I was back in my old neighborhood a couple of weekends ago, walking toward the farmer's market, when I passed a little knot of people who were looking up and gesturing toward the dignified brick apartment buildings that line one of the boulevards. They were all clearly from somewhere else, and one of them was explaining the handsome buildings, which apparently struck them as odd, to the others:
"I think they're pretty dumpy on the inside, but they look good from out here," he said.
I thought that was pretty remarkable, because the guy wasn't actually claiming to have been inside any of the buildings he was talking about. He just thought they were run-down dumps inside. All he could actually see were the buildings' admittedly-impressive outsides, but he he didn't or couldn't permit himself to be impressed by them. So he assumed that the handsome buildings were all squalid inside.
He was dead wrong. I should know. He was pointing at my old building.
I lived in that place for seven years, in a big pre-war apartment with hardwood floors, and the only thing that was ever remotely squalid in that place was my bachelor housekeeping. It was a nicer place than I really should have rented right out of graduate school; my excuse is that I'd come straight from California, where the rent on even a shabby studio was always basically all the money you had, and so my big beautiful apartment with the fancy view seemed like a steal. And having an apartment like that made feel like I was finally, after so many years of school, a middle-class grownup. I only left that building when I got married and began my weekly interstate commute, because I needed a place closer to my office when I was in town.
Now, there may theoretically be an apartment building on that street that isn't well maintained on the inside. Maybe they weren't all as nice as mine. But I've been in lots of those buildings, either as a prospective renter or while visiting a friend, and I've never seen any of the dumpy apartments this guy was talking about.
The guy explaining how terrible the apartments on that street were (don't let the fancy outsides fool you!) wasn't saying that because he knew it to be so. He apparently believed that those buildings were all concealing slum conditions because he wanted (or needed) to believe that. I don't know about you, but when I'm in a place I haven't been before I generally assume that the houses I'm looking at are pretty much the way they look, with the insides roughly as shabby, shiny, or well-kept as the outsides. I would never look at a house with its paint peeling off and say, "I bet it's an absolute palace inside," or presume that a fancy-looking house on the lake is secretly a dump. But for whatever reason, these strangers were not ready to accept that my neighborhood actually was the way it looked. So they had to invent facts not in evidence, the dumpy apartments secretly hidden inside impressive buildings, rather than deal with the reality staring them in the face. Those nice-looking buildings just couldn't be what they looked like, because they weren't supposed to be there.
(And actually, it was a little bit worse than that. As my spouse pointed out to me later, that guy had to actively ignore evidence he could see, namely the carefully-maintained landscaping around the buildings he was calling dumpy. In his world, the landlords have let those beautiful old buildings run to complete ruin but also meticulously landscaped them.)
Why not just accept the evidence in front of their eyes? One possible explanation is what I'll call suburbanite bias: the conviction that life in the Big Dirty City is just one long squalid nightmare. I don't just mean preferring to live outside the city yourself. I mean the insistence that living anywhere in the city is so hopelessly awful that anybody would count themselves blessed to "escape" to the suburbs. I should admit that I've never viewed the suburbs as a place to which I would eagerly escape; there's a reason that my blog name isn't "Doctor Pepper Pike, OH." But I see that some people might like a suburb better than the city. What I'm talking about is the belief that everyone in the city, except maybe a handful in luxury high-rises, must be living in a horrifying slum. Call it Urban Derangement Syndrome.
It could also have been about the specific part of the city my neighborhood is in. The skeptical visitors might simply have been unable to believe the sight of lovely vintage buildings in the black part of town. The neighborhood is actually mixed-race; I've spent years there, and I'm so white I'm nearly translucent. African-Americans are a plurality rather than a majority. And it's also a mixed-income neighborhood, with a healthy share of working-class homeowners but a bunch of doctors and classical musicians too. But the neighborhood has enough African-Americans that visitors from a racially unmixed area might view it as a "black neighborhood." (In this case, that which is not all-but-completely white becomes "black.") They may have refused to believe in the impressive apartment buildings they were seeing because they were under the impression that they were in The Ghetto, where all African-Americans live in miserable tenements and have The Blues. If you can buy decent soul food, it must be a slum. The Ghetto, in this case, is positively full of endocrinologists and cellists, but this isn't about the details. It's about the Big Picture, where all black people live in Bad Neighborhoods. How can there be nice apartments in a Bad Neighborhood? It makes no sense.
