, most bands barely make a living*. Just read over at LGM that Drive By Truckers and other bands were very grateful dependent on Obamacare. Touring is almost prohibitive for anybody but top bands or people living in their vans. Read an article on John Prine that said he comes close to that.
I really don't know current distribution for hits. Record stores? A lot of middling bands feel they aren't promoted by the label, but I just don't know how/who Beyonce determines how many albums to print and how and where they are sold. I have heard that Walmart for instance is the gatekeeper for a gold record.
*But this could be wrong, and making 50-100k apiece is not that hard for an established band. Most incorporate for tax breaks and group insurance.
I have books on this to be read.
158.3: One of my reasons for supporting social insurance is that it opens up the gates for people to take creative risks like forming a band and going on tour or starting a small business without needing to either be rich to start out with or have backing from someone rich. It enables a more creative and dynamic society overall because people can take the risk of complete failure knowing that it does not mean losing health insurance or going hungry and homeless or being utterly fucked in their old age. There are more basic reasons I support social insurance schemes (I don't hate poor people, and I think people should look out for each other), but I haven't seen the "unleash creativity" argument made, though no doubt it has been somewhere. You're also not really free if you have no meaningful options other than be a wage slave or starve - meaningful freedom implies autonomy and a range of acceptable choices. This is something glibertarians just don't get.
159: In the tech press you see the effect on entrepreneurship mentioned fairly regularly.
159: Ian Brown of the Stone Roses made exactly this argument in an interview with the Maker back in their pomp. Somewhat unfortunately he framed it in terms of taking advantage of the social insurance system illegally....
If the United States has social insurance, Chuck Tingle wouldn't have had to pander to the market and could have been the next J.K. Rowling. But I don't think that's reason enough to stop trying to get social insurance here.
153 et al: Labour are a shower the likes of which the world has never seen. It is a marvel of the age.
157: You're right that the vast majority of musicians didn't get their fair share of the sales, but what they did get was quite a bit of record label largesse--equipment, really significant advances, pretty good touring setups.
It wasn't A. fair compensation, or B. real wealth you could hold on to, but my point is that more or less any band that was more than a one hit wonder would get to lead the rock n roll lifestyle for a few years. By contrast, now you have bands with a decade of success* that are still touring in their own shitty van and couch-surfing.
So what I'm suggesting is that there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow anymore, so there's no shame in grabbing what you can when you can. Selling your song to a car company might be the only 5-figure check your band ever sees, even as they get airplay in cities across the country. I mean, I think the other factors people have mentioned matter as well, but as far as the specific incentives of the recording industry go, I think the near-impossibility of achieving even a five year stretch of living like a rock star changes the incentives massively.
I'd add that this changed pretty rapidly in the '90s. Grunge hit, the record companies went out and signed everybody "alternative" or even just kind of youthful, and then by '98 all those contracts had been voided and the labels were being swapped and/or shut down in rapid succession. You had bands that had had honest-to-god hits on big labels in '96 completely on their own by '98.
*I'm thinking of mid-tier bands like The National or The Hold Steady, probably The Decembrists. Their predecessors are, I dunno, Quicksilver Messenger Service or The Guess Who. Bands that were never headlining big shows, but were widely known, still remembered, and, I'm betting, at some point got a nice, fat check from a record company (against future sales).
The only person I even knew who made a living a music (unless you count music teachers) died last week. He was my age.
159: In the (AFAIK unaired) commercial we made for Hillary, it was specifically the entrepreneurship angle of CHIP that they came for: AB & I both have our own businesses, and it's really only possible because, through CHIP, we know that the kids will never, ever be uninsured (we actually spent the fall uninsured* ourselves, because AB's Pitt class was canceled for the first time in 15 years; Pitt has good benefits for adjuncts, it turns out).
I agree it's not a point made often or strongly enough, and I'm not sure why.
*no wait, that's wrong; we were on Obamacare, of course, which was pricey, but still 1/3 of what COBRA would have been. Anyway, I think we both avoided using it, just to keep things simple.
165: Do you mean the former record store owner?
It's a golden age, but without the gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPmoKPCbo3o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXAZKa43b0I (Yes, that's her dad, the congressional candidate, on pedal steel)
My classmate/neighbor was super-close with him & his family for 25 years; they basically sat vigil with them as he died.
162 Chuck Tingle is great just the way he is.
Though social insurance would be good and just.
Is the decline of the middleman relevant? As in, it used to be the artist made a deal with a record company or publisher who might exert creative pressure, but that could be resisted, and they took most of the scutwork of marketing, advertising, etc. off your hands. Now whether an artist has a contract with a middleman or tries to go it alone, cutbacks mean they are expected to proactively network and market and so forth - e.g., maintain their own social media presence, and the money-grubbing aspects of the work are a lot less submerged.
. . . the money-grubbing aspects of the work are a lot less submerged.
I wasn't just thinking of artists, when I was thinking about "selling-out", thought that's obviously the most visible example. But, it makes me think, I wonder if the dot com boom helped kill the idea of "selling-out" because it made it seem possible to make huge amounts of money without being visible "money-grubbing."
By contrast, now you have bands with a decade of success* that are still touring in their own shitty van and couch-surfing.
I don't think it's quite that bad for the bands I know. I don't think any of them are rich. While I don't know their exact incomes, I know people well enough to guess, and I'm pretty sure that -- after all costs are covered -- it's sort of low level professional salaries that are being made, along the same lines as an ordinary academic or teacher, or similar. With boom years and fallow years depending on the cycle of album/tour, etc.
I'm pretty sure that -- after all costs are covered -- it's sort of low level professional salaries that are being made, along the same lines as an ordinary academic or teacher, or similar. With boom years and fallow years depending on the cycle of album/tour, etc.
