Diss Me, Baby!: September 2008 Archives

The U.S. Congress is working "to finalize the language of an agreement," reports the NYTimes this morning, concerning "the bailout" of what has been called "the financial crisis" and/or "the economic crisis" in the United States.

Overthinkingit.com imagines "put[ting] Bruce Wayne in charge of the SEC." Surrealism of The Dark Knight aside (compliance or complicity?), critique and background information (listen to Jim Crotty's interview) has been issuing from my University for weeks. I admitted to a friend,

"I don't know enough about macro-economics to argue [against the opinion that the bailout is the only option], and certainly have no idea regarding the other consequences (intended and not) that will rain down upon us little people if they do not bail out the banks, but letting people keep their homes seems good to me. Let the major players take the hit and figure out new, better rules."

Perhaps a naive stance, but I want to bridge the harder science of physics with this soft science of economics. I missed most of last Friday's live broadcast from CERN about the next operational steps for the Large Hadron Collider. When I did tune in, one of the scientists was responding to a concern that iron might bend against the steel floor (or some such) because certain experimental results differed from simulated results in an earlier test.

The point the responding scientist emphasized, was that the data is the information, not the simulation: "We won't fit the data to the simulation," he said (quoted from memory), "We will believe the data, as we always should." Someone else argued: "We must do a risk versus benefit analysis for every intervention we imagine we want to make.... according to the Alara Principle - you must do it now" (in this case, install a pre-shower). The question CERN scientists are debating is:

The CERN debate regards when to determine priorities - now, or after some weeks of data has been secured? In another email, I wrote:

I believe [the critique emerging from my University and others] engage[s] the matter of the government tending to bail out the large investors and major institutions (even if the premises for their business are shaky - such as financing purchases that people cannot afford) instead of, or without also bailing out the individuals who suffer the most direct and dire consequences.
I do not want a debate between conservatives (keep traditional, established systems in place) and progressives (change everything), rather, I'd like to figure out ways to change our basis of comparison to long-term sustainability with evidence of gradual improvement for everyone: this is my understanding of U.S. banking policy after the Great Depression, and especially after WWII. Indeed - up through the 1960s, ALL social classes improved their status. Of course markets are more complicated now, but that is just an excuse for a lack of creativity and policy innovation.

Of course, it always matters which data one chooses to pay attention to, and there is always information left out. So illustrates another article in today's NYTimes, describing the participation of Goldman Sachs in negotiations to save American International Group. Gretchen Morgenson explains that the housing collapse is often cited - i.e., framed - as the "cause" of the problem, but argues that A.I.G. is a better exemplar, much closer to - and indicative of - the root of the problem:

the virus exploded from a freewheeling little 377-person unit in London, and flourished in a climate of opulent pay, lax oversight and blind faith in financial risk models.

I am astonished at how easy it has been for the housing market as symptom to become the scapegoat for the problem.

"We have to commit [the bailout agreement] to paper so we can formally agree," Nancy Pelosi is quoted in the NYTimes headline story quoted above. The language is the crux of the matter.

The BBC's Newsnight reported (introduced with a dramatic actionflick score) on Friday's imminent challenge to the U.S. Congress about dealing with the U.S. economy. This clip was shared with my academic department (Communication) with this intro:

"If you are interested in English humor, BBC-interview techniques and reporting, and want to learn a thing or two about the current 'Wall Street' crisis, which you may have missed in the [U.S.] mainstream media, watch [it]."

I learned a thing or three about the dynamic forces at play: financial interests, political imperatives, the role of the presidential campaign debate as a factor in Congress' negotiations. Responses from Communication Department faculty included "Stephen Colbert's razor sharp take on the financial crisis," and a multilayered observation comparing British and U.S. modes of humor and reporting.

In addition to Colbert's labeling of the (apparent) need for the U.S. to decide "in a panic" the largest financial overhaul in our lifetimes, is that while the BBC may have more of a history of engaging "troubling questions," such difficult questions "are [being] posed of those proposing the bailout, questions that used to be hard to pose here [in the U.S.]. Now, though," explains another faculty member, "they're surfacing, e.g. on Rachel Maddow (weeknights, MSNBC, also mainstream)."

