How much stupid *is* in the economy?

I have a confession: much as I consider myself a numbers person and follow business, economic, and finance news, there is a lot that I still don't "get". I realized this week that most of it comes down to my extremely conservative nature when it comes to money. If I were going to invest in stocks, I would do it because I had researched the intrinsic value of the company and had good reason to believe that it would do well in the future. If I were going to invest in bonds -- which I had always been told before this month were so safe that they were boring and should be avoided for that reason alone -- I would do so because I believed in the strength of the entity selling it and hold it until it matured; hell, I would probably reinvest the funds after. It took me a while to remember that most people do not see their investments that way; they do not look at the long-term, and many don't even look at the medium-term. They are super-sensitive to every hiccup and will bail if they see enough people doing so, just as they will invest in something if they see enough people doing so. I have always been distrustful of the crowd, which is why I remain hesitant to trust this very emotional bunch with my financial security.

This obsession with short-term thinking, apparently, blinds people to the consequences of obvious phenomenon right in front of them...say, a decade or so of extremely low interest rates. 

I suffered through the last recession. I have complained at length about it, so I don't want to go on more about it here. I was also a conscious human being in 1987, 1990, and 2001, so I knew that another recession would come, no matter what the Treasury or Fed did to soften the impact. That is why I worked very hard to stabilize my financial circumstances. (I am not wagging my finger at anyone who wasn't able to do so; I appreciate that my family enjoyed some privileges that many others don't, and while my choices may have created some opportunities, it mostly amplified what advantages I already had.) That is also why I had a savings account and noticed that, while my accounts were modestly growing, they weren't growing as much as they might if, say, interest rates weren't consistently low.

What could possibly go wrong?

Let's agree that the world economy shouldn't pivot on my needs alone...but I somehow doubt that I was the only person in my position who had a little bit of money that I was trying to grow but didn't want to "risk". But that isn't what made the low rates so galling. They were, as far as I could see, the most durable measure that was taken after the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession, and they outlived their usefulness.

What was the point of low-interest rates? To make money more available to spend...but how? By encouraging people to borrow money. That money financed (or refinanced) mortgages, cars, educations, and businesses. Some of that might have been great -- but what about opportunities to build wealth that you didn't first have to borrow for? What about raising the minimum wage so it could be a livable wage, so that if a family had two wage- or salary-earners, they could save money? What about lowering the cost of education so that families didn't have to bet everyone's futures so one person could get a Bachelors degree? What about making it easier for people with high school diplomas or Associates degrees to get good paying jobs? What about subsidizing the cost of childcare so more parents who wanted to work could be a part of the workforce and generate more income? What about not making high end residential developments so easy to build -- with that cheap and easy money -- and driving up the cost of housing for everyone in the process?

Yeah, I guess keeping interest rates low was much easier than attacking those problems. A shame no one reminded people who worked with money for a living as well as the vast majority of our elected representatives about long-term consequences.

Here we are, and there's nothing we can do to change it except move forward. Here's hoping everyone remembers that nothing lasts forever and plans accordingly, especially those we trust to plan for us. (One last thing I'll say: cryptocurrency really shouldn't be your backup plan.)

Deb in the City

The road to hell

If I'm writing a lot about Slavery and the Culture of Taste, it's because the book covers numerous topics that get at the heart of the intensifying anxiety so many of us experience as we contemplate the current state of our culture.

One of the things I can't stop thinking about is how the internal contradictions were always so obvious to the "founders" of modernity. Instead of addressing those contradictions, they played verbal and mental gymnastics with themselves, then threw on layers of pretension to hide what they couldn't fix.

Did it really never occur to anyone that their circles couldn't be squared? That they needed to strip down to brass tacks and start again? Because it certainly has occurred to a number of people now. Or did they think that there was a moment, some time in a vague future, in which those contradictions could be resolved? Was that moment supposed to be now?

If you value liberty as a fundamental right and believe that your civilization is better when those in it are free, you don't get around that by redefining certain people as inferior or subhuman because it is an economic necessity that those people work under conditions you wouldn't be willing to take on for yourself. You have to redesign your economic system, which will almost inevitably mean redefining the concept of success. 

I feel pretty strongly that the answer isn't to use machines to provide silent servitude; the fact that so many -- in business and fiction -- fantasize about robots that might as well be sentient speaks, to me, of a recognition that a spark of humanity is necessary for, well, the company of other human beings, and we endeavor to escape that at our own peril.