I remember reading something similar in Appetite For Self-Destruction (2005). IIRC, he used the example of the band TV On The Radio, and said that a hit album gave them in the neighborhood of a couple hundred thousand each. Which is good money, but in the category of "professional salary" if you look at the amount of time they had put in.
Tangentially related to the OP, I googled "Exiting the Vampire Castle" (I think I'd heard of it before, but had no idea what it was) and found out that the writer recently committed suicide.
Yes, I hadn't heard to "Exiting The Vampire Castle" until it came up in a recent thread in connection with his suicide (there was also a post about it).
[credit where credit is due].
re: 176
Yeah. I don't know if lump sums quite as large as that ever went into anyone's pockets, but spread over 3 years, with income coming in from tours and sales, yeah. I'd guess somewhere in that ballpark. About the same as a secondary school teacher would make.
I notice that in the context of Ireland I think of teacher/Garda and indeed nurse as lower middle class rather than working class. Working class in my head is Council worker/hairdresser/bus driver/cleaner/labourer/shop assistant.
I wonder if the dot com boom helped kill the idea of "selling-out" because it made it seem possible to make huge amounts of money without being visible "money-grubbing."
Well, thats when I sold out. I had a friend who sold out before me, and convinced me it was actually pretty sweet. Of course, that guy later quit to go sell beer at Wrigley Field. What's the reverse of selling out?
Un-selling out is like un-losing one's virginity; it can't be done.
I bet John Wayne Bobbit talked about losing his re-attached penis virginity.
I later ditched my over-paying tech job to move to Africa. That was a pretty good un-sellout.
Re: Bands. Nobody I know has ever gotten really successful, except for Heiruspecs and Dillinger 4 (all of whom I know at only a friendly acquaintance level). But I did used to drink with the guy who did the booking at the Triple Rock, and we'd talk about all the barely established new acts that would tour with big tour buses. His analysis was that they were basically spending most of what they might expect in tour compensation on the buses.
Also, that time I hired a very-successful-in-Europe pop musician to perform here, he came over and did a bunch of composition and performing for two weeks for about five grand. So if that was a reasonable amount to him, I would say mid-middle class salary -- like what my supervisor probably makes.
I grew up surrounded by hippies and so removed from the zeitgeist of mainstream America that it distorts my intuitions, but I think part of it was you used to be able to be a total bum but still have a basic level of comfort that isn't achievable anymore, at least in all large and some mid-sized cities.
I had a friend who formed a relatively successful band while at an Ivy League school, and his parents seriously pressured him to drop out of school to be a full-time musician. Their feeling was you can do college any time, but a chance to get a hit Indie band is pretty rare.
I haven't even read this thread yet. I will, I'm actually looking forward to it. Threads like this I think, "oh I should participate in this, this is something I actually know about, unlike most stuff on here where I'm just happily listening and learning things." But I'm home, it's late, and I just opened up a thank you card to find out that I've been stiffed on an honorarium, again. It's not a lot of money, but I'd already mentally spent it getting my brakes fixed. And I am going to feel like an idiot whether I try to chase it down ( from this large corporation with lots of money) or whether I let it go. I think the thing that pisses me off most about it is that the card is a very feminine card, with wording of that implies thank you for your charitable donation. No it very wasn't. It was discussed.
Again, without having read the thread, this is something I've noticed more and more in the 30 some years I've been working: the requestthat I'll do shit for free isn't a new thing, but the wealth of the places asking for the freebies seems to have increased. (I do have proper representation, this particular thing is more of a side gig.)
155: My previous hesitation to give up on Corbyn is no longer operative. Especially with the news today, it seems clear that if there were any actual leadership among any party willing to take against Brexit, it could either be actually or at least effectively stopped. Instead, thanks to Corbyn, it seems most likely that the Lib Dems will ride a symbolic anti-hard-Brexit stand back to relevance while Labour rides Corbyn to further irrelevance. It is painful to watch.
191 That sucks Penny. Even worse to give you a thank card is like piling the insult on top of the injury.
192 I don't get it. Labour should be able to ride a tide of popularity into power even by opposing Brexit . Why don't they do it out of sheer self-interest?
On the same note what's with all the Dems voting to approve Trump's horrendous cabinet picks? Oppose you useless fucks! Aren't you paying attention? He's crazy and unpopular. (I'll give a pass for approving Mattis, the one speck of sanity who may be able to rein in Trump's worst impulses.)
Is it a coincidence that Zinke's confirmation got postponed just as Badlands National Park took on leading the Resistance?
Probably, yeah. There's lots of crazy stuff going on lately.
Labour should be able to ride a tide of popularity into power even by opposing Brexit . Why don't they do it out of sheer self-interest?
Because Corbyn is rather keen on the idea of Brexit, and the PLP can't get rid of him, and they can't even be seen to oppose him too much because then Momentum will get them deselected. Some Labour MPs are still going to vote against it.
Anyway, what's the way forward here? The next election is not until 2020, by which time Brexit will have happened. The only way to have one sooner would be to call for a vote of no confidence, which Corbyn won't do, and which the opposition would lose anyway; the Conservatives desperately want the Brexit issue to just go away. Fighting an election on Brexit would be a nightmare for everyone. And it would be on Brexit: the vote of no confidence would be called as part of a deliberate and open move to put a Labour government in power that would ignore the referendum result and keep Britain in the EU. That would also endanger the seats of lots of Labour MPs who have Leaver constituencies.
200 So you're totally fucked?
And aren't we all.
