Month: December 2008

By Patrick Appel
The rich are trying to pass as middle-class:

Now many bankers, along with discovering $15 bottles of wine, are finding other ways to cut back—if not out of necessity, then from collective guilt and fear: the fitness trainer from three times a week to once a week; the haircut and highlights every eight weeks instead of every five. One prominent “hedgie” recently flew to China for business—but not on a private plane, as before. “Why should I pay $250,000 for a private plane,” he said to a friend, “when I can pay $20,000 to fly commercial first class?” The new thriftiness takes a bit of getting used to. “I was at the Food Emporium in Bedford [in Westchester County] yesterday, using my Food Emporium discount card,” recounts one Greenwich woman. “The well-dressed wife of a Wall Street guy was standing behind me. She asked me how to get one. Then she said, ‘Have you ever used coupons?’ I said, ‘Sure, maybe not lately, but sure.’ She said, ‘It’s all the rage now—where do you get them?’”

This sounds like a movie pitch. Newsweek has a nearly identical article:

Across America’s upper strata, rich folk like Hirtenstein are experiencing an unfamiliar emotion: luxury shame. The late Coco Chanel, doyenne of 20th century fashion, long ago said that luxury is "the opposite of vulgarity," not of poverty. But in these recessionary times, it seems vulgar to flaunt one’s luxurious lifestyle. And so the wealthy are going blingless and eschewing the spending sprees of the recent Gilded Age, giving new meaning to the phrase "embarrassment of riches."  The trend is horrible news for the $175-billion global luxury market, which is already absorbing the blows of plummeting personal wealth. Just in time for Christmas, this new "embarrassment of riches" is cutting into sales of high-end retailers and brands like Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, Bentley and BMW, Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Virginia Postrel had a good article on inconspicuous consumption among the rich a few months ago.

By Patrick Appel
Joshua Benton wonders:

One other important note from that internal New York Times memo my colleague Zach got a hold of: The company reports it has “more than 10,000 paid subscribers” to an electronic edition of the newspaper on Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader. To my knowledge (please correct me if I’m wrong), that’s the first time a major newspaper has released numbers on how it’s doing on Kindle — a platform lots of newspaper execs are eager to see turn into a saving grace for their industry.

Given that the electronic Times costs $13.99 a month, that would mean the NYT Kindle edition is generating in the neighborhood of $1.68 million a year. How much of that goes to NYT Co. and how much stays with Amazon is unclear.

by Chris Bodenner
NYU prof. Clay Shirky discusses the underappreciated impact of "Dear Mr. Obama," which he calls "the single most affecting video of the election":

I am an anti-Iraq-war Democrat, and it nevertheless brought tears to my eyes (and I don’t cry easy — will.i.am’s Yes We Can left me fairly cold.)
…
It was seen 13 million times in 3 months, which topped Obama Girl in absolute views, and I’ve got a Crush…on Obama was up a year and a half. … The video was largely circulated via homophilous forwarding along conservative channels. Despite the incredible viewership, I’m betting that the ratio of BoingBoing readers who have seen Obama Girl to those who’ve seen Dear Mr. Obama is at least 10:1. (When my students presented it to ~100 NYU students on election eve, something like 3 of them had seen it.)
…
Dear Mr. Obama was a trifecta. For the base, a muscular but polite attack on the very issue that brought Obama into the spotlight. For the undecided, the emotional charge is much likelier to sway them than argumentation. And for the Dems — nothing. The video might as well not have existed for all it was seen in Democratic circles. Since the video’s sole speaker can’t be criticized without making the criticizer look churlish at best, almost no Dems forwarded it, linked to it, talked about it. … Dear Mr. Obama was music to Republican ears while being inert in Democratic hands; expect it to be a template for 2010.