Philip Ball's excellent Modern Myths theorized that one of the fears Frankenstein stokes is that we will become the robots, not so much that they will take us over. After reading Slavery and the Culture of Taste, I have to wonder to what extent Frankenstein was inspired by slavery. I can't help but think that Mary Shelley, like so many around her, had a deep seated recognition that modernity was creating monsters -- more out of those who used other human beings than the misused human beings.

Sunny Auyang's book The Dragon and The Eagle covered these topics as well. Auyang distinguishes between those who use slaves (Han China) from those who depend on them (Imperial Rome). Empires end: ultimately what drives them is conquest, and sooner or later the costs of conquest outweigh the benefits. But while all empires suffer from hypocrisy of one flavor or another -- the prestige of the metropolitan center versus the practical importance of the "creole" borders; philosophies that center on the importance of law and advancement versus those that lean on custom to justify corruption -- those that depend on slavery come to almost neurotically venerate the concepts of freedom and liberty. 

In many cases, concepts do not take shape until their hateful opposite is articulated. This may be normal. What is unhealthy is not only that those contradictions are allowed to co-exist, but that a society allows itself to become or remain dependent on that which they have told themselves is intolerable. This is what twists us and causes us to make compromises that we, ultimately, can't live with; this is what causes us to be people who don't really believe anything except that which is most likely to help us survive. This is what makes us hypocrites who spout ideals that in the final analysis we won't do anything to support them. 

I started writing this post before I came across this article about Israel from The New Republic. My rabbi is quoted there, and his quotes are one of the few bright spots in the piece. The Jewish way is to do the work. (I might add so is the Korean way, so I am doubly obligated; I suspect there are few cultures in the world that valued complacency.) The work needs to be done, but I am under no delusions that doing so will guarantee that Israel will be any kind of safe haven for me or anyone else in my family. Not everyone in my family is straight; no one has been Orthodox since my grandfather; I am a woman of mixed heritage. This Israeli government isn't welcoming to people like me, period.

And even if it were...no, I'm sorry, I can't stomach the trampling of human rights anymore. (Yes, I refer to the Palestinians. No, I don't care that some of them wouldn't like me because I'm Jewish; the vast majority are not that way, which is amazing given their increasing desperation, which by definition leaves people with few good and ethical options.) I've fought with many people on both sides of the issue of Israel since the age of fifteen, and for some reason it's only gotten worse as I've gotten older. It is bad enough that I live now in a settler-colonial country that has made mistreatment of BIPOC and immigrant people a policy; I do not want to flee to another place that does the same thing. I do not want my safety to come at the cost of someone else's. I am not going to be soothed that I am doing the right thing because of a chauvinist notion about my heritage.

Good intentions by themselves aren't the only things that guide us to hell. I submit that the dirt surrounding that path are the compromises, contradictions, and hypocrisies that we try to blind ourselves to, and the end of the road is the point at which those good intentions run out. Of course it's hell. 

I want to survive -- I want my family to survive -- but I don't want any of us to do it in hell, especially while there's still time to avert it. Let's all do the work while we still can.

Deb in the City

A Re-evaluation of Tidying

When I first read Marie Kondo in 2015, I felt something click. This was what I had been looking for. Here was the thing that spoke to the desire for a clean aesthetic with my increasing dread of consumerism. And what the effort was pinned on was Joy, or if you prefer, Happiness. I had been given permission to be Happy, and instead of needing to buy something, I needed to look at what I already had and decide what I needed to keep, not disavow. I also loved that she *wasn't* talking about minimalism, and in fact made room for people who genuinely enjoyed certain things to keep them. I harbored a fantasy about a relative of mine being able to have a home that spotlighted their love of tea, peacocks, and red. 

But maybe the better question is why I was looking for it.

I've felt bullied in my life for and by a lot of things, and the state of my home was a big one. My homes were too messy when I was younger; I was messy, I was dirty. It was a failure of my parents, but of course it was my mother's responsibility because that's how people look at everything. And when I got married and had a family of my own, no one gave me an excuse if I had to work as well as take care of a family, or if I didn't have money for the things that made a home more inviting. I was expected to keep a certain kind of home. Because I failed, I decided it was easier not to have certain people over -- certain family members as well as, er, friends -- than to have to defend myself. I did not want those people back in my home once I made it "presentable" or "acceptable"; in fact, maybe it's even fair that I didn't want to be accepted. But I did want to proclaim to people that it was exactly as I wanted it, and that while I had decided I could not use my home or other possessions to achieve approval, I could at least use it to exercise control.

Healthy? Hell no. But, I daresay, completely normal, with a legacy stretching back centuries.