A slightly different version of this problem would be that the visitors viewed an entire side of town, the stereotypically "black" side, as one vast undifferentiated expanse of The Ghetto, and could not process that the "black" portion of a city actually has all kinds of neighborhoods, good, bad, and in-between. One way or another, the outsiders' refusal to accept what they were seeing as real is about a refusal to accept complexity. It's refusal to accept the variety that messes with easy simplifications. The "black side of town" is no more one single place than a city or a neighborhood is one place: they contain multitudes.
My other neighborhood, in the city where I own a home with my spouse, is also probably misunderstood by some outsiders. That neighborhood too is economically and ethnically mixed, and also viewed as the scary desperate city by surbanites with Urban Derangement Syndrome. Our house was built in the 1920s, and has no room for a huge lawn or huge attached garage. And it's only a few blocks from a high school with a large proportion of African-American students. ZOMG! Black teenagers! It are an urban jungle! Every night, my spouse and I lock our vintage leaded-glass windows and huddle by the working fireplace in terror.
Neither neighborhood is an exclusive bougie enclave. They have petty crime; you need to lock your doors, you shouldn't leave valuables in the car, and you shouldn't believe that everyone buttonholing you on the street is telling you their real story. When I first moved in to my old apartment my morning newspaper would get stolen in the morning. In other words, they are neighborhoods in cities, where you should take basic sensible precautions and generally not be an idiot. Does that make them "high crime" neighborhoods? Depends on how you're counting. Are they "dangerous" neighborhoods, where random pedestrians will be waylaid by a bunch of extras from The Wire? No. The scary thugs only live in the secret slum apartments hidden inside nice buildings. They never come out.
The thing about a city is that no neighborhood is very far from a different neighborhood; a good city doesn't sprawl. A city that does is a collection of suburbs on steroids. That boulevard of brick pre-war apartment buildings is only a block or two in one direction from a street full of blue-collar single-family homes. Half a mile in another direction is a shady street lined with what I can only call minor mansions. One nearby street is a depressed and dispiriting commercial strip. Another nearby street is filled with antiques dealers. Half a mile's run in yet another direction takes you to a park filled with live deer. It's a neighborhood. It neighbors other things. That's the point.
I left that neighborhood, but I didn't "escape" it. In fact, on the morning that I passed the guy explaining how all the apartments were actually dumps, I was in the neighborhood because I was moving back. My spouse has taken a year's leave from her job, so I gave up the bachelor pad near my office and moved with her back to another big pre-war apartment in another of those handsome buildings that the guy considered dumps in disguise. (Meanwhile, we rented the house in our other urban neighborhood to a group of classical musicians. Mostly string section. You know: animals.) So my old neighborhood is also my new neighborhood, at least for a year. And if the apartments in the neighborhood are secretly dumpy, well, I just rented another. Its dumpiness is still secret.
After I passed those confident visitors I went to the farmer's market and then back to my new apartment where my wife and my unpacked boxes were waiting. Then I stood at the counter in my newly-renovated kitchen and ate an organic peach. Just another day in the hood.
cross-posted from Dagblog
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Monday, August 05, 2013
A Tale of Two Newspapers
Everyone's talking about Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post. But it's also been a dramatic week for two newspapers close to my heart in different ways: The Boston Globe and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Two days ago, The Globe, like the WaPo, was sold to an individual billionaire with a high profile. Today the Plain Dealer, which has not been sold, stopped delivering the newspaper. It will still be printed every morning, but it will only be delivered three days a week. Nearly one third of its reporters were laid off on Wednesday. It's not the first round of buyouts or layoffs at the PD, and it's not the second either. The newsroom is now down to about a third of what it was in the 1990s.
The Plain Dealer will be "digital-first" from now on. On the first day of this bold step into the future, naturally, the electronic version of the newspaper crashed. Digital-first means you try to log into the website first, and when that doesn't work you go out and see if the drugstore will sell you an actial copy of the paper. But hey, you get what you pay for, right? And the web side of the business is strictly non-union.
