You Can’t Heal What You Can’t Diagnose

I feel a bit sorry for mayors and governors currently trying to deal with a growing pandemic that has nothing to do with medicine. Rather, it is the pandemic of outrage aimed at a prevailing social context that is more obsessed with economic value, rather than the productivity and well-being of the overall population. The outrage may have been triggered by what appears to be deliberate brutality motivated by racism, but that trigger may be part of a larger context in which the very idea of a healthy society has gone by the wayside. I would like to suggest that there are two key aspects of this malady, which are unlikely to be addressed under the current conditions of governance.

One of these is poverty. When one considers how much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the one percent of the one percent, it should be no surprise at the intimidating magnitude of the number of those than cannot earn a wage sufficient to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Indeed, wealth resides with those that do not have to worry about those three factors. To them productivity is simply a matter of manipulating instruments whose only design is to transform wealth into more wealth. Associating productivity with any particular “product” is irrelevant when the health of an enterprise is measured only by the value of the stock it issues on a major exchange. Until attention is redirected towards both productive workers and satisfied consumers, those that are not part of the one percent of the one percent will be ignored by any excuse for a social contract.

The other aspect is health; and, to some extent, it is related to the circumstances behind poverty and the consequences of those circumstances. During my lifetime I have observed the very idea of health care devolve from a public service to a network of private enterprises, all of which prioritize positions on stock exchanges over the effectiveness of all levels of practitioners and the effective treatment of those served by those practitioners. In other words health care, by virtue of having been industrialized, has become yet another puppet whose strings are pulled by the one percent of the one percent.

The idea of a social contract was originally conceived as a model for the relationship between the individual and the state. However, similar contracts must exist between an individual and those organizations with which that individual must interact. Interaction may involve provisions, employment, or ongoing relationships, such as health maintenance rather than treating maladies after they arise. For the one percent of the one percent, however, any instance of a social contract is nothing other than a fiction of convenience that will “keep the outsiders in their place.” Until countries around the world develop and maintain more equitable approaches to the management of wealth and health, those “outsiders” will continue to wallow in discontent. That discontent will continue to lead to frustration, that frustration will lead to pots that cause damage when they boil over too energetically.

Compelling Voices of Disenfranchisement at Herbst

While the self-indulgent were indulging themselves with Fleet Week and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (not to mention, for the sake of fairness, the War Memorial Opera House and Davies Symphony Hall), Herbst Theatre was hosting the world premiere of the one-hour spoken-word chamber opera “Echoes,” composed by Danny Clay and given a staged performance directed by Sean San José. The piece was created to launch the new Hear Now and Then Series produced for the 38th season of San Francisco Performances. The text sources came from Youth Speaks, an organization that encourages pre-college students to get actively involved in writing and performing poetry through programs held during the school day, in after-school hours, and on weekends.

Preparation of the libretto was curated by Tassiana Willis, one of the inaugural Emerging Arts Fellows at Youth Speaks, whose texts were combined with those of four other poet-performers, Gabriel Cortez, A. M. Smiley, Aimee Suzara, and Michael Wayne Turner III. The libretto also included texts by Tongo Eisen-Martin and Enrique Garcia Naranjo; and one of the poems was delivered by San José himself. Finally, Turner’s compelling delivery of “The Young Dead Soldiers,” by the late American poet Archibald MacLeish, played a major role in establishing context for the abundance of last night’s poetry of the living.

Clay conceived a highly imaginative score to establish the context for this wealth of poetry. The background for that context incorporated field recordings most likely taken from the streets of San Francisco (most of which were probably about as far from the comfort zone of the self-indulgent as one might imagine). The performing musicians on stage included the Kronos Quartet of violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Sunny Yang and The Living Earth Show duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. Every now and then Clay’s tapes seemed either to echo or to reinforce the instrumental work, suggesting that his field work may have included rehearsals of his score.

There are probably several ways to interpret the opera’s title. My personal inclination is that these are all echoes from streets in San Francisco that receive little awareness or attention from that self-indulgent class I keep citing, particularly those members of the class who inhabit comfortable offices in City Hall. Those echoes first emerge as reflections of poems created by those chosen by fate to live on those streets. The poems were then themselves echoed through the performances staged by San José, and the semantic implications emerging from those performances were then reflected through the musical contexts established by Clay’s score. If that is not enough to account for the plural form of the noun in the title, I don’t know what is!

In such a context it would be fair to say that words consistently tended to prevail over music. San José coached some thoroughly compelling and passionate readings from the Youth Speaks crew. That intensity even extended to the MacLeish poem, which is now engraved on polished stone in the new Memorial Court that now occupies the space between the Opera House and the Veterans Building. Under San José’s direction, Youth Speaks exercised the talent of seizing and holding attention to every word, if not every phrase-demarcating pause.