201 are you going to try to go back to sleep or just say to hell with it and get up?
re 202.1
Yes. The even more annoying thing, is that many/most of the mainstream Leave campaigners campaigned on a platform that is quite different from what is going to result. If May and her crew of crooks and morons wanted to go for a soft Brexit (Norway-style) they could, and the Labour party would back them. But they are totally invested in satisfying the worst anti-immigrant UKIP take on Brexit.
To the point that I have tinfoil-hat type thoughts about it all.
I feel there ought to be a conspiracy to account for their behaviour, but I can't work out who's conspiring or why. Cui bono? Is Putin running May AND Davies AND Johnson (none of whom would have anything to do with each other if they didn't have to pretend to be a government)?
||
As if this saga couldn't get any weirder, Peter Thiel has become a NZ citizen in mysterious circumstances
>
MPs can switch parties, right? If there was ever a time to say fuck loyalty and take a chance on the next election this has to be it.
205 The bug-out location of choice for the .01%
re: 204
I suspect it's more that various people who expediently claimed to be Remain or soft-Brexiteers are actually pretty sympathetic to the hard-right/UKIP position on Europe and on lots of other issues. For a combination of career-driven and ideological reasons.
So, now that they have a chance to rewrite things in the ideological direction they want, without having to go through all the trouble of acquiring votes based on a hard-right Tory manifesto. They can ram through everything they want. Including removal of workers rights, a load of repressive law and order measures, fucking of the NHS, etc all under the cover of 'Brexit means Brexit'.
I don't know why you need a conspiracy to account for their behaviour. The Tories hate immigrants, with some small amount of moderation from the IoD wing that wants cheap labour. They hate regulation and they especially hate European regulation. They hate the Human Rights Act and the ECHR it enshrines into law, and thereby the jurisdiction of the ECJ. And they want to win back those UKIP votes. It's entirely predictable behaviour.
The only surprise (which isn't a surprise when you consider that fucking Boris Johnson is our foreign secretary), is how shambolic the process has been so far.
re; 209
Well, the conspiratorial element is the deliberate attempt to subvert any reasonable democratic process, and to continually refine vague or ambiguous commitments in the direction of the hard right option. It's an internal coup within the Tory party, effectively. Rather than a conspiracy in some P2 sense.
With no plausible beneficial trade deals on the horizon has May thought about implementing Juche?
We may be heading that way ourselves, mind you.
With no plausible beneficial trade deals on the horizon has May thought about implementing Juche?
Britain's form of Juche is becoming self-sufficient in tax avoidance schemes under the visionary leadership of Saint Maggie.
So it's not all innovative jams and marmalades?
It pretty much will be. Citibank are going to put their new operations anywhere but London; Morgan Stanley will be moving 1,000 jobs to Ireland or the mainland; the odds on Nissan fucking off out of Sunderland despite their assurances to the government are visibly shortening. The list just grows.
An added layer of complexity is my impressionistic take is that the rest of Europe now want the UK out ASAP with the worst deal possible. Total anecdata, but the Europeans I know say that not Brexiting is no longer an option, once the UK indicated they wanted out. I suppose there's not much the EU could do if Britain decided to stay in, but they'd have a much chillier relationship with continental Europe than before.
I was reading about Trump's visit to CEOs, and his statements about bilateral trade agreements, and I thought "This is as bad as Brexit." And then I wondered exactly how many Trump policies I would think are as bad as Brexit. Maybe 5? So Trump = 5 Brexits. It's the new atomic unit for when a country shoots itself in the face.
Christ, this is what it must have been like to be Norman Angell, right? We're all Norman Angell. Historians will write how stupid we were for not realizing the historical inevitability of our countries' pursuing policies that would be rejected by lead-poisoned meth-heads for being too impulsive.
I suppose there's not much the EU could do if Britain decided to stay in, but they'd have a much chillier relationship with continental Europe than before.
And it wasn't exactly cordial before.
216: That seems to be be the position, which is absurd. I understand trying to punish defectors, which is just evil and perhaps short-sighted, but if Brexit can be avoided, why not move heaven and earth to avoid it? Meanwhile, the British public walked into this thing apparently thinking they could dictate terms to hated Brussels, whereas it would seem that their only leverage consists of threatening to remain.
We're all Norman Angell. Historians will write how stupid we were for not realizing the historical inevitability of our countries' pursuing policies that would be rejected by lead-poisoned meth-heads for being too impulsive.
If we're lucky. If we are unlucky, we will all be Thomas Mann writing Doktor Faustus with help from Adorno.
Got a compulsion to revisit one of my favorites under relevant circumstances. Of course, Mann felt more directly responsible for the fate of his country than the later half of your diagnosis would imply.
Not easy to sum up Leverkuhn/Faust as metaphor or allegory (and self-rebuke), but something like the rejection of love in service of the intellect, art, ambition and self-expression, both as a nation and as individuals.
Love as duty and practice, not desire and narcissism. Even unto the pre-Nazis, even unto the pre-Trumpkins. Even when they hate you, Thou Shalt Love, as commanded.
Corbyn has just presented his condolences to the family of a dead policeman who's not dead.
5 days, and the horror is sinking in, with the global gag order and the immigration restrictions.
If we are real unlucky, it will be Canticle for Leibowitz
If we are real lucky, Trump will be gone in 90 days.
219 Is there no way to avoid it?
Is there no way to avoid it?
It would be extremely difficult at this stage. The only thing I can think of would be if some totally unforeseen circumstance arose which made the consequences of leaving so self-evidently appalling that even the David Davieses of this world changed their minds. Otherwise everybody is locked in.
but if Brexit can be avoided, why not move heaven and earth to avoid it?
Stealing the City's business is just too attractive. In today's climate of substituting economic for military competition, of competing for mobile capital instead of territory, Brexit was a declaration of war.