Now, plenty of people will tell you that this is an inevitable consequence of our modern age. The newspaper has to die, because the internet demands it! Also, video killed the radio star, which is why you no longer own a radio. But apparently, it's not inevitable everywhere. The Boston Globe got sold to John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, for a Filene's-bargain-basement price of $70 million, even when other bidders offered more. Henry isn't talking layoffs. Boston is going to stay a two-newspaper town, and the premier newspaper is going to keep competing hard.
(Anyone who thinks that Henry bought the newspaper to get more or nicer coverage for the Red Sox, by the way, has no idea how the Boston sports media works. The Red Sox are not going to get more attention from Henry's Globe, because it is literally impossible for the Red Sox to get any more attention than they already do. And the coverage is not going to get nicer or softer, because the readers won't read that. The gold standard for Boston sports coverage remains a complex brew of idolatry and hostility. Boston baseball reporters don't play softball.)
Starting today, Cleveland is a less-than-one-newspaper city, with a Plain Dealer that is somewhat less than a newspaper. And that brings Cleveland one step closer to becoming something less than a city. It is part of a great city's death. Boston, a city that has thrived in the information age, will keep the major newspaper that a major city needs to function and thrive. The New York Times seems to have deliberately sold The Globe to an owner whose other enterprises are tied to Boston's civic health, and who seems motivated to protect the city's basic ecosystem. That's a choice on the Times Company's part. And the way Henry eventually runs his newspaper (or Jeff Bezos runs his) is a choice, just as the Newhouse family's decision to gut The Plain Dealer was a choice.
There's more than one route to profitability here. John Henry is not stupid with money. But he might have to be content with a lower direct return. A good newspaper in the internet age is only modestly profitable. A gutted newspaper is more profitable for a while, as long as you keep cutting costs faster than you lose revenue, but that's not a sustainable business model. That is selling copper wiring from abandoned houses.
Cleveland is a city being slowly run to death by economic rationalists whose business model adds up to sheer madness. It illustrates American business's suicidal focus on cost containment, with everyone trying to run the leanest operation in a city suffering economic famine. It is cheaper to lay off workers, and so stores no longer have enough consumers. The stores scale back, and their suppliers go hungry. It no longer "makes sense" to run a department store downtown. It no longer "makes sense" to run a daily newspaper. And then you are trying to attract new enterprises to a city you have to leave to find a Macy's, trying to recruit employees to a city where you can't get a newspaper delivered on Monday or Tuesday. It makes no sense.
Cleveland is a city of assets whose value has been allowed to decline, and assets whose value is ignored. It is a city of grand buildings left unrenovated and unoccupied, because no one chooses to value them. It is a city where a great newspaper is allowed to become a part-time enterprise, because no one chooses to see its value. And little by little it has become a place torn down by its owners, stripped down to be sold for parts by people who do not live there, who do not need or wish for the city to thrive. The car that could be rebuilt is sold for scrap metal. The business that could be made profitable is closed.
Don't cry for the Washington Post. There are worse things than being bought. The worst thing that happened to The Plain Dealer was its out-of-town owners keeping it.
cross-posted from Dagblog
The Plain Dealer will be "digital-first" from now on. On the first day of this bold step into the future, naturally, the electronic version of the newspaper crashed. Digital-first means you try to log into the website first, and when that doesn't work you go out and see if the drugstore will sell you an actial copy of the paper. But hey, you get what you pay for, right? And the web side of the business is strictly non-union.
Now, plenty of people will tell you that this is an inevitable consequence of our modern age. The newspaper has to die, because the internet demands it! Also, video killed the radio star, which is why you no longer own a radio. But apparently, it's not inevitable everywhere. The Boston Globe got sold to John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, for a Filene's-bargain-basement price of $70 million, even when other bidders offered more. Henry isn't talking layoffs. Boston is going to stay a two-newspaper town, and the premier newspaper is going to keep competing hard.