Clay wisely decided not to compete with this intensity. Almost all of the music written for Kronos involved relatively mournful chord progressions repeated with the persistence of incantation. (Before the poets took the stage, Clay also exercised a bit of deconstruction with this context, having fragments of the individual lines of those chord progressions played as solos.) The Living Earth Show, on the other hand, was there to provide “high-intensity punctuation marks” between the readings. Much of this involved explosive percussion work, so forceful that it seemed as if Andrews was just miming his guitar work. There were also some more subtle punctuations, but what was most important was Clay’s skill in having the music speak for itself without giving any sense of competing with the words.

All of this went down excellently before a clearly highly appreciative audience. The objective may have been to speak truth to power, but power usually depends on a skill for judiciously turning a deaf ear. So it may very well be that “Echoes” never advanced beyond preaching to the choir. Even so, times are so bad these days that even the choir needs a bit of reinforcement from time to time. Ideally, this is a show that should be taken on the road, but on a road that will deliver the message to those most in need of getting it by virtue of their power to take meaningful action.

Another Way for the Rich to Make Life Worse for the Poor

As our government looks more and more like a plutocracy with every new announcement from the President-elect, it is worth remembering that attacks on public education are as significant as those on climate control. In the latest (December 8) issue of The New York Review, Diane Ravitch has written a piece about two recent studies of the efforts to privatize our education system. The second of these, by Mercedes K. Schneider, says it all in the book title: School Choice: The End of Public Education?

One paragraph from Ravitch's treatment of this book is worth reproducing:

Schneider documents the encouragement by the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama for the growth of the charter industry. And she follows the money trail, showing the millions poured into charter proliferation by the Waltons and other billionaires. Charter advocates say that they support charters and minority students from "failing" public schools. Walmart employs an astonishing 1.4 million people in the United States alone, many of whom are paid less than the minimum wage. The Waltons would have a more dramatic impact on the well-being of children by paying their workers a minimum wage of $15 an hour than they do by opening charter schools and enfeebling community public school.

In other words "the well-being of children" is simply not part of the equation, particularly if those children are in or near poverty. The change that Obmaha encouraged us to hope for is not going to happen because the rich are not content with having it all. They also insist of keeping it all. The idea that education may enable a future generation to rise to similar heights is simply not acceptable to them.

Diane Ravitch Offers More Lessons that Those in Power will Willfully Ignore

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has a particularly valuable article by Diane Ravitch entitled "Solving the Mystery of the Schools." On the surface it is a review of two books analyzing two projects to improve the quality of education in our country. The first book is about throwing money (much of it from Mark Zuckerberg) and rock-star enthusiasm (from Newark Mayor Cory Booker) at the Newark school system. The problem is that those with wealth and power saw no reason to bring those with hands-on experience in hands-on education into the planning meetings; so, as might be expected, the book is a chronicle of high hopes and dismal failure. This is coupled by a second book about more active classroom involvement by those knowing what they are doing, bringing about any number of positive results but failing to translate those results into better numbers on standardized tests. Taken together, these books provide object lessons about how ignorance in policy-making always seems to trump wisdom in practice.

The second book actually tries to diagnose this pathological precept. Ravitch quotes the author, Kristina Rizga on this matter:

Some of the most important things that matter in a quality education—critical thinking, intrinsic motivation, resilience, self-management, resourcefulness, and relationship skills—exist in the realms that can’t be easily measured by statistical measures and computer algorithms, but they can be detected by teachers using human judgment. America’s business-inspired obsession with prioritizing “metrics” in a complex world that deals with the development of individual minds has become the primary cause of mediocrity in American schools.

In other words our educational system is as flawed as our health care for exactly the same reason. Both are dominated by market-based thinking according to which each is to be viewed as an industry that needs to be efficiently managed for the sake of turning a lucrative profit. Never mind that only "the one percent of the one percent" ever really benefit from such thinking. If they are rich, then they must be doing the right thing.

This then takes us to Ravitch's own punch line, which she reserves for her final sentence:

As a society, we should be ashamed that so many children are immersed in poverty and violence every day of their lives.

The real shame is that we have entrusted that responsibility for "human judgment" to those whose only achievement is the creation of wealth. Because nothing else matters, we allow poverty to flourish at greater and greater levels as a corollary to the widening distribution of wealth. Is it any wonder that violence follows poverty as night follows the day? Perhaps this is what "the one percent of the one percent" actually want. Perhaps they figure that such a corollary of violence will eventually lead to poverty self-destructing, after which the super-rich can live in the happiness of their wealth without feeling guilty about any harsh realities. The only question they seem to have overlooked is whether or not they will be able to sustain themselves in such a world. Unfortunately, the rest of us will not be around to witness their encounter with that revelation.

