Although I don't watch much in the way of television these days, I did see all three seasons of "Borgen", the Danish political drama with a similar appeal and character depth akin to "The West Wing", and last night after the Academy Awards, I found the Danish short film "Helium" (winner of this year's Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film) on iTunes available for a very reasonable price ($2 for SD, $3 for HD).
It is a 22 minute film dealing with death, hope, imagination and love. How it dealt with such a compelling subject was through a gently subtle understatement in much the same way the political drama covered the evolution of its principal protagonist without being overly dramatic or obvious the way TV often is presented here.
I am very pleased to have a copy for my library. Heartily recommended.
Monday, March 3, 2014
The Plot Thickens in Ukraine
This posting on CNN this evening fills in some intriguing background information regarding the situation in the Crimea (my caps and emphasis):
(CNN) -- Tensions smoldered in Ukraine, and in capitals around the world on Monday, as Russian troops consolidated their hold on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, global stocks slipped on fears things could get worse and diplomats grasped for a way to stop the situation from escalating.
(CNN) -- Tensions smoldered in Ukraine, and in capitals around the world on Monday, as Russian troops consolidated their hold on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, global stocks slipped on fears things could get worse and diplomats grasped for a way to stop the situation from escalating.
At an emergency U.N.
Security Council meeting to discuss the unfolding crisis, diplomats
asked Russia to withdraw its troops and called for mediation.
Russia's envoy said his
country's aim in Ukraine is to stop radical extremists who are
destabilizing the country -- adding that ousted Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych had asked Russia to send troops.
The United States' ambassador accused Russia of breaking international law and responding to an "imaginary threat."
Russian Ambassador Vitaly
Churkin read a letter from Yanukovych at the meeting, describing
Ukraine as a country "on the brink of civil war," plagued by "chaos and
anarchy."
"I would call on the
President of Russia, Mr. Putin, asking him to use the armed forces of
the Russian Federation to establish legitimacy, peace, law and order,
stability, and defending the people of Ukraine," the letter said.
Introducing The Foundation Trilogy in an Unusual Way
As my children and girl friend warily know from countless repetitions, among the handful of books I hold near and dear are Isaac Asimov's collection of three books written in the 1950s and published individually as "Foundation", "Foundation and Empire", and "Second Foundation"; and collectively know as "The Foundation Trilogy". [NOTE: for entirely selfish reasons I am limiting my discourse to these three novels, not the others subsequently written by Asimov directly or his authorized substitutes...I've read several and while there's merit to be found, there was nothing essential that...for me...requires their being included along with the original trio.]
For a reasonable introduction, I'm including a column written several years ago by another enthusiast whose name is better known these days for comments relating to slightly less esoteric topics as economics instead of psychohistory:
Paul Krugman: Asimov's Foundation novels grounded my economics
theguardian.com, Tuesday 4 December 2012
There are certain novels that can shape a teenage boy's life. For some, it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; for others it's Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As a widely quoted internet meme says, the unrealistic fantasy world portrayed in one of those books can warp a young man's character forever; the other book is about orcs. But for me, of course, it was neither. My Book – the one that has stayed with me for four-and-a-half decades – is Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, written when Asimov was barely out of his teens himself. I didn't grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.
OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don't expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried.
So how do the Foundation novels look to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever. The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece; there has never been anything quite like it. By the way, spoilers follow, so stop reading if you want to encounter the whole thing fresh.
Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it's not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it's set in the future, there's interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details, playing a fairly minor part in the story. The Foundation novels are about society, not gadgets – and unlike, say, William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, which are excellent in a very different way, they're about societies that don't seem much affected by technological progress. Asimov's Galactic Empire sounds an awful lot like the Roman Empire. Trantor, the empire's capital, comes across as a sort of hyper-version of Manhattan in the 1940s. The Foundation itself seems to recapitulate a fair bit of American history, passing through Boss Tweed politics and Robber Baron-style plutocracy; by the end of the trilogy it has evolved into something resembling mid 20th-century America – although Asimov makes it clear that this is by no means its final state.
Let me be clear, however: in pointing out the familiarity of the various societies we see in Foundation, I'm not being critical. On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov's invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science that understands society, can predict how it changes, and can be used to shape those changes.
That conceit underlies the whole story arc. In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed "psychohistory", the aforementioned rigorous science of society. Applying that science to the all-powerful Galactic Empire in which they live, they discover that it is in fact in terminal decline, and that a 30,000-year era of barbarism will follow its fall. But they also discover that a carefully designed nudge can change that path. The empire can't be saved, but the length of the coming dark age can be reduced to a mere millennium.
The novels follow the unfolding of that plan. For the first book and a half – Foundation and the first half of Foundation and Empire – all goes well. Then the plot takes a swerve, as the plan goes off course, only to be put back on track by the mysterious Second Foundation in the eponymous third novel.
Described that way, the story can sound arid and didactic. And the truth is that if you're looking for richly nuanced character development, you should go read Anna Karenina. Asimov was actually better than many science-fiction authors at creating interesting individuals – as a teenager I had a crush on Arkady Darell, the firecracker teenaged sort-of heroine of the trilogy's conclusion – but that's not saying much.
For that matter, you'll also be disappointed if you're looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time. There's only one brief description of a space battle – and the true purpose of the battle, we learn, is not the defeat of an ultimately trivial enemy but the creation of a state of mind that serves the Plan. There is, to be fair, one scene in which the fate of the galaxy hinges on the quick action of a hero (or actually heroine – Bayta Darell, at the end of Foundation and Empire). But even then it's not conventional action writing: Bayta saves the day at the very last minute by shooting one of the good guys.
