Matins

¶ Over the weekend, Matt Bai published a thoughtful piece about the generational nature of Tea Partying. We love this kind of optimism — everything will be fine when we’re dead. (NYT)

But the insidious presence of racism within some quarters of the movement — or, maybe more accurately in some cases, an utter indifference toward racial sensitivities — shouldn’t really surprise anyone. That’s not necessarily because a subset of these antigovernment ideologues are racist, per se, but in part because they are just plain old — at least relatively speaking. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in June, 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 — and 29 percent of voters 65 and older — say they agree with the movement’s philosophy; among Americans 49 and younger, that percentage drops precipitously. A New York Times/CBS News poll in April found that fully three-quarters of self-identified Tea Party advocates were older than 45, and 29 percent were older than 64.

This does not mean that there aren’t hateful 25-year-olds coming to Tea Party rallies and letting fly racial slurs. What it does mean is that a sizable percentage of the Tea Party types were born into a segregated America, many of them in the South or in the new working-class suburbs of the North, and lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. Their racial attitudes, like their philosophies of governance, reflect their complicated journeys. (This is true for a lot of older, urban Democrats, too, who consider themselves liberal but whose racial commentary causes their grandchildren to recoil.)

Lauds

¶ Anne Midgette talks to Naxos chief Klaus Heymann about the facts and figures of classical-music CD sales, which are about the only kind of CD sales that look better than half-dead. (Washington Post; via  Arts Journal)

[As for regular sales:] right now, in the first five months our recording of the Spohr concerto for 2 violins sold 7,000 worldwide. Then Vaughan Williams, “Dona nobis pacem,” 6,000 in only 3 months. 4,500 Vaughan Williams Sacred Choral Works. Alsop Dvorak Symphonies 7 and 8, 4,000 in only two months. Petrenko Shostakovich 8 Liverpool also about 4,000 in only 2 months. Khachaturian cello concerto also about 4,000. Haydn Stabat Mater from Trinity New York also 4,000, but that’s not selling so strongly any more. Roussel Symphony No. 4 also 4,000 in 4 months.

It’s a very odd repertory nowadays. It’s in many ways gratifiying that all this material [is selling]. Of course with sales of 4,000, you’re not making any money. [What really sell are things like] The Best of Chopin, which is is probably now up to 300,000 or 400,000 in total. Most of what is downloaded on iTunes is this kind of thing. They download the whole album. [As for our other releases,] many of these things will eventually reach 6, 7,000. Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem with orchestra and chorus, in copyright, probably loses us $10,000 or $15,000. But long term, with all our other revenue sources, we’ll probably break even.

Prime

¶ Even though we’re not entirely sure what Tyler Cowen is talking about here, we sense that he is correct to set the former productivity of currently unemployed workers at zero. (Output has recovered, but employment has not.)

Some people identify the zero marginal product hypothesis with the “hopeless dregs of the earth” description, but the two are not necessarily the same.  Complementarity, combined with some fixed initial factors, can yield zero or near-zero marginal products of labor.  (You’ll see the phrase “excess capacity” used in this context, though that matches the oligopoly hypothesis more closely.)  The “dregs of the earth” view is pessimistic, but the complementarity version of the zero marginal product idea can be quite optimistic, predicting a very rapid recovery in the labor market, once the interactions turn positive. 

The “dregs” and the “complementarities” views also have different policy recommendations.  The dregs view implies either hopelessness or a lot of fundamental retraining or ongoing assistance, while the complementarity view leads one to ask how we might mobilize positive complementarities (rather than leaving orphaned factors of production) more quickly.  Perhaps there are some fixed factors, such as managerial oversight, and entrepreneurs do not want to strain those fixed factors too hard.  How can we make such fixed factors more replicable or more flexible?

Clicking through, we also agree with Arnold King’s comment about unemployment among older educated workers. (Library of Economics and Liberty)

Older workers may suffer from a human capital vintage problem. Their education and experience may have become obsolete rather suddenly, because of globalization and technological change.