Do You Judge a Man by his Credentials?

Like many, I have taken a rather jaundiced view of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The fact that just about everything discussed in the preparation of this plan was performed in absolute secrecy (strict enough to avoid penetration by WikiLeaks) was enough to give me pause as a first impression. This seemed like another one of those gatherings inspired by organizations such as the World Economic Forum, whose motto ought to be, "Making the rich and mighty richer and mightier." Thus, when I got a hyperlink to the article "Why Support the TPP?" on the Facts & Arts Web site (which I read primarily for the arts), I decided to click with curiosity heavily seasoned with skepticism.

I did not take long for skepticism to come down like John Henry's hammer. The author is Jeffrey Frankel. His credentials are listed as "Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University." Say what? This says as much about Harvard as it does about Frankel. I suppose it would be really cool (at least to the rich and mighty) to have a resume that describes you as having a degree from Harvard in "Capital Formation and Growth." The fact that Harvard has become so specialized is just as disturbing as its efforts to displace the University of Chicago as the recognized haven for the "paid brains" of the rich. Time to get a home in that rock.

Thinking Out-of-the-Box About Greece

These days the phrase "thinking out of the box" has been so over-used (and usually abused at the same time) that it is little more than a worthless cliché. Nevertheless, it is clear that "old school establishment" thinking by those who control the world's wealth is making conditions in Greece worse, rather than better, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the refugee problem permeating Europe to a case of muddling through at its most ineffective. Meanwhile, Greece has to contend with a flood of those refugees arriving faster than they are departing.

Why not view them as a resource, rather than a problem? Instead of talking about bail-out funds, why not institute a development fund that bean-counters would see as an attractive opportunity for investment. The money could be used to bring life back to those businesses that used to thrive in Greece and probably, at the same time, allow a new generation of business to take root in the country. Properly planned, employment would come not only to all those Greeks living from hand to mouth but also to refugees, who left their home countries because conditions and/or opportunities for work were no longer viable. Properly finances and managed, Greece could become the sort of melting pot for the 21st century that the United States was for much of the 20th.

Perhaps the problem with this proposed solution is that it could result in Greece becoming a new economic competitor; and "established money" is more worried about that outcome than about the pending failure of Greece to sustain itself as a country.

Another Toy for the Idle Rich

These days it seems as if there is some kind of competition over who can the most absurd pastimes for the idle rich. The latest competitor is the property developer currently planning a pair of ten-story towers of luxury properties called Embassy Gardens at Nine Elms in London. Ten stories is not very high, but the place is likely to attract attention because the towers will be bridged by a swimming pool. According to a BBC News report, this idea was commissioned by Ballymore Group, whose chief executive described swimming in it as being like "floating through the air in central London." It least he was tactful enough to omit saying that it would provided a new way to look down on the poor people at street level. Meanwhile, points go to the BBC for an excellent account of all the engineering problems behind this fatuous vision. Anyone reading the story is probably already making mental notes about making sure not to walk under the damned thing!

Is ISIS a Product of the Failed Arab Spring?

I can appreciate the decision of the author of "The Mystery of ISIS," scheduled for the next issue of The New York Review of Books and currently available on their Web site, to remain anonymous. The article is rich with both historical background and analysis, yet it never draws any conclusions as to why ISIS should be recruiting so many followers on such a broad international scale. I would like to suggest that the author may have overlooked the role that may have been played by the Arab Spring, not so much in terms of any immediate impact that happened, fizzled, or backfired but with regard to the motivating forces behind protest. Those forces had so much in common that, as I observed in August of 2011, they could be found in Israel as well as its many Arab neighbors.

The writer that seems to have been most aware of those forces was Fareed Zakaria, whose analysis on the Time.com Web site argued that those who gathered in Tahrir Square were there because, regardless of how much education or training they had, they could not see a future for themselves in Egypt as it was in early 2011. Indeed, such a social context would suggest that the Arab Spring inspired not only Israeli youth but also the subsequent Occupy movement. Perhaps the most important consequence of globalization is that, practically everywhere in the world, there is now a generation of educated young people who see absolutely no prospects for a viable future. That future has been withheld from them by the tyrannical forces of an "economic elite," the top 1% of the tope 1%, if you will, that understands the world only in terms of balance sheets and returns on investment.