Yet despite their lack of conventional cliffhangers and, for the most part, either heroes or villains, the Foundation novels are deeply thrilling – suspenseful, engrossing, and, if I may say, bracingly cynical. For the absence of conventional cliffhangers doesn't mean an absence of unconventional cliffhangers.
In the first book-and-a-half there are a series of moments in which the fate of the galaxy seems to hang in the balance, as the Foundation faces the apparent threat of extinction at the hands of barbarian kings, regional warlords, and eventually the decaying but still powerful empire itself. Each of these crises is met by the men of the hour, whose bravery and cunning seem to offer the only hope. Each time, the Foundation triumphs. But here's the trick: after the fact, it becomes clear that bravery and cunning had nothing to do with it, because the Foundation was fated to win thanks to the laws of psychohistory. Each time, just to drive the point home, the image of Hari Seldon, recorded centuries before, appears in the Time Vault to explain to everyone what just happened. The barbarians were never going to prevail, because the Foundation's superior technology, packaged as religion, gave it the ability to play them off against each other. The warlord's weapons were no match for the Foundation's economic clout. And so on.
This unique plot structure creates an ironic resonance between the Foundation novels and a seemingly unrelated genre, what I'd call prophetic fantasy. These are novels – Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time cycle comes to mind – in which the protagonists have a mystical destiny, foreshadowed in visions and ancient writings, and the unfolding of the plot tells of their march toward that destiny. Actually, I'm a sucker for that kind of fiction, which makes for great escapism precisely because real life is nothing like that. The first half of the Foundation series manages, however, to have the structure of prophecy and destiny without the mysticism; it's all about the laws of psychohistory, you see, and Hari Seldon's prescience comes from his mathematics.
Yet if the Foundation books are a tale of prophecy fulfilled, it's a very bourgeois version of prophecy. This is no tale of the secret heir coming into his heritage, of the invincible swordsman winning the day with his prowess. Asimov clearly despises both aristocracy and militarism; his heroes, such as they are, are unpretentious and a bit uncouth, with nothing martial about them. "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent," declares Mayor Salvor Hardin.
But wait: Foundation isn't about the triumph of the middle class, either. We never get to see the promised Second Empire, which may be just as well, because it probably wouldn't be very likeable. Clearly, it's not going to be a democracy – it's going to be a mathematicized version of Plato's Republic, in which the Guardians derive their virtue from the axioms of psychohistory. What this means for the books is that while a relatively bourgeois society may be the winner in each of the duels, Asimov is neither endorsing that society nor giving it a special long-run destiny. What this means for the storytelling is that the struggles don't have to be and aren't structured as a conventional tale of good guys versus villains, and the novels have that unexpected cynicism. The Foundation may start out a lot nicer than its barbarous neighbours, but it evolves over time into a corrupt oligarchy – and that's all part of the plan. And because the story arc is about the fulfilment of the Seldon Plan, not the triumph of the men in white hats, Asimov is also free to make some of his villains not especially villainous. Bel Riose, the imperial general who menaces the Foundation, is more appealing than the plutocrats running the place at the time. Even the Mule, who endangers the whole plan, is a surprisingly sympathetic character.
Which brings us to the Mule, the deus ex mutagen who drives the swerve in the plot halfway through the series. When I first read Foundation all those years ago, I resented the Mule's appearance, which interrupts the smooth tale of psychohistorical inevitability. On a reread, however, I see that Asimov knew what he was doing – and not just because another book and a half of Seldon Crises would have gotten very stale.
The Mule is a mutant whose ability to control others' emotions lets him conquer the Foundation and threaten the whole Seldon Plan. To contain the menace, the Second Foundation – a hidden group of psychohistorians, the secret keepers of the Plan – must emerge from hiding. So far, this sounds like any of a hundred tales of the struggle between good and evil. But Foundation isn't that kind of series. The problem, you see, isn't how to defeat the Mule and ensure the triumph of truth, justice, and the Foundation way. It is, instead, to get the Plan back on track – and that requires making sure that nobody understands the Plan!
So the Mule (who, as I said, isn't an entirely unsympathetic character) must be defeated, but the defeat must be subtle – no dramatic space battles, no victory parade, in fact no obvious defeat at all. Characteristically for the whole series, the accomplishment of the Mule's quiet defeat itself depends crucially on his not understanding the need for subtlety: he must believe that the Second Foundation is planning the very kind of shoot-em-up denouement that it must in fact avoid.
Even so, the Second Foundation has shown a bit of its hand – so the final episode concerns the confrontation between the First and Second Foundations, a confrontation that the Second Foundation must win by appearing to lose. For the restoration of the Seldon Plan requires the cultivation of a proper state of ignorance; the First Foundation must unlearn its dangerous knowledge of the Second Foundation's influence, and this can only be achieved through the Second Foundation's apparent destruction.
Oh, and the surprise in the very last line of the whole series still brings a smile to my face.
Are there flaws in the Foundation novels? Of course there are. The characters are, by and large, two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. There's also a notable lack of physical description of the characters or, well, anything. As I said, Tolstoy this isn't. A nerdier gripe – indeed, a very, very nerdy gripe – is that, in imposing his historical templates on the galactic civilisation, Asimov clearly had a problem with scale. Tazenda, in Second Foundation, is supposed to be a more or less barbarian kingdom, a flyspeck polity that only rules 20 planets. Um, 20 planets? Then there's Trantor, the world completely covered in metal because its 75m square miles of land surface area must bear 40 billion people. Do the math, and you realize that Trantor as described has only half the population density of New Jersey, which wasn't covered in metal the last time I looked out my window.
