This is one of several reasons to worry that the US has really overreached in the situation with Russia.
From this exercise we have learned that sanctions are a far weaker economic weapon against Russia than interventions in energy markets. It could even be argued that Russia did not need access to their foreign exchange reserves this time around thanks to the impact the invasion and the sanctions had on oil prices. If history does judge the seizure of Russian foreign exchange reserves as a largely fruitless exercise, it will be a cruel irony because, as we shall see, the act of seizing these reserves could have long-term effects on American financial hegemony.
I used to get lost all the time. I’d ask for directions, look for landmarks, fold maps, carry a guidebook, and keep an atlas in the glove compartment. I never knew when the next train was coming. I waited around a lot.
I memorized phone numbers, jotted things down in notebooks, had conversations with taxi drivers, talked to random people at bars, wrote checks, went to the bank, and daydreamed. I was grossly inefficient and terribly bored. I rarely got what I wanted and, when I did, I had to wait at least 8-10 days for it to be delivered. I was not archived, nor was I searchable; things I said just disappeared forever.
I had no idea how many steps I’d walked or stairs I’d climbed. My desk’s height did not adjust; I just sat in a chair and took it. I tolerated unstapled stomachs, breasts which subjugated themselves to gravity, and butts that were incapable of functioning as shelves. I had no influence and never disrupted anything. Strangers did not wish me a happy birthday or “Like” me. My personal brand was invisible.
I feel very seen here, although I have the good fortune of not needing to be nocturnal to make it happen (that’s a strategy I’ve used before, though).
But in trying to draw connections between people and cultures—to describe what we all share, despite our myriad differences—researchers may be papering over variation in even these most elemental traits. Some social needs are probably universal up to a certain age; babies need connection to their caregivers, to have eye contact and touch and warmth. But for adults, needs may be less definitive. “I think there are some people so unusually low in that need that for them it basically doesn’t exist,” DeYoung, the University of Minnesota psychologist, told me. “We should take seriously the possibility that there are people who really don’t need social connection.” Psychologists may be missing those people altogether: If they remain in solitude—if they’re not even awake at the same hours as the rest of us—we might not notice they’re there.
Of note:
Herman, for instance, sees his wife when their schedules happen to overlap, but much of his time at home is spent by himself, watching sports on TV or exercising on his stationary bike while she sleeps. (She’s introverted too, he told me, and their marriage works well because they can function well independently.)
The suspension of a common rational standard of judgment to allow for the toleration of deception, abuse, violence, and hypocrisy—so long as it is committed on one’s own side of the culture war divide—conforms neatly to the definition of doublethink: “To know and not to know . . . to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.”8 This is, of course, one of the few remaining things that can bring the Left and the Right together in perfect harmony.
To many Americans, such comparisons will be nothing short of blasphemous. To imply that the political tribes are engaged in a mutually beneficial racket and to suggest that politics would be better served by reorganization around strictly material economic questions would be to deny or unduly trivialize what for them are the very real moral stakes involved. So long as issues are defined in such Manichaean terms, the thought of diverging in any way from the culture war paradigm is inevitably met with one of the following retorts: “So, do you support racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc.?” or, “Do you support critical race theory, vaccine tyranny, and the chemical castration of children?”
But, of course, a reflexive and reductive tribalism that precludes any prospect of programmatic change is the whole point. As dramatic material disparities increasingly separate and cordon off the country’s uppermost elites from everyone else, the ensuing discontent can only find expression in the inadequate symbolic vocabulary of the culture war, that is, through mostly aesthetic and performative gestures that have no power to move the levers of economic policy.
I find it frustratingly difficult to evaluate which claims economists make actually have empirical backing and which don’t. This certainly isn’t the first thing I’ve read that suggests that the field has a real problem with believing theory over facts.
For the workers who are curious why their wages have not increased in the past decade – while the incomes of some, such as footballers, have soared – the Bank of England’s website has a reassuring message: ‘There is a method to this madness: the economic theory of supply and demand’. The bank’s website provides an ‘idiot’s guide’ to the economy that explains how ‘Supply and demand is a bit like an economist’s version of the law of gravity. It decides how much everything costs: a cup of coffee, a house and even your salary.’
The US Federal Reserve Bank provides similar explainers for Americans who want to understand how their country’s wealth is created or allocated, including a colourful downloadable infographic that shows how higher prices create additional supplies of goods, and lower prices create additional demand. On its website, the International Monetary Fund notes that supply, demand and price are ‘magic words’ that make the economist’s ‘heart beat faster’.
For the economists in the neoclassical tradition, as most are, the world can be understood as a series of supply-and-demand curves – the X-shaped graphs that Alfred Marshall first made for his book Principles of Economics (1890) and that now litter almost every chapter of almost every economics textbook. Humans might be occasionally irrational but, en masse, orthodox economics says they respond to prices in a consistent and proportional way. People have what economists call ‘price elasticities’ that make their behaviour predictable and open to manipulation.
[…]This neoclassical perspective is widely, although not uniformly, accepted by world political leaders. It informs and underpins policies on taxation, spending, labour market regulation, health, the environment and more.