By Patrick Appel

Ross counters Henry Blodget:

[Blodget] runs through a typical housing bubble scenario – somebody buys a house late in the game and loses his shirt – and argues that almost everybody involved, from the homebuyer to the real-estate agent to the mortgage broker to the people on Wall Street and Washington who enabled the whole thing were making the same kind of mistakes, and indeed, were acting "just the way you would expect them to act under the circumstances." Now in a sense, this is convincing. But at a same time, our hypothetical homebuyer had very different responsibilities than a hypothetical Wall Street banker. His decision to buy at the height of the bubble put him at risk to lose, say, tens of thousands of dollars and perhaps the roof over his head. Those are high stakes, obviously, but they’re high stakes for him and for his family. Whereas the risky decisions being made the people running, say, Citibank had serious consequences for millions of people, in America and around the world. And this distinction ought to matter, both to how people should be expected to behave, and how they should be judged.

Yglesias wieghs in here.

By Patrick Appel

Photographer Filippo Minelli describes his work:

What I want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life… [on] the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies. It’s a kind of reminder, for people like me…, I’m an Apple user and also have social-network accounts, that the real world is deeply far from the idealization we have of it…

By Patrick Appel
From a study on happiness and social networks:

The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network. Happiness, in other words, is not merely a function of individual experience or individual choice but is also a property of groups of people.

(hat tip: Mind Hacks)

By Patrick Appel
Larison responds to Reihan’s thoughts on Iraq and Afghanistan:

Reihan is as smart and fair-minded a person as you can find among supporters of the war, and if I could imagine persuading anyone on the other side that the war was, in fact, an exercise in illegal aggression that did nothing to benefit American national security and served no vital U.S. interests that person would have to be Reihan. Right away, however, I am struck by a basic difficulty: how can a war opponent honestly call the war what he regards it to be while persuading a reasonable war supporter that he should no longer support it? Debates over the war have been as fruitless as they have been in part because the core assumptions and foreign policy visions of people on either side are so wildly divergent and contradictory that they are barely talking about the same thing.

This brings us to the larger question of persuadability–who is actually persuadable on a given question? I have started to have the creeping suspicion that persuadability in debate is very much like being an undecided voter: the less you know, and the less you have thought, about a particular topic, the more likely you are to be persuadable. This has much less to do with being reasonable, open-minded or willing to look at evidence; persuadability is probably closely linked to lack of knowledge, and the side in the debate that successfully fills that gap first wins. The longer you have been tied to a particular view, and the more time you have spent articulating reasons for holding it, the less persuadable you are going to be. Those who are persuadable are also likely to be the weakest in their newfound convictions, which they will drop just about as quickly as they adopted them.

It is true that there are war supporters who have since soured on the war or some that even flipped and became staunch opponents; war has radicalizing effects, and especially when things go awry it can cause dramatic shifts in the views of some people. Some who trusted the administration’s claims were burned when those claims were proven bogus. On the whole, however, very, very few have come into opposition because of antiwar arguments.

By Patrick Appel

Reihan unpacks what he means by a "strong national defense"

I will say that I’m struck by those who argue that those who adhere to the Bush-Obama policy of keeping the United States engaged in Iraq are the ones who want to “prolong” the conflict, as the shadow war between these two countries has been going on since at least 1990, if you include the devastating effect of sanctions and the low-level air war. There is real chance that the war might finally end, provided we extend security guarantees and help achieve a durable political settlement. And yes, I understand that my use of the “Bush-Obama policy” will raises hackles. It’s meant to — the gap at this point between AEI and the Center for a New American Security is small and shrinking, as the post-2006 shift in Iraq has forced informed observers to take a more pragmatic approach.

Oaxaca, Mexico, 8.15 am.

By Patrick Appel
A group of editors and book critics debate the significance of a settlement between Google and the Association of American Publishers, a deal which will allow Google to make searchable digital copies of millions of books that have gone out of print. Carlin Romano, literary critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is optimistic:

Both Google and authors emerge as winners. Google wins because, for a tiny $125 million settlement, it gets to set up another near-monopoly business, the selling of out-of-print books online, and take a 37 percent cut. Authors of out-of-print books win because they’ll get otherwise unobtainable revenue for online purchase of older books that normally would not produce any royalties.

The losers, aside from the would-be online competitors of Google, are sellers of used books, both companies and individuals. Google’s service will surely lessen demand for out-of-print books. But that doesn’t violate the philosophy behind copyright, because authors traditionally receive no remuneration for sale of used copies of their books.