221. This whole process could have been designed to undermine the peace process in NI, and no major party seems to give a shit. That in itself ought to be enough to give them pause, even if all the financiers and industrialists were cheering them on.
I am no expert or even knowledgable, but I suspect that no-exit is not simply a matter of principle or rules.
The purpose of the rules in neoliberal globalization, the reason Greece and Cyprus were not allowed to withdraw and devalue, is that Germany and Scandanavia and Benelux are damn well not going to allow one country to steal another's jobs and factories.
They have seen what happens, and will not allow Hamburg to become Detroit, will not allow Turin to become Gary, with the Trumpism and fascism to follow.
the reason Greece and Cyprus were not allowed to withdraw and devalue,
Greece - as in, large majorities of the population - did not want to withdraw and devalue - not from the euro and certainly not from the EU. ND didn't want to withdraw. Syriza didn't want to withdraw. The explicitly pro-withdrawal Syriza splinter party got 2.8% of the votes and zero seats in the 2015 election. Leaving the euro and devaluing would have meant immense suffering for ordinary Greeks, and the ordinary Greeks, correctly, decided not to do that.
today's climate of substituting economic for military competition, of competing for mobile capital instead of territory
Wait, when did that happen?
re: 228
Scotland will go, I think, also.
Unless of course the May government just decides to flat out not allow and/or disregard a referendum vote, which is possible, I suppose.
Pretty amazing if they utterly tank the UK economy, break up the UK, and revive the Troubles, in one fell swoop. Because of a 2% swing in the vote.
230: You refute yourself. They didn't want to because the costs would be too high. The New Economy, neoliberalism, wants to make internal devaluation, austerity, the only sane way to compete.
231: What, are France and Germany still swapping Alsace-Lorraine?
229 is probably wrong, but I need better, more reasonable arguments. Not simply, no Exit cause.
Spain won't allow an independent Scotland to join the EU because Catalonia, so I'm not sure Scotland gains by going. Where to?
234 They don't join, they simply remain while England and Wales leaves.
re: 234
There have been somewhat encouraging noises, and I suspect it could be wangled without necessarily being blocked by Spain. Pre-Brexit, yes. Spain would never have it. Post, where essentially the UK leaves the EU and Scotland does not ... not quite so sure.
I suspect Sturgeon would be happy for some kind of deal for Scotland -- Norway-like -- while remaining within the UK but it'll never happen for obvious reasons. Khan would no doubt quite like a similar deal for London, as would the NI Assembly for NI.
re; 235
I think legally that can't happen. It'd have to be UK leaves, Scotland reapplies to join. But yeah, politically it could be sold as something like that.
Is that what they mean by "Homage to Catalonia"?
Pretty amazing if they utterly tank the UK economy, break up the UK, and revive the Troubles, in one fell swoop. Because of a 2% swing in the vote.
Which vote only happened because of Cameron's cowardice. He's quite likely to go down in history as the worst PM of all time.
234 They don't join, they simply remain while England and Wales leaves.
Not legally doable. Scotland only has EU membership through the UK.
235: I can't imagine the institutional details necessary for that. Who would have to accept that argument? A court? The EU is fucking confusing.
229: The Greeks definitely didn't want out. They hold their own elites in as much or more contempt as they do Brussels.
Scotland should invade Spain on general principles. (There may be negative unintended consequences to this plan that I haven't anticipated.)
I was semi-seriously considering writing a book called "Who Ruined Everything," about the incompetence in northern European Treasury departments, like Schauble. Now I barely remember why they seemed so incompetent. I just Googled Schauble now, and he reasonably called for soft Brexit. (A Swiss-style deal, he said.) Instead May is driving Britain into the ditch.
It's fucking posh boys/girls, basically. At least that's what my class prejudice tells me, and there's a level at which I'm basically right.
Amoral public school wankers fucking shit up. It's basically the whole UK getting Bullingdon Clubbed.
He's quite likely to go down in history as the worst PM of all time.
He's certainly leading on points at the moment but if May contrives everything ttaM listed in 232 she might pip him at the post. She didn't have to interpret the referendum outcome in the most pig headed way possible.
Does anyone understand how it got so bad? Was this secretly what May wanted all along? Has she just been roundly outmaneuvered? Has she just lost control of events?
242. Mostly. May actually went to a Grammar which was reorganised as a Comp while she was there. Still Oxford, though.
If devolution happened, can you guys start cross-border cattle raiding again. Please.
If I could answer 244 I'd write a book and become rich.
"You guy" was mostly, but not exclusively, to Scottish people.
They didn't want to because the costs would be too high. The New Economy, neoliberalism, wants to make internal devaluation, austerity, the only sane way to compete.
No, the costs would have been too high because if you devalue your currency (by, in the Greek case, an estimated 50%) it means that everything you import suddenly becomes twice as expensive. And Greece imports a lot of stuff that ordinary Greeks really need. That is not the fault of "neoliberalism"; that's just inherent in the definition of the word "devalue" and in the fact that Greeks like having stuff that isn't all made in Greece.
231: What, are France and Germany still swapping Alsace-Lorraine?
Wow, if only we could come up with a good recent example of a European nation using military force to grab territory off another European nation. Perhaps one of these nations might be known for drinking vodka and wearing furry hats, and the territory might be some sort of peninsula. Any thoughts?
Or perhaps we might find some other examples elsewhere. Are the Palestinians using economic means to compete for mobile capital, or are they still fairly interested in territory? How about the Kurds, ISIS, the Syrian and Iraqi governments?
She didn't have to interpret the referendum outcome in the most pig headed way possible.
Well, maybe. That depends whether she is thinking about the best outcome for the UK, or England, or the Conservative Party, or Theresa May.