Tierce

¶ Some of the most interesting psychological work being done today concerns pricing — always a mysterious subject. There’s something very heartening about the results yielded by Ayelet Gneezy’s theme-park experiment yielded. Of four pricing options — fixed price; voluntary price; fixed price inclusive of charitable contribution; voluntary price inclusive of charitable contribution — the last was the surprising winner, both with customers and for profitability.

But when customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof. Around 4.5% of the customers asked for a photo (up 9 times from the standard price plan), and on average, each one paid $5.33 for the privilege. Even after taking away the charitable donations, that still left Gneezy with a decent profit.

The tastiest findings concerned freeloading:

There’s more evidence to back up this idea in the experiment – when Gneezy added a charitable donation to the pay-what-you-want scheme, fewer people bought the photo. The option to name your own price attracts a lot of cheapskate customers, who may not actually want the product very much, and who aren’t prepared to pay much, if anything, for it.

We missed this interesting piece at Not Exactly Rocket Science last week; happily, there’s Marginal Revolution to catch us up.

Sext

¶ The Epicurean Dealmaker (of all people) is piqued (by Peggy Noonan) into making some astoudingly assured remarks about wise men.

It is an old saying, but true nonetheless, that the wise person is certain of little but his or her ignorance. A wise man is wise enough to know what he does not know. He believes the world is too mulitfarious, changeable, and miraculous a place to put much trust in feeble humanity’s ability to comprehend and control it as we would wish. Therefore, a wise man counsels caution, and encourages us to pay attention to our ignorance—what we do not and cannot know—as we make our way through life.

A wise man does not provide answers. A wise man asks questions, and encourages us to ask questions of ourselves. For this reason, Peggy Noonan’s implicit identification of the Best and Brightest as “the wise men” of the Vietnam era is flat wrong both chronologically and conceptually. JFK’s whiz kids were a bunch of brilliant, arrogant young Turks, not a collection of grizzled old veterans of the Second World War or the Korean War. And they did not have or offer any questions at all: in contrast, they had all the (in retrospect, wrong) answers. They didn’t offer wisdom. They offered an agenda.

But here’s the rub, Dear Readers. If our beloved wise men, wherever we find them, cannot or will not provide the answers, then we must come up with them ourselves. We may value their sage counsel and radical skepticism concerning the source and security of our own apparent knowledge and opinions, but we’re gonna have to make the difficult decisions ourselves. Wise men counsel caution and care; we the living cannot help but act. If we are truly listening, our wise mens’ counsel will only make those decisions and actions harder to take.

Which is not to say we should not find them, and employ them, and value their advice. But we must understand that cultivating the path of wisdom does not lead to the answers to life—if any such childish fantasies exist. It merely allows us to test and practice our courage in the face of the ineluctable Unknown.

Never forget: every wise man started out a simple fool like you or me. He learned wisdom by questioning, by learning, and by doing. There is no secret stash of wise men waiting at WalMart for us to purchase.

It is time we manned up and learned to become our own wise men.

Hear, hear!

Nones

¶ Is Little England dissolving in Greater Anglophonia? That’s what we took away from Linda Colley’s arrestingly interesting coverage of two new books of “English History.” Boyd Hilton’s 1783-1846 contribution to the New Oxford History suffers by comparison with James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth. How can you write about England without taking into account the drainage of millions of its people, during Hilton’s period, to colonies and other parts of the world?  [P]

One of the major reasons why is brilliantly set out in James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939. Reading these two formidable and formidably long books back to back is to be alerted to how much the writing of British (and English) history has changed and diversified in recent decades. When the early volumes of the original Oxford History of England were published in the 1930s and 1940s, historians of Britain who hailed from other parts of the world, or worked there, tended usually to defer in their methods and interpretations to those prevailing in the ‘mother country’. Now, British-based historians are increasingly likely to find sections of their own past being rewritten and revised by overseas scholars in different, sometimes uncomfortable, but generally fruitful ways. Belich is a New Zealander of Croatian descent, and his book is an argument against both British and American historical exceptionalism and parochialism.

