Anxious to know when he would see his mistress once more, Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his autobiography that he went to the deserted ruins of the Colosseum late at night with a friend, to consult the spirits of the dead on the happy event. The spirits apparently manifested themselves in such a frightful way that Benvenuto, beside himself with fear, confessed that he made "the noise of a thousand flatulent trumpetings." The sonnet that opens his interesting book reminds us that "the wind, it beareth man's thoughts away," but unfortunately it faces a tall order in disposing of the methane of cattle—it seems that the average cow emits 500 liters of methane every day—and since methane has 20 times the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide, we may have Clarabell to blame if the time comes when Miami can only be viewed from above, through glass-bottomed excursion boats. The government is considering the possibility of a tax on cow emissions, a measure that might be aptly named "Cork and trade," and of course farmers are very displeased.
Perhaps it was solicitousness for public opinion on that proposed measure that has caused our Memphis Pink Palace Museum to offer an educational exhibit on animal waste (I'm not kidding). The flyer I received last night invited me to a members-only preview to "Get the Scoop on Poop: learn the science of what animals leave behind." Actually, I feel I have sufficient education in that already from my neighbors' two unsupervised dogs; indeed, one evening, having stepped unaware in their leavings while walking to my car to go to a movie, I spent much of the show wondering why the dolt sitting a few seats away couldn't practice basic hygiene before going out in public and actually considered moving to another seat to evade it, which just goes to prove the adage, "Wherever you go, there you are."
As to the exhibit, yes, I know that important scientific knowledge may be gleaned from feces, and I have listened to jokes about what bears do in the woods, but I never expected to be invited to ponder such matters in a museum. To ensure that members would find the prospect sufficiently attractive, the flyer helpfully noted, "Light refreshments will be served" which, for sheer tone-deafness, reminds me of the honest comment made by a courageous young model once, who said "When you're in Playboy, you really get a lot of exposure."
The sights, though fortunately not the smells, of nature were on silent and austere display this afternoon when my son and I drove to the William B. Clark Nature Preserve near Rossville, Tennessee. Several hundred acres of river bottomland are protected from development and may be viewed by walking a third of a mile along a sturdy boardwalk that takes you into the heart of the swamp. But for the gentle swaying of the trees, bare in winter and standing like unlit candles in the afternoon sun, the only movement we saw was a solitary hawk wheeling overhead. No planes, no wires, no voices. At first, I wondered why Mark kept taking out his cell phone, but I now realize it was to photograph the quiet beauty of the scene.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Hast thou philosophy, shepherd?
It was my father who went to college, but my mother whom I always remember absorbed in a book. Mom did not go to college until she was in her 30s. Dad was intelligent and well-spoken, but for him, the purpose of knowledge was to learn useful things or guide his thoughts in the right paths. For mom, reading was a key to asking why things were this way instead of another.
That difference appeared again a few years ago when our new Memphis Public Library building was dedicated, and local citizens were outraged to discover that among quotes from famous authors etched into the pavement near the Library's entrance, there were some from authors of whom they didn't approve, including Marx. One outraged citizen wrote to the local newspaper in protest, declaring, with perfect sincerity, that a library was supposed to be "a place of indoctrination."
For all I know, the person who wrote that absurdity held a college degree, though it didn't save him from completely misunderstanding the whole educational enterprise. Indoctrination is instruction in a prescribed set of norms that are not meant to be disputed; training is the impartation of facts, principles, and techniques meant to be mastered by rote, though that mastery may eventually lead to insights over and above the mere body of material that the student originally learned. Education, to be sure, builds on facts—there's not much point in discussing the effects of European discovery of the New World if one doesn't know when Columbus came over—but it is more than that. Education takes facts and teaches students to think. And that is really the problem.
This has nothing to do with whether most people could cultivate contemplative and analytical habits of mind if they wished; it is to reflect, instead, on the fact that the willingness to sift, to compare, to ask "why" and "what if" often causes discomfort not only to others but to the questioner himself. Philosopher James P. Carse was right to comment that "Many people read to have their views confirmed; the educated person reads to be surprised."
It may be that just about anyone could benefit from wrestling, at some point in his life, with the insights of Plato or Shakespeare; the question is whether he should pursue this as a private interest or be forced to pay thousands of dollars to do so as a requirement for obtaining the most ordinary employment. Charles Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, made this point in an excellent article in The New York Times last Sunday:
Lest this seem like another dyspeptic rant on "today's good-for-nothing youngsters," a similar perspective was provided in the June Atlantic by an anonymous professor teaching English 101 and 102 in a "college of last resort" to classes made up mostly of forty-somethings who must complete a degree for job advancement:
The author relates the heartbreaking story of Mrs. L., a mature student assigned to do a research paper citing both sides of a historical controversy. Not only could she not write a coherent paragraph; she was never really able to understand the nature of the assignment in the first place. This has nothing to do with socio-economic status; I remember an article in The American Scholar some years ago remarking that for a certain sort of 60-something member of the country club class, taking graduate courses was seen as an interesting alternate form of recreation.
I overheard half of a telephone conversation once, in which one of my fellow students tried to reassure her caller that she would give her the help she needed in writing a comparison-and-contrast paper, a concept that the caller seemed unable to grasp. After the call was over, my fellow student chuckled merrily and said "Oh, that Anne! What a character! She just loves education. She has got herself two Master's degrees, and she has come back for more!" And if she continued to pay fees, no doubt the school saw no reason not to collect them.