In any individual country this would be a desperate situation. On a global scale it is an invitation to catastrophe. Through skillful manipulation of the "consciousness industry," surpassing that of both the Nazis and the economic elite, ISIS has been able to circulate its message to those who feel, rightfully so, that there is nothing they can do to bring any satisfaction into their lives. Moralists can wax indignantly that ISIS should try to deceive so many vulnerable individuals, but do they give any thought as to why those individuals were so vulnerable in the first place?

Think about it. Through globalization the economic elite has create a world in which even the basic premises behind governance have gone onto the rocks, smashed by the domination of marketing over legislation and jurisprudence. "Rational man" may be justified in declaring that the efforts of ISIS to burn down the whole house and replace it with their caliphate are "barbaric;" but are they any more barbaric than they ways in which the "wise men [sic] of Davos" have all but obliterated the middle class in any economic society? The world may ultimately be divided between those who waste away out of their own helplessness and those who rally to ISIS for the simple reason that they have nothing better to do with themselves.

Does Europe Remember Greenspan?

I see that both the French and German stock exchanges are doing very well this morning. As I write this, both are up more than 3.75%. This is obviously connected to the fact that the lead story on BBC World Service News was that a viable solution to the problem of Greek debt may actually be in sight. Mind you, the problem has not yet be solved; but stock markets live in the fictions of the future, rather than in the immediate present. This makes them prime targets for what Alan Greenspan once called "irrational exuberance." Those of us more interested in common sense, rather than good manners, might prefer to call it "grabbing at straws."

Recently Columbia University Press published a book entitled What Does Europe Want? The Union and Its Discontents. It is basically a "dialog through essays" between Slavoj Žižek can Srećko Horvat. However, of particularly interest if the Foreword written by Alexis Tsipras, listed only as "Greek politician, president of SYRIZA," since, at the time he wrote it, the idea of an election in Greece was not yet in sight, let alone a rise in public support for Tsipras' political party.

These are all voices that realize that "economic recovery" is a concept that may well serve the ultra-rich but is condemning just about everyone else to poverty even greater than what was suffered before the collapse of the last decade. One might go so far as to say that even talk about the wealth gap has been devalued. Nevertheless, there was one rather unconventional sign of hope in a less-publicized story that the BBC ran over the weekend. They managed to find a specialist in population dynamics that was bold enough to suggest that the extinction of the human species is not only possible but likely to occur sooner than anyone had dared consider. Considered as a system, the earth may take care of itself better than any mere humans can; and, if humans try to interfere with the earth, then they may well be outwitted by some simple mathematical principles!

The Company We Keep

A Better Balance is a legal advocacy group that promotes workplace fairness for families. They seem to have timed their latest report, "Investing in Our Families: The Case for Paid Family Leave in New York and the Nation," to come out in time for Mother's Day. Susanna Kim reported for ABC News that the United States is only one of three countries that does not have a statute for paid maternity leave. The other two are Papua New Guinea and Suriname. I suspect that the reason this comparison was stressed is that the United States is the only one of those three countries that would be called "economically developed." That being the case, whatever Republican conservatives may try to tell us, the United States is the only country that places economic development above family values, which is probably just a neutral way of saying that the United States is the only country that thinks in terms of keeping wealth, rather than applying it to the overall well-being of its population.

Rating the Freshness of Food Purchases

I have to say that I have been relatively pleased with the alliance formed between KGO-TV (the ABC affiliate for the Bay Area) and Consumer Reports, particularly since the latter seems to have dropped the "lifetime" subscription as a reward for a donation I made many decades ago (reminding me a bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Nevertheless, I have always been skeptical about Consumer Reports articles about food and nutrition, since they would often base their findings on attributes that different from the criteria stressed by other concerned organizations, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Therefore, I have to question the value of today's report on the quality of fresh produce at different outlets. Regardless of the criteria behind the evaluations, the entire path that brings an item of produce to a customer's shopping bag is long, involved, and totally local. Thus, I have to wonder if, when a particular store is listed in operating out of a large number of states, the resulting rating is an averaging over all of those states or the result of examining only a few (or even one) of them. Even more problematic is that the ratings may have depended in when the outlets were evaluated, since it is not hard to imagine conditions changing radically from one week (or day) to the next.

These days my biggest concerns with inventory, fresh or processed, is how decisions are made. It is not hard to imagine that the large chains now relegate all such decisions to software. They all have had problems making ends meet since the economic downturn, meaning that they have all had to downsize, meaning that they probably let go of a good deal of "expert knowledge," letting some fast-talking consultant convince them that the knowledge would be "preserved" in the software. Indeed, I think we all have cause for concern that the expertise of a human evaluator may be out of the loop for just about any purchase of food made anywhere, with the possible exception of farmers' markets. Furthermore, I suspect that Google-informed consumers have less intuitive knowledge about when the food they buy may be contaminated or just spoiled. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether this all amounts to a skillfully calculated plot to "reduce the surplus population!"