Maddow's metaphor of kids in a candy store is excellent. Robert Reich also weighs in on the sugar high. Addiction. That is what this behavior reminds me of - junkies who will do anything in order to score the next hit. Addicts need treatment, and toxic substances (such as those emitting radiation) need careful, deliberate, and open handling. We need to weigh the financial and economic priorities at stake - those in potential as well as those at risk.

Walking the chilly streets of Antwerp this morning, I did not feel alone. Sure, my friends went bowling without me (such nerve!), but they teased me about it - which is almost as good as being there. :-)

While some of those pals (you'll have to guess which ones), may have still been roaring (like Fran, the Trader from Haven), "Who wants another drink? I mean, besides me?" I was waiting in line . . .

No, not for a rock concert, but to make an appointment (three weeks out!) to register my guest residency for the next nine months. The other day, Houda and Quetzal set me up for the Logic Test that would determine my placement for Dutch language lessons, with a delay of less than twenty-four hours! Quite efficient, those two. :-)

I'm here during the elephant parade, which works for me (better than the cows that swept the artworld a few years back). I fancy myself a bit like Lathan Devers (who goes underground for The Foundation as a captive of The Empire), or Ambassador Spock, when he went underground to try and make peace with the Romulans. Although I do not mean to suggest that I am in enemy territory (the battlelines, as it were, are hardly so clear-cut), I would say that I am here in "the smallness . . . and the individuality; a relic of personal initiative in a Galaxy of mass life" (p. 107). Of course, in quoting Asimov I will also take issue with some of the claims infusing his representations. For instance, "relic" is not appropriate (at least not yet - don't age me that quickly!). Asimov's "psychohistory" is premised upon statistics as the base measure of truth and certainty. Without engaging the essential battle of qualitative vs quantitative research methodologies, let's take his argument on its merit. Batya explains:

"The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more..." (p. 112)

Work backwards with me according to this logic - Asimov's mythical future involves quadrillions of human beings (maybe more, me and numerous zeros have little basis of understanding). Our relatively puny sample (current population of Earth) must be in some multiple of decimal points of a mere one percent, yes? In short, hardly enough to extrapolate much further than a few decades ahead, if even that, and only in terms of hugely broad trends - such as economic spits and backfires and, probably, worsening evidence of climate change. (No wonder the immediate occupies most people's attention.) Again, I hope some of you with a better sense of scale will correct me if I'm way off here, but doesn't this put us (as a mass) somewhere near the level of a quantum particle? Remember I'm operating within Asimov's conjecture of the human conglomerate.

Which implies that the universe of possible futures is actually pretty wide open, eh?

Asimov would discount the machinations of individual efforts as "this wild threshing up of tiny ripples" (p. 96), however such ripples writ large compose the limits of such mathematical equations as he proposes may someday be possible. Just because we lack, as yet, the tools to turn our perceptions of these ripples into certain prediction, this hardly proves that the ripples, as such, are devoid of meaning or doomed to ineffectuality.

Most of what I sense, leaving Asimov for the moment, I am unable to articulate. For instance, there is a quality of sound - or lack therof - about this city that I cannot place. It must be in reference to the background noise of Amherst but what it is that is "missing" I cannot say. The cafes buzz (even if the vast majority lack internet, sigh), and music plays in most shops. There is a hum of traffic, too, although perhaps it is less consistent (no constant thrum of a major interstate nearby). The air is still - windy, yes (its bite precedes itself: a warning of fall and winter to come). Perhaps I project my own psychic state onto the environment, but the atmosphere gives a sense of suspension . . . as if there is action brewing, momentum building, some sweep of happenings either suppressed or swelling which will soon burst upon the scene.

Hmmm. A Seldon crisis? :-) Of course not, we've not reached the mass eligible for that kind of mapping. Perhaps, however, a problematic moment, or a confluence of them - crises on small enough scales to be permeable to group relations theory, predictable in terms of general knowledge concerning group dynamics, and thus indicative of "a new turning" (p. 112), as crisis directs us on.

