Daily Office:
Tuesday 7 September 2010
¶ Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich welcomes us “the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans,” and explains why we can no longer count on consumers to spend the economy out of its rut. Not to mention the inequity of our growing income disparity.
Here’s the point. Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth — and that’s good for everyone.
The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving. That’s the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we’ll be stuck in the Great Recession.
¶ One of the things we love about Felix Salmon is his sense — rare for a financial writer — that money isn’t everything. Sometimes, in fact, it’s completely irrelevant, as here: “It’s a bad idea to regulate the art market.”
The last thing we need is some kind of formal ratification — by an agency of the Federal Reserve, no less — that art is a financial asset. The art market is broken, we all know that — but so long as everybody knows that the market is broken, there’s a limit to how aggrieved they can reasonably become if they go in with the idea of art being some kind of investment, and end up losing money.
The problem with any kind of regulatory framework for art dealers or even for art funds is that it gives them a veneer of legitimacy which they would then use to woo a huge new class of art buyers. The art market is minuscule in relation to more legitimate alternative investment classes, and even a small amount of “asset allocation†out of say old-school hedge funds and into art would create a lot of unnecessary disruption in the art market, mainly benefitting today’s dealers.
It’s much easier if we all just accept that the game is rigged against us, and that the only reason to buy art is to enjoy it. You can’t be ripped off if you’re paying for your own subjective enjoyment of an artwork. If by contrast you want to buy something which you’ll be able to sell at a profit in the future, you shouldn’t be in the art market at all.
¶ Meanwhile, Philip Greenspun has a “Good book for discouraging independent filmmakers.”
Martin provides some useful advice for people who cannot be talked out of a career in independent film, e.g., try to use available light since it means that you can work twice as fast and not pay everyone to stand around while lights are moved. Mostly, however, he provides sobering tales of the difficulties of getting a film produced and seen legally. A chapter is devoted to obtaining music rights, e.g., if an actor absent-mindedly hums a tune while the camera is rolling, the segment must be thrown out or the rights to the tune secured, possibly costing more than $100,000. Your kid can forget being an independent screenwriter; the on-staff Hollywood studio folks will simply steal the ideas since they know they’ll need to go through some rewrites anyway.
¶ Joshua Brown’s “outliers,” at The Reformed Broker. “I define an outlier as an event that is unlikely but possible.” We have no idea which is the likeliest (or the unlikeliest), but we can’t help thinking that Item Nº 4 would clear the air.
4. Ballmer is Audi 5000: He’ll go out like a lamb before this becomes a shareholder revolt thing. The truth is, he had everything to lose, inheriting the reins when he did with Microsoft ($MSFT) at the very pinnacle of its power. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg inherited New York City after Rudy Guiliani had ushered in the Big Apple’s Platinum Age and somehow Bloomberg managed to actually improve things. Ballmer didn’t. He’s never been in touch with the kids, doesn’t have a particularly impressive vision, is not possessed of much imagination and he’s not a consumer tech guy. The anti-Steve Jobs will resign and the board will find a consumer-oriented CEO to replace him. Bill Gates will not be looking to pull a Michael Dell and return to “save the company”; I think he likes his story exactly the way it reads now.
¶ At The American Prospect, Chris Mooney reviews a book about industrial polution in the bad old days before the Environmental Protection Act. Guess what? The EPA didn’t put an end to the good old “spill, study, and stall.” Beyond that depressing reflection, Mr Mooney has a very good idea about putting a stop to tendentious, bogus “science.”
There’s no doubt from this saga that we still need strong government regulation: 100 years of experience shows that companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. But we can go further. We probably also need more explicit sanctions to prevent science from being cynically used to stall public policy — the research equivalent of filing frivolous motions in a courtroom. The prostitution of science is much too easy. It happens far too often. And at this point, the evidence is overwhelming that it’s a systematic strategy that industry will continue to employ unless there are penalties to be paid.
¶ Say that you live in London town, and pay a visit to New York City. How do you compare and contrast these immense and amazing metropolises? Our minds may boggle, but James Ward knows what counts. Which city sells the better souvenir pens? Here is the third wing of his tripartite analysis (which Gotham wins).
SCULPTURAL
The sculptural pen is defined by the inclusion of a local landmark or figure recreated in molded plastic perched on top of the pen. Ideally, it helps if the chosen landmark is quite linear in form so as to continue the line of the pen. For this reason, towers and statues are ideal. Beaches or lakes are not really suitable.
New York, of course, has the perfect sculptural pen icon in the form of the Statue of Liberty. It’s almost as if it had been DESIGNED to appear on the top of a souvenir pen (it wasn’t – the injection molding process used to produce the pens hadn’t been invented in 1886 when the statue was presented to America by the people of France). However, there is one flaw in the design of the Statue of Liberty which impacts on its suitability for this type of pen: the torch. When cheaply produced in plastic, the upraised arm can be fragile. In fact, I bought two Statue of Liberty pens during my trip. The flame of the torch snapped off one. The poor lady’s hand snapped off the other.
London doesn’t really have anything like the Statue of Liberty which sits as well on the top of a pen. There’s Big Ben of course, but that looks a bit odd separated from the Houses of Parliament. Nelson’s Column isn’t iconic enough. The London Eye is too round. Tower Bridge is too wide. The Angus Steakhouse on Shaftesbury Avenue apparently isn’t important enough to justify a pen.
