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