Conferring on Extremism

As a refugee from the world of high technology research, I must confess that I have a rather jaundiced view of conferences. It has struck me that such events have always been, first and foremost, an excuse for travel. When the excuse was to parade recent activities, I came to accept it as tolerable and even set the standard that if, over the course of half a week away from my desk, I had encountered one result worthy of attention, then the trip was a good one.

More insidious, however, are those conferences that are concerned more with policy than with results. These are an excuse for little more than jawboning. They may conclude with an agenda of action items, but action rarely emerges from such an agenda. As a result I was far more than a little skeptical when I read about the White House hosting a special conference on terrorism.

Having read Marwan Bishara's editorial this morning on the Al Jazeera English Web site, I was glad to see that I was not alone in my thoughts. Bishara was perceptive enough to look beyond all the usual gratuitous observations that were uttered and turn, instead, to what was not said. Furthermore, I chose to concentrate his enumeration of "sins of omission" on the conference's host, President Barack Obama. Here is the basic summary of that enumeration:

Obama said nothing about how proxy and other western wars have created the fertile grounds for the type of extremism that has been evolving and spreading in the Arab and Muslim world.

How the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan coupled with US/Saudi intervention on the side of the mujahideen led to the creation of al-Qaeda.

Or, how the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, coupled with Iran's interference, prepared the ground for the creation and expansion of ISIL.

Nevertheless, I think there is a broader view, which first came on my radar during the early heady days of the Arab Spring. It is not enough to observe that the world, as a whole, has lapsed into a "forever war" mentality. We need to home in on how that mentality is being sustained.

What we learned from the protests that arose during the Arab Spring (protests that, it is important to observe, extended to include the educated young citizens of Israel) was that the current generation of youth, particularly those who have enjoyed a rich education, is desperately concerned that they have no future in the world as it is being run by its current leaders. While Corita Kent believed that war was not healthy for children and other living beings, that slender minority that controls the lion's share of the world's wealth sees great value in war, particularly as a solution to providing for those of the "other class," condemning them to be little more than "cannon fodder" for the many new generations of cannons that provide a major chuck of revenue to the moneyed class.

In also is amusing to see how, through control of the consciousness industry, that class has tried to cloak its elite status with a smoke screen. The recent report about the top 1% controlling more wealth than the remaining 99% overlooked just how much of that top 1% has almost no control at all. That upper tier needs to be narrowed down to 0.1%, if not 0.01% before we can really appreciate just how unevenly wealth has been distributed.

In my "other life" of writing about music, I have recently been listening to a new recording of the songs composed by Claude Debussy. This last of these songs, for a single unaccompanied voice, is a Christmas carol for homeless children. Debussy wrote this in 1915 when Europe was being torn apart by war. Who speaks for the homeless today?

Unequal Justice When it Matters

Jed S. Rakoff's article in the latest issue of The New York Review, "Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied," a review of Brandon L. Garrett's Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations, provides a valuable critique of the concept of "deferred prosecution." However, given Rakoff's experience as a judge, I am not sure what to make of his comments when comparing deferred prosecution with a decision to take a case to a jury trial. The fact is that, when a large corporation is involved, whether the case is brought against the corporation itself or individual employees at just about any level in the organization chart, the corporation will have access to a far more generous supply of litigation expertise than either the government or individual(s) filing the case. The idea that the courtroom provides even a remote approximation to a level playing field is dangerously idealistic. The result is that those who are disadvantaged, financially or physically, by negligence or malice from a large corporation, will be even more disadvantaged in any attempt to seek justice and any contingent compensation for those damaged, let alone punishment for the guilty. Until we recognize that our justice system is as broken as all the other elements of our current governmental structure, we shall be at the mercy of those who appreciate just how much power their wealth entails.

Sweeping the Problem Under the Rug

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam, will apparently be co-chair of this year's World Economic Forum. On the surface this looks like she will have a bully pulpit to bring serious issues about world poverty to the attention of the rich and mighty. However, I have come to believe that, when the rich and mighty gather, they are interested in little more than becoming richer and mightier. Thus, while her pulpit may have a prominent location, she may discover that most, if not all, of the congregation has gathered in another chapel.