But these are, as I said, nerdy concerns. After all, the Foundation novels aren't really about the galaxy, or even about space travel. They're about the true final frontier – understanding ourselves, and the societies we make.
A non-nerdy concern – or anyway, a less nerdy concern – would be this: Now that I'm a social scientist myself, or at least as close to being one as we manage to get in these early days of human civilisation, what do I think of Asimov's belief that we can, indeed, conquer that final frontier – that we can develop a social science that gives its acolytes a unique ability to understand and perhaps shape human destiny?
Well, on good days I do feel as if we're making progress in that direction. And as an economist I've been having a fair number of such good days lately.
I know that sounds like a strange claim to make when the actual management of the economy has been a total disaster. But hey, Hari Seldon didn't do his work by convincing the emperor to change his policies – he had to conceal his project under a false front and wait a thousand years for results. Now, there isn't, to my knowledge, a secret cabal of economists with a thousand-year plan to save our current civilisation (but then I wouldn't tell you if there was, would I?). But I've been struck these past several years by just how much power good economics has to make correct predictions that are very much at odds with popular prejudices and "common sense".
To take a not at all arbitrary example, a standard macroeconomic approach, the IS-LM model (don't ask) told us that under depression-type conditions like those we're experiencing, some of the usual rules would cease to apply: trillion-dollar budget deficits wouldn't drive up interest rates, huge increases in the money supply wouldn't cause runaway inflation. Economists who took that model seriously back in, say, early 2009 were ridiculed and lambasted for making such counterintuitive assertions. But their predictions came true. So yes, it's possible to have social science with the power to predict events and, maybe, to lead to a better future.
That said, it's a long way from getting the medium-term path of interest rates and inflation more or less right to predicting the overall course of civilisation centuries in advance. Asimov's psychohistory evidently integrates economics with political science and sociology, which are much harder subjects than economics – economics is, after all, largely about greed, while other social sciences have to deal with more complex emotions. There are wonderful, insightful political scientists and sociologists working today, but their fields have yet to develop even the (very limited) degree of intellectual integration that makes doing economics sometimes feel like we're living in at least the very early dawn of Hari Seldon's psychohistory.
But maybe those fields will come along too. Will we then be ready to start making recordings for the Time Vault? Actually, no – and I think never. If there eventually is a true, integrated social science, it will still be a science of complex, nonlinear systems – systems that are chaotic in the technical sense, and hence not susceptible to detailed long-run forecasts. Think of weather forecasting: no matter how good the models get, we're never going to be able to predict that a particular storm will hit Philadelphia in a particular week 20 years from now. I'm willing to believe in faster-than-light travel; I'm not willing to believe that Hari Seldon can time his recorded appearance to coincide precisely with the latest crisis between Terminus and its neighbours.
But like the cardboard characters, this little implausibility in the Foundation novels matters not at all. They remain, uniquely, a thrilling tale about how self-knowledge – an understanding of how our own society works – can change history for the better. And they're every bit as inspirational now as they were when I first read them, three-quarters of my life ago.
For a reasonable introduction, I'm including a column written several years ago by another enthusiast whose name is better known these days for comments relating to slightly less esoteric topics as economics instead of psychohistory:
Paul Krugman: Asimov's Foundation novels grounded my economics
theguardian.com, Tuesday 4 December 2012
There are certain novels that can shape a teenage boy's life. For some, it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; for others it's Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As a widely quoted internet meme says, the unrealistic fantasy world portrayed in one of those books can warp a young man's character forever; the other book is about orcs. But for me, of course, it was neither. My Book – the one that has stayed with me for four-and-a-half decades – is Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, written when Asimov was barely out of his teens himself. I didn't grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.
OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don't expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried.
So how do the Foundation novels look to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever. The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece; there has never been anything quite like it. By the way, spoilers follow, so stop reading if you want to encounter the whole thing fresh.
Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it's not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it's set in the future, there's interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details, playing a fairly minor part in the story. The Foundation novels are about society, not gadgets – and unlike, say, William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, which are excellent in a very different way, they're about societies that don't seem much affected by technological progress. Asimov's Galactic Empire sounds an awful lot like the Roman Empire. Trantor, the empire's capital, comes across as a sort of hyper-version of Manhattan in the 1940s. The Foundation itself seems to recapitulate a fair bit of American history, passing through Boss Tweed politics and Robber Baron-style plutocracy; by the end of the trilogy it has evolved into something resembling mid 20th-century America – although Asimov makes it clear that this is by no means its final state.
Let me be clear, however: in pointing out the familiarity of the various societies we see in Foundation, I'm not being critical. On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov's invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science that understands society, can predict how it changes, and can be used to shape those changes.
That conceit underlies the whole story arc. In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed "psychohistory", the aforementioned rigorous science of society. Applying that science to the all-powerful Galactic Empire in which they live, they discover that it is in fact in terminal decline, and that a 30,000-year era of barbarism will follow its fall. But they also discover that a carefully designed nudge can change that path. The empire can't be saved, but the length of the coming dark age can be reduced to a mere millennium.