Because a soft Brexit would be better for the UK than a hard one, but not necessarily for the party or for May - it leaves them open to the charge that the British people voted to TAKE BACK CONTROL and now here we are still having to comply with BRUSSELS RULES and even paying into the budget, and we have been BETRAYED. Big electoral problem. Certainly doesn't allow you to scoop up any Labour Leaver voters from the northern cities, and risks you losing your own Leaver voters to UKIP. And, for you personally, leaves you open to a leadership challenge.
Whereas if you go for the hardest option possible, and let your possible rivals take the lead on it, you can blame them for any problems, and your electoral position looks much better because Labour can't exactly run on a platform of "let's go back in" - and wouldn't anyway, because of Corbyn, vide supra.
Yeah, May's policy seems pretty clearly driven by a desperate need to be able to campaign in 2020 on a clean "we've taken back control" message. She (and the likes of Davies) had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the realisation that some form of transitional arrangement beyond 2019 would be necessary simply for the basic functioning of the economy/civil service not to collapse.
I can't imagine the institutional details necessary for that. Who would have to accept that argument? A court? The EU is fucking confusing.
From the EU's perspective, the ECJ would be the ultimate arbiter, but I don't think it's a particularly disputed point that newly independent nations don't inherit membership. The SNP have made noises about seeking (and being able to obtain) an expedited membership application so that there'd be no interregnum, but it's just wishful thinking at this point.
From a UK law perspective, the Supreme Court ruling seems to suggest it's not possible either.
205: I was thinking we should discuss that NYer article.
She shares that failing with That Woman, who famously and publicly described the miners' union as a more dangerous enemy than Argentina. Because, of course, Gen Galtieri never actually threatened her.
252: I was reading a piece at The American Conservative in which the writer was declaring how horrified he was by that NYer article.
It was kind of pathetic. "So, you're just now figuring out that the very rich overwhelmingly worship at the church of 'Fuck you, I got mine'?" I suspect he genuinely bought into the wealth worshiping BS that's such a prominent feature of conservatism, and is now being mugged by the reality that the rich aren't the Benevolent Wise Men he thought they were.
OT: I'm trying to develop ways to troll NextDoor. So when somebody asked for the best security system, I said you just need the sign and you can get it from somebody's yard. So, somebody called me an asshole for that. Should I report them for profanity?
BTW, thanks for 174 & 176. I guess I was misjudging the level of fame at which "comfortable, semi-stable career" becomes a thing.
this is something I've noticed more and more in the 30 some years I've been working: the requestthat I'll do shit for free isn't a new thing, but the wealth of the places asking for the freebies seems to have increased
This is absolutely something I've observed with my friends who are photogs and designers. It's very tempting to blame HuffPo--and I do think that was big, signal shift--but of course it's larger forces at work. I honestly think that part of it is that writing "well enough"* is something that, at this point, you really can get for free (or close to it), and so big orgs think they should be able to get other things free as well. But the gap between casual hobbyist in photography or web design and professional work is bigger. Or, more accurately, audiences are better able to spot the gap. Back in the day, practically every magazine had high quality, professional photography, whether the prose was brilliant, good, or merely competent. Now you have real newspapers publishing iPhone pics taken by reporters, and it's glaring.
*my breath is occasionally taken by dreck that goes up on real (but low tier) websites. But I think you have to get to pretty awful writing before most readers really notice, and more or less anyone with an English degree can clear the bar.
AIHMHB, a family friend is a German economist and advisor to the Merkel govt. He also did one of the initial evaluations of the Greek economy way back when. When I visited him in 2012, he said the German government was looking for a way to kick Greece out of the Eurozone without letting them devalue the drachma 2.0. Haven't talked to him recently to see if he feels the same way after further immiserating Greece, but I wouldn't be that surprised if the worst of the austerity was designed to actively force the Greeks out.
How about Scotland merges with Catalonia to create Scatalonia, the newest EU nation?
I was thinking about whether Brexit or Trump was worse the other day. On the one hand, Trump has the potential to end the world as we know it, short-term through nukes or long-term through catastrophic climate change (it might be too late on this one). Britain has only fucked themselves over, so globally Trump could be much worse. Also Trump seems to be doing his best to plunge us into dystopia much faster than I assumed possible. On the other hand, Trump is presumably temporary, at worst he has 8 years to irrevocably fuck us up, and hopefully much of the fucking can be undone by a better administration/congress. Brexit is a permanent one-way ticket out of the EU for the foreseeable future.
a. Why do you want to troll next door? b. The sign does most of the work, but it needs to look plausible, i.e. recently installed and from a company that does business in your area. So dumpster diving foe a sign probably not wise.
People put signs in the lawns right next to their houses. You can just grab them, unless they have a meta-security system.
It's fucking posh boys/girls, basically. At least that's what my class prejudice tells me, and there's a level at which I'm basically right.
Amoral public school wankers fucking shit up. It's basically the whole UK getting Bullingdon Clubbed.
This is why it's a bad idea to let elites inbreed themselves into idiocy.
Of course, we've had far less time for inbreeding and our elites still manage to be idiots, so who knows. (Though, in the US I think the problem is less that the bulk of our elites are actual idiots and more that they're greedy evil moral midgets willing to tolerate idiots so long as they can fuck over everyone else and get even richer.)
Britain has only fucked themselves over, so globally Trump could be much worse.
At present. But I worry that the next steps may be a) more countries leaving the EU and b) the undermining of NATO (Trump plays a part here too) which would be very dangerous indeed. And Trump alone can at most only make climate change marginally worse and more costly, by causing a four-year delay in US action - he can't make the difference between it happening and not happening. As you say, much of what he does can be partly remedied later.