A college degree has become a sort of űber-high school diploma in the minds of many employers and for no good reason. While I agree that a study of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is probably one of the best introductions ever to office politics, I see no reason to require a clerical worker to learn it as an indispensable step to promotion, unless she simply wants to, and if she does, more power to her. Meanwhile, I have a step-cousin, a very sharp individual who has contributed computer code to NASA's missions to Mars, who cannot get permanent positions in the private sector for want of a college degree.
Once, it was assumed that a college degree was undertaken only as preparation for the ministry or a teaching career, and I agree with that archaic standard to the extent that everyone who sought it knew exactly what they were after and why. Again, to admit that college is not for everyone has nothing to do with misanthropy or invidious social distinctions. In 1983, 30-year-old Robert Martin was found living near Rossville, Tennessee, barefoot, with half his teeth missing, in a shack with no electricity or running water, with his elderly grandmother. He owned a Bible and a copy of Milton's works, and he knew both very nearly by heart. Taken to Vanderbilt, he amazed the professors with his knowledge. He had a hunger to know, and to think consequentially about what he had learned. I think it's time to leave liberal arts educations to those constituted like Martin and let the rest of the workforce demonstrate their competence through certification exercises that actually have something to do with their occupations. If they discover, at some point, that they have an urge to learn what Chaucer's pilgrims were up to and why, then I hope they find a willing teacher who can make those characters speak once more.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
That difference appeared again a few years ago when our new Memphis Public Library building was dedicated, and local citizens were outraged to discover that among quotes from famous authors etched into the pavement near the Library's entrance, there were some from authors of whom they didn't approve, including Marx. One outraged citizen wrote to the local newspaper in protest, declaring, with perfect sincerity, that a library was supposed to be "a place of indoctrination."
For all I know, the person who wrote that absurdity held a college degree, though it didn't save him from completely misunderstanding the whole educational enterprise. Indoctrination is instruction in a prescribed set of norms that are not meant to be disputed; training is the impartation of facts, principles, and techniques meant to be mastered by rote, though that mastery may eventually lead to insights over and above the mere body of material that the student originally learned. Education, to be sure, builds on facts—there's not much point in discussing the effects of European discovery of the New World if one doesn't know when Columbus came over—but it is more than that. Education takes facts and teaches students to think. And that is really the problem.
This has nothing to do with whether most people could cultivate contemplative and analytical habits of mind if they wished; it is to reflect, instead, on the fact that the willingness to sift, to compare, to ask "why" and "what if" often causes discomfort not only to others but to the questioner himself. Philosopher James P. Carse was right to comment that "Many people read to have their views confirmed; the educated person reads to be surprised."
It may be that just about anyone could benefit from wrestling, at some point in his life, with the insights of Plato or Shakespeare; the question is whether he should pursue this as a private interest or be forced to pay thousands of dollars to do so as a requirement for obtaining the most ordinary employment. Charles Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, made this point in an excellent article in The New York Times last Sunday:
My beef is not with liberal education, but with the use of the degree as a job qualification.
For most of the nation’s youths, making the bachelor’s degree a job qualification means demanding a credential that is beyond their reach. It is a truth that politicians and educators cannot bring themselves to say out loud: A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work.
If you doubt it, go back and look through your old college textbooks, and then do a little homework on the reading ability of high school seniors. About 10 percent to 20 percent of all 18-year-olds can absorb the material in your old liberal arts textbooks. For engineering and the hard sciences, the percentage is probably not as high as 10....
But I’m not thinking just about students who are not smart enough to deal with college-level material. Many young people who have the intellectual ability to succeed in rigorous liberal arts courses don’t want to. For these students, the distribution requirements of the college degree do not open up new horizons. They are bothersome time-wasters.
A century ago, these students would happily have gone to work after high school. Now they know they need to acquire additional skills, but they want to treat college as vocational training, not as a leisurely journey to well-roundedness.
Lest this seem like another dyspeptic rant on "today's good-for-nothing youngsters," a similar perspective was provided in the June Atlantic by an anonymous professor teaching English 101 and 102 in a "college of last resort" to classes made up mostly of forty-somethings who must complete a degree for job advancement:
Some of their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old. Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home and family. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings. I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.
My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading “Araby” or “Barn Burning,” their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?
The goal of English 101 is to instruct students in the sort of expository writing that theoretically will be required across the curriculum. My students must venture the compare-and-contrast paper, the argument paper, the process-analysis paper (which explains how some action is performed—as a lab report might), and the dreaded research paper, complete with parenthetical citations and a listing of works cited, all in Modern Language Association format. In 102, we read short stories, poetry, and Hamlet, and we take several stabs at the only writing more dreaded than the research paper: the absolutely despised Writing About Literature.
The author relates the heartbreaking story of Mrs. L., a mature student assigned to do a research paper citing both sides of a historical controversy. Not only could she not write a coherent paragraph; she was never really able to understand the nature of the assignment in the first place. This has nothing to do with socio-economic status; I remember an article in The American Scholar some years ago remarking that for a certain sort of 60-something member of the country club class, taking graduate courses was seen as an interesting alternate form of recreation.