The novels follow the unfolding of that plan. For the first book and a half – Foundation and the first half of Foundation and Empire – all goes well. Then the plot takes a swerve, as the plan goes off course, only to be put back on track by the mysterious Second Foundation in the eponymous third novel.
Described that way, the story can sound arid and didactic. And the truth is that if you're looking for richly nuanced character development, you should go read Anna Karenina. Asimov was actually better than many science-fiction authors at creating interesting individuals – as a teenager I had a crush on Arkady Darell, the firecracker teenaged sort-of heroine of the trilogy's conclusion – but that's not saying much.
For that matter, you'll also be disappointed if you're looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time. There's only one brief description of a space battle – and the true purpose of the battle, we learn, is not the defeat of an ultimately trivial enemy but the creation of a state of mind that serves the Plan. There is, to be fair, one scene in which the fate of the galaxy hinges on the quick action of a hero (or actually heroine – Bayta Darell, at the end of Foundation and Empire). But even then it's not conventional action writing: Bayta saves the day at the very last minute by shooting one of the good guys.
Yet despite their lack of conventional cliffhangers and, for the most part, either heroes or villains, the Foundation novels are deeply thrilling – suspenseful, engrossing, and, if I may say, bracingly cynical. For the absence of conventional cliffhangers doesn't mean an absence of unconventional cliffhangers.
In the first book-and-a-half there are a series of moments in which the fate of the galaxy seems to hang in the balance, as the Foundation faces the apparent threat of extinction at the hands of barbarian kings, regional warlords, and eventually the decaying but still powerful empire itself. Each of these crises is met by the men of the hour, whose bravery and cunning seem to offer the only hope. Each time, the Foundation triumphs. But here's the trick: after the fact, it becomes clear that bravery and cunning had nothing to do with it, because the Foundation was fated to win thanks to the laws of psychohistory. Each time, just to drive the point home, the image of Hari Seldon, recorded centuries before, appears in the Time Vault to explain to everyone what just happened. The barbarians were never going to prevail, because the Foundation's superior technology, packaged as religion, gave it the ability to play them off against each other. The warlord's weapons were no match for the Foundation's economic clout. And so on.
This unique plot structure creates an ironic resonance between the Foundation novels and a seemingly unrelated genre, what I'd call prophetic fantasy. These are novels – Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time cycle comes to mind – in which the protagonists have a mystical destiny, foreshadowed in visions and ancient writings, and the unfolding of the plot tells of their march toward that destiny. Actually, I'm a sucker for that kind of fiction, which makes for great escapism precisely because real life is nothing like that. The first half of the Foundation series manages, however, to have the structure of prophecy and destiny without the mysticism; it's all about the laws of psychohistory, you see, and Hari Seldon's prescience comes from his mathematics.
Yet if the Foundation books are a tale of prophecy fulfilled, it's a very bourgeois version of prophecy. This is no tale of the secret heir coming into his heritage, of the invincible swordsman winning the day with his prowess. Asimov clearly despises both aristocracy and militarism; his heroes, such as they are, are unpretentious and a bit uncouth, with nothing martial about them. "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent," declares Mayor Salvor Hardin.
But wait: Foundation isn't about the triumph of the middle class, either. We never get to see the promised Second Empire, which may be just as well, because it probably wouldn't be very likeable. Clearly, it's not going to be a democracy – it's going to be a mathematicized version of Plato's Republic, in which the Guardians derive their virtue from the axioms of psychohistory. What this means for the books is that while a relatively bourgeois society may be the winner in each of the duels, Asimov is neither endorsing that society nor giving it a special long-run destiny. What this means for the storytelling is that the struggles don't have to be and aren't structured as a conventional tale of good guys versus villains, and the novels have that unexpected cynicism. The Foundation may start out a lot nicer than its barbarous neighbours, but it evolves over time into a corrupt oligarchy – and that's all part of the plan. And because the story arc is about the fulfilment of the Seldon Plan, not the triumph of the men in white hats, Asimov is also free to make some of his villains not especially villainous. Bel Riose, the imperial general who menaces the Foundation, is more appealing than the plutocrats running the place at the time. Even the Mule, who endangers the whole plan, is a surprisingly sympathetic character.
Which brings us to the Mule, the deus ex mutagen who drives the swerve in the plot halfway through the series. When I first read Foundation all those years ago, I resented the Mule's appearance, which interrupts the smooth tale of psychohistorical inevitability. On a reread, however, I see that Asimov knew what he was doing – and not just because another book and a half of Seldon Crises would have gotten very stale.
The Mule is a mutant whose ability to control others' emotions lets him conquer the Foundation and threaten the whole Seldon Plan. To contain the menace, the Second Foundation – a hidden group of psychohistorians, the secret keepers of the Plan – must emerge from hiding. So far, this sounds like any of a hundred tales of the struggle between good and evil. But Foundation isn't that kind of series. The problem, you see, isn't how to defeat the Mule and ensure the triumph of truth, justice, and the Foundation way. It is, instead, to get the Plan back on track – and that requires making sure that nobody understands the Plan!
So the Mule (who, as I said, isn't an entirely unsympathetic character) must be defeated, but the defeat must be subtle – no dramatic space battles, no victory parade, in fact no obvious defeat at all. Characteristically for the whole series, the accomplishment of the Mule's quiet defeat itself depends crucially on his not understanding the need for subtlety: he must believe that the Second Foundation is planning the very kind of shoot-em-up denouement that it must in fact avoid.