The first thing that forced me to admit that maybe tidying really was more aspirational than I had wanted to be true was Catherine McCormack's fantastic Women in the Picture. McCormack addresses four dominant female archetypes and what they mean for the civilizations that produce and consume them: Venus, the Mother, Damsels and Dead Maidens, and the Monstrous Woman. If you guessed that the home falls into the Mother's sphere of influence, you are correct. 

Aren't we so productive?

I've patted myself on the back for years for how much tidying leans into anti-consumerism, even if it isn't minimalism. But as Slavery and the Culture of Taste drove home to me recently, objects aren't the only things we consume in our modern civilization. We perform -- produce -- sell -- emotions and ideals just as much as we consume them. And let's not pretend that can't be equally damaging as the overproduction of..."goods".

McCormack pointed her readers to Dutch paintings of scenes of domestic bliss: the wives and mothers who were the focus of the paintings were in control of their tidy environment and obedient children. As befitted a proud Protestant household, the subject's prosperity wasn't advertised with an abundance of objects but with the openness and cleanliness of space. For the vast majority of homes, these paintings aren't a reflection of reality; no matter how prosperous, it is difficult to imagine that one woman, caring for multiple children, is able to maintain a home as tidy and organized as the one idealized here.

I squirmed as McCormack pointed out the similarities between these paintings and their visual descendants on Pinterest and Instagram. There, again, is the Mother in scenes of domestic bliss that we can only aspire to: she is forever young, surrounded by obedient children who are the picture of health -- themselves an advertisement for how productive she is -- efficiently going about the business of making the home (usually the kitchen) work. You only think what the picture is selling is the high-tech eco-chic appliance that is tastefully displayed, or the premium food that is being consumed and sure to provide magical healing properties; that picture is really selling an idealized aspect of femininity, and we keep buying. Most of us can't have the gadgets, but we can have a tidier space, and with that, we can enter the marketplace of ideals as producers of our own and start selling. (Why get upset with the economy of attention that runs so many internet sites? It's only making obvious what has always been true.) And isn't being purchased from even better than being in control?

The above insight was uncomfortable, but welcome to adulthood in the 21st century. It wasn't until Slavery and the Culture of Taste that I started stepping back in horror. No, don't worry -- you haven't imagined that the aesthetic ideal of modernity has generally been cluttered with objects, and in many ways is the opposite of the perfectly tidied space. But one special category of the person of culture, the person of taste, always understood that everything has its place and everything must be put in it in order to achieve maximum productivity. Yes, that person was the slave master, and yes, it does imply all of the ugliness of human beings as objects in a greater machine that you think it does.

So why is it that Marie Kondo sounds so similar? Because she -- and many like her -- have as a principle that everything should have a place and the key to order is to put everything in it. Should you fail to do this, she promises that the first out of place item will invite disorder. Why does it make us feel better when she says it but make us cringe when someone who controlled other human beings says it?

Our personal spaces do say something about us, whether we want them to or not. So what is it that we are hoping they will tell everyone about us? What is it we are hoping we can transform about ourselves by transforming our space? Do we want our spaces to embody some kind of domestic ideal that is a safe haven for those who don't spend that much time in their homes, as it was most probably for the real patrons of those Dutch paintings? Or do we want them to be as efficient as a plantation worked by people who needed to be orderly under threat of constant violence? Maybe the bullying I mentioned at the beginning isn't unique to me, and maybe that has something to do with the answer to these questions.

I'm growing more ashamed of the way I've kept my home, and not because it was a mess. I'm not proud that I've made other family members feel as bad about how they kept their space as I was made to feel. I thought I'd kept out the people who made me feel inadequate in my own home, but really I'm not sure they ever left. Maybe I can't do much about them, but at least I've kept some of their friends out by not being on Pinterest or Instagram for the last few years. If I can stop consuming some of those ideals, maybe -- hopefully -- that eventually will be something.

Deb in the City

Staring at the Abyss

I'm in the midst of drafting my series -- almost done with installment fifteen, and then we're onto the finale (wait, what?). I will still, of course, be editing for a while (no, trust me...), so still being in "research mode" isn't inappropriate.

I've read a lot of history, politics, science writing, as well as sci-fi and fantasy, but lately my reading has delved into what we might term the dystopian side of things -- and I refer to the non-fiction. Is there anything more dystopian than chattel slavery? I mean, other than settler-colonialism?

Perhaps modernity itself.