Instead, London is forced to rely on its more mundane features for sculptural pens – red telephone boxes (the sort which don’t really exist anymore) and policeman’s helmets. It is a sad state of affairs when, as a country, the best thing we have to celebrate in pen form is a phone box and a tall hat.
¶ At The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss looks into the labor movement in China — and the help that it’s getting from Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union. (via  Marginal Revolution) Â
That’s why Andy Stern’s efforts in China, despite the criticism, seem so valuable. “I get in trouble on Glenn Beck saying, ‘Workers of the world unite!’ It’s not just a slogan,” Stern says. It’s critical, he adds, for US and Chinese workers to see each other as allies, and he argues that efforts such as his can help shift the ACFTU in a direction that will make it much more representative of its hundreds of millions of members. “There’s a big evolution going on,” says Stern. “And to me, the question is, Where does the union end up, not where it started.” Like Crothall, Stern emphasizes that it isn’t just workers who want the ACFTU to change the way it operates. “The government is pushing them to transform, too.”
[snip]
In the end, however, there is probably very little that the United States can do to change China’s trajectory. Few, if any, of the economic measures suggested to force China to make changes are likely to work, at least not without backfiring and causing massive dislocation in the United States as well. “Any attempt to get tough with the Chinese would also bite us in the ass,” says Left Business Observer‘s Henwood. If a trade war begins to develop, China can, among other things, wield its vast holdings of dollars and US Treasury bills as a weapon and can look elsewhere for imports that it now buys from the United States. Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch says the United States ought to place democratization and human rights far higher on its agenda, even in meetings on other topics, without fear that China will be insulted: “There are all sorts of ways of saying it in meetings between the two countries without it being a giant Fuck you! in the middle of the meeting.” So far, President Obama seems to have sidetracked human rights.
The United States may have little choice but to get used to the fact that China is coming into its own. If that’s the case, though, we may be able to use the Chinese challenge to make sweeping changes in the way America does business at home. “It isn’t just China’s rise, which is tectonic, but it’s our own financial, political and cultural collapse that is cause for even more consternation,” says Orville Schell. “We need to find ways to accommodate China, and to influence it. And it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will be easy, or even peaceable.”
¶ A much-discussed book of the moment — a sort of indie Freedom, if you will —is Tom McCarthy’s C. Zachary Adam Cohen’s enthusiastic review, at Slant, bears out our conviction that a favorable review is the most informative kind. We can tell from Mr Cohen’s commentary that C is not for us. Â
The concluding section of the novel takes place in Egypt as the British deal with the loss of their colony, indeed their whole empire. And yet Serge is sent as a kind of spy to determine the best location for communication masts to be erected so as to ensure the uninterrupted communication of an empire on the wane. It’s the protuberance of communication lines that mirrors the recession of an empire.
Words, letters, symbols, images, motifs. These constitute the essence of McCarthy’s novel, and as he has chosen to set this novel amid the turn of the century, Serge’s life parallels the birth and development of wireless communications. McCarthy must have known this theme would resonate with today’s audience, beset as we are from all angles by instant, real-time communication technology. We must know that many of our messages simply get lost in the ether. One gets the sense reading C that McCarthy wanted to illustrate how even the most scientific and reasonable of pursuits contains elements that defy our understanding. There is, even in the most progressive of technologies, magic at hand. And this magic is buried deep within the novel, often so full and thick of thematic sorcery, that it threatens to overwhelm the reader.
¶ We kid you not: the New York City Department of Sanitation has its own resident sociologist, Robin Nagle. (No, we didn’t know, either.) The Believer’s Alex Carp talks with Ms Nagle about the highs and lows of garbage collection. (The highs involve the cognitive issue of “invisibilization.”)
BLVR: You’ve also written about how sanitation workers commented on how they get to know a block’s trash on their route over time, down to the specific households. I was wondering if this was at all surprising, or useful, for you in regard to your training in anthropology and social science, which aim to coax out subtle information but in very different ways.
RN: It’s just archaeology. But it’s archaeology in the moment, very temporary, nothing formal. It’s a folk archaeology of contemporary household trash on the curb.
It takes time, because you don’t get a steady route, necessarily, until you have some seniority. But senior men and women who’ve been on the job for a while, who’ve had the same route for a long time, they know. I’ve heard stories of a guy who watched a family: watched a couple marry, move into this building where he picked up, and they had a child. The child came to know him. He watched her grow up. He watched her go to college. He watched her have children of her own. And they became buddies over time. And then when he retired, she was heartbroken. It was a nice little vignette.
We assume when we put our garbage in the bag—especially if, you know, it’s a black bag, usually, or a green bag, we can’t see what’s inside. We don’t want people to see what’s inside. How embarrassing! But those bags break. Or it’s just in a bin and then it’s tipped and all the contents spill. And sure, you can read it. Over time, if you’re doing that same set of blocks for ten years, you will be able to give a pretty savvy account of what’s happened there across that decade.
¶ Rough Seas; Major Unseaworthiness. Have a drink. (Joe.My.God)Â
¶ Casa Kike. (BLDGBLOG)