Even so, the Second Foundation has shown a bit of its hand – so the final episode concerns the confrontation between the First and Second Foundations, a confrontation that the Second Foundation must win by appearing to lose. For the restoration of the Seldon Plan requires the cultivation of a proper state of ignorance; the First Foundation must unlearn its dangerous knowledge of the Second Foundation's influence, and this can only be achieved through the Second Foundation's apparent destruction.
Oh, and the surprise in the very last line of the whole series still brings a smile to my face.
Are there flaws in the Foundation novels? Of course there are. The characters are, by and large, two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. There's also a notable lack of physical description of the characters or, well, anything. As I said, Tolstoy this isn't. A nerdier gripe – indeed, a very, very nerdy gripe – is that, in imposing his historical templates on the galactic civilisation, Asimov clearly had a problem with scale. Tazenda, in Second Foundation, is supposed to be a more or less barbarian kingdom, a flyspeck polity that only rules 20 planets. Um, 20 planets? Then there's Trantor, the world completely covered in metal because its 75m square miles of land surface area must bear 40 billion people. Do the math, and you realize that Trantor as described has only half the population density of New Jersey, which wasn't covered in metal the last time I looked out my window.
But these are, as I said, nerdy concerns. After all, the Foundation novels aren't really about the galaxy, or even about space travel. They're about the true final frontier – understanding ourselves, and the societies we make.
A non-nerdy concern – or anyway, a less nerdy concern – would be this: Now that I'm a social scientist myself, or at least as close to being one as we manage to get in these early days of human civilisation, what do I think of Asimov's belief that we can, indeed, conquer that final frontier – that we can develop a social science that gives its acolytes a unique ability to understand and perhaps shape human destiny?
Well, on good days I do feel as if we're making progress in that direction. And as an economist I've been having a fair number of such good days lately.
I know that sounds like a strange claim to make when the actual management of the economy has been a total disaster. But hey, Hari Seldon didn't do his work by convincing the emperor to change his policies – he had to conceal his project under a false front and wait a thousand years for results. Now, there isn't, to my knowledge, a secret cabal of economists with a thousand-year plan to save our current civilisation (but then I wouldn't tell you if there was, would I?). But I've been struck these past several years by just how much power good economics has to make correct predictions that are very much at odds with popular prejudices and "common sense".
To take a not at all arbitrary example, a standard macroeconomic approach, the IS-LM model (don't ask) told us that under depression-type conditions like those we're experiencing, some of the usual rules would cease to apply: trillion-dollar budget deficits wouldn't drive up interest rates, huge increases in the money supply wouldn't cause runaway inflation. Economists who took that model seriously back in, say, early 2009 were ridiculed and lambasted for making such counterintuitive assertions. But their predictions came true. So yes, it's possible to have social science with the power to predict events and, maybe, to lead to a better future.
That said, it's a long way from getting the medium-term path of interest rates and inflation more or less right to predicting the overall course of civilisation centuries in advance. Asimov's psychohistory evidently integrates economics with political science and sociology, which are much harder subjects than economics – economics is, after all, largely about greed, while other social sciences have to deal with more complex emotions. There are wonderful, insightful political scientists and sociologists working today, but their fields have yet to develop even the (very limited) degree of intellectual integration that makes doing economics sometimes feel like we're living in at least the very early dawn of Hari Seldon's psychohistory.
But maybe those fields will come along too. Will we then be ready to start making recordings for the Time Vault? Actually, no – and I think never. If there eventually is a true, integrated social science, it will still be a science of complex, nonlinear systems – systems that are chaotic in the technical sense, and hence not susceptible to detailed long-run forecasts. Think of weather forecasting: no matter how good the models get, we're never going to be able to predict that a particular storm will hit Philadelphia in a particular week 20 years from now. I'm willing to believe in faster-than-light travel; I'm not willing to believe that Hari Seldon can time his recorded appearance to coincide precisely with the latest crisis between Terminus and its neighbours.
But like the cardboard characters, this little implausibility in the Foundation novels matters not at all. They remain, uniquely, a thrilling tale about how self-knowledge – an understanding of how our own society works – can change history for the better. And they're every bit as inspirational now as they were when I first read them, three-quarters of my life ago.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Where have you gone, Five Thirty Eight dot Com? (sung to Mrs. Robinson)
The Sunday New York Times posted an article about the prospects for the US Senate in this year's November elections, but I missed the clear prose of Nate Silver whose blend of facts, polls and predictions made his Times column a must-read during the last election, particularly with so many others predicting results wildly at odds with both his projections and reality (in essence, the two became one).
I know he is still assembling his staff for the latest reboot for ESPN/ABC (and it looks like a stellar group indeed), but I hope he will begin posting again soon...for "junkies" like me, there was more to his efforts than just numbers or context; there was a connection to a larger, broader canvas that is too often missing from political analysis these days, especially those done by major media outlets. It isn't enough to find out the results of an isolated race here or there; what's more important is seeing if there are trends being set in a regional or national context, and what it may portend for the next two years.
And for those who wonder what good the Senate is these days (other than a foil for the House), don't forget that there are four members of the Supreme Court over 75 years of age (Scalia, Kennedy, Breyer and Ginsburg) and all nominees must go through the senate for confirmation. The first two are longtime bastions of the conservative wing and their retirement/passing would mark a real change in the court's direction if replaced by more moderate justices...but that possibility diminishes if the Senate achieves a GOP majority, and at the moment, that is too close to call; hence the need for Mr. Silver.
