Small defeats: Govier's short stories

     Katherine Govier. The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery (1994) The title story tells how professional photographer Sandro slides into doctoring photos, and eventually repents after a period of adding or removing people from group photos. A small defeat, but characteristic of the fates of Govier’s characters. It seems to me to be a Canadian characteristic, for Munro, Atwood, Garner, Mitchell etc all tell similar stories. Yet these defeats as often as not strengthen the characters. They have found their proper place in the scheme of things, and accepting that is a kind of victory.
     I enjoyed reading the book, but not enough to read it without interruptions. Worth a look if you find a copy. The title refers to Sandro’s shop, which he has named after the nearby church. **½

Econ 101: Why wage subsidies won’t bankrupt the country

A comment in response to the Financial Post’s worry about how much the wage subsidy program will cost. It was announced by Prime Minister Trudeau on 2020 03 30.

Since this is a wage subsidy program, most of the money will be used to pay for shelter, utilities, food, and transportation. Most of these dollars will generate sales tax revenue for  the Province (8% in Ontario) and/or the Federal government (5%) when spent.

But a dollar spent will be spent again. The consensus is that a dollar will be spent between five and seven times before all or part of it returns to the original spender. That means about 65 to 70% of the money will return to the governments.

In short, the wage subsidy will largely pay for itself. The question, “How much will the program cost?” misses the point.

Footnote: The Canadian government will provide wage subsidies of 75% on the first $59,400 of a person's wages. This will be available to all employers whose business has been impacted by covid-19. The Prime Minister also urged businesses to pay the additional 25%, and warned that any business trying to game the system will be dealt with. Many workers will eventually pay income tax on all or part of the wage subsidy.

Update 2020 03 31: My arithmetic is off, since food isn't taxed. So I estimate the payback in taxes at about 40 to 70%. However I haven't factored in the payback, financial and otherwise, of keeping the suppliers of food and transportation etc in business.

Nostalgia and history: Cartoons by Lancaster

Osbert Lancaster. The Penguin Osbert Lancaster. (1964) Lancaster was for many years an editorial cartoonist for the Daily Express. He had other sources of income, too. His charmingly accurate stereotypes of the upper middle and upper classes shows that he belonged to that social stratum.
     The cartoons are of course dated in their references to then current political and social issues, but his commentary is not. Rather more damage is done by foolishness, incompetence, and an uninformed desire to do good than by active malice. Thus, in a 1949 cartoon, one newspaper reader to another, “I may be underestimating slightly, but by my reckoning this makes the seventeenth ‘most important mission in history’ since 1945.”
     There’s also a section on the development of interior decorating, acutely observed. All in all, a nicely done dose of nostalgia and history. ****

"20th century functional" architecture, as seen by Lancaster. He was an expert historian of architectural fashion.

 

Econ 101: Supply chain fragility (another example of neo-liberal economic failure)

A letter I sent to the Atlantic Magazine a few minutes ago

Re: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/supply-chains-and-coronavirus/608329/

Lizzy O'Leary's piece is a welcome reminder of reality. But it doesn't go far enough. The cure is not to "diversify the supply chain", as implied towards the of her article. It's to change the mindset that maximizing profits is the aim of a business, or worse, that it's the aim of the economy.

It is that mindset that has pared down resilience. A resilient system has redundancies. Redundancies cost money. Removing them reduces the costs, and hence maximizes profits.

Business profitability is one, and only one, of the many numbers that describe the state of an economy. Believing that it is the purpose of the system to maximize that one number is obviously crazy. One might as well say that it is the purpose of eating to maximize the throughput of the digestive system.

Businesses exist to provide what we need and what we want. That is their social, and therefore their economic role. "Profit" is a signal that the business is fulfilling that role. That's all it is.

It's time to rescue the economy from the advice of economists who have a superstitious reverence for profitability.

Maigret takes the waters

     Georges Simenon. Maigret in Vichy (1968) Told by his friend and doctor to take the waters at Vichy, Maigret is enjoying a relaxed daily routine with his wife. On their regular walks, they see “the lady in lilac”, whose self-possession attracts Maigret’s attention. A few days on, she is murdered.
     The local inspector is a former colleague and protege of Maigret’s, so of course the great man is drawn into the investigation. It proceeds to its inevitable end through a series of interviews. That’s Simenon’s schtick: dialogue feels more immediate than narration, so we keep reading to find out where the new information will lead. As novels, these books are light weight, the characters are realised just enough to carry the story forward. As entertainments, they are first class. Simenon knows how to set the hook.
    

I enjoyed reading this confection, but it didn’t persuade me. We’ve watched a few episodes of Maigret played by Rowan Atkinson, which I find much more persuasive. Why is it that second rate books so often make first rate television? **½

Michael Richards didn't rant about being white

From an email exchange.

I was sent an email that included a rant supposedly by Michael Richards.
This was my response:

Oh dear, what a whinge!

