How the oil cartel changed global trading (Paper Money, by Adam Smith, 1981)

Adam Smith. Paper Money. (1981) A discussion of the effects of the oil crisis of the early 1970s, when Saudi Arabia and nearby countries formed OPEC. This resulted in what Smith calls “the greatest transfer of wealth” in the history of Earth. Its effect on money was to devalue the dollar, which now has about 1/10th of its former value.

In 1980 or thereabouts the second round of inflation began. Central banks everywhere raised interest rates into the double digits. Ordinary folk like us faced mortgages offered at above 20%. We paid 23% on the line of credit we used to build our house. The bank manager asked his central office to approve a mortgage in the high teens. As that rate came down year-by-year, we maintained the high mortgage payment, and so paid it off in less than half the originally calculated time.

Smith has managed to turn his tale of accounting, interest rates, monetary policy and such into a page turner. That’s the effect of both the large number of stories about his interviews with bankers, economists, money market gurus etc, and of his style. He tells the story of his investigations, which reveals the story of the two huge rounds of inflation and the restructuring of the global banking system. He writes high journalism: Factually as accurate as he can make it, larded with analysis and theory, all conveyed as his personal experience and thinking.

A side effect of reading this book is a better understanding of why Trump’s tariffs (if sustained) will lead to another round of inflation, and probably another restructuring of the global banking system. Another effect is a clearer insight into international trade: Basically, it’s bartering, with the values of the goods in the contracts and account books denominated in US dollars. A possible (and based on Smith’s explanations IMO a likely) outcome of the tariffs will be the loss of the US dollar’s status as the global currency.

Highly recommended. ****

Footnote: As of this posting, Trump has rolled back tariffs on several types of food. It seems the tariffs have begun to bite, and the voters are unhappy.

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future

Mike Higgs, compiler. Dan Dare: Operation Saturn (1989). Originally Eagle V3-47, February 1953, to V5-31, May 1954.

Granny Morgan subscribed to the Eagle for us. The cover comic on every issue was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. He wore a very 1950-ish uniform, he had a batman who was loveable working-class clown, and he showed proper deference to his commanding officer, a grey-mustachioed figure of probity. His sidekicks were a Yank and a Frenchman, but of course Dan the Englishman was the leader of this multi-national space force. The space ships were technically impossible. The first trip was to Venus, home of two antagonistic tribes separated by a fiery equator. All very simplistic, but it satisfied our desire for space opera.

This story begins with “black cats”, robot ships that attack and destroy inner-planet space ships. Their origin is Saturn. An evil scientist-entrepreneur offers to help the space force on their mission. He is of course a traitor who will deliver Earth to the evil emperor who wants to rule the solar system. And so on. Dare and the oppressed races who inhabit Saturn’s moons win, of course, and the would-be emperor dissolves into glittery stuff, maybe gas or maybe dust.

Rereading this story, I see what I didn’t see at the time: the jingoistic assumption that Britain would rule the space-waves, that English daring would solve all problems, that the lesser races needed the leadership of Dare, that the other powers would happily cede leadership to Britain, etc. Eagle was founded by an Anglican clergyman who wanted to counter-act the influence of Beano and other English comics, and the increasing influence of American comics. Eagle was printed on slick paper, with lots of wholesome content, such as centre-spreads illustrating and describing interesting technical achievements. Dan Dare served as the hero-model that would raise a generation of wholesome and upright English boys to wholesome and upright English manhood, ready to take their wholesome and rightful places in the post-war utopia. Or something like that.

We collected our copies. Before we came to Canada, I cut out the centre-spreads dealing with railways. I kept them for years. When the Dan Dare comics were compiled into books, my brother subscribed. This one was an extra copy that he offered to me. I was glad to have it. Rereading it triggered nostalgic memories of 11 Broad Walk, Sunday walks with our uncle and the dog, and listening to radio comedy shows with Grandpa that Granny disapproved of. The Dan Dare story is a slap-dash creation; no publisher would waste ink on it nowadays. It could have been done more carefully, with more plausible physics, fully developed characters, and aliens that were more than funny coloured humans. As it is, it was a nostalgia trip for me. **

Starlight (Bester, 1976): Classics from the Sci-Fi Golden Age.