The problem, and a key reason why economic policy often fails, is that, while Isaac Newton’s law of gravity can predict behaviour at all times anywhere on this planet, these and other supposed economic laws often fail.
[I’m cleaning out my drafts folder and decided this one seemed worth publishing]
I’ve struggled for a long time with the question of when and whether it makes sense to try to buy a home. I don’t have any answers, but I found this essay pretty thought-provoking:
“People rarely realize that the desire to be a homeowner isn’t a purely natural desire, though we tend to think about it as inherent,” Heiman says. When we think about the McCarthy hearings, we often remember the Hollywood aspect—the glamorous stars persecuted for their supposed leftist leanings. But before McCarthy gave his famous anti-communist speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, the senator had focused much of his career on opposing public housing and protecting corporate interests. Since the post-World War II period, the government had been providing housing to veterans and their families. “They did an extraordinary job of building affordable housing on a mass scale during the war,” explains Heiman. In the 1940s, McCarthy and other right-wing politicians became concerned that the housing projects had gone too far—McCarthy even called public housing “breeding ground[s] for communists.” In the late 1940s, he sided with William Levitt (and other private manufacturers) in their fight against public housing projects. Levitt was promoting his cookie-cutter housing communities, which McCarthy believed were more in line with America’s capitalist economic structure and ideals. (“No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do,” Levitt once famously said.) As the Cold War wore on, this sentiment grew, particularly among members of the Republican Party. From 1950 onward, Heiman says, “homeownership was packaged and sold.”
Never afraid of a challenge, Facebook appears to have embarked on a campaign to convince the world to hate Apple, love targeted advertising, and believe the social network when it says it is doing it all out of a desire to defend small businesses.
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The point of contention is a feature coming to iPhones in the new year that will require developers to ask for permission before they can track what users do across apps.
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On Wednesday, the company held a press conference with two such businesses: a burger company in Charleston, South Carolina, and a coffee shop in San Francisco…Facebook was vague on how the specific change proposed by Apple would affect businesses like Wilsondebriano’s. The iPhone manufacturer is specifically seeking to make it harder for developers to track users across multiple apps without consent…
However, [FB advertising exec] Levy argued that the point was to defend all such advertising. “Folks should go study Apple policies, because this is about control of the entire internet,” he said. “This is about a long-term view that is about anti-personalised advertising, and we think is trying to take the world back 10 or 20 years.”
Well said, Levy! I for one am thrilled at the idea of adtech losing the past 10-20 years of slimy innovation.
Anger is the binding agent of every mob, from the scale of a few to the scale of a few billion. It feels good to be angry, and when we’re in it we don’t want to let it go. Our greatest defense against madness, then, would be calming down while on some powerful, primal level wanting the opposite. This is something small groups of men have struggled with for as long as we’ve existed, but it has not been until the last few years that a single fit of rage could almost instantly infect the planet. Social media has been an integral part of culture for a period of time that represents seconds of human existence, and we have already seen the emergence of globally-destabilizing conflict because of it. Conflicts of this kind will continue to emerge, and there is no reason to believe we’ve seen the most destructive of them. For the first time in history, we actually have to find a way to manage our impulse toward meme-induced hysteria. At its simplest, a little mental hygiene might be helpful. The notion we all suffer from confirmation bias needs to be normalized, and discussed. When relaying some emotionally-charged story, it is worth relaying first how this kind of story makes you feel in general, and the sort of things you might be missing. Admittedly, in the fever of rage, this will be incredibly difficult. But what about the other end? When receiving a piece of information that evokes anger, could one reflect on the bias of a source, be it a journalist or a friend? Who is the bearer of this bad news, and what are their values? If you had to guess, how would you think they wanted this piece of information to make you feel? Angry? To what end? Getting comfortable with being wrong would also help, as would expecting people around us to be wrong. This, by the way, is something that happens more than it doesn’t. People are constantly wrong. Stories are constantly corrected. That we are not yet skeptical of every new piece of information we receive, with so much evidence all around us now that misinformation is not the exception but the rule, is indication that skepticism of this kind is simply not something we are meaningfully capable of on our own. But might there be some solution in technology?
It would be helpful to know when we’re spending an unusual amount of time focused on a topic. Is this a new interest, or is it an obsession? More importantly, how many other people are focused on the topic? Is that number growing? How fast? I’m not sure what a fire drill for global madness looks like, but an alarm alone — just the knowledge we may be in the middle of a mass hysteria — is something Google could build in a week, and it would have tremendous benefit. The early-stage introduction of a counter-narrative to rapid social sharing would introduce doubt, and that would encourage self-reflection. This would blunt the spread of any possible madness and invite closer examination of the meme from anyone still sober enough to think it over critically. I can’t imagine anything more frustrating while overcome with meme-induced hysteria than a pop-up warning that I might not be thinking clearly. But of course this is precisely when I’d most need the warning. A tool like this would undoubtedly produce all manner of embarrassing false positives. But a goofy, minor irritation is a small price to pay for averting cataclysm. We need to name these concepts, we need to talk about them, and we need to make the act of calming down a cherished cultural institution. We also need to do it now.