At one level, Replenishing the Earth helps to explain why the ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ people of England and its adjacent countries were usually kept within political bounds after the 1780s, despite exponential population growth and an explosion of new ideas and economic stresses. As Belich demonstrates, this was due not simply to the contrivances of political actors within Britain, but also to the fact that substantial numbers of its potentially ‘dangerous’ people moved somewhere else. Before the 1780s, British settlement overseas had lagged behind Spanish emigration to the Americas and elsewhere. But ‘after 1780, and especially after 1815’, ‘Anglos’ drew ‘ahead in the settler races’. Whereas some half a million souls emigrated from the ‘British Isles’ in the 18th century, at least 25 million did so between 1815 and 1924, of whom some 18 million never returned. A parallel mass movement of human beings occurred on the other side of the Atlantic. Before 1776, London had restricted westwards migration from its mainland American colonies, in the hope both of maintaining peace with indigenous peoples and of keeping a close eye on its own white settlers. But after the Revolution, American movement westwards surged, not steadily, but in explosive bursts. Between 1815 and 1930, 12 million American-born individuals migrated to the middle and western regions of their continent. So did millions of others born elsewhere. In 1830, Chicago contained half a dozen houses and a few Indian tepees. Sixty years later, it was home to more than a million people.

Vespers

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Colin Marshall interviews David Lipsky, author of the recent David Foster Wallace book, Although Of Course You End Up Being Yourself. We liked these nuggets about the archaic period of DFW’s celebrity, when it was limited to a “campus following” (and to Pauline Kael!).

His first book came out my last year in college, and you’re always looking out, saying, “Hey, who else is publishing?” It was this giant book that was incredibly smart. I’m laughing because he had very mixed feelings about that book. He says to me, Broom of the System — that’s his first novel — “had a lot of fans, but unfortunately they’re all about eleven.” His book of stories came out about two years later, which he was much harder on than we were. When that book came out, I was in New York trying to find ways to write and also not feel incredibly tense and nervous in supermarket lines.

That book came out, and everyone passed it around; it was one of those books were other writers and other really smart readers would say, “Look, you have to read this.” I’d say, “Oh man, another Wallace book, this is great.” There stories in there that were just incredibly sharp. There’s a critic David really loves who we talk about in the book names Pauline Kael, the New Yorker‘s critic for a long time, really a brilliant writer. Wallace was making this march toward the capital city of readers.

About four years after that book came out, Pauline Kael was giving her last interview; she’d retired from the New Yorker. She just mentioned, kind of out of the blue, that her favorite two short stories by a young writer in the last couple of years has been two stores from that book: the story about Lyndon Johnson called “Lyndon”, and the story about a young actress going on the David Letterman show called “My Appearance”. At Rolling Stone there’s a thing we do every year called the “Hot List”, where we say, “Here’s what’s coming that you have to pay attention to.” It became a bit of a joke in the meetings we had every year: me and some other people kept saying David Foster Wallace. After a couple years, those meetings would begin with people saying, “Look, don’t say David Foster Wallace.” There was this great thing in late ’95 when his cruise ship piece came out and literally everybody in the city who read seemed to be talking about it. We could turn to the magazine and say, “Look, he’s great!”

Compline

¶ Ben Brantley remembers the thrill of bumping into Greta Garbo in Midtown (in 1985) — and rather misses the times when stars could be intensely private people. (NYT)

A hunger abides in us to see mere mortals approaching perfection and I, for one, would just as soon not be asked to separate the dancer from the dance, or for that matter the beauty from the beauty. (Imagine Garbo visiting “America’s Next Top Model” to give tips on eyebrow plucking.) Artists of any kind — and that includes pop stars — are almost never as interesting as their art. And those with a superstitious resistance to describing what they do professionally are not wrong. (Note to Lady Gaga: Keep the masks on and the interviews to a minimum.)

When we first fall in love with people, they always seem remote, unattainable. Holding on to love after you’ve crossed the divide between you and the object of your desire is a chapter in achieving maturity; it’s what marriage is supposed to be. But there’s a part of us that needs to keep falling in love with the girl in the mists in the distance or the boy riding away on a horse. You’ve been there, I’m sure, and you know what happens when these dream girls and boys open their mouths or scratch themselves. The mystery dissolves like fog at sunrise. [Emphasis supplied]

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 10:30 am.