Paper is kindly, because it teaches this humility and opens one’s eyes to the vacuity of the ego. Someone who writes a page and, half an hour later while waiting for a bus, realizes that he understands nothing, not even what he has just written, learns to recognize his own inconsequence, and as he dwells upon the fatuity of his own page realizes that each person takes his own lucubrations to be the center of the universe. And there you have it in a nutshell — everybody does. And perhaps the writer has a fraternal feeling towards that myriad of everybodies who, like him, fancy they are souls elect as they trundle their whims towards the grave; perhaps he realizes how stupid it is, in our common, jostling rush towards nothingness, to do each other injury. Writers constitute a universal secret order, a freemasonry, a Grand Lodge of stupidity. It is no coincidence that they themselves, from Jean Paul to Musil, have been the ones to compose essays and eulogies on Stupidity. (Claudio Magris, Danube)

“In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century…The book outsold all Woolf’s previous novels, and the proceeds enabled the Woolfs to buy a cat.”

Like in this NYT Tea Party article here.  Excellent feature, but it doesn’t really indicate that anything but a very small minority of Americans has taken leave of its senses. Which isn’t anything new. Yet the Democrats seem to be collapsing. Why? How genuinely widespread is the crazy and not-crazy opposition when they’re not being shown on a 24-hour news channel?

Or is offscreen even a relevant political category anymore? Maybe I’ll just watch Fox for a while, that should clear up any questions I have.

He takes a rag from his pocket and carefully wipes the last day’s accumulation of snow from the plaque. The old parking lot nearby, and even the parts of the sidewalk that haven’t been shoveled are covered in inches of snow. But the memorial has barely any, even before he begins his work. He has been here every day, making sure these words can be read, though he knows that no one else will read them today. Everyone passes with their shoulders tense against the cold and their eyes scanning the sidewalk for treacherous bits of ice. That doesn’t matter to him.

When he goes, the flakes immediately begin re-whitening the brass surface. An hour later the letters have vanished; but he will be back tomorrow.

A bit of background:

In the economics world, behavioral economics is aimed at looking at how people actually make choices, instead of assuming that everybody has excellent information about the given state of markets and the future consequences of their options, and will choose what’s best for them, given their preferences.

In most experiments (and in anybody’s experience of real life) it turns out that people don’t always act to maximize their interests. We make stupid choices. We discount future gains too heavily. We smoke, drink, do drugs, party, don’t exercise, watch porn, drop out of school, quit our jobs and move to Europe to be writers in dying mediums. Null point pour les neoclassicism.

In this writer’s mind, and in others, the gropings of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are linked to behavioral economics, insofar as they chip away at the traditional foundations of the human spirit. These former two semi-disciplines, or intellectual movements, are aimed at grounding elements of our behavior, personalities, and perhaps cultures in our biology. Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate is an excellent primer on these ideas: In a nutshell, we are built initially from genetic instructions. This includes our brains, and our various neurochemical and hormonal eccentricities. These differences, from the very beginning, have consequences – some of us learn faster or slower in certain areas, some are fatter or skinnier (which has societal (but not deterministic) consequences), some are excellent athletes, some can swim through mathematics as though numbers are the sea and they dolphins. We are different from one another, mentally, physically, in every way that has anything to do with genes — and it makes more sense to understand this rather than pretend we start as identical beings, and grow apart.

So. We’re different. We’re not perfectly rational. Wolfe argues that these ideas are chipping away at the heart of old-style liberalism, the idea that we can and should choose our destinies for ourselves, with the minimum amount of interference from outside (with certain necessary caveats that increase the collective amount of autonomy available, such as: no, you can’t own slaves, asshole).

I think there are a few problems with this. I don’t think he gets evolutionary psychology or behavioral economics all that well. As many critics of these disciplines do, he confuses predispositions and statistical likelihoods with a kind of predetermination

(Christians and sociobiologists) both believe in predestination.  For the one we are stained with sin.  For the other we are products of our genetic makeup.  In neither case can we change our destiny.

This statement is bollocks. Sociobiologists (at least good ones) believe that we have constraints on our personalities and capabilities, just as we have constraints on our physical abilities. This isn’t a popular notion, particularly in America, but it is very, very far from the idea of predestination.  (I have these genes, thus I am more likely than someone who does not to express them by acting more aggressively than the norm; *not*: I have these genes, so I will be a rapist).

What Wolfe is really attacking, however, is the idea of the new “libertarian paternalists” that want to help us overcome our irrationalities by “nudging” our choices. Putting their fingers on the scales. It’s not really a new idea – we’ve tried to influence people’s consumption choices through things like “sin taxes” for years. But it, or this explanation for old behavior, is gaining ground as we see the very wide areas in which we don’t choose rationally.