They removed it. Let it be known that you can't call me an asshole on Nextdoor even when I am in fact being as asshole on Nextdoor.
261: posh they are, but they aren't inbred aristocrats. Or at least Cameron, Gove, Davis and May aren't, and Johnson is a positive melting pot.
How about Scotland merges with Catalonia to create Scatalonia, the newest EU nation?
With everything else in the world going to shit, why the fuck not?
I know a Catalan guy who was born in Glasgow. He could be President.
As a nation composed of two geographically distinct units bonded together, the logical name for the new country is surely not Scatalonia but Catamaronia.
The economists in the German government are probably the most incompetent group of economists in the world. They're just lucky that there are so many high-profile non-economists are much more incompetent.
268: It is their economists, then? I'm not informed enough to know to what extent German economic policy is driven by technocrats.
The economists in the German government are probably the most incompetent group of economists in the world
I didn't think Steinbrueck was that bad, economically speaking. Way better than Schaeuble, anyway. Unfortunately, he wasn't in the government when it mattered.
|| Attention conservation notice: off-topic half-formed questions from a graduate of the blog comment section school of economics.
Is it possible that the stability of inflation during the Great Moderation aided the growth in inequality? By removing a source of turbulence, allowing financial institutions and the wealthy to extend their time horizons far into the future, did it increase their already large advantage over the short-term, liquidity constrained rest of us?
Has there been much work done analyzing the flow of money and the accumulation of debts and credits with spectral graph theory? If the data is there for a large number of individuals and institutions it seems like a good analytical tool.
If the standard tools of the Fed work through a combination of reserve requirements and short-term fluctuations in bank's cash flow, did the wave of bank mergers and consequent growth of individual banks reduce those fluctuations, effectively shortening the Fed's lever?
Gentrification and general dissolution of communities as a result of economic forces bothers me. Could we provide some sort of insurance against rising rents? Funded by property tax, redistributed to people who've lived in their neighborhoods for a while. In exchange, automatic stabilizers against local economic downturns could be provided to rural communities or something. I mean, obviously we can't, but could we?
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Huh, Schauble is a lawyer, not an economist. Weidmann, who is the head of the Bundesbank and a moron, is an economist. I guess if we're going to throw it open to finance ministers I don't know if Schauble is worse than Osbourne.
I should clarify your average German economist is fine. It's just the ones that work for the CDU.
272.last: you could do that, but the problem you have there is that people's circumstances change. You're basically subsidising people to stay in the same house all their lives. That might not be great for a community because its members will grow up and want to move into a bigger house for the kids, and then a smaller one when they retire.
Overall, is keeping communities static really what you want to achieve? Brick Lane in London used to have a flourishing Huguenot community. Then that community was destroyed utterly by an influx of Jewish immigrants and all that was left was a few street names. Then a bit later the flourishing Jewish community was destroyed utterly by an influx of Bangladeshi immigrants and all that's left of them now is a few bagel shops. And now the Bangladeshis are complaining about eastern European immigrants coming in and destroying their community. I suppose we could subsidise the Bangladeshis to allow them to stay where they are and simply outbid the Poles for the housing. But you're basically saying "London right now is the way we like it, and if anyone tries to start any new immigrant communities, we'll pay you to stop them".
274.1: When they move they get a payout? I feel like a dedicated neoliberal could engineer a neutral system.
You could just introduce a Group Areas Act. Soweto maintained its essential character as a community for decades. No risk of gentrification and an influx of white hipsters there!
I think a much simpler way is just reduce inequality. If you have a very poor section of your population, they will live in the worst bit of town, and if you do something to make that bit of town nicer and more attractive then they will be gradually priced out, whether they rent or own their houses, as long as they continue to be very poor. So you can either try to make everywhere adequately nice (this has happened to an extent; however poor you are in Britain, the law will prevent you living somewhere too shitty, because it will be condemned as unfit for human habitation), or you can try to make everyone adequately rich.
272: Oh man, you want a book. I recommend the Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism because it is recent, 2016, an comprehensive, there is a section 1/50, on rents with a bibliography. Actually I think there might be couple on gentrification and rents.
Basic rules, pretty Marxian
1) Rich got richer and more powerful
2) Rich made policy to do 1), and bought economists to obfuscate and normalize the methods by which they achieved 1) It can be tough to explain how it works, ir is supposed to be
3) Populists and socialists and social democrats etc have had little to no influence on policy for decades
so 4) Whatever you see, whatever came out of gov't, central banks, or mainstream academic economics was neoliberal and designed to achieve 1)
5) plebs got some social issue advances,
Here's a shorter one for you from today, Naked Capitalism
Now if your initial reaction is "That headline just can't be true cause Obama is a Democrat, nice guy, and ally of the middle class" that just means they got you long long ago
Steinbrueck was an economist by training. Weidmann is not in the government, though admittedly he was during the Eurozone crisis. I'd agree he's pretty awful, although he's just the apotheosis of the Bundesbank's general approach.
272: Ex recto, I'm pretty skeptical of that hypothesis, at least as it relates to banks. I'd argue the opposite, that until the onset of the financial crisis, banks' time horizons had in fact radically shortened, due to their reliance on short term wholesale funding. It was extremely rare for banks (I'm mainly talking about Europe here, but it's broadly true for the US, with a caveat about Fannie/Freddie and CRE lending for CMBS) to lend or borrow unsecured beyond five years, and they'd do the former on a floating-rate basis so their time horizon was effectively three months. Similarly they were hugely incentivised by the pre-crisis (technically pre-pre-crisis regulatory framework to lend on a contingent basis which capped even their theoretical time horizon at a year).