Consider a recent Oxfam statistic that merited an article on the BBC News Web site. The basic finding is that by 2016 the wealthiest 1% will control more than 50% of the world's wealth. In other words that 1% will be wealthier than the total of the remaining 99%. However, before gasping too deeply, we should consider the work of the BBC's own statistician, Anthony Reuben, who calculated how much wealth it takes to be part of that 1%. The answer is "just over half a million pounds." To put that in local terms, just about anyone owning a house in San Francisco will qualify.

The problem is that there is now a distinction between "rich" and "super-rich," which, thanks to the ability of the super-rich to control the media (and, as a corollary, world governments) is being conveniently ignored. What we might call "extreme wealth" is limited to a very narrow slice at the top of that 1% category. How narrow is that slice? This would require deeper statistical study than has yet been made public. My guess is that those in that slice know how narrow it is and also know that they have the power to maintain it, if not make it narrower. Do we really expect that they will apply any of that extreme wealth to evening out the overall distribution, perhaps to a point at which we no longer have to worry about statistics for extreme poverty?

The Fall of Intellectual Prestige

Reading some of Virgil Thomson's columns for the Herald Tribune can sometimes be downright painfully anachronistic. Consider what he wrote on October 3, 1944 about the future of symphony orchestras in the United States:

This [financial] support will be forthcoming exactly as long as the orchestras maintain their nationwide intellectual prestige. And they will maintain that only so long as they are clearly instruments of public instruction.

To put this in historical perspective, Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life appeared in 1963, writing primarily about the state of the American mentality in the decade following the one in which Thomson wrote the above passage. This was a time when "intellectual prestige" was, for all intents and purposes, an oxymoron, since anyone with intellect might question a society driven by little more than the pursuit of consumer goods or the uneven distribution of wealth; and anyone raising such questions clearly posed a Communist threat.

Things have changed a lot since then. The Iron Curtain fell and some of the most vigorous capitalism in the world is practices in the former Soviet Union. It is probably practiced even more vigorously in the People's Republic of China, which has not given up its Communist name but has shown itself to be highly adept at the gaming tables of capitalism. However, when intellectual prestige was beaten down to a pulp in the Fifties, it never really recovered, even when we managed to elect Presidents who valued intellect as much as Franklin Roosevelt did in trying to get the country out of the Great Depression. Now we live in an age in which it does not take very much intellect to recognize that people are more likely to believe in Santa Claus or winning the lottery than they are to benefit from what our government is trying to pass of as "economic recovery." Indeed, it is because intellectuals know a naked emperor when they see one that they are still viewed as dangerous; and, in such a cultural setting, "intellectual prestige" is a liability, rather than an asset.

Technology Enables Living with a Problem, Rather than Solving It

Apparently inspired by Google, the Chinese search company Baidu is now branching into innovating products. According to a report on the BBC News Web site, one of the first steps in that direction has been the announcement of a new electronic implementation of "smart" chopsticks. Stripping away the hype, this amounts to building sensors into a chopstick. In the first release the sensors do not detect very much, temperature and sodium content are the two properties names specifically in the article. The long-range plan, however, is that a single chopstick should be endowed with enough sensors to let you know whether or not your food is safe to eat.

China seems to share with the United States a common predicament regarding food safety. This amounts to the extent to which any regulatory authorities that are created almost immediately find themselves in an arms race with the food processing industry. It is as if the latter has decided that it is more profitable to evade regulation, rather than commit to obeying it. Thus we now have a technology whose long-term goal is to compensate for the fact that regulators are always on the losing side of this battle.

Needless to say, it is unlikely that this new technology will be cheap. Indeed, we shall probably see soon enough a direct correlation between "smart" and "expensive." At some point, probably in the near future, only the rich will be protected from the foibles of the food processing industry. However, ours being a democratic society, the poor will still have a choice: be smart enough to eat what is safe without the assistance of technology or die of food poisoning.

Does Money Buy Happiness?

Hannah Gregg, of ABC7 News, decided to revisit the 2009 study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Denton, which established that income of $75,000 was the threshold of emotional well-being. Granting the fact that the study was controversial, she decided to see what would happen if she tried to adjust this so-called "Happiness Benchmark" to account for economic factors, such as inflation. Her conclusion was that the benchmark had, indeed, risen and was now at $83,000. She also prepared a state-by-state breakdown, applying her calculations to individual states to determine what it would take to be happy there. As might be guessed, California clocked in above the average at $95,325.

Idle curiosity drove me to look back on my tax forms for last year. Since my wife and I are both in retirement, I figured that, at the very least, it might tell me something about how effective our "wealth management" practices were. I discovered that our household was above the national figure and below that for California.

Needless to say, I do not take any of this particularly seriously. Obviously, when revenue shifts to a stock portfolio, you start thinking more about income than growth. In 2006, I decided to set up a spreadsheet through which I could track the difference between income and expenses on a month-by-month basis. It turns out that, while, at this fine monthly level, that difference fluctuates between positive and negative, over the long term we have been pretty successful at keeping it positive. We refer to the cumulative difference as a "cushion."

One result is that we tend to think of large expenses in terms of their impact on that cushion, bearing in mind that it has become sort of a rainy-day resource. This means that we tend to spend less than we did when household income was significantly higher than the benchmark. However, I do not think that either my wife or I would say that we are less happy because we are spending less. To the contrary, I think that one of the results of moving over to retirement income is that we are more likely to be happy with what we have, rather than what we want.

I wanted to report on this exercise because I believe that emotional well-being is an important factor. However, I have to worry about the reasoning behind the effort of Kahneman and Denton to reduce it to a single number. Indeed, I have argued in the past that such "bottom-line thinking" is responsible for a lot of really bad social decisions, the most serious being those concerned with health care. Even worse is when that bottom line is a dollar figure, rather than some other quantitative measurement.

Then I realized that I was flying in the face of nature. A consumerist society is all about having what you want and having a bottom-line dollar figure that will allow you to get it. It is a bit like a casino in which the tables are rigged against you. You can never have enough money to be happy; but, as John Oliver noted on his HBO program last Sunday, you are manipulated (by what is sometimes called "consciousness industry") into such an unrealistic state of optimism that you prefer the remote chance of breaking the casino's bank to the dangers of the more likely outcome that the casino will break you. The possibility that happiness can be found by walking away from the casino, rather than walking into it, never really arises, simply because those who have the wealth can spent it on propaganda to convince us that no alternative is even remotely thinkable.

Jeff Madrick's Latest Take on Why Economic Recovery is a Myth

Jeff Madrick's latest NYRBlog post tries to look beyond the usual cant about the uneven distribution of wealth in an effort to tease out why any suggestion of economic recovery cannot, at least at present, be anything other than an illusion. Here is the crux of his punch line:

Inequality has traditionally meant that incomes at the top grow faster than the next category down, which in turn grow faster than the next category, and so on. All categories can grow to some extent. As has been apparent to economists for several years, however, this is no longer the case. We now have stagnating incomes for a large majority of Americans and runaway incomes at the very top—especially the top tenth of the top one percent. This is not so much “inequality” as a complete lack of growth for much of the country.

To this should be added the corollary that the elite "top tenth of the top one percent" have not achieved that status through economic growth. The "creation of wealth" through elaborate processes of exchange, many of which involve computational instruments whose workings are poorly understood (even by those who profit the most by them), has nothing to do with economic growth. To paraphrase a proposition posed by Robert Skidelsky, those who make money no longer have to worry about "real-world" matters like making things.

Unfortunately, this narrow elite of money-makers now have enough of the stuff that they can exert those controls of government through which they can continue their practices unimpeded. The Occupy movement tried to bring this state of affairs to our attention. Unfortunately, being informed about it did not lead to the problem being resolved. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that, while the rest of us may have the power of the ballot box, the votes of ordinary citizens simply cannot stand up to the support of the moneyed elite. Nor will logic prevail. Because those with wealth realize that they can maintain and grow their status simply by tweaking software, the idea that they may be snuffing out an entire country of potential consumers no longer signifies.

Throughout history many countries have perished through the irrational embrace of religious beliefs; the fate of our own country may follow a similar path, not through religion but through an intense obsession with a pernicious secular myth.

A Musicological Appreciation of the Distinction between Nouns and Verbs

At the beginning of this year, I wrote about an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society by Rob C. Wegman which suggested that the governing powers of "the city of fifteenth-century Leiden thought more about the issues of both education and poverty than government at any level in our own country in the present day." However, I was not drawn to this article by my interests in educational policy. Rather, I was drawn to the paper by its title "From Maker to Composer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 1450–1500." I had encountered that title while reading Kate van Orden’s book Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print, about which I had written (in rather glowing terms) on my Examiner.com national site at the end of last month. The thesis behind this book is that the sixteenth century, which happened to begin with the publication of the first volume of the masses of Josquin des Prez in 1502, was a period during which how people thought about music went through a radical "paradigm" shift (to invoke the terminology of of Thomas S. Kuhn's monograph, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." In prior centuries thinking about music was solely a matter of thinking about making it through performance. However, Ottaviano Petrucci's printed volume of Josquin's music introduced the possibility that one could make music by making a document, rather than making a performance.