….people should neither be left completely free to do what they want nor should they be coerced by government.  Instead their choices should be constrained by organizing them according to design principles that will produce the optimum outcome for themselves and their society.  Thaler and Sunstein call such design a form of “choice architecture.”… The goal of the behavioral economists is to give people choices over how much to save for their retirement or to recycle their trash, but to design the choices in ways that will overcome the irrationality and ignorance that shape individual decisions.

So: Sin taxes. Gas taxes, to lower people’s carbon production and push them to public transit (which they like in theory, but don’t do enough on their own). Anti-smoking campaigns. Anti-obesity campaigns. Structuring tax breaks so the benefits come in chunks, rather than all at once, so we are more likely to spend the money instead of save it.

These “choice architects” are undemocratically screwing with the way we as supposedly rational people are choosing, Wolfe argues. He seems to be disputing the idea that we are fundamentally irrational; believing, perhaps, that despite the evidence, it is better that we continue acting (as policymakers and as humans) as if we were perfectly rational, rather than accepting that we are not and working to ameliorate the consequences.

Who nudges, is his ultimate question. Who is elitist enough to decide what’s “best” for us, and structure our alternatives so we are more likely to choose well. Which, fair enough, it is never a pleasant idea to hear from the government that: This is the best for you. Despite your stupid desire to eat fatty foods, smoke, etc., we simply won’t let you. (Or wait, maybe that sounds suspiciously familiar. Something about drugs, alcohol, speed limits, dress codes, hate speech prohibitions…)

We don’t like people trying to affect our supposedly free choices. We want the government out of our heads. So we leave the space wide open for psychologically sophisticated marketers, I suppose…

Wolfe’s argument fundamentally hangs on the idea of transparency. He argues that the construction of “choice architecture” can not be transparent. I see no reason why this should be the case. We have always had policy goals, which amount to ideas about how society should look. These policy goals are developed by the government and its advisors. The government is elected. We have the ability to write about and criticize the government.

So, yes, I think Wolfe is wrong. But I do think this debate about human nature will structure the political debates of the future. Are we rational or are we not? Are we identical in every way or are we not? It will be important to remember that “all men are created equal” is poor science (Men? Created? Equal? Really?); however, as a political statement meaning that every person should be given equal rights, or should be given roughly equal opportunities (two very different ideas), it remains extraordinarily powerful.

According to the NYT, Tina Brown is hot on creating a new publishing imprint that will rush books to market just a few months — one to three for writing, another one or two for editing and production.

It’s a fabbo business idea. Books fail because people’s interest moves on too quickly, she argues. True enough. Who cares about Iraq these days? Or Lehman brothers. Or what happened yesterday…  Polanski who?

But, c’mon. Damn. They’ll be short books, some 150 pages, and if you’re a beat writer, know your stuff, don’t mind working like a dog for a few months, it’s totally doable. Nobody’s going to expect prose that shimmers, and yeah, they’ll probably sell.

And this will increase the pressure on writers even more, to produce more, write faster, report less, edit less, fact-check less, write shittier sentences. We’ll get long, sometimes beautifully written academic tomes on one end of the market, and quick-turnaround jobbies by journalists and freelancers (thus further reducing the intellectual reputation of journalists) on the other, and the smart middle will be further hollowed out. More unintended consequences.

I’m going to go invest in some stock for anti-carpel tunnel products.

In an especially rich essay, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists”—in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988), edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg—Hall wrote: “The first thing to ask about an ‘organic’ ideology that, however unexpectedly, succeeds in organizing substantial sections of the masses and mobilizing them for political action, is not what is false about it but what is true.” What, in other words, actively makes sense to people whose beliefs you do not share? Hall proposed that leftist intellectuals should not answer that question by assuming that working-class conservatives have succumbed to false consciousness: “It is a highly unstable theory about the world which has to assume that vast numbers of ordinary people, mentally equipped in much the same way as you or I, can simply be thoroughly and systematically duped into misrecognizing entirely where their real interests lie. Even less acceptable is the position that, whereas ‘they’—the masses—are the dupes of history, ‘we’—the privileged—are somehow without a trace of illusion and can see, transitively, right through into the truth, the essence, of a situation.”

This has fairly widely been dubbed the most boring election in history. Which — aren’t we in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression? Wasn’t there a gigantic financial crises this time last year, technically on Merkel’s watch? Shouldn’t there be a revolution or something (and come on, 12 percent for the Linke, the former East German state party, now a left opposition, doesn’t count)?