(Anyone who thinks that Henry bought the newspaper to get more or nicer coverage for the Red Sox, by the way, has no idea how the Boston sports media works. The Red Sox are not going to get more attention from Henry's Globe, because it is literally impossible for the Red Sox to get any more attention than they already do. And the coverage is not going to get nicer or softer, because the readers won't read that. The gold standard for Boston sports coverage remains a complex brew of idolatry and hostility. Boston baseball reporters don't play softball.)
Starting today, Cleveland is a less-than-one-newspaper city, with a Plain Dealer that is somewhat less than a newspaper. And that brings Cleveland one step closer to becoming something less than a city. It is part of a great city's death. Boston, a city that has thrived in the information age, will keep the major newspaper that a major city needs to function and thrive. The New York Times seems to have deliberately sold The Globe to an owner whose other enterprises are tied to Boston's civic health, and who seems motivated to protect the city's basic ecosystem. That's a choice on the Times Company's part. And the way Henry eventually runs his newspaper (or Jeff Bezos runs his) is a choice, just as the Newhouse family's decision to gut The Plain Dealer was a choice.
There's more than one route to profitability here. John Henry is not stupid with money. But he might have to be content with a lower direct return. A good newspaper in the internet age is only modestly profitable. A gutted newspaper is more profitable for a while, as long as you keep cutting costs faster than you lose revenue, but that's not a sustainable business model. That is selling copper wiring from abandoned houses.
Cleveland is a city being slowly run to death by economic rationalists whose business model adds up to sheer madness. It illustrates American business's suicidal focus on cost containment, with everyone trying to run the leanest operation in a city suffering economic famine. It is cheaper to lay off workers, and so stores no longer have enough consumers. The stores scale back, and their suppliers go hungry. It no longer "makes sense" to run a department store downtown. It no longer "makes sense" to run a daily newspaper. And then you are trying to attract new enterprises to a city you have to leave to find a Macy's, trying to recruit employees to a city where you can't get a newspaper delivered on Monday or Tuesday. It makes no sense.
Cleveland is a city of assets whose value has been allowed to decline, and assets whose value is ignored. It is a city of grand buildings left unrenovated and unoccupied, because no one chooses to value them. It is a city where a great newspaper is allowed to become a part-time enterprise, because no one chooses to see its value. And little by little it has become a place torn down by its owners, stripped down to be sold for parts by people who do not live there, who do not need or wish for the city to thrive. The car that could be rebuilt is sold for scrap metal. The business that could be made profitable is closed.
Don't cry for the Washington Post. There are worse things than being bought. The worst thing that happened to The Plain Dealer was its out-of-town owners keeping it.
cross-posted from Dagblog
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Tribal Knowledge
Fox News's hostile interview with Reza Aslan has lit up the internet. (See Michael Maiello and Historiann for two of the smarter takes.) Obviously, interviewer Lauren Green's insistence that something must be very wrong for a Muslim to write a book about Jesus, and that such a book must be wrong, is a problem. But Green (and her producers) are simply peddling a toxic version of an idea that lots of us entertain in various forms. The idea that a non-believer cannot understand (or worse, should not be allowed to speak about) a belief is only a more aggressive outgrowth of the common conviction that being a believer, or identifying with some specific group, gives you a special insight or understanding denied to outsiders. The conviction that no Muslim could write a "fair" book about Jesus grows from the belief that Christians, by virtue of being Christians, understand Jesus better than anyone else possibly could. That sense of privileged understanding comes from one's social identity, not from actual knowledge, and can be actively hostile to such knowledge. In the Reza Aslan example, faith in Jesus Christ might be construed as more important than, for example, the ability to read Biblical Greek. To a certain kind of Christian, a Muslim who can read New Testament Greek represents not one but two problems. Aslan's scholarly accomplishment is perceived as a threat to "knowledge" derived by other means.