Phillipe, our tour guide, said "Belgium is surrealistic" in reference to the language alliance of the German-speaking population in the east with the French-speakers of the south. Belgium, he explained, is "a small country with complicated problems." The majority language speakers of Dutch are the Flemish in the north. I will need to devote a single blog entry concerning what I have learned about these language dynamics to date - I think I have enough to sketch an outline of the main discourses. (We'll see!)

Meanwhile, I put most of my energy towards my new colleagues. What a fascinating lot! You may guess I gravitated toward Colin ("metaheuristics") and Jared ("neurogenesis") immediately. :-) Colin's description of metaheuristics as a huge simplified abstraction of simple rules applied to a population which then generates complex interactions put me immediately in mind of Asimov's "human conglomerate." Jared's work on bird brains led to a comment that there are now two known areas of the brain that produce new cells throughout life: the subverticular zone (responsible for smell) and a region above the hippocampus engaged with memory. What better start to this research project than optimization forces and new cells in the brain?

Bill, who is here to teach about the color line in American literature, said there is no other approach for addressing matters of race/ism than "to start with the present and proceed to the past." (I want to take his class!) He really got me excited later, inquiring about this blog (!), when he described the inevitability of a diurnal narrative structure emerging with and without the writer's conscious intentions. Yes! Indeed this is what I have grasped (over five long years and a lot of nudging from friends to present my thinking in a more organized fashion) and - hopefully - put into deliberate motion with the three new categories linkable from the cutesy flash animation (above). How much force/creation can be generated is a function of participation/response (so it seems to me). I am in agreement with Bill that one can only begin with the present. I am hopeful the past can help us learn how to make choices toward more preferred futures (presuming some agreement can be forged on a vision).

Vanja and I compared notes concerning our respective "Institutional Review Boards" processes in order to receive authorization for "human subjects research." I received varying advice on approaching the Members of the European Parliament. One person is convinced response rates will be low. :-/ Jen suggested I follow 'chains' of connections by developing each contact slowly and deliberately. Meanwhile, I'm still hoping to find people to translate a few more of the initial invitations so that I can approach MEPs in their official national language. It's just a hunch (as is most of this action research project), but I'm thinking I might up the percentage of interest just a nib by making this gesture. We'll see!

Zac "The Architect", Cathleen, and Kathy "The Medievalist" had an interesting conversation about the differences between studying the work of live persons (or those who lived recently enough that people who knew them in person are still alive) and studying those long dead. Is it really true that one can define clearer boundaries about a past subject than about a more current one? I'm not sure. I do know that I'm grappling with the liveliness of my own subject , its "superfluidity" to use Zac's term, and have struggled to impose a boundary of location and membership (the European Parliament and its current Members), as well as to define the locus of study on MEPs discourses concerning the choices they make in terms of which language to speak, when and why, and how the attitudes revealed or exposed by these discourses establish a certain frame of reference in relation to interpretation. What is/are those frames, and how do they establish behavioral rituals that instruct (by example), thus limiting and enabling potentials of communication across cultural/linguistic differences?

Cathy's artist of study, Marcel Broodthaers, kinda seems like a guy right up my alley (not necessarily an ally - so many people read my business card mistakenly! I guess ally is either not much in favor or largely unused.) He is famous among Belgians for his mussel pottery. Cathy described how some of his work "pretends to teach" and that he interspersed text in his work in an anti-modernist way . . . there was something she said about his use of space that I'd like to understand better. Later, on the tour, Phillipe explained that symmetry in buildings was a feature to emerge during the Renaissance in the 16th century. It had never occurred to me before that symmetry was not always a desirable geometry, or at least a frame of reference anchoring artistic deviations!

We're all waiting to witness Alyssa in action, meanwhile I was reminded of the incredible cello performance I saw in Northampton some years ago - dang, can't find a blogpost about it! - when they surrounded us with forty or more cellos and played deep and low like whale song. Still gives me shivers! Finally, Caitlin has also carved out a language-related project. I may even have a lead for her! :-)

When I got home yesterday evening, my host and I had a long conversation about the day and all its learnings, ending with a bit of collaborative poetry: