by
n+1
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
One muggy evening, I realized the time had come to say goodbye. I asked Harjinder to remove the oxygen mask and leave the room. My mother and sister sat on the edge of the bed. I opened my father’s mouth and gave him the first dose of morphine. Over the next few hours, I poured into him all the morphine I had.
The air in the room grew thick. Each breath sounded like a sea roaring for an eternity. He was slipping, he was drowning, and at times he appeared to be resisting. Tears flowed from his eyes until all the air left him and his body sank.
The power went out. The entire house fell into darkness. It felt timely; we didn’t have to see each other’s grief-stricken faces.
wow
As Solow remarked when he received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987, “One of the achievements of growth theory was to relate equilibrium growth to asset pricing under tranquil conditions.” In other words, private investment and distribution goals could be made objects of indirect planning if capital markets sent meaningful signals about social priorities. But “the hard part of disequilibrium growth is that we do not have — and it may be impossible to have — a really good theory of asset valuation under turbulent conditions.” High securities prices might signal that a corporation or municipality was satisfying public wants through its provision of sales or services — or that it had been thrown on the betting table or the chopping block. Profits and profitability in the capital market, it turned out, no longer told us anything about what kind of products and services the public wanted to consume and how. Maybe they never had.
When economists aggregate all the various types of capital into a single quantity — corporate paper, equipment, patents, real estate, et cetera — they make it impossible to know whether the right tax incentives will channel this abstraction into labor income, productivity, or growth. Most often, liberated capital flows into asset bidding, more debt, corporate stock buybacks, dividends, and idle cash to be hoarded. You might call it wealth, but you’d need the right education to believe it.
Historically, the tendency in American economics has been to conflate investment talk with trading talk, which opens the door to the argument that cutting tax rates for large savers will increase the funds available for starting businesses and creating jobs, rather than for taking bets and protecting status. Since high rates of return should mean available investment opportunities, the confusion leads people to oppose any limits on profits. This makes it difficult to determine what type of social activity our financial institutions are sustaining — increasing the income of ordinary workers or safeguarding hoarded wealth. The devastating effects of this confusion are now self-evident, and they cast a shadow over the Clinton and Obama Administrations.
[...] Yale Law professor David Singh Grewal asks how our theory of history changes when we see capital as a “social relation” rather than “simply a stock of assets, whose equilibrium rental price may be established through conventional supply and demand considerations.” Grewal argues that the ability of the state to “limit — or buttress — the prerogatives of capital” is rooted in the legal distinction between a government constitution and a government administration. In this analysis, it is the law, rather than productivity, that determines the distribution of income. Conflicts that emerge between a new administration and constitutional law — as with the campaigns to abolish slavery, to institute the graduated income tax, or to establish a federal minimum wage or universal health insurance at the state level — “are only to be overcome, if at all, in extraordinary moments of popular constitutional lawmaking.” [...]
capital should definitely be seen as a social relation
[...] As Naidu writes, financial markets and labor relations are both arenas in which state power plays the determining role; both are shaped by the contingencies of government interference or lack thereof. When values collapse and debts go unpaid, or when a strike threatens the health and safety of the community, it falls to the courts and the police to decide which groups will come out ahead. If we follow this line of thinking, property values represent more than expectations about social desires; they represent confidence that ownership will continue to carry influence and power. Property rights are best understood as “the ability to call on the government to secure the promised flow of income.”
As Steinbaum writes with startling frankness, income and wealth “tend to diverge because the ideological commitments of capitalism prohibit policies that would check divergence.” If there is a formula here, it is about power and ideas, not a purely economic understanding of r>g. The state produces inequality by ensuring a constant rate of return to capital, even when growth is slowing.
this is great
[...] Art objects critical of their own status as assets are still assets. Contemporary art has shaped the world like any other market. Freeport art storage is just a new take on the Swiss bank, housing millions of artworks in tax-free and mostly extraterritorial storage zones. In “If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!” and “Is Art a Currency?” Steyerl argues that art is an alternative currency, “a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value,” and that its industries “trigger trickle-up effects which are then flushed sideways into tax havens.” But it is not a common currency available to all. As Steyerl writes, “Contemporary art is just a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality.”
[...] President Obama spoke softly about the seriousness of human-driven climate change in public while his administration chipped away at automobile emissions and provided token green-energy incentives. These may have been the correct policies for a major, developed nation . . . in the early 1990s. But like much else after the financial crisis in 2008, the opportunity for a visionary shift in national focus — one that would have required investment at least equal to that being poured into the unwinnable war on terror — was bartered away to chase after an illusory political consensus with the terminally uncompromising opposition.
love the phrasing
ONCE IN A WHILE, and with increasing frequency, climate change rises to the forefront of popular consciousness. It happened, for instance, in 2007, when An Inconvenient Truth won two Oscars and extreme heatwaves swept across the US and Europe, causing wildfires that torched over ten million acres of forest. A critical mass of people aided by the notion that others are doing something similar can break through the powerful psychological resistance and look the blinding thing in the face. It’s devastating and painful; you grieve and you panic. Even so, there’s relief in bringing something so painful into view, in holding it with your mind. But you can only look for so long. Resistance reasserts itself, and you slide back behind it. Next time you come out a tiny bit further before you retreat. This is how understanding happens, through a series of breakthroughs and retrenchments and consolidations, as with all efforts toward intentional growth. A single revelation is rarely enough. Even though “we know, we know,” as Bellow’s Mr. Sammler says about the human moral impulse, we also forget, forget.
So much of our daily behavior is confused and uncertain. We can’t seem to lead the lives we have and acknowledge the future simultaneously, even as we must. We keep our eyes on the middle distance — our hopes for the country (universal healthcare!) and for ourselves — and only feel the shadows on the horizon across our peripheral vision. We are everyday climate deniers the way we are everyday death deniers: we write our articles, save for “retirement,” canvass for causes that give us the most hope. We go to bars and ask our friends whether they plan to have kids. Those of us with kids have become “preppers” in both senses, drilling our toddlers with blocks, trilingual board books, and Raspberry Pis to ace the local magnet preschool’s entrance exam while lobbying high schools to teach organic farming and archery. Perhaps we should start cultivating other friends, those with hand skills, for when civilization breaks. But what will we be able to offer in return? We can edit their mission statements! More likely we’ll do the unskilled labor, like rusticated Chinese intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps our arrow-slinging children will bear us on their backs out of the civilization we ruined for them.
jesus
Intellectually, this is the most difficult: to let go of our impulses toward the infinite and the eternal, which in another era might have been satisfied by religion but which we learned to redirect into literature and culture. There was a powerful seduction in the idea that while individual humans may die, books and ideas provide humans a quantum of immortality. Even if we didn’t write a lasting work, we could participate in a community of shared meaning and purpose that predated us and would, because of our efforts, outlast us. The intimacy we may still feel with a long-dead writer or artist, even living ones we’ve never met, is the most special thing in the world. Such premises, though, cannot be reconciled with an understanding of what’s ahead. We delay grappling with the fact of death in favor of a kind of collective immortality of literature, of shared thought — but that kind of immortality is premised on the existence of our civilization and the maintenance of our traditions. And when human civilization ends, whether in the sudden collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet or with a giant methane fart or both, wet and smelly, it’s unlikely that whatever comes after will have much interest in shoring fragments against our ruins.