On the other hand, you could argue that Europe's failure to develop a meaningful inflation-linked bond market, despite at least in certain countries the existence of very large investors with substantial inflation-linked liabilities, is an artefact of moderated inflation expectations.
But you're basically saying "London right now is the way we like it, and if anyone tries to start any new immigrant communities, we'll pay you to stop them".
Substitute England for London and that's Theresa May.
The point is that people have a moral equity in their home that is unrecognized. Shareholders are the only legitimate stakeholders, externalities abound. Surely one could design a system that would make that moral equity act more like the usual kind without introducing any behavioral incentives not already present in property ownership.
277: This would have redistributive effects, and also potential benefits even in an economy with reduced inequality.
278: Yeah, the usual trickle down justification for neoliberal policy.
279: There has to be a cost for sercuritization, right? A cost that increases with volatility in inflation?
279.2: There ya go Eggplant. Even if I could play, I wouldn't.
Rich got richer, banks did it. What you think Greenspan and Bernanke were for the working class?
If you want data, you can look at banking and inflation policy for contrast during the Great Compression, 1945-1975 maybe high point of working class power and satisfaction, when much greater inflation and volatility were tolerated. Stable low inflation and lack of boom/bust sufficient in themselves to generate inequality? Of course not. Or maybe not.
279: There has to be a cost for sercuritization, right? A cost that increases with volatility in inflation?
There are lots of costs. I'm not sure which exactly you're referring to. If you're just referring to interest rates, that's not particularly different to that which would be borne/imposed by banks or other institutions. The caveat to that is that in the US, there's much more fixed-rate securitisation issuance, which has to price in inflation expectations, and Fannie/Freddie bonds are all about stripping out everything but interest rate (ie inflation at a remove) risks. But a) it's pretty hard to argue that securitisation involved a lengthening of time horizons from pre-securitisation lending, though in the current environment it generally does mean longer term funding than unsecured funding, and b) Fannie/Freddie until the bailout was at least in theory supposed to pass on the benefits of inflation volatility hedging to ordinary people - Americans have basically a free option to refinance whenever interest rates fall, something that most borrowers in Europe don't have.
If you're referring to other costs, like fees, then inflation related changes are trivial in the grand scheme of things.
And if you're referring to externalities like agent/principal issues, I don't know you'd try to tie that to inflation.
256: The core parts of lots of jobs are things that lots of people do for fun and don't require much expertise. Writing, photography, solving tricky puzzles, making pretty stuff, walking through tourist attractions. (The exact amount of expertise required for certain puzzles varies, but anyways.) They're jobs nonetheless because you have to pay someone to do that 8 hours a day, with a professional demeanor, and to do all the bookkeepping and menial tasks that support the work. Or at least, that used to be the case. A lot of stuff has already been automated. A lot of other stuff can't be automated so far or couldn't be until recently but I assume it's just a matter of time.
In theory, this could lead to a Star Trek-like economy where people spend 5-10 hours per week working and that's enough to make a comfortable living. Technically not post-scarcity, just with labor standards that are as far ahead of the present day as the present day is ahead of 1817. Given what the status quo and human nature are, the current practice of massive debt, unpaid internships, crowdsourced media, volunteering for for-profit things, and the "sharing" economy is only likely to grow.
Huh. I've never thought of this before, nor read the idea in any of the voluminous lit on gentrification, but why not some form of equity as part of one's rent?
Set aside political reality, I think it might make sense and get at the goal. The exact mechanics are unimportant, but let's say it's something along the lines of, whatever the ratio of your rent to the value of the property when you start renting, some portion of that is defined as going towards an equity share*. The longer you stay, the more equity you get. And it's not defined in dollar terms, but percentage.
First, philosophical underpinning: vacant buildings decline in value, rapidly. Having a renter, unless they're actively malign, is a benefit to a property owner, above and beyond rental income (which, at bare minimum, covers taxes, maintenance, and, I guess, depreciation of physical plant, although if we're talking pie-in-the-sky, I tend to reject the last one as artificial--a well-built building has an indefinite lifespan. Beyond that are the more idealized ideas about equity--someone living in a neighborhood should share in its improvement in a material way.
So, where does this get us?
First, in an ordinary, non-gentrifying neighborhood, this a. gives the renter an incentive to not trash the place, and b. acts as a sort of savings for the renter. It's also a hedge against inflation--if your rent goes up, you can apply your equity towards keeping it flat, such that you pay in for a year, then pay it back down for a year, and come out even (if the landlord jacks things up to manipulate the system, he gets an empty building, having had to pay cash out to the original renters). But either way, when you move out, you cash out your share one way or the other: free rent for a month or two, or an actual cash-out. Not sure what happens if there's a decrease in property value. Anyway, what I want too get at is...
Under nascent gentrification, short term renters simply get to stay a bit longer, or see a tidy cash sum for leaving. But long-term renters will see their accumulated equity become a real share in the new wealth. It's enough to control their rent for years, or else to cash out and be able to rent in another, less-gentrified (but not crappy) neighborhood, or to put a down-payment on a house.
Now the tricky part is, what does a landlord do who doesn't want to sell? Someone's been earning (I dunno), 0.5% a year for 10 years in a property that's gone from $100k in value to $300k. How do you give them $10k when their total rent burden (because you never jacked your rents) was just $60k in all that time, and the $200k increase in your property value is primarily realized in increased taxes?
I'm not sure. But I feel as if there's something here.
*$100k duplex, $500/mo. rent (this is pre-gentrification, after all). 200:1 ratio. Then you look at ordinary appreciation in excess of inflation; call it 2.4%/year, or 0.2%/month. Split that evenly between owner and renters, and each renter is "buying" 0.05% of appreciation per month, or $50. Hmm.