I picked up Simon Gikandi's Slavery and the Culture of Taste in January, and it was only a coincidence that I finished it in February aka Black History Month. It was without a doubt the most difficult book I have ever read. I've whined at length about how hard it was to get through Edward Said's Orientalism, and no small part of that was the sometimes obtuse academic language, and the liberal use of French passages...which I don't speak. That book was easier to read than Slavery and the Culture of Taste. (Stamped from the Beginning was easier to read.) 

 

Not for the faint of heart, but everyone should read it

As I've gotten older, reading about slavery and what it really was has gotten more difficult. It's an increase in empathy in general, but it's also -- and this is a good thing -- other Brown and Black people getting more concerted media attention when they talk about historical experiences and the continuing ramifications. A couple of authors have made oblique references here and there that have stopped me cold, but I could go on trying to understand the shape of history. (And they have shown up in the most unexpected places; take a look at Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene.) Not with this book.

I have never read anything that so completely described the psychological and psychic displacement that wasn't just attendant to slavery but that made slavery possible. African bodies needed to be transformed from people into objects for the benefit of the slave holders, who, like everyone everywhere, told themselves stories about how good they were, but even though slaves miraculously held onto their sense of themselves as selves and not things, the processes of being displaced, stripped, packed into small spaces as if they were animals, being deprived of privacy, being branded, being regularly, sadistically abused, losing their names, losing their sense of time, and being subject to losing their communities and families at any point traumatized them. As they would anybody. I cried several times while reading the descriptions of these processes, and the only thing that kept me reading was the feeling that I could not do anything to right those wrongs unless I understood it. That is perhaps the most earnest thing I've ever written in this space, and I mean it.

What terrified me was Gikandi's explanation of how the affected psychological and sociological processes work, and how easy it would be to break anyone from anywhere if you did those things to them. I wasn't under any delusions that there was something particularly vulnerable about African captives, but looking out at the world and seeing a planet filled with people that could be as easily broken if as sadistically treated -- and knowing that I was one of them...isn't that part of the horror of dystopian fiction?

(It strikes me how much the dominant community has suffered for ignoring the plight of the people they oppressed. The psychic displacement that African slaves suffered from is not substantially unrelated to what we have seen in other totalitarian civilizations, whether it's the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Communist China. We can't, probably, expect most people to assert their previous identities in the same ways when Big Brother is watching with increasingly sophisticated surveillance, but those of us who aren't being tormented should be a little less surprised that simply changing governments and material conditions doesn't magically undo years of psychological and sociological damage.)

Spoiler alert, in case you needed one: miraculously, slaves did not by and large break. They not only established relationships and communities, they kept their senses of self, even if they had to redefine that in a hostile setting. They were hyper-aware that they were the negative by which their "owners" and those communities defined themselves -- much as, per Said, Europe couldn't exist without The Oriental Other -- but their psyches stayed intact by asserting their own history (or remembered fragments of it) in whatever spaces were available, whether it was as dance, art, and ritual or in the provision grounds they used to feed themselves. As time went on, many communities also explicitly thumbed their noses not at the stereotypes they were subjected to but the "manners" their owners pretended to. They used performance to mock performance and thereby establish their own identities.

If I'm honest, I picked up this book because I was interested in the concept of "taste", which is coming up more in other books I've read (Culture and Imperialism, Fearing the Black Body, Women in the Picture). I was not disappointed by Gikandi's insights. Intertwined with Taste is Performance, and modern civilization would not exist without it. Before modernity, what many European cultures needed to perform was Goodness, for God and for our communities, but modernity required the performance of Happiness. Keeping in mind the maxim that the medium is the message and eventually comes to alter it, I would say happiness is more suited to performance than goodness, and for that reason has stuck with us for so long. 

And why shouldn't we be happy when we have everything...underwritten by the exploitation of others? It's really not a new insight -- people understood even when they didn't want to that their wealth was coming off of slavery -- and it has been haunting modern civilization since the beginning. As much as people tried to get around it by strictly defining "We" and by desperately trying to convince themselves that other people weren't just that, we never entirely lost sight that our system is based on varying degrees of haves and have nots. Just as we needed to perform Goodness to convince everyone that we were destined for heaven, we need to perform Happiness to convince everyone that we are destined for success and therefore trustworthy with opportunity. 

Fear of damnation is still the real driver.

We read history to understand our present moment, and this was no exception. I continue to seek to understand the emptiness and hypocrisy that can characterize our culture. I know I'm not the only one, and I presume other people will understand when I say that sometimes it feels as if the abyss is looking back at me. Perhaps that is why I really wanted to finish this book -- millions of people have climbed out of the abyss after they were shoved into it. If they can survive, so can we. But only if we acknowledge them as Us first.

Deb in the City