 Alfred Bester. Starlight (1976) A combination of two previous anthologies. Bester is IMO an under-rated sci-fi author. He was a competent genre writer, and several of his sci-fi stories are classics. For example They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To, which tells of a man and a woman marooned in a city after an unexplained catastrophe that removed all other humans. She’s careful to tot up all her “purchases” at the stores. He’s anxious to find a TV repairman so that he can watch his favourite shows. Read it to find out what happens. The twist at the end is typical of Bester’s stories. He wrote for a market and did it well. I enjoyed re-reading this collection. ** to ****.

The report of the Amazon outage led me to reflect on the Internet and other things.

The Internet was devised to be resilient, hence its decentralised design, and its multi-path topology. DARPA (the Pentagon’s research & development branch) paid for it. Then (of course) the private sector took it. Now we have Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc violating the principle of decentralisation. That clearly makes the internet less resilient. The outage occurred in one of Amazon’s server centres, but if affected all of its network, and caused problems to millions of its customers.

The outage demonstrates the weakness or flaw of centralised control. Yet humans repeatedly strive to achieve just that. The ultimate centralised control in politics is totalitarianism, usually realised in a dictatorship. But oligarchy serves the purpose well enough that it’s the most common form of polity. Democracy touted as a system of voting for the leaders hides that unpleasant fact.

I think that democracy is better defined as a system of reaching consensus. Such systems have existed on the tribal and village level. At the tribal level, centralised control is reserved for war, when reaching consensus would take too long, and so the efficiency of a war chief as leader is worth the sacrifice.

Control is about information. Democracy as the method of consensus attempts to gather and disseminate information from everyone. When everyone listens to everyone else, there is an automatic error-correction. The best available information will usually determine the consensus. Usually, because values and desires also play a role, and we are willing to put up with less than the best in order to preserve our values or satisfy some desire.

Totalitarianism strives to concentrate all information in one person or small group. Since that means constant cognitive dissonance for most people, I wonder why it’s accepted. It seems we can tolerate a certain amount of cognitive discomfort. When too many people reach an uncomfortable level, there will be agitation for political change. So the aim of totalitarians is to keep cognitive dissonance within tolerable levels, and to deflect the inevitable anger onto some easily identifiable target. Orwell showed how that works in 1984. It seems the people behind Trump have understood his explanation, and are trying to install a self-perpetuating system.

Footnote: More on the development of the internet here: Arpanet Etc

The Door To Anywhere (Pohl, 1967)

Frederik Pohl. Door To Anywhere (1967) Retitled reprint of The Tenth Galaxy Reader. Pohl’s selections are all worth reading; several have become classics of short science fiction. The 60s saw a shift from techno space opera to fictions speculating about the social and psychological effects of technical progress. Or rather, innovation; the stories generally clarify that innovation and progress are not synonyms.

Two samples: The Tunnel Under the World, in which miniature androids living in a miniature world harbour the minds and memories of real people, thus making them ideal test subjects for adverting campaigns.

An Elephant for the Prinkip, in which a spacer contracts to deliver an elephant to a collector of beasts. It’s a joke tale, but fun. The narrator ends up with are responsibility he didn’t count on. He should’ve read every word of the contract.

A good record of what sold in the 1960s sci-fi market. Recommended for any sci-fi fan. *** 

Nero Wolfe in Montana (Death of a Dude, 1969)

  Rex Stout. Death of a Dude (1969 Archie’s a guest at Lily Rowan’s ranch, on a rare break from work. There’s a murder, Archie’s stuck for various reasons, the main one being that he’s an outsider who believes the obvious suspect is innocent. The community believes the suspect acted out of exculpatory rage at the seducer of his girl. Archie’s attempts to find the real killer interfere with the sheriff’s investigations. A lot of people don’t want to talk. And so on.