In other news, Secretary of State Kerry's trip to Kiev is a welcome sign that the US might not go down the same path with Ukraine that it did with Georgia. Kicking Russia out of the G8 would also go a long way towards convincing the Kremlin that its plans for annexing the Crimea might not be worth the economic isolation and impact on imports that an organized international response could impose. Whatever happens this coming week will depend in large part on what develops by Wednesday or Thursday: if Kerry is followed by other EU officials and some kind of effort by NATO, then all bets are off...but if the SOS visit is followed up by...nothing, then expect some kind of renewed Russian push into the eastern part of Ukraine by next weekend.
And just to show that I do sometimes watch TV, I thought Ellen's selfie was awesome and the pizza gambit was funny at first but kinda fizzled out, though it was interesting to learn which celebrities (a) brought money with them, and (b) what they thought was a reasonable amount to chip in towards the take out order.
And after ten hours and almost 200 updates, my old 2005 PC desktop now runs on Windows 7 Professional, which means I won't have to worry about Microsoft's April deadline for removing support from XP. There is of course the small problem that after reinstalling iTunes, I ran a duplicate check and found slightly over 10,000 tracks with more than more entry in the library. How to remove the duplicates without accidentally deleting anything that should be in the library: now THAT is a challenge.
I know he is still assembling his staff for the latest reboot for ESPN/ABC (and it looks like a stellar group indeed), but I hope he will begin posting again soon...for "junkies" like me, there was more to his efforts than just numbers or context; there was a connection to a larger, broader canvas that is too often missing from political analysis these days, especially those done by major media outlets. It isn't enough to find out the results of an isolated race here or there; what's more important is seeing if there are trends being set in a regional or national context, and what it may portend for the next two years.
And for those who wonder what good the Senate is these days (other than a foil for the House), don't forget that there are four members of the Supreme Court over 75 years of age (Scalia, Kennedy, Breyer and Ginsburg) and all nominees must go through the senate for confirmation. The first two are longtime bastions of the conservative wing and their retirement/passing would mark a real change in the court's direction if replaced by more moderate justices...but that possibility diminishes if the Senate achieves a GOP majority, and at the moment, that is too close to call; hence the need for Mr. Silver.
In other news, Secretary of State Kerry's trip to Kiev is a welcome sign that the US might not go down the same path with Ukraine that it did with Georgia. Kicking Russia out of the G8 would also go a long way towards convincing the Kremlin that its plans for annexing the Crimea might not be worth the economic isolation and impact on imports that an organized international response could impose. Whatever happens this coming week will depend in large part on what develops by Wednesday or Thursday: if Kerry is followed by other EU officials and some kind of effort by NATO, then all bets are off...but if the SOS visit is followed up by...nothing, then expect some kind of renewed Russian push into the eastern part of Ukraine by next weekend.
And just to show that I do sometimes watch TV, I thought Ellen's selfie was awesome and the pizza gambit was funny at first but kinda fizzled out, though it was interesting to learn which celebrities (a) brought money with them, and (b) what they thought was a reasonable amount to chip in towards the take out order.
And after ten hours and almost 200 updates, my old 2005 PC desktop now runs on Windows 7 Professional, which means I won't have to worry about Microsoft's April deadline for removing support from XP. There is of course the small problem that after reinstalling iTunes, I ran a duplicate check and found slightly over 10,000 tracks with more than more entry in the library. How to remove the duplicates without accidentally deleting anything that should be in the library: now THAT is a challenge.
On Kindles and E. B. White
Although anyone who's ever visited my home can attest to the fact that I am an ardent reader and collector of books, I still purchase a number of ebooks destined for use on one of my digital devices primarily through the Kindle app. The reason for this is totally consistent (at least I think it is) with the bookshelf content that greets me every morning when I head downstairs for coffee and the latest news...and while the ability to pick up a book and leaf through pages, whether in search of a particular passage or just for pleasure's sake, is a gift best learned early and cultivated throughout life, to be able to have the content of whole books accompany oneself, whether on a short drive across town or a longer journey of several nights' duration away from home, can be a comfort beyond description.
I remember those not-so-long-ago days when I headed to college across the continent, and one of the things that kept me from being even more depressed and homesick was a precious box shipped out in advance of my arrival and waiting for me as I entered that bare dorm room, holding a handful of my favorite books. Many years later but before the advent of the Internet, when work kept me out of town for the better part of the week in little towns or states many hours away from home, I considered the added bulk and weight of 2-3 books worthwhile just for their reminder of my life elsewhere.
I wonder how E. B. White, that wondrous writer whose name for me will always be synonymous with The New Yorker, would feel if he could see his Essays and New Yorker Writings uploaded onto my Kindle this evening. That hardcover book of essays was bought in New Haven in 1977 (an event notable enough for me to write inside the book itself) for the grand sum of $12.95, and while I knew his name from (of course!) Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, I had not yet discovered the breadth and depth of what he had wrote for that magazine whose covers drew me to the news stand without exception every Tuesday or Thursday (the days when deliveries from the east coast appeared, weather permitting).
Through those essays I learned something about a sense of rhythm and cadence that comes from a writing style crafted in the manner of an easy, comfortable conversation. When done right, the flow of ideas can seem so naturally spontaneous, with grammar, spelling and punctuation all falling into place naturally...as befits the person who helped popularize William Strunk's The Elements of Style!
Of course, I dutifully did my share of exercises and writing papers that taught me how and why sentences and paragraphs needed to be structured just so...but as I read his essays, I began to understand how I could use all that to make my own writing seem less stilted and formal, and more the way I wanted to come across: as someone sharing not just memories or thoughts but instilling them with that intangible quality that comes from wanting to share something meaningful with the reader.