It’s astonishing how badly the left has come out of this crisis. It’s not that the right has fantastic ideas; certainly not in the States, where they’ve collapsed into sputtering brain-fevered monosyllables. But there is no coherent alternative to centrism today. Everyone is spending like mad, in a Keynesian approach to the post-Friedman global economy. Angie’s social market economy is not radically different from what Obama wants to do the States; and here, because she’s staked out that centrist ground, she wins.

Her new partners, the liberals, want tax cuts. Maybe they’ll get some, but Germany is awash in debt, at least by its standards, and if George W. Bush has shown anything, it is that shotgun-targeted tax cuts don’t produce anything but pain and messes that have to be cleaned up later. Not much room to maneuver in that respect.

So where is the coherent left? Certainly not in Germany. Or in France. Even socialist Sweden has a center-right government. There are good ideas coming from the left, like New Deal-type spending on green technology; but this can be adopted just as well by the center-right, and will, by Merkel.

We need a new labor movement; something that reflects the realities of today’s economy. Something that represents, or is grounded in, the interests of deliberately mobile, flexible workers. Freelancers and contractors, programmers and writers and service types. Based on an economics that understands that people aren’t rational, that the free market fails miserably in many areas (but actually does work pretty well in others), and doesn’t let finance types assure the world that they’re getting hugely rich because what they’re doing is really, really good for everybody.

Four hundred lei to the bus station, the driver suggests. No meters. We do the math. It comes out somewhere north of $125. This seems high. Absurd, we say. We’ll take the bus.

“It is very far. At least 40 kilometers,” the taxi diver says. We have no idea where the station is, as it was unfindable on Google maps. He might be right.  Yet the rate on the door says it is only 1.9 lei (about 64 cents) per kilometer. I point this out.

“Oh, no,” He shakes his head. His mustache bristles with authority. “In town only. Two hundred lei.”

We’ll take the bus, we say. Assuming there is a bus. He counteroffers. 100 lei to the Gara de Nord train station. We don’t know where that is either, but assume it must be a very long way away. A good part of the extraordinarily long distance to the bus station, at least. We agree, feeling our time vanishing.

“OK,” he says, disgusted. “But not with me.” He gets out of his cab, finds a colleague, and we transfer our bags. The new driver takes us four kilometers before pulling into the train station. I seethe. I have been counting. I do not like flying, it makes me nervous in the air and then angry when I hit the ground. It is not my most winning characteristic.

“Four kilometers!” I say. “Four only!”

“Yes. No. 100 Lei,” the driver says. He is not aggressive, but is clearly bracing himself for the argument. His English is not good. We swap numbers. Four. 100. Four only. 100. We are getting nowhere. Our first bus, from somewhere near this train station, leaves in 10 minutes, and all we have in our pockets are 100 lei bills. It is a losing argument. We pay. I am surly.

There are no signs indicating a bus station is nearby. We walk back along the street we had come, toward buses I have seen in a parking lot. We ask a water vendor, and he points us in the other direction, chattering in Romanian that we cannot understand. We walk in that direction for a few blocks, ask at a hotel, and they know nothing. We walk back to the buses I had seen, and this turns out to be a bus station but not the one we’re looking for. We walk back the other direction again, farther this time, and ask a clothing vendor who turns out to speak German. He consults with a friend and points us in a third direction.

It is very late now, and when we get to where they have pointed us, there is an empty minibus station, and a collection of very hot wild dogs lying in what little shade they can find. We are also very hot. I am dripping.

We finally find a public bus system, which for 1.30 lei (about 40 cents) apiece takes us to the bus station we originally wanted, which is not 40 kilometers away but is also not marked, and which we overshoot by several stops. But once found, our bus is there, with an dried apple-faced bus driver who speaks no English or German but is extraordinarily friendly and guides us to our seat, and we are going to Transylvania at last.

He pulls his head back inside, throwing the car into reverse. A minute later the car lurches forward, and the brakes squeal a second time. Again the young man leans out the window and shouts until tangling himself in his own cursing. The little audience gathered outside the coffee house laughs and claps appreciatively, and the actor turns to give them a sly smile.

Inside, the regular is delighted. “I used to see this in New Zealand. Two cars race up to a stoplight right next to each other, like this, you know?” His hands mime the cars’ sudden stop. “Guy gets out of one and the other driver, the idiot, rolls down his window. First one punches him right in the face, and then gets back in his car and drives off.”

Laughs all around. “That was a movie?” somebody asks.

“No, no, that was real.”