I overheard half of a telephone conversation once, in which one of my fellow students tried to reassure her caller that she would give her the help she needed in writing a comparison-and-contrast paper, a concept that the caller seemed unable to grasp. After the call was over, my fellow student chuckled merrily and said "Oh, that Anne! What a character! She just loves education. She has got herself two Master's degrees, and she has come back for more!" And if she continued to pay fees, no doubt the school saw no reason not to collect them.
A college degree has become a sort of űber-high school diploma in the minds of many employers and for no good reason. While I agree that a study of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is probably one of the best introductions ever to office politics, I see no reason to require a clerical worker to learn it as an indispensable step to promotion, unless she simply wants to, and if she does, more power to her. Meanwhile, I have a step-cousin, a very sharp individual who has contributed computer code to NASA's missions to Mars, who cannot get permanent positions in the private sector for want of a college degree.
Once, it was assumed that a college degree was undertaken only as preparation for the ministry or a teaching career, and I agree with that archaic standard to the extent that everyone who sought it knew exactly what they were after and why. Again, to admit that college is not for everyone has nothing to do with misanthropy or invidious social distinctions. In 1983, 30-year-old Robert Martin was found living near Rossville, Tennessee, barefoot, with half his teeth missing, in a shack with no electricity or running water, with his elderly grandmother. He owned a Bible and a copy of Milton's works, and he knew both very nearly by heart. Taken to Vanderbilt, he amazed the professors with his knowledge. He had a hunger to know, and to think consequentially about what he had learned. I think it's time to leave liberal arts educations to those constituted like Martin and let the rest of the workforce demonstrate their competence through certification exercises that actually have something to do with their occupations. If they discover, at some point, that they have an urge to learn what Chaucer's pilgrims were up to and why, then I hope they find a willing teacher who can make those characters speak once more.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Brokeback or bareback?
From an article posted Friday in Slate, I learn that two names that were googled this year with a frequency matching Sarah Palin and John McCain were Heath Ledger and Miley Cyrus. Ledger I can understand, and I hope he gets a posthumous Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight, which was simply amazing; as to the other search object, I'd certainly rather gaze on a pretty young woman, even chastely, than on McCain any day—but Miley Cyrus? Who is she and why should anyone outside her friends and family be interested in her? Two years ago, her name was an item that I included on a list of practice questions for my office trivia team; now, tickets to her performances are scalped.
Her notoriety this year came from the Annie Leibovitz photos in Vanity Fair, and if viewers of the pictures took exception to Leibovitz tastelessly posing Cyrus with her boneheaded father in ways that looked like boyfriend and girlfriend, I agree. It seems there are times when no one has less common sense than artists, as Peter Lynch showed, for instance, when he filmed the humiliating near-rape scene between Willem Dafoe and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart and called it "An episode of female empowerment" (I won't say "Hand me a barf bag" because that motif was another element all too evident in the film). But what got everyone searching for Miley was a single shot that revealed no more than my then-14-year-old daughter did when she donned her new Speedo and went swimming a few years ago: a bare back. Of course society must reject the prurient exploitation of minors, but the last time I checked, shoulder blades were not secondary sexual characteristics, nor their display pornographic.
It's ironic—in April, touring a restored mansion in the annual "pilgrimage" of ante-bellum homes in nearby Holly Springs, Mississippi, I was startled to see several photographs, in one room, of what I assume was the owner's 12-year-old granddaughter in various states of undress, though the photos were very tastefully posed and could not be taken as pornographic. For that matter, on another historic homes tour a year or two ago, passing through some private family rooms, I came across a nude oil portrait of a young woman, and a moment later, found myself face to face with the original (dressed, of course), trying to contain her amusement at the startled glances of the guests. Cyrus's photo is pretty tame compared to those instances, and it seems the feverish interest is based on "concern" over what might have happened had she not adequately draped herself; frankly, it's all beginning to sound to me like John Ashcroft veiling the statues in the lobby of the Justice Department. Let little 15-year-old Destiny Hope do her television show and worry about dating and leave the rest of us to recollect ourselves and consider when our fixation on a young woman's bare back reflects things about our own thoughts that we'd just as soon not reveal.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
Her notoriety this year came from the Annie Leibovitz photos in Vanity Fair, and if viewers of the pictures took exception to Leibovitz tastelessly posing Cyrus with her boneheaded father in ways that looked like boyfriend and girlfriend, I agree. It seems there are times when no one has less common sense than artists, as Peter Lynch showed, for instance, when he filmed the humiliating near-rape scene between Willem Dafoe and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart and called it "An episode of female empowerment" (I won't say "Hand me a barf bag" because that motif was another element all too evident in the film). But what got everyone searching for Miley was a single shot that revealed no more than my then-14-year-old daughter did when she donned her new Speedo and went swimming a few years ago: a bare back. Of course society must reject the prurient exploitation of minors, but the last time I checked, shoulder blades were not secondary sexual characteristics, nor their display pornographic.