And Michael Richards did not make these points, in court or anywhere else. See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/proud-to-be-white/ (1)

The reason there are "just Americans" is because white is the default standard. That's not in itself racist, but it does prompt racist logic, such as "My country is being taken away from me...".

Just as "male" is the default standard for "human", which among other things has caused subtle and not so subtle errors in diagnosis, medication trials, biological science, etc. E.g, it has  endangered/killed many women who were having heart attacks, because women typically don't have the same heart attack symptoms as men.

Just as college students have been the default "subjects" for psych and sociology studies simply because they were handy. But they are different from most people. For one thing, their brains are still immature.

Just as Western thinking/culture is the default standard for logic and common sense. Which is why Westerners are astonished when people elsewhere in the world think differently.

Actually, there are (still) Polish-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. Just not English-Americans. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (aka WASP) is the default standard for "just Americans".

Etc.

(1) Misrepresenting sources is a common extremist tactic. It's just one example of the extremist belief that any wrong-doing is justified if it's done "for the cause", whatever the cause may be. For example, it's how the Inquisition justified the torture and burning of "heretics". That included some of my Protestant ancestors. Of course, other ancestors happily justified murdering Catholics using the same logic.

Have a good day,

Update 2020-11-14: There's more than one Michael Richards the stand-up comic did make a racist rant. The Guardian carried a story about how it wrecked his career.

 

 

Economics: dismal, and less than a science

David Orrell. Economyths: 11 Ways Economics Gets It Wrong (2017) In this revised edition of his book, Orrell adds updates on each myth. Basically, the neo-classical economics establishment snarled back at him. It seems his book touched a nerve. Not surprising, since Orrell’s thesis is that neo-classical economics is so far out of touch with reality that it’s dangerously wrong.
     Some years ago, I read an online proof that a legislated minimum wage could not possibly work, since the law of supply and demand guaranteed that the lowest wages offered represented the actual value of the work performed by those workers. I wrote a note to the author suggesting that the analysis left out of account employers’ power to set wages at almost any level they wished, and that their greed would depress wages below what the work was worth. I got no answer. Presumably, I did not understand economics.
     Fact is, I read Milton Friedman many years ago, and I thought then what I think now: the man had no understanding of how real people behave. For it’s always been clear to me that economics is a branch of social psychology. The law of supply and demand is about psychology, it’s about the perception of scarcity and desirability. “Value” is about psychology: if the seller values a ware more than a buyer, he will ask a price the buyer is unwilling to pay. Hence haggling. And so on.
     And so on. Orrell has analysed the myths much better than I have, which makes his book very much worth reading. I found it at our local dollar store on the remaindered-books rack, a sad fate for such an important work.
     His most interesting notion is that money behaves like quantum particles, because it has a dual nature: it is both material (coins etc) and abstract (numbers). I don’t buy this, because I see no obvious way for that notion to account for inflation. It may well be that quantum math will provide better models of how money behaves as an element of the economy, but inflation is an effect of psychology. Ordinary inflation is a natural effect of people charging more than a good is worth in order to make a profit and/or to pay the interest on their debts. Runaway inflation occurs when people no longer believe that money represents values well enough to be used as a generic IOU. But those observations are merely the beginnings of an attempt to account for inflation, which is fundamentally crazy: It’s as if we needed more and more meter sticks to measure the distance from here to London.
     Still, I think this book is a necessary and useful primer in economics. By showing that the notion of “utility” is empty, or that economic decisions are irrational, or that the system is inherently unstable, etc, Orrell shows that neo-classic economic theory is empty. I’ll go further than he does: he shows that it’s a mess of superstitions, a pseudoscience like astrology. ****
    Update 2020-03-28: The single biggest failure of Friedmanite economic theory is its pricing of externals. It's zero. That means that prices will understate the relative costs of goods and services. This is most obvious in the costs of raw materials. Ignoring the cost of externals underprices mineral resources, and overprices organic resources. Thus we overuse concrete, and underuse wood.
     BTW, back in the 1970s I read an article by an accountant, who "proved" that the costs of replanting forests could never be recovered. That's when I began to suspect that "generally accepted accounting principles" are somewhat removed from reality. These accounting practices are of course based on Friedmanite assumptions about costs and how to account for them.
    Update 2020-04-14. "Generally accepted accounting principles" are also designed to minimise tax obligations. The accountant also has some choice in which principles to apply: They can make a bad year look good, and vice versa, depending on whether their client wants to attract investors or distract the taxman. As long as the principles used are spelled out, that's ethical.

Covid-19 and self-isolation after travel abroad

Good advice for  anyone anywhere returning home from  abroad. Keep yourself as safe as possible. We're all in this together.

Tororoto Star business writer catches up to reality

David Olive writing in the Toronto Star points out that oil is a dying business, an that it's past time for Alberta to diversify its economy.