Writing letters as I did in those pre-eMail days with a fine point fountain pen and youthful eyesight, the effect on me was profound: I could write easily and quickly...in most cases I would think of something and have it written out almost immediately without being aware of any cogent thought process, and I stopped only to replace the paper or refill the ink (something in the scraping of the pen nib across the paper seemed more personal and involved than a ballpoint; I had my own set of 'snobbisms' to take care of as the years passed). In discovering the same sort of creative individual 'voice' in E. B. White's writing style that I wanted to convey in my own writings, I consider him still to be one of my 'muses' that helped shaped my own writing personality.
And what an unusual collection of influences! E. B. White...Edwin Denby...Anne Morrow Lindbergh...more on these as we continue this journey.
JOHN F. KENNEDY 11/ 30/ 63
WHEN WE THINK OF HIM, he is without a hat, standing in the wind and the weather . He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to confront and to enjoy the cold and the wind of these times, whether the winds of nature or the winds of political circumstance and national danger. He died of exposure, but in a way that he would have settled for—in the line of duty, and with his friends and enemies all around, supporting him and shooting at him. It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.
White, E. B. (2014-02-18). Writings from The New Yorker 1925-1976 (Kindle Locations 3082-3089). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Springtime in the heyday of the Model T was a delirious season. Owning a car was still a major excitement, roads were still wonderful and bad. The Fords were obviously conceived in madness: any car which was capable of going from forward into reverse without any perceptible mechanical hiatus was bound to be a mighty challenging thing to the human imagination. Boys used to veer them off the highway into a level pasture and run wild with them, as though they were cutting up with a girl. Most everybody used the reverse pedal quite as much as the regular foot brake — it distributed the wear over the bands and wore them all down evenly. That was the big trick, to wear all the bands down evenly, so that the final chattering would be total and the whole unit scream for renewal.
The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you drew up to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would be bright enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary since. I suppose it’s time to say good-bye. Farewell, my lovely!
White, E. B. (2014-02-25). Essays of E. B. White (Kindle Locations 2977-2984). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
I remember those not-so-long-ago days when I headed to college across the continent, and one of the things that kept me from being even more depressed and homesick was a precious box shipped out in advance of my arrival and waiting for me as I entered that bare dorm room, holding a handful of my favorite books. Many years later but before the advent of the Internet, when work kept me out of town for the better part of the week in little towns or states many hours away from home, I considered the added bulk and weight of 2-3 books worthwhile just for their reminder of my life elsewhere.
I wonder how E. B. White, that wondrous writer whose name for me will always be synonymous with The New Yorker, would feel if he could see his Essays and New Yorker Writings uploaded onto my Kindle this evening. That hardcover book of essays was bought in New Haven in 1977 (an event notable enough for me to write inside the book itself) for the grand sum of $12.95, and while I knew his name from (of course!) Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, I had not yet discovered the breadth and depth of what he had wrote for that magazine whose covers drew me to the news stand without exception every Tuesday or Thursday (the days when deliveries from the east coast appeared, weather permitting).
Through those essays I learned something about a sense of rhythm and cadence that comes from a writing style crafted in the manner of an easy, comfortable conversation. When done right, the flow of ideas can seem so naturally spontaneous, with grammar, spelling and punctuation all falling into place naturally...as befits the person who helped popularize William Strunk's The Elements of Style!
Of course, I dutifully did my share of exercises and writing papers that taught me how and why sentences and paragraphs needed to be structured just so...but as I read his essays, I began to understand how I could use all that to make my own writing seem less stilted and formal, and more the way I wanted to come across: as someone sharing not just memories or thoughts but instilling them with that intangible quality that comes from wanting to share something meaningful with the reader.
Writing letters as I did in those pre-eMail days with a fine point fountain pen and youthful eyesight, the effect on me was profound: I could write easily and quickly...in most cases I would think of something and have it written out almost immediately without being aware of any cogent thought process, and I stopped only to replace the paper or refill the ink (something in the scraping of the pen nib across the paper seemed more personal and involved than a ballpoint; I had my own set of 'snobbisms' to take care of as the years passed). In discovering the same sort of creative individual 'voice' in E. B. White's writing style that I wanted to convey in my own writings, I consider him still to be one of my 'muses' that helped shaped my own writing personality.
And what an unusual collection of influences! E. B. White...Edwin Denby...Anne Morrow Lindbergh...more on these as we continue this journey.
JOHN F. KENNEDY 11/ 30/ 63
WHEN WE THINK OF HIM, he is without a hat, standing in the wind and the weather . He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to confront and to enjoy the cold and the wind of these times, whether the winds of nature or the winds of political circumstance and national danger. He died of exposure, but in a way that he would have settled for—in the line of duty, and with his friends and enemies all around, supporting him and shooting at him. It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.
White, E. B. (2014-02-18). Writings from The New Yorker 1925-1976 (Kindle Locations 3082-3089). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Springtime in the heyday of the Model T was a delirious season. Owning a car was still a major excitement, roads were still wonderful and bad. The Fords were obviously conceived in madness: any car which was capable of going from forward into reverse without any perceptible mechanical hiatus was bound to be a mighty challenging thing to the human imagination. Boys used to veer them off the highway into a level pasture and run wild with them, as though they were cutting up with a girl. Most everybody used the reverse pedal quite as much as the regular foot brake — it distributed the wear over the bands and wore them all down evenly. That was the big trick, to wear all the bands down evenly, so that the final chattering would be total and the whole unit scream for renewal.
