Month: October 2014

Is The American Political Novel Dead?

David Marcus ponders the question:

Since the 1960s, the political novel has gone abroad, into exile, journeying to those countries where politics is still a signifier for action. Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee, André Brink became its English-language masters. Even when American novelists picked up the intrigues of political commitment, they often exported their novels abroad. Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer had to go to the fictional Central American country of Boca Grande, Don DeLillo’s The Names to junta-controlled Greece. Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate set its apocalyptic conspiracies in Jerusalem and Gaza and perhaps one of our finest political novels, Norman Rush’s Mortals, explored the desolation of political action in the dry, desert veld of Botswana. To be sure life is better, if perhaps more neurotic, on this side of a state of emergency and without the fear and upheaval, the violence and terror, of revolutionary politics. But how has it affected our political imaginations?

Keep Those Starry Eyes Peeled

Julian Baggini identifies a “highly contagious meme [that] is spreading around the world,” one that “takes serious ideas and turns them into play, packages big subjects into small parcels, and makes negativity the deadliest of sins.” The culprit? What he terms “Generation TED”:

To be progressive and radical once meant being sceptical and opposed to large corporations. For Generation TED, however, this is outdated thinking that leads only to cynicism and inertia. It’s time to grow up and accept that to do good things in a capitalist world you often need to tap the wealthy. In reality, this has always been true: think of Engels supporting Marx, or Beatrice and Sidney Webb funding Fabian Socialism with inherited wealth.

The rejection of cynicism, however, sometimes looks less like realism and more like naive, starry-eyed optimism.

In its mission statement, TED says: ‘We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world.’ It goes without saying that this change is supposed to be for the better. Viewers get to choose which adjective best describes the video they’ve watched: beautiful, courageous, funny, informative, ingenious, inspiring, fascinating, jaw-dropping, or persuasive. ‘Bullshit’ and ‘misleading’ are not on the list. Generation TED believes that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all.

He continues, “Generation TED does lack sufficient scepticism”:

Truly great ideas are sculpted with the chisel of critical thought, not created fully formed by spontaneous genius and good intent. We don’t need to wallow with postmodern irony in the contradictions and paradoxes of the modern world but nor should we ignore them. There are signs that Generation TED is learning this lesson. TED, for example, has added an asterisk to its strapline ‘Ideas worth spreading’, which leads to a series of wry footnotes including ‘and challenging’. It is as though even TED has realised that undiluted positivity is not enough and that critical, sceptical voices are needed too.

Previous Dish on TED skepticism here.

Those Regressive Scandinavians

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Cathie Jo Martin and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez note that countries with bigger welfare states tend to have less progressive taxation:

The reason Northern European countries with more regressive taxes achieve such high levels of labor market equality, despite less progressive tax systems, is that they spend money on increasing the skills and earning power of low-end wage earners.

Countries with the lowest levels of inequality have learned that policies to cultivate skills for all workers and to achieve full employment policies can accelerate economic growth while also reducing inequality. Large investments in human capital reduce societal conflicts over the distribution of resources, even while expanding the economic pie.

Countries like Denmark and Sweden also redistribute income, but this largely occurs through the funding of egalitarian social benefits — public health care, education — that also contribute to a productive, healthy workforce.  Whereas these countries raise most of their revenue in a relatively more regressive manner, they use this revenue to fund social benefits that improve both the living standards and productive capacities of lower-class residents. In contrast, countries with the most progressive tax systems, like the United States, tend to raise most of their revenue through levies on the wealthy and on capital, and end up investing little in job training and other social benefits that reduce inequality.

Quote For The Day

“There’s a reason so many writers once lived [in Manhattan], beyond the convenient laundromats and the take-out food, the libraries and cafés. We have always worked off the energy generated by this town, the money-making and tower-building as much as the street art and underground cultures. Now the energy is different: the underground has almost entirely disappeared. (You hope there are still young artists in Washington Heights, in the Barrio, or Stuyvesant Town, but how much longer can they hang on?) A twisted kind of energy radiates instead off the soulcycling mothers and marathon-running octogenarians, the entertainment lawyers glued to their iPhones and the moguls building five “individualized” condo townhouses where once there was a hospital.

It’s not a pretty energy, but it still runs what’s left of the show. I contribute to it. I ride a stationary bike like the rest of them. And then I despair when Shakespeare and Co. closes in favor of another Foot Locker. There’s no way to be in good faith on this island anymore. You have to crush so many things with your mind vise just to get through the day. Which seems to me another aspect of the ad outside of my window: willful intoxication. Or to put it more snappily: ‘You don’t have to be high to live here, but it helps,'” – Zadie Smith.

Face Of The Day

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D.L. Cade describes Elido Turco’s series Dream Creatures as “a study in mirrored tree bark images”:

Turco loves walking the mountain paths of his native Friuli with his wife, and for years he would use this time to try and find human forms and faces formed by the bark and roots of the trees in the forest. The catches, he admits, were few and far between until, one day, curiosity got the best of him and he decided to mirror an image on his computer. What he discovered was “a world of … fantastic creatures” the he had never realized existed. …

From the series’ description:

Silently, on tiptoe, within their universe I feel observed. A mutual understanding allows my presence in their world… an unreal world populated by entities created in the dense forests, in the shade of ancient trees and rocks.

Emblematic characters, grim, sinister, sweet, joyous… Each one with its own story to tell, so many stories and personalities engraved in the deep rough texture of their faces, expressions sometimes impenetrable.

See more of Turco’s work here.

Is Amazon A Monopoly?