I made the same points as Olive three years ago: https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2016/12/pipelines-and-alberta-economy.html

Social distancing and covid-19 (link)

Well-done aimation showing why social distancing matters:
https://youtu.be/dSQztKXR6k0

Five by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick. The Variable Man (1957) What’s there to say? Dick had probably the wildest and most accurate imagination of the golden age SF writers. He wanted to know the social and psychological effects of technology, and there are still too few writers (and others) who take that question seriously. Each tale in this anthology deals with issues that still trouble us. His technical imagination was limited, but his social and psychological imagination was not.
     The Variable Man: social control by algorithm, warfare between empires, the urge towards dictatorship, rivalries between government agencies.
     Second Variety: total war, autonomous weapons, artificial intelligence.
     The Minority Report: preventing crime by identifying criminal before they do the deed.
     Autofac: automated and autonomous production.
     A World of Talents: social competition and class struggle, symbolised by conflict between humans with psi talents and humans without.
     Dick’s vision is often bleak, but even in the bleakest stories the spark of resistance to tyranny glows, however dimly. ****

ETs want Earth!

    Groff Conklin. Invaders of Earth (1952) A nicely done collection of invader stories, with enough twists to satisfy even the reader of current speculative fiction. About the only thing none of the  authors attempt is a truly alien alien. Not surprising, since every example is pulp or popular magazine fiction, whose authors couldn’t afford to speculate too far outside of their putative readers’ boxes.
     I won’t summarise any of the stories. The Wikipedia article lists all 22 stories published in the original hard-cover edition. This Tempo Books edition, contains only 17. All first rate examples of their genre. A keeper, despite its age. Or maybe because of it. ***

Alan Bullock: Hitler

     Alan Bullock. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962) A re-read. See my first review  About the only things to add are, first, that Hitler suffered from Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
     In his Epilogue, Bullock points out that Hitler was a European, and that the malaise that he embodied was not unique to Germany. He writes Hitler’s idiom was German, but the thoughts and emotions to which he gave expression have a more universal currency. Quite so, and the rise of the far right, of ethnic nationalisms, of the paranoia triggered by the globalisation of our world, show that these thoughts and emotions are never far below the surface.
     Bullock ends his Epilogue with  [Hitler] was in revolt against ‘the System’ not just in Germany but in Europe, against the liberal-bourgeois order, symbolised for him in the Vienna which had once rejected him. To destroy this was his mission, the mission in which he never ceased to believe, and in this, the most deeply felt of his purposes, he did not fail. Europe may rise again, but the old Europe between the 1789, the year of the French Revolution, an 1939, the year of Hitler’s War, has gone forever – and the last figure in its history is Adolf Hitler, the architect of its ruin. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice – If you seek a monument, look around.
     The European Union is an attempt to refashion that liberal bourgeois polity. Brexit is an attempt to repudiate it. It’s ironic that the liberal democracy that refused to surrender to Hitler in 1942 is now the carrier of the same infection, and the one that came to England’s aid is sick with it.
     800 and some pages, and oddly enough a page-turner. Recommended. ***

Two Movies

I like movies, and sometimes watch one twice or even three times. Here's two we watched in March of this year.

    High Noon (1952) [D: Fred Zinneman. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly] This is one of the classics that holds up. If anything, it gets better every time I see it. Simple story of a sheriff who decides on his wedding day that he has to finish a job he started when he arrested a killer, who has been released, and is coming back for revenge. The one man who is willing to help pulls out when he finds out he’s the only one. The townsfolk back off from risking their lives, unwilling to accept that the killer and his cronies will destroy the town if they win. Cooper wins of course, and rides off with his bride, no doubt happy to leave the town to stew in its cowardice.
   The movie’s a fable, but it’s an unobtrusive one. The pace, the beautifully composed shots, the wonderful tonality of the black and white film, the use of natural sound, the haunting theme music, the conceit of making the movie exactly as long as the sheriff’s job, the desolation surrounding the town, the well-realised characters, all these combine to tell an astonishingly believable story. I’ve seen this movie at least three times that I can recall; I do not tire of it. ****

The movie is adapted from a short story The Tin Star. See my disussion of it at https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2014/08/john-cunningham-tin-star-colliers.html

   The American President (1995) [D: Rob Reiner. Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Michael J. Fox, Martin Sheen.] A love fantasy set in the White House, where widowed president Andrew Shepherd woos lobbyist Sidney Ellen Wade, while dealing with a reelection campaign. The plot is convoluted enough that a short summary is impossible, but the main line is clear enough: Boy meets girl, boy and girl have an affair, boy almost loses girl, boy and girl wed and live happily ever after. Well acted, competently paced and photographed, with just enough cliches bent off-kilter to provide freshness: we enjoyed this movie. Romantic love always gets me. I want to believe that everybody can be happy. The political games are well handled, too, and while they avoid getting too deep into the dirt and stay well away from the dark side, they feel true enough to make us believe the threats to Andrew and Sidney’s happiness, and how they resolve the ethical questions surrounding their relationship. **-½