This is by no means limited to Christians, or to religious believers. I happened to read Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives the week before the Aslan interview. In that book, Malcolm deals, fairly indulgently, with the common claim among Freudians that only someone who has undergone Freudian analysis is entitled to an opinion about Freud. Only insiders, only properly initiated believers, can be authorities on the subject. (Replace "Freud" here with "scientology" and "Freudian analysis" with "dianetics counseling" and see how that sounds.) And this insistence that outsiders could not possibly understand led important Freudians to restrict access to factual evidence. (Malcolm also weirdly treats this as not-unreasonable.) The custodians of the Freud Archive refused to allow scholars to see biographical evidence about Freud, including letters in his own hand, unless they were sure that the scholar was a true believer who would stick to the current Freudian orthodoxies. The facts are a threat to belief.
A less toxic but more annoying version of this behavior that I run into a lot is some people's conviction that they have a special insight into certain literature because of their ethnic background. There are, unfortunately, Irish-American students who are profoundly convinced that they have special insight into James Joyce or W. B. Yeats because of their "Irishness." This is observably untrue. Being named O'Shaughnessy doesn't give you any special insight into Ulysses, or guarantee that you'll understand any of it. Likewise, you occasionally run into Brits who are convinced that anyone who is not English or (if the person in question is Scottish or Welsh) not British could ever properly understand Shakespeare. There's much more I would like to know about Shakespeare's works, but I am willing to match my current knowledge of the subject against David Beckham's at any time. He can bring along Posh Spice for help.
But followed to its conclusion, this identification with the literature of one's tribe can shade into racism; the presumption of privileged understanding is, after all, a presumption of privilege. An English racist gives himself credit for Shakespeare's works, despite not having been much help writing them, and presumes that this gives him one-up on, say, a Pakistani immigrant who got at least as much Shakespeare in school as the Englishman did. The English racist may not understand a quarter of Henry V, but he takes credit for it because it was produced by "his people." Indeed, literary scholarship once actively promoted this racialist approach. You can still find old anthologies with titles like "Poems of the English race." Similarly, the Irish-American undergraduate who gives himself credit for Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney is in danger of slipping into the belief that his ethnic group possesses certain kinds of innate superiority. The more seriously he takes that belief, the uglier it has the potential to get.
There's nothing wrong with taking a particular interest in something because of your tribal affiliations. (I've got my Yeats and Heaney on the bookshelf.) But believing that you have special access to understanding it is a problem, not least because it keeps you from doing the work required to actually know about something.
I'm a practicing Christian and Reza Aslan is not. But Reza Aslan can read the Christian Gospels in the original and I cannot. That means he has a lot of things to say that I'm interested to hear. I'm going to make my own decisions about my beliefs at the end of the day. (I also know a translator of the New Testament and I acknowledge his superior learning, but I don't go to the same church he does on Sundays.) I'm perfectly happy to admit that Reza Aslan knows things about my religion that I do not know myself. If I refused to admit that, I would cut myself off from learning more.
In the end, tribal knowledge isn't about knowing. It's about believing one knows. That is a very different thing. And at a certain point, actual information starts to feel like a threat to one's tribal certitude. Nothing is more dangerous to the illusion of knowledge than facts. There's more than one reason that Lauren Green didn't let Reza Aslan talk about his book. She might have learned something about the historical Jesus, and that would have been intolerable.
cross-posted from Dagblog
This is by no means limited to Christians, or to religious believers. I happened to read Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives the week before the Aslan interview. In that book, Malcolm deals, fairly indulgently, with the common claim among Freudians that only someone who has undergone Freudian analysis is entitled to an opinion about Freud. Only insiders, only properly initiated believers, can be authorities on the subject. (Replace "Freud" here with "scientology" and "Freudian analysis" with "dianetics counseling" and see how that sounds.) And this insistence that outsiders could not possibly understand led important Freudians to restrict access to factual evidence. (Malcolm also weirdly treats this as not-unreasonable.) The custodians of the Freud Archive refused to allow scholars to see biographical evidence about Freud, including letters in his own hand, unless they were sure that the scholar was a true believer who would stick to the current Freudian orthodoxies. The facts are a threat to belief.