It's ironic—in April, touring a restored mansion in the annual "pilgrimage" of ante-bellum homes in nearby Holly Springs, Mississippi, I was startled to see several photographs, in one room, of what I assume was the owner's 12-year-old granddaughter in various states of undress, though the photos were very tastefully posed and could not be taken as pornographic. For that matter, on another historic homes tour a year or two ago, passing through some private family rooms, I came across a nude oil portrait of a young woman, and a moment later, found myself face to face with the original (dressed, of course), trying to contain her amusement at the startled glances of the guests. Cyrus's photo is pretty tame compared to those instances, and it seems the feverish interest is based on "concern" over what might have happened had she not adequately draped herself; frankly, it's all beginning to sound to me like John Ashcroft veiling the statues in the lobby of the Justice Department. Let little 15-year-old Destiny Hope do her television show and worry about dating and leave the rest of us to recollect ourselves and consider when our fixation on a young woman's bare back reflects things about our own thoughts that we'd just as soon not reveal.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
No bailout bargain
It would be nice if the economy would have a Clive Huggins moment. Clive was my late father, and, having been raised in the Depression, was always fearful of the prospect of paying too much for something; thus, he was often punished by the rule that says you get what you pay for. The Christmas trees he brought home looked like the last survivors of a worldwide drought, while he grumbled that he had overpaid. I, on the other hand, being perfectly willing to pay a premium price where I can afford it (though, on my budget, such willingness is more often a state of mind than an actual monetary transaction) and am likely to gain real quality by doing so, sometimes find myself buying perfectly creditable items for absurdly low prices. When that happens—e.g., paying $85 for $250 luggage or $18 for a $120 lounging robe—I call it a Clive Huggins moment. One of the largest Christmas trees I ever had, a tree so large I actually had to block one of the doors of my apartment to find a place to set it up, cost me $2, which was ridiculously low even for 1974.
Jeffrey Garten, writing in Newsweek recently, was convinced that we are trying to nickel-and-dime our way out of the current financial crisis and that nothing but an investment of $1 trillion, or 7% of GDP over the next 2 years, will give the economy the necessary infusion of capital and inspire consumer confidence once more:
I only wish someone could figure out the ratio of fear to real potential economic damage. Of course the government needs to spend, but how much? The exasperating thing is the extent to which the crisis is driven by emotion. I think of this, for instance, when I read of homeowners who, we are told, are still stuck paying on homes that are now worth less than the balance of the mortgage. So? My Saturn Ion is worth less than what I owe on it, even at the 0% APR financing I obtained from a desperate car dealer last year (another Clive Huggins moment), but that doesn't keep it from getting me to work, and I am still making payments. There is a real economic crisis—no argument there—and an additional amount of hand-wringing that is no doubt making the situation potentially much worse than it needs to be.
Actually, psychology is as interesting in figuring out how we got here as it is in figuring out how to get out of this mess. Henry Blodget, once notorious as a Wall St. tech stock analyst forced out of his occupation after the dot.com meltdown by Eliot Spitzer (never mind), provides a very incisive analysis of why there will always be economic bubbles and why perfectly intelligent, well-intentioned people will miss them until it's too late, in his article "Why Wall Street Always Blows It" in the current Atlantic:
One of the biggest culprits, as Blodget points out, is the recurring belief that "it's different this time" in a way that is supposed to make caution irrelevant:
The other deadly ingredient in bubbles is that investment professionals won't keep their jobs if they restrict themselves to prudent courses leading to merely reasonable returns; the same competition that fuels a free market also drives each fund manager to chase larger and larger returns for his investors, on peril of a forced retirement. Blodget cites the instance of fund manager Julian Robertson, whose Tiger Management company lost 66% of its assets to withdrawals by disgruntled investors and finally closed its doors because Robertson correctly anticipated the tech stock meltdown and moved his investors' funds elsewhere (where returns were lesser, though on safer ground).
In other words, we don't want the slick mortgage broker, the BMW-driving realtor, or the glib investment pitchman to do the right thing for us but the thing, instead, that will make us feel as well off as our neighbors occupying the houses that they also couldn't afford. Frankly, I wonder if the Dutch had the right idea when they went nuts over tulip bulbs in 1634; the Semper Augustus bulb was commanding prices equal to that of a house on the Amsterdam market, but at least that was a product of nature.
Actually, Jane Bryant Quinn quotes financial advisor Steve Leuthold in a recent column as saying that investors should buy just about anything at this point, on the grounds that it is likely to be a bargain. That was certainly true of the $22.99 box of firelogs I talked an exasperated Kroger manager into selling me for $5.99 yesterday, after it had been mislabeled, but I don't think that's what Leuthold meant. If stocks scare you too much, perhaps you could consider bidding on Jeff Koons's metal "Hanging Heart" sculpture, a colossal piece of kitsch that recently sold for $27 million, which proves that a fool and his money are soon parted. I think my best buy today was ordering Facing Mount Kenya from Amazon.com on the advice of the Kenyan clergyman of the church I have been visiting; an ethnographic study done at the London School of Economics by a young Jomo Kenyatta in the 1930s, it is supposed to be a very insightful analysis of Kikuyu life and culture. I got it for just $1.75.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
Jeffrey Garten, writing in Newsweek recently, was convinced that we are trying to nickel-and-dime our way out of the current financial crisis and that nothing but an investment of $1 trillion, or 7% of GDP over the next 2 years, will give the economy the necessary infusion of capital and inspire consumer confidence once more:
The fundamental issue is fear. Despite the colossal problems in the U.S. economy, the dollar continues to strengthen, which just shows that investors fear other markets even more. Billions of dollars are flowing into three-year U.S. Treasury bills, whose interest rate is zero, so investors are merely trying to minimize losses, not make money. Clearly, the governments have not succeeded in restoring calm. Their efforts look improvised, confused and ineffective to the average consumer or investor. The poster child for this problem is the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program in the United States. The bitter congressional debates over the program and its shifting purpose—from buying toxic assets to injecting cash—has left the public feeling that Washington isn't quite sure what it is doing. For many weeks now, the Treasury and the Fed have appeared to be constantly on the brink of unveiling yet another new program, leaving the impression that even they don't believe the current ones will work.