Surprise, surprise!  Nero Wolfe travels to Montana to lend a hand. He ups the gastronomic and investigative ante. Lily Rowan helps out. Several people serve as plausible suspects for all the plausible reasons. The case ends happily for the people who deserve it. The reader (me) spent a pleasant few hours absorbing this concoction. Recommended. ***

Pym: The Sweet Dove Died (1978)

 Barbara Pym. The Sweet Dove Died. (1978) Leonora, a self-absorbed woman of a certain age, obsessive about her appearance and other people’s manners, decides that James, nephew of her long-time (and never-to-be-successful) wooer Humphrey will make a wonderful accessory. While on an antique-hunting trip for his uncle, James meets Phoebe, who seduces him despite himself, and later tries to assert property rights in him. But then James meets Ned, an even smarmier and vicious version of the self-absorbed narcissist than Leonora. In the end, James escape the clutches of both Phoebe and Ned, but Leonora decides that Humphrey will make a better dancer of sycophantic attendance.

Pym has a sharp eye for hypocrisy, self-delusion, and moral laziness. Her style is blandly descriptive, leaving it up to the reader to have both moral insight and the ability to make the moral judgments on her characters. Perhaps she also expects us to agree that these, too, are human beings, and deserve some measure of happiness despite their flaws. If so, she’s succeeded. After a couple of starts, I was drawn in. You may be too. Recommended, but Pym is an acquired taste. ***

Interior Monologue

I heard the phrase recently. Can’t recall exactly when. It was uttered on a radio program, but I can’t recall what the program was about. Probably literature, since interior monologue is a narrative ploy. The mention sent me off on a sidetrack. An interior monologue, in fact, in which I began to compose a note about how interior monologue has been part of my waking life for as long as I can remember.

Most of the time, it’s me talking to myself, thinking out loud internally, so to speak, testing ways of saying things so they make sense. I talk out loud like this too, some of the time, which causes problems when people assume I’m stating some kind of position or point of view. I’m not. I sometimes wonder whether so-called mansplaining is just some other guy doing the same thing.

I also like to restate what seem to me plausible insights in order to lead into the test of whatever comes up as the next step. I want what I think I’ve found to be plausible to lead to the next idea. Anyhow, that’s how many of my ideas happen: I go over what I think I know or understand, and something new shows up. So I turn it this way and that, I say it several different ways to myself, to see which way of saying it makes sense. Sometimes this forces me to rethink what I think I know or understand.

Sometimes a new idea just appears. Well, they’re rarely new ideas, they’re usually new ways (to me) of saying old ideas. I try them out, vary them, until I find a formulation that seems to express that idea clearly and pithily. I do this with poorly-recalled memes I’ve found elsewhere too, like this one (I can’t recall the original):

We used to think the cure for stupidity was more facts. Then we got the internet.

Excellent Women (Pym, 1952)

 Barbara Pym. Excellent Women. (1952) Mildred Lathbury, daughter of a clergyman (deceased), narrates this tale of apparently uneventful lives. She’s generally disposed to do the right and kindly thing, but every now and then a throwaway remark reveals a sharp moral intelligence. She knows phonies when she sees or hears one. She has part-time work with an organization that helps impoverished gentlewomen, but we are told nothing about it.

Mildred is one of the excellent single or otherwise unencumbered women that every functioning, well-run parish depends on to do what needs to be done, because after all they don’t have much else to do, do they? Mildred’s a spinster. Her responses to the few men in her life show that it’s by choice. Everard Bone, an archeologist, is the one man who’s her equal in intellect and insight. But he’s emotionally awkward, so nothing comes of the couple of times she visits him. The Wiki article on Pym’s novels indicates that between books Mildred does in fact marry him; but as she’s background scenery in other books, we know nothing of their courtship and marriage. 

I enjoy Pym’s books. There are fierce undercurrents beneath the placid surface flow of the narrative. Every now and then, a swirl or eddy of indignation, or unwitting cruelty, or exasperation reveals that even the most humdrum lives include the usual quota of pain and suffering, most of it undeserved. This book has a good deal of this, but includes compensating (if small) pleasures and joys. Well, not so small when compared to the pain. Recommended. ****

Maigret and the Black Sheep (Simenon, 1962)

 Simenon. Maigret and the Black Sheep. (1962) A respectable retired manufacturer dies of a gunshot from his own pistol while his wife and daughter are at the opera. It’s not suicide, but murder. But there seems to be no reason for anyone to want him dead. Maigret patiently digs up the facts that reveal the murderer’s reasons for wanting to kill. Family secrets and incomplete, misleading, or false answers to questions delay the resolution of the story in the satisfactory Simenon manner. Maigret wins again.