Franklin Foer argues that the company is “the shining representative of a new golden age of monopoly that also includes Google and Walmart”:

We seem to believe that the Web is far too fluid to fall capture to monopoly. If a site starts to develop the lameness of an AltaVista or Myspace, consumers will unhesitatingly abandon it. But while that meritocratic theory might be true enough for a search engine or social media site, Amazon is different. It has a record of shredding young businesses, like Zappos and Diapers.com, just as they begin to pose a competitive challenge. It uses its riches to undercut opponents on price—Amazon was prepared to lose $100 million in three months in its quest to harm Diapers.com—then once it has exhausted the resources of its foes, it buys them and walks away even stronger. This big-footing necessitates a government response.

Yglesias counters that “having a lot of the market is not the same as having a monopoly”:

One important hint about Amazon’s non-monopoly status can be found in its quarterly financial reports. That’s where you find out about a company’s profits. In its most recent quarter, for example, Amazon lost $126 million. Losing money is pretty typical for Amazon, which is not really a profitable company. If you’d like to know more about that, I published 5,000 words on the subject in January. But suffice it to say that “low and often non-existent profits” and “monopoly” are not really concepts that go together.

Competitors hate Amazon because retail was an ultra-competitive low-margin game before Jeff Bezos ever came to town. To delve into this field and make it even more competitive and even lower-margin seems somewhere between unseemly and insane — but it’s the reverse of a monopoly.

While conceding that Amazon “does have something like a monopoly over the books market,” Annie Lowrey also fails to see how the term applies to the company overall:

Who is losing when Amazon is winning? Does the government really need to step in to protect Amazon’s rivals, provided that the market remains a market? Why is it wrong for Amazon to demand more and more from its suppliers? Is there any evidence that Amazon controls other markets like it controls the books market? All this is unclear.

She continues:

None of this is to say that Amazon should not face new regulations to force it to treat its workers better. None of this is to say that Amazon could not become a monopoly by pushing out or buying up more of its e-commerce rivals. None of this is to say that its harassment of Hachette is right or should be legal or should not face some serious pushback from the government and consumers. None of this is to say, either, that our legal framework should not view seemingly benign monopolies, like Google, with anything other than skepticism. But Amazon being a shitty, vicious competitor and Amazon being a monopoly are hardly the same thing.

Derek Thompson joins the “what monopoly?” chorus but acknowledges that Foer’s essay raises an interesting point that “there is something devilishly seductive to the conveniences of digital capitalism that makes life better for us as consumers and worse for us as workers”

Does buying diapers once from Amazon makes one morally complicit in the working conditions of its warehouse employees? What about subscribing to Amazon Prime? Having an Amazon credit card? These are harder questions, but they have nothing to do with Amazon’s mythical status as a monopolist. If the government thinks warehouse workers deserve higher wages and better conditions, we don’t have to go through the Justice Department’s anti-trust squad to improve their lot. We can just pass new laws. Don’t ask consumers to boycott a good deal.

Previous Dish on Amazon’s controversial business tactics here.

A Poem For Monday

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“Morning” by Ellen Bass:

after Gwendolyn Brooks

The morning of her death she
woke fierce, some dormant force revived,
insistent. For the last time
I sat my mother up, shifted the loose mass
of her body to lean against me. Her dried-up
legs dangled next to mine, triumphs
of will, all the mornings she forced
herself to spritz cheap perfume,
hoist each pendulum breast into
its halter, place the straps in the old
ruts. We were alone, petals
falling from bouquets crowded
around us. I pulled
some pillows behind me when I couldn’t
hold her any longer
and we rested there, the
body of my mother slumped
against my breast, the slow droop
of green stalks in their vases.
Her long-exhaled breaths
kept coming against her
resolve. And in the exquisite
pauses in between
I could feel her settle—
the way an infant
grows heavier and heavier
in your arms
as it falls asleep.

(From Like a Beggar. © 2014 by Ellen Bass. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Erin Stoodley)

A Terrorized Foreign Policy

Arguing that the Middle East is not nearly as important to US interests as we’re led to believe, Justin Logan deconstructs the notion that we focus so heavily on the region because of terrorism:

This explanation for why the Middle East supposedly matters is peculiar, in that the basic contours of U.S. policy in the region predate 9/11. It is tough to think that a concern that emerged after a policy began explains the policy. But there is no evidence that terrorism is a threat that warrants an effort to micromanage the Middle East. The chance of an American being killed by terrorism outside a war zone from 1970-2012 was roughly one in 4,000,000. By any conventional risk analysis, this is an extraordinarily low risk. Perhaps this is why, as early as 2002, smart risk analysts were asking questions about counterterrorism policy such as “How much should we be willing to pay for a small reduction in probabilities that are already extremely low?”

The amount we’re paying now to fight terrorism—roughly $100 billion per year—is simply crazy.

If someone ran a hedge fund assessing risk the way the U.S. government has responded to terrorism, it would not be long for the world. Indeed, it is difficult to identify how U.S. policy across the region—with the possible exception of some drone strikes and special operations raids—have reduced the extremely low probability of another major terrorist attack. If anything, our policies may have increased them.

But terrorism, as Shana Gadarian’s research confirms, drives Americans toward more hawkish policy positions, particularly when we see images of it on TV:

Political and media observers, particularly on the left, worry that media coverage of the Islamic State is terrifying Americans and persuading them to support foreign policies and candidates that they would otherwise not support. Political science suggests that their fears are warranted. My own research – conducted in the wake of 9/11 – provides strong evidence that both the amount and tone of media coverage of terrorism can significantly influence foreign policy attitudes. Americans who were already worried about future terrorism after 9/11, were more likely to support the use of military force abroad and increased spending on security at home after seeing news stories about terrorism with images like the World Trade Center on fire.