I only wish someone could figure out the ratio of fear to real potential economic damage. Of course the government needs to spend, but how much? The exasperating thing is the extent to which the crisis is driven by emotion. I think of this, for instance, when I read of homeowners who, we are told, are still stuck paying on homes that are now worth less than the balance of the mortgage. So? My Saturn Ion is worth less than what I owe on it, even at the 0% APR financing I obtained from a desperate car dealer last year (another Clive Huggins moment), but that doesn't keep it from getting me to work, and I am still making payments. There is a real economic crisis—no argument there—and an additional amount of hand-wringing that is no doubt making the situation potentially much worse than it needs to be.
Actually, psychology is as interesting in figuring out how we got here as it is in figuring out how to get out of this mess. Henry Blodget, once notorious as a Wall St. tech stock analyst forced out of his occupation after the dot.com meltdown by Eliot Spitzer (never mind), provides a very incisive analysis of why there will always be economic bubbles and why perfectly intelligent, well-intentioned people will miss them until it's too late, in his article "Why Wall Street Always Blows It" in the current Atlantic:
...most bubbles are the product of more than just bad faith, or incompetence, or rank stupidity; the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that they will form. In this sense, bubbles are perfectly rational—or at least they’re a rational and unavoidable by-product of capitalism (which, as Winston Churchill might have said, is the worst economic system on the planet except for all the others). Technology and circumstances change, but the human animal doesn’t.
One of the biggest culprits, as Blodget points out, is the recurring belief that "it's different this time" in a way that is supposed to make caution irrelevant:
Those are said to be the most expensive words in the English language, by the way: it’s different this time. You can’t have a bubble without good explanations for why it’s different this time. If everyone knew that this time wasn’t different, the market would stop going up. But the future is always uncertain—and amid uncertainty, all sorts of faith-based theories can flourish, even on Wall Street.
In the 1920s, the “differences” were said to be the miraculous new technologies (phones, cars, planes) that would speed the economy, as well as Prohibition, which was supposed to produce an ultra-efficient, ultra-responsible workforce. (Don’t laugh: one of the most respected economists of the era, Irving Fisher of Yale University, believed that one.) In the tech bubble of the 1990s, the differences were low interest rates, low inflation, a government budget surplus, the Internet revolution, and a Federal Reserve chairman apparently so divinely talented that he had made the business cycle obsolete. In the housing bubble, they were low interest rates, population growth, new mortgage products, a new ownership society, and, of course, the fact that “they aren’t making any more land.”
In hindsight, it’s obvious that all these differences were bogus (they’ve never made any more land—except in Dubai, which now has its own problems). At the time, however, with prices going up every day, things sure seemed different.
In fairness to the thousands of experts who’ve snookered themselves throughout the years, a complicating factor is always at work: the ever-present possibility that it really might have been different. Everything is obvious only after the crash.
The other deadly ingredient in bubbles is that investment professionals won't keep their jobs if they restrict themselves to prudent courses leading to merely reasonable returns; the same competition that fuels a free market also drives each fund manager to chase larger and larger returns for his investors, on peril of a forced retirement. Blodget cites the instance of fund manager Julian Robertson, whose Tiger Management company lost 66% of its assets to withdrawals by disgruntled investors and finally closed its doors because Robertson correctly anticipated the tech stock meltdown and moved his investors' funds elsewhere (where returns were lesser, though on safer ground).
In other words, we don't want the slick mortgage broker, the BMW-driving realtor, or the glib investment pitchman to do the right thing for us but the thing, instead, that will make us feel as well off as our neighbors occupying the houses that they also couldn't afford. Frankly, I wonder if the Dutch had the right idea when they went nuts over tulip bulbs in 1634; the Semper Augustus bulb was commanding prices equal to that of a house on the Amsterdam market, but at least that was a product of nature.