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My god but is work turning into an even greater shitshow thn tge next say an usual.
Being told to go ahead and do x verbally then the next morning being chewed out about going ahead with x. Complete and utter bullshit. Sick of it.
There's another job in a field I qualify for stateside. Think I will put an application in pronto while I wait for this other opportunity in the region to open up.
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288.1 s/b than usual. Even my phone is fucking with me.
The universe fucks with us all.
272: People have used graph theory to examine how banks are interconnected, but I don't know if the specific form of the connections tells you that much beyond the knowledge that banks are all interconnected. Why spectral graph theory, in particular? I don't think I've seen that used.
287: I've been thinking about that idea for a while. I don't see anything obviously wrong with it, but it does seem hard to imagine it happening. The same idea seems natural for having a long-term job and conventional equity.
The worst thing about having a shitty day at work these days is you can have a really shitty day and get all wrapped up in the utter shittiness of it forgetting all else only to emerge later suddenly remembering that Trump is really president. Ta da! Your day just got infinitely shittier.
Sorry to hear about your bad day, Barry. Sympathies.
People have used graph theory to examine how banks are interconnected, but I don't know if the specific form of the connections tells you that much beyond the knowledge that banks are all interconnected
There's quite a bit you can tell - some network shapes are inherently much more stable than others against shocks, for example, so if you're a central bank you can a) tell how stable your country's banking system will be and b) tell which banks are the most important if you want to stop a shock spreading - it may not be the largest ones. And you can build different networks based on different properties; interbank lending, interbank holdings of credit default swaps, even inferred networks of reputational influence.
But I don't remember seeing spectral graph theory used.
I'm pretty skeptical of the ability to do much meaningful prediction given how poor quality/too high level most central bank data on financial institutions tends to be, though to be fair it has improved greatly since the crisis. It's often really basic stuff, too, like the way EFG Eurobank, at the time one of the largest lenders in Greece, was classified as Swiss in BIS data until 2010.
Does the shape matter? The banks are all connected to several other banks, and as a graph it is connected. I have to think if a critical mass go down, they all go down, no matter the specifics of the shape.
296: turns out that it does, yes. Most banking systems are bow-tie-shaped; you have a core of a few banks which are all highly connected to each other, and then a periphery of other banks that are only loosely connected to a few of the core banks. And it turns out that a shock at a core bank spreads much more quickly and catastrophically than a shock at a peripheral bank. Also, that you can make more money investing in the peripheral banks because they aren't as vulnerable to contagion.
I thought Eggplant literally meant the mathematical theory of graphs, and not just a illustrative picture like your bowtie. If he meant what you said, then I think this is reasonably well-documented in the economics of banking literature.
288: Hang in there. My job just got markedly better; my terrible coworker got fired last Friday while I was out of the office! Since he did almost nothing, there's little downside for me, and the upside is that my dealings with HR will be much more limited.
Good luck with other applications, Barry.
298: yes, it is as of the last few years. But what that means is that there's no such thing as a "critical mass" that goes down and causes a crisis - it matters very much which particular banks are in trouble and where they are located within the network.
299 Glad to hear that ydnew, that must be a load off.
I'm hanging. In there.
Labour are a shower the likes of which the world has never seen. It is a marvel of the age.
Continuing today with the statement about whipping the Brexit vote.
Making a farce of their planned amendments (which were already pretty farcical).
I've never thought of this before, nor read the idea in any of the voluminous lit on gentrification, but why not some form of equity as part of one's rent?
Its a novel idea, but I don't see how it doesn't lead to higher rents because, if a landlord is losing equity as he rents out a place they would need to be compensated for that somehow. They've still got a mortgage to pay, after all.
Also, I think the idea only really works in areas where there is rapid appreciation of real-estate. So it doesn't seem universally appropriate, but maybe it could work if targeted at specific neighborhoods.
Like maybe rent control could be retired and replaced with an equity-based system. I don't know if that make things better or worse.
298: I was thinking graph theory could better characterize things like the velocity of money or inflation. It's my impression that these are typically treated as if they are single, economy-wide scalars. Depending on how connected the economy is there may be multiple time constants discoverable by spectral decomposition.
305: That I have never seen. They do normally act as if velocity is a single scalar. Though I don't know if anybody has data fine-grained enough to do anything with the idea. Maybe credit card companies?
"Lack of data" was my third guess for why my google scholar searches came back empty, behind "my shitty research skills" and "the perfidy of economists".
Not that perfidy makes sense in this case, it's just my default assumption when the world doesn't give me the results it should.
Most of the time they model trade in the economy as happening all at once, so for your idea to work you would have to model individual transactions. There are some models that have that property -- Ross Starr's trading post model, and search models of money. Maybe these could be extended.
Further to the intermittent Liquidation of the Labour Party subthread, frontbenchers are beginning to resign again, this time over Brexit.
284 and all that: I may have misused some vocabulary, misleading you. My intuition* is that sporadic bouts of inflation make it harder to accumulate and preserve wealth and act like soft debt jubilees. A bit of turbulence to interfere with the agglomerative nature of wealth.
*Obviously underinformed, but inspired by Piketty.
309: With enough data (inflows, outflows, and initial endowments for representative samples of individuals, corporations, financial institutions, etc) one wouldn't really need a model to make more detailed measurements of the instantaneous flow of money. I expect decomposition would help characterize changes in wealth distribution, and suspect it would show differing rates of inflation in the financial economy and the real economy.
The idea of inflation in the financial economy is one that's really hard to pin down. In theory, the value of a financial asset is determined by the value of the underlying cash flows. Now theory could be wrong, but that would mean that the ratio of asset prices to cash flows would keep climbing. You do see them go up, but then there's a crash and they go back down.