A less toxic but more annoying version of this behavior that I run into a lot is some people's conviction that they have a special insight into certain literature because of their ethnic background. There are, unfortunately, Irish-American students who are profoundly convinced that they have special insight into James Joyce or W. B. Yeats because of their "Irishness." This is observably untrue. Being named O'Shaughnessy doesn't give you any special insight into Ulysses, or guarantee that you'll understand any of it. Likewise, you occasionally run into Brits who are convinced that anyone who is not English or (if the person in question is Scottish or Welsh) not British could ever properly understand Shakespeare. There's much more I would like to know about Shakespeare's works, but I am willing to match my current knowledge of the subject against David Beckham's at any time. He can bring along Posh Spice for help.
But followed to its conclusion, this identification with the literature of one's tribe can shade into racism; the presumption of privileged understanding is, after all, a presumption of privilege. An English racist gives himself credit for Shakespeare's works, despite not having been much help writing them, and presumes that this gives him one-up on, say, a Pakistani immigrant who got at least as much Shakespeare in school as the Englishman did. The English racist may not understand a quarter of Henry V, but he takes credit for it because it was produced by "his people." Indeed, literary scholarship once actively promoted this racialist approach. You can still find old anthologies with titles like "Poems of the English race." Similarly, the Irish-American undergraduate who gives himself credit for Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney is in danger of slipping into the belief that his ethnic group possesses certain kinds of innate superiority. The more seriously he takes that belief, the uglier it has the potential to get.
There's nothing wrong with taking a particular interest in something because of your tribal affiliations. (I've got my Yeats and Heaney on the bookshelf.) But believing that you have special access to understanding it is a problem, not least because it keeps you from doing the work required to actually know about something.
I'm a practicing Christian and Reza Aslan is not. But Reza Aslan can read the Christian Gospels in the original and I cannot. That means he has a lot of things to say that I'm interested to hear. I'm going to make my own decisions about my beliefs at the end of the day. (I also know a translator of the New Testament and I acknowledge his superior learning, but I don't go to the same church he does on Sundays.) I'm perfectly happy to admit that Reza Aslan knows things about my religion that I do not know myself. If I refused to admit that, I would cut myself off from learning more.
In the end, tribal knowledge isn't about knowing. It's about believing one knows. That is a very different thing. And at a certain point, actual information starts to feel like a threat to one's tribal certitude. Nothing is more dangerous to the illusion of knowledge than facts. There's more than one reason that Lauren Green didn't let Reza Aslan talk about his book. She might have learned something about the historical Jesus, and that would have been intolerable.
cross-posted from Dagblog
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Larry Summers Is Bad with Money
So, apparently Larry Summers is now the leading candidate for Chairman of the Federal Reserve. This is a bad idea, for lots of reasons, not least of which is that Summers' sudden ascendancy is a sign that The Usual Suspects are talking him up, and it's The Usual Suspects who not only got our economy into this mess but made our government's top priority not getting out of the mess "too quickly." Summers himself was one of Obama's leading economic advisers during the first term, and neither his advice nor Obama's first-term policy were effective in turning the Great Recession around. The result of Summers's advice was always too little, too late. It was Summers who insisted on asking Congress for a smaller stimulus package than the economy needed, on the theory that the smaller package would get passed. Of course, Congress took that smaller package and cut it down even more.
Larry Summers is also responsible for doing major financial damage to America's largest educational non-profit. People mainly remember Summers's stint at Harvard for the way it ended, with Summers making stupid and self-destructive remarks that cost him the job. That's a real problem; without wading into everything problematic about that speech, it displays a lack of discipline that may be disqualifying. But people generally don't focus on the dire financial consequences of Summers's leadership. Summers's bad economic decisions cost Harvard a staggering amount of money. His main legacy at Harvard is an enormous hole in the ground.
During the bubble/boom years, Summers decided to put billions of dollars of Harvard's endowment into complex financial derivatives, mainly interest rate swaps. He got his way. After all, wasn't he an economist? Hadn't be been Treasury Secretary? Surely, he knew what he was doing. But Summers put three and a half billion dollars into some of the most toxic and illiquid investments possible. When the crash happened in 2008, those investments got hammered: a billion dollar loss for starters, followed by hundreds and hundreds of millions more in interest and bankers' fees as the school had to borrow money at a disadvantage to meet margin calls on all those toxic securities. All told, Harvard lost nearly $11 billion dollars of its endowment in the crash. It survived; going from $37 billion to