Actually, Jane Bryant Quinn quotes financial advisor Steve Leuthold in a recent column as saying that investors should buy just about anything at this point, on the grounds that it is likely to be a bargain. That was certainly true of the $22.99 box of firelogs I talked an exasperated Kroger manager into selling me for $5.99 yesterday, after it had been mislabeled, but I don't think that's what Leuthold meant. If stocks scare you too much, perhaps you could consider bidding on Jeff Koons's metal "Hanging Heart" sculpture, a colossal piece of kitsch that recently sold for $27 million, which proves that a fool and his money are soon parted. I think my best buy today was ordering Facing Mount Kenya from Amazon.com on the advice of the Kenyan clergyman of the church I have been visiting; an ethnographic study done at the London School of Economics by a young Jomo Kenyatta in the 1930s, it is supposed to be a very insightful analysis of Kikuyu life and culture. I got it for just $1.75.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Barack Jindal
I voted for Obama and would be delighted to see him fulfill his apparent promise. After the sheer boneheadedness of the officers of government my fellow Republicans had been content to elect, it was time for a change. I heartily agreed with Christopher Buckley's explanation for his defection:
Exactly. Still, don't throw out your Republican campaign literature yet, Christopher; like 10-year-old Cameron Bright reappearing as Nicole Kidman's deceased husband in Birth comes the Gipper reborn—or so many are beginning to hope—as a 36-year-old up-and-comer restoring competence and honesty to a state nearly as corrupt as Rod Blagojevich's Illinois. The comparisons are a bit of a stretch; Reagan never pretended to a résumé that included graduating from Brown at 21 and completing a Rhodes Scholarship at 23, but this most quintessentially American of 20th-century Presidents would certainly warm to a small boy, a son of Indian immigrants, who suddenly announced at age 5 that he would answer to no name but Bobby because that was his favorite character on The Brady Bunch. Republicans today, as described in Andrew Romano's piece in a recent issue of Newsweek, are flocking to the young Governor of Louisiana for a combination of style and substance, as Grover Norquist describes it:
I don't want Jindal to run as a sort of rebuke or comeuppance to Barack Obama; if the President-elect is as principled as he is intelligent, if he governs wisely and well, if he can truly effect needed changes in energy, the economy, and healthcare without incurring a ruinous debt, if he can restore our damaged credibility among nations, more power to him. No, I want Jindal to enter the arena because more nearly-matched competition puts each contestant on his mettle and forces voters to be very sure of why they are choosing one over the other; I want him to run also so as to put to rest for good the idea that the incoherent, swaggering, shoot-a-moose-from-a-helicopter style of another governor is seen once and for all as the tasteless national joke that it is.
Jindal claims he has no intention of running in 2012, and if he really means that, he needs to be reminded that Iowa is not in his jurisdiction, but whenever he chooses to run, can he win? There are at least two points of vulnerability: his uncompromising opposition to abortion under any circumstances whatsoever, and his self-attested participation in an amateur exorcism at Brown.
The majority of voters—even self-described pro-choice advocates, it seems—do not wish to see the wanton taking of unborn life for convenience but wish only to see abortion, as the phrase goes, become "safe, legal, and rare." It has to be a comfort even to those who are strongly pro-life, as I am, that the incidence of abortion has actually declined since the early 1990s. I hope for a cultural change of the type that caused the rate of smoking to drop by half over the past 40 years: the emergence of a culture that regards unborn life with such care and reverence as to see abortion as a regrettable choice and avoid it if possible; a blanket refusal to so much as consider it even for medical necessity is not likely to win votes for a candidate for national office. As to the rest of his religious views, I can only trust that someone with a biology degree from Brown will exercise his apparently considerable intelligence and not resort, for political or any other reasons, to the asinine prescription to "teach the controversy" to public school students, a controversy that would never have existed but for the perverse refusal of the scientifically ignorant to assent to what they don't want to understand.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of "conservative" government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.
Exactly. Still, don't throw out your Republican campaign literature yet, Christopher; like 10-year-old Cameron Bright reappearing as Nicole Kidman's deceased husband in Birth comes the Gipper reborn—or so many are beginning to hope—as a 36-year-old up-and-comer restoring competence and honesty to a state nearly as corrupt as Rod Blagojevich's Illinois. The comparisons are a bit of a stretch; Reagan never pretended to a résumé that included graduating from Brown at 21 and completing a Rhodes Scholarship at 23, but this most quintessentially American of 20th-century Presidents would certainly warm to a small boy, a son of Indian immigrants, who suddenly announced at age 5 that he would answer to no name but Bobby because that was his favorite character on The Brady Bunch. Republicans today, as described in Andrew Romano's piece in a recent issue of Newsweek, are flocking to the young Governor of Louisiana for a combination of style and substance, as Grover Norquist describes it:
First of all, he's brilliant....Two, he's from an immigrant community, so that speaks to immigrant experience, period. Three, he's a Catholic who lives his values instead of shouting at you about them. Four, he's a principled Reagan Republican. Five, he's from the South but doesn't look like a Southern sheriff. And he's got more successes as a governor, already, one year in, than George W. Bush or Obama had when they ran for president. He's exactly what we need.
I don't want Jindal to run as a sort of rebuke or comeuppance to Barack Obama; if the President-elect is as principled as he is intelligent, if he governs wisely and well, if he can truly effect needed changes in energy, the economy, and healthcare without incurring a ruinous debt, if he can restore our damaged credibility among nations, more power to him. No, I want Jindal to enter the arena because more nearly-matched competition puts each contestant on his mettle and forces voters to be very sure of why they are choosing one over the other; I want him to run also so as to put to rest for good the idea that the incoherent, swaggering, shoot-a-moose-from-a-helicopter style of another governor is seen once and for all as the tasteless national joke that it is.
Jindal claims he has no intention of running in 2012, and if he really means that, he needs to be reminded that Iowa is not in his jurisdiction, but whenever he chooses to run, can he win? There are at least two points of vulnerability: his uncompromising opposition to abortion under any circumstances whatsoever, and his self-attested participation in an amateur exorcism at Brown.