I confess that the TV versions of Maigret make the reading more pleasurable. Simenon is good with dialogue, but poor with visuals. If you like Maigret, this one will please you, perhaps even more than it pleased me. **½

Dumb Birds (Kracht, A Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, 2019)

 

Matt Kracht. The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America (2019) Early in his life, Kracht suffered exposure to the mysteries of bird watching. It took, but it left some emotional scars. So he wrote this book, a nicely done satire on field guides, and a fairly gentle put-down of bird watchers. I enjoyed it. But some of the more tight-assed members of the tribe may take offense. It does get a bit repetitive.

 Recommended, but you have been warned. **½

165 years ago (Essays From The Times, 1860)

(The Times), Essays From the Times. (1860) I received this collection many decades ago while researching Swift’s literary reputation as part of my work on his satiric poems. Like most critics of his verse, the anonymous essayist reprinted in this collection fails to notice that Swift used impersonation in his verse as well as in his prose. Very few readers have believed that the supposed author of A Modest Proposal is Swift himself. The suggestion that the poor should raise their children to be tasty dishes for the rich is ascribed to the supposed author, a practical man of business suggesting a solution to poverty. But the uncritically accepted Romantic notion that a poet expresses his most authentic self in his verse prevented Victorian and later critics from realising that Swift used the same method in many of his satiric verses. The speakers of Swift's satires are not Swift, but various personages. Some are people of sense, others quite the opposite.

The Romantic poets were disingenuous in their claims. The speaker of a Wordsworth poem is an idealised version of himself. The Romantics would have you believe that this idealised version is the real thing. I don’t think so. In fact, I think all writing is a kind of impersonation.

This time round, I read all the essays. What struck me most was the writers’ blithe confidence in the correctness of their judgements and censures, especially of their subject’s morality. People of every age tend to believe that their judgements on their forebears are correct. But it seems that the Victorians were the first in many centuries to believe that their judgments were final. As such, they are a cautionary example: The current wave of belief that we have reached a pinnacle of moral and ethical righteousness is as misplaced as those of every earlier age. If anything, we repeat the errors of our ancestors, technologically enhanced. Human progress is a circle dance.

These essays are essential reading for any student of the 19th century. The essay on Swift’s life and works found its place in the bibliography of my thesis. ***

The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins, 2009)

 Richard Dawkins. The Greatest Show On Earth. (2009) Most of Dawkins’s work has been the attempt to convince people that Creation Science, aka Intelligent Design, is wrong. This book is his marshalling of the evidence that evolution is real, and that we have increasing knowledge and understanding of how it happens. The basic principle is random variation constrained by deterministic laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s because most mutations do not improve the organism’s chances of surviving long enough to breed, or to outbreed siblings and cousins, that the few favourable mutations not only gain a foothold but spread. IOW, while mutations are random, their effects are not, and that is enough to guarantee that most beneficial mutations will usually spread while deleterious ones will not (if they haven’t killed their hosts). One consequence is that the best versions of essential genes are conserved across species. The preservation and spread of favourable genotypes is what “natural selection” actually means.

A well done book, which in the end is the best refutation to the pseudoscience peddled  by the creationists. Recommended. ****

Footnote: It seems to me that one of the motivations for Creationism is a misreading of the Bible. The assumption seems to be that the factual truth is primary. Or Fundamental. Or even the Only Truth. Therefore there is only one legitimate method of interpreting the biblical texts, namely to assume its factual truth. From this point of view, only factual truth can guarantee the truth of whatever moral or theological or other propositions the reader wishes to assert.

But the assumption that factual truth proves moral, theological, and other abstract truths has a fundamental problem for the believer: By making factual truth primary, religious truths are logically contingent. That means that any changes in factual truths may change religious truths. At some level, fundamentalists seem to understand this, hence their insistence that the factual truths they read into the biblical narratives cannot be contradicted. It also means they must find ways of proving the truth of the facts as stated in the Bible.