This struck a familiar nerve for me. Last August I had found myself thinking, once again, about the difference between a verb-based approach to thinking about music (where the focus is on those actions that lead to performance) and a noun-based approach in which thinking about artifacts, such as pieces of paper with music notation on them, is more important than the dynamics of interpreting the notation. It was that familiarity that led me to check out what Wegman had to say about the distinction between making and composing. Through this paper, I was pleased to discover that I was far from the first to recognize the distinction between nouns and verbs in thinking about music. Instead, that recognition could be traced all the way back to Aristotle.

There are some real gems of observation in that section of Wegman's paper that deals with the distinction between making and doing. His primary source is the medieval theorist Tinctoris, but he is also interested in how one can read Tinctoris' texts properly. Here is the first quote that resonated with me:

At the root of Tinctoris's perception lies the Aristotelian distinction between making (poiesis) and doing (praxis). Music, by definition, belongs to the latter category. To ‘make’ is to produce a piece of work, an object, and sound is not an object but motion. It is fleeting, transitory, immaterial: sound cannot be made (factus) but only uttered (prolatus).To think of music as a ‘thing’ is a paradox: things have permanence and spatial extension, and for sound this is unthinkable unless it is represented by ink on paper, thus assuming matter and form.

The distinction between nouns and verbs then arises in addressing the nature of "Tinctoris's perception" as follows:

And the principal characteristic of the perception is, in fact, its commonsensical nature, its rootedness in everyday language: a thing is a substance (noun) modified by accidents (adjectives),while motion is caused by action (verb), involving an agent (nominative) and patient (accusative). Tinctoris's written/mental classification, cited above, parallels exactly this noun/verb distinction. While written counterpoint, by its very nature, can only be represented by a noun (res facta or cantus compositus), oral counterpoint necessarily requires one to use a verb (cantare super librum). The noun contrapunctus, covering both, can be an overarching term by virtue of being, not an object, but an ars, a knowledge of the rules for making and doing.

From that position Wegman can then return to the "Aristotelian distinction," now reflected by the writings of Thomas Aquinas:

Although writing, creating, and making are nowadays used interchangeably as synonyms for composing, medievals were acutely conscious of the distinctions between them, and they carefully maintained these in written statements. ‘To create,’ as Aquinas put it (ibid., 264), is to ‘produce something out of nothing,’ which only the Creator can. To make or to compose is to work on or put together material provided by nature, which is what the artist does. To write, finally, is to copy (scribere).

I suppose that, had I been younger, I would have felt disappointed to discover that what I had thought was my own bright idea had actually been hijacked from Aristotle. However, I have been nurturing this idea for quite some time, going back to my own days as a Silicon Valley researcher. No matter how hard I worked at it, I always felt as if I was the only one who saw any value in it. As a result of reading Wegman's paper, I no longer feel quite so solitary!

Terrorism by the Book of Edgar Allan Poe

Yesterday's Taliban attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, was, without a doubt, a major news story, significant enough that it is still reverberating. Having now gone through several reports, I still find that the Al Jazeera English article, which takes wire service material and adds their own "local knowledge" sources, makes for one of the best accounts. Perhaps one of the reasons that my attention was drawn to their treatment was that it reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and the futility of that tale's protagonist to insulate himself and his closest friends from the ravages of a plague.

It struck me that both the Lebanese restaurant and the Wazir Akbar Khan district where it was located made for a setting with that same kind of insulation in mind. Those being insulated were the rich and mighty, foreigners and Afghans alike. Consider this sentence in the Al Jazeera report about the Taverna du Liban:

It has steel doors and customers have to pass through security to get in, as is the case with many restaurants in the city.

Consider, now, this sentence from the statement given by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid:

There was a suicide attack on a foreign hotel where special foreign invaders are coming for dinner.

We may choose to debate whether or not that noun "invaders" is appropriate; but no such debate is necessary in the eyes of the Taliban.

This is yet another case in which it would be folly to deny that the attacker has a point of view. The use of that noun clearly indicates a point of view that foreigners are exploiting Afghan resources with the collusion of other Afghans getting rich in the process. This is an effort to fight back against the invasion and driver out the invaders. The only problem is that history tells us what happened the last time the Taliban succeeded in this mission.

All this took place just as Prince Prospero's most favored guests were preparing for the relocation of his fortified castle to Davos. My guess is that the Taliban will be given a generous amount of lip service. It is unlikely, however, that they will receive any other kind of attention from the World Economic Forum. This would make the Taliban the reductio ad absurdum of the activism of the impoverished. Someone should start wondering whether or not such bloodthirsty absurdity is really the only way to deal with the unabated growth of poverty around the world.