The majority of voters—even self-described pro-choice advocates, it seems—do not wish to see the wanton taking of unborn life for convenience but wish only to see abortion, as the phrase goes, become "safe, legal, and rare." It has to be a comfort even to those who are strongly pro-life, as I am, that the incidence of abortion has actually declined since the early 1990s. I hope for a cultural change of the type that caused the rate of smoking to drop by half over the past 40 years: the emergence of a culture that regards unborn life with such care and reverence as to see abortion as a regrettable choice and avoid it if possible; a blanket refusal to so much as consider it even for medical necessity is not likely to win votes for a candidate for national office. As to the rest of his religious views, I can only trust that someone with a biology degree from Brown will exercise his apparently considerable intelligence and not resort, for political or any other reasons, to the asinine prescription to "teach the controversy" to public school students, a controversy that would never have existed but for the perverse refusal of the scientifically ignorant to assent to what they don't want to understand.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Detroit's Appomattox
If Southerners act in concert, their purpose must be sinister, or so says Michael Lind in his article last week in Salon, "How to End the South's Economic War on the North." The action of Senators Shelby, Corker, and McConnell to block the bailout of Detroit's Big Three cannot possibly be ascribed to a failure to understand why Toyota, Nissan, and BMW should be penalized for not raising their per-hour labor costs from $46 to Detroit's standard $71 or to add $1,500 in worker health-care costs to the price of every car, as Ford does; it must, instead, be a plot to avenge Jeff Davis and express contempt for the rest of the country. If Lind were not the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, he should be a novelist or perhaps a psychologist; while analyzing others, he might try to get a clearer insight into his own outrage over the fact that the South will not acquiesce in his contempt for the region or submit to being told what is best for it by enlightened liberals like Lind. I think this is one Whitehead that needs to be squeezed.
I take no pleasure in reading about the wasteland of Flint or the prospect of faithful and competent auto-workers being turned out into the cold because of factors over which they have no control. For that matter, I do think the Big Three must not be allowed to fail altogether, for the ripple effect both of the size of their work force and in their supplier relationships. But their prospective failure is not a plot, from the South or anywhere else, but simply a result of management's own mistakes and of competition from those who do their jobs better. Yes, it is true that the states of the old Confederacy spend less on public services such as education and healthcare than others, and that ought to be rectified; it is also true that the large payrolls made possible by foreign auto-makers in those regions help to improve the quality of life for the workers and their families (see Daniel Gross's article in the December 22 Newsweek on the economic impact of the foreign auto industry on the South). In any case, is there something sacrosanct about living in the Snow Belt? Just as Southern laborers once migrated north for better jobs, perhaps it's time for workers in Michigan to abandon their frozen habitations and do the opposite. If they come in sufficient numbers, they may even vote higher taxes for public services, if they wish.
I understand that the elephant in the room is union vs. non-union labor. Union work rules are sometimes necessary to protect the worker against the caprice of management; I remember reading the reminiscences of an early labor leader in which he recalled that no matter how bad economic conditions became, somehow, the members of the company baseball team were never included in layoffs. Unions happened because corporate management of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were as blind as GM and Chrysler management have been for some time now, and their contributions to equity in the workplace should not be simply dismissed. If union contracts eventually saddled the employer with health-care and pension obligations that can no longer be sustained, they were at least an understanding for worker and employer alike that faithful service over the employee's working life would result in comfort and economic security.
Now it is time to renegotiate all of it, if not the basic principle of mutual obligation, then the details of how such a principle can be honored in today's economy. The solution lies neither in abandoning the Detroit worker to freeze and starve nor in wild-eyed calls from the likes of Lind for a "New Reconstruction" in which the South eventually becomes as bankrupt and hamstrung as the North, but in an honest understanding between management and labor about building cars that work, that do not despoil the environment, and that the worker can afford, along with reasonable health and pension benefits. Instead of punishing Dixie for its success, others would do well to emulate it.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
I take no pleasure in reading about the wasteland of Flint or the prospect of faithful and competent auto-workers being turned out into the cold because of factors over which they have no control. For that matter, I do think the Big Three must not be allowed to fail altogether, for the ripple effect both of the size of their work force and in their supplier relationships. But their prospective failure is not a plot, from the South or anywhere else, but simply a result of management's own mistakes and of competition from those who do their jobs better. Yes, it is true that the states of the old Confederacy spend less on public services such as education and healthcare than others, and that ought to be rectified; it is also true that the large payrolls made possible by foreign auto-makers in those regions help to improve the quality of life for the workers and their families (see Daniel Gross's article in the December 22 Newsweek on the economic impact of the foreign auto industry on the South). In any case, is there something sacrosanct about living in the Snow Belt? Just as Southern laborers once migrated north for better jobs, perhaps it's time for workers in Michigan to abandon their frozen habitations and do the opposite. If they come in sufficient numbers, they may even vote higher taxes for public services, if they wish.
I understand that the elephant in the room is union vs. non-union labor. Union work rules are sometimes necessary to protect the worker against the caprice of management; I remember reading the reminiscences of an early labor leader in which he recalled that no matter how bad economic conditions became, somehow, the members of the company baseball team were never included in layoffs. Unions happened because corporate management of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were as blind as GM and Chrysler management have been for some time now, and their contributions to equity in the workplace should not be simply dismissed. If union contracts eventually saddled the employer with health-care and pension obligations that can no longer be sustained, they were at least an understanding for worker and employer alike that faithful service over the employee's working life would result in comfort and economic security.