The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you drew up to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would be bright enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary since. I suppose it’s time to say good-bye. Farewell, my lovely!
White, E. B. (2014-02-25). Essays of E. B. White (Kindle Locations 2977-2984). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Some Additional Reading Worth Your Time
As I get started into the rhythm of regular entries, I recommend to anyone reading along the following blogs, which I find not only enlightening and well written, but also informative:
http://www.theatlantic.com/james-fallows/
(James Fallows is a longtime China/far east observer whose recent postings have included stories of rebirth and renewal in communities across the United States)
http://annekaneko.blogspot.com/
(The blogger lives close to Fukushima and presents an interesting counterpoint to the official news regarding the "cleanup" being undertaken at the site of the nuclear reactors affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami)
In a vein not so heavily emphasizing current news, the following are worth checking in on a semi-regular basis for either sheer entertainment, imagination or if the latest news prove too discouraging or aggravating:
http://www.improvisedlife.com/
http://www.brainpickings.org/
http://www.theatlantic.com/james-fallows/
(James Fallows is a longtime China/far east observer whose recent postings have included stories of rebirth and renewal in communities across the United States)
http://annekaneko.blogspot.com/
(The blogger lives close to Fukushima and presents an interesting counterpoint to the official news regarding the "cleanup" being undertaken at the site of the nuclear reactors affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami)
In a vein not so heavily emphasizing current news, the following are worth checking in on a semi-regular basis for either sheer entertainment, imagination or if the latest news prove too discouraging or aggravating:
http://www.improvisedlife.com/
http://www.brainpickings.org/
Dismay, Sadness and Disgust
When I had heard that American intelligence officials were unofficially downplaying the chances of a Russian intervention in Ukraine (specifically the Crimea) several days ago...a point also advanced on the front page of the Council on Foreign Affairs website as recently as this morning, I had that sinking feeling that once again the West (in particular the US and EU) is going to find themselves on the outside looking in as an opposing force (Russia in this case; in the past, China, Syria, Al Qaeda, Taliban) gains the upper hand through unilateral force that may have been forbidden under international treaty but then who's to stop them? Can this be the tipping point that throws the world into another version of the cold war that led to so much economic ruin and worldwide paranoia?
In this situation, I find less fault with this country than I do the EU or NATO, whose own self interests once again made it possible for someone like Russia to claim justified action under the excuse of nationalism or terrorism. The US cannot and should not have to be the one defining force opposing this kind of naked aggression everywhere, particularly in the EU's backyard or worse yet, southeastern border.
Adding to this sense of dread has been the total lack of updated news anywhere...blogs or tweets from correspondents for the New York Times and BBC are about it...nothing of substance on CNN or even NPR. To be sure, it is a weekend and most sources are filled with either sports or escapism, but it should not have to be so difficult to find current information on such an important topic as this.
Then I came across an article on NPR that struck closer to home:
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/01/284178406/a-picket-line-at-the-oscars-visual-effects-artists-to-protest
My son works in LA and has had to contend with this issue firsthand. The attitude of the studios is understandable but despicable: in order to maximize profits, one goes where the most tax breaks are; and if you have to uproot people to do so or fire them, oh well....We're not talking about exorbitant compensation here: people with first class education credentials are paid little or nothing, with no benefits or job security. That kind of attitude is pervasive throughout many professions but is most apparent whenever the arts are involved...fortunately, at least some fields have union organization/protection (musicians, stage crews, actors), but that was accomplished during recent history when the very concept of unionizing wasn't as viewed with as much derision as it is now. I truly doubt if the general public will ever care very much about restoring a sense of balance to a genre where multi-BILLION dollar ventures are dependent on technicians being collectively paid a fraction of what ONE star or secondary personality receives, but at least it's worth a try.
In this situation, I find less fault with this country than I do the EU or NATO, whose own self interests once again made it possible for someone like Russia to claim justified action under the excuse of nationalism or terrorism. The US cannot and should not have to be the one defining force opposing this kind of naked aggression everywhere, particularly in the EU's backyard or worse yet, southeastern border.
Adding to this sense of dread has been the total lack of updated news anywhere...blogs or tweets from correspondents for the New York Times and BBC are about it...nothing of substance on CNN or even NPR. To be sure, it is a weekend and most sources are filled with either sports or escapism, but it should not have to be so difficult to find current information on such an important topic as this.
Then I came across an article on NPR that struck closer to home:
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/01/284178406/a-picket-line-at-the-oscars-visual-effects-artists-to-protest
My son works in LA and has had to contend with this issue firsthand. The attitude of the studios is understandable but despicable: in order to maximize profits, one goes where the most tax breaks are; and if you have to uproot people to do so or fire them, oh well....We're not talking about exorbitant compensation here: people with first class education credentials are paid little or nothing, with no benefits or job security. That kind of attitude is pervasive throughout many professions but is most apparent whenever the arts are involved...fortunately, at least some fields have union organization/protection (musicians, stage crews, actors), but that was accomplished during recent history when the very concept of unionizing wasn't as viewed with as much derision as it is now. I truly doubt if the general public will ever care very much about restoring a sense of balance to a genre where multi-BILLION dollar ventures are dependent on technicians being collectively paid a fraction of what ONE star or secondary personality receives, but at least it's worth a try.
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