Now it is time to renegotiate all of it, if not the basic principle of mutual obligation, then the details of how such a principle can be honored in today's economy. The solution lies neither in abandoning the Detroit worker to freeze and starve nor in wild-eyed calls from the likes of Lind for a "New Reconstruction" in which the South eventually becomes as bankrupt and hamstrung as the North, but in an honest understanding between management and labor about building cars that work, that do not despoil the environment, and that the worker can afford, along with reasonable health and pension benefits. Instead of punishing Dixie for its success, others would do well to emulate it.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Better to light a candle
I admire the ways in which civilization is maintained and spread in the face of hardship. In the rude days of the Saxon Heptarchy, Theodore of Tarsus taught the Scriptures, Greek, poetry, and astronomy to young Anglo-Saxon scholars at Canterbury. Young Edward Taylor took his leave of Harvard President Charles Chauncy and set out into a New England winter in 1671 to travel 100 miles to the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, where he served the next 58 years as pastor, doctor, and counselor, while writing the only known Metaphysical poetry by an American author. On Sundays, his parishioners often worshipped while listening for a drumbeat that would warn them of Indian attack.
Today I learn that Andrew Jackson, thought to be the least educated U.S. President of his day (his predecessor, John Quincy Adams, who detested him, refused to attend a ceremony in which Harvard, Adams's alma mater, conferred an honorary degree on Jackson) studied, as boy in upstate South Carolina, with a Presbyterian minister, emerging with an ability to quote Plutarch and Pope, and having memorized verbatim the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a 4,500-word-long compendium of Reformed Protestant theology, consisting of 107 questions and answers on the Bible and church doctrine. Famous for his violent temper and his irregular courtship of a still-married woman (amazingly, it had been his mother's hope that he would become a minister), Jackson read 3 chapters of the Bible daily and, for inspiration in valor, cherished Jane Porter's 1809 The Scottish Chiefs, her rather breathless retelling of the struggles of Sir William Wallace. (It's a tribute to Jackson's love of reading that he could be so influenced by a book that was not published until he was 42 years old and had already served as a Senator, Major-General of Militia, and Tennesee Superior Court Judge.) He was raised and educated in a frontier settlement so primitive that his own father's pallbearers drank themselves into besotted confusion and lost Jackson senior's casket in the snow, as they stumbled through the wilderness to bury him. Orphaned at 14, young Jackson estranged himself from his only surviving family, relatives of his mother, by his violence and irascibility.
Sometimes even those qualities served him in good stead. Riding the circuit as a Tennessee judge, he found a small-town sheriff too frightened to arrest a man accused of mutilating one of his own children in a drunken frolic. Jackson confronted the man, who was armed, and told him to surrender or die.
His legend has come down to us as that of a man almost pathologically angry and I wondered what, besides his physical courage, made men respect and follow him, but as Jon Meacham's biography points out, Jackson, as a perpetual outsider, had managed to cultivate a certain degree of charm, and that, added to his bravery, drew men to him. Fleeing hostile Indians in the wilderness of Tennessee with his legal colleague, John Overton, Jackson was nearly swept over the edge of a waterfall to his death; at the last moment, he calmly extended an oar to Overton, standing on the riverbank, who caught it and pulled Jackson to safety. “You were within an ace, Sir, of being pulled over the brink and dashed to pieces,” Overton observed.
Jackson calmly replied, “A miss is as good as a mile. Follow me and I’ll save you yet.”
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
Today I learn that Andrew Jackson, thought to be the least educated U.S. President of his day (his predecessor, John Quincy Adams, who detested him, refused to attend a ceremony in which Harvard, Adams's alma mater, conferred an honorary degree on Jackson) studied, as boy in upstate South Carolina, with a Presbyterian minister, emerging with an ability to quote Plutarch and Pope, and having memorized verbatim the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a 4,500-word-long compendium of Reformed Protestant theology, consisting of 107 questions and answers on the Bible and church doctrine. Famous for his violent temper and his irregular courtship of a still-married woman (amazingly, it had been his mother's hope that he would become a minister), Jackson read 3 chapters of the Bible daily and, for inspiration in valor, cherished Jane Porter's 1809 The Scottish Chiefs, her rather breathless retelling of the struggles of Sir William Wallace. (It's a tribute to Jackson's love of reading that he could be so influenced by a book that was not published until he was 42 years old and had already served as a Senator, Major-General of Militia, and Tennesee Superior Court Judge.) He was raised and educated in a frontier settlement so primitive that his own father's pallbearers drank themselves into besotted confusion and lost Jackson senior's casket in the snow, as they stumbled through the wilderness to bury him. Orphaned at 14, young Jackson estranged himself from his only surviving family, relatives of his mother, by his violence and irascibility.
Sometimes even those qualities served him in good stead. Riding the circuit as a Tennessee judge, he found a small-town sheriff too frightened to arrest a man accused of mutilating one of his own children in a drunken frolic. Jackson confronted the man, who was armed, and told him to surrender or die.
His legend has come down to us as that of a man almost pathologically angry and I wondered what, besides his physical courage, made men respect and follow him, but as Jon Meacham's biography points out, Jackson, as a perpetual outsider, had managed to cultivate a certain degree of charm, and that, added to his bravery, drew men to him. Fleeing hostile Indians in the wilderness of Tennessee with his legal colleague, John Overton, Jackson was nearly swept over the edge of a waterfall to his death; at the last moment, he calmly extended an oar to Overton, standing on the riverbank, who caught it and pulled Jackson to safety. “You were within an ace, Sir, of being pulled over the brink and dashed to pieces,” Overton observed.
Jackson calmly replied, “A miss is as good as a mile. Follow me and I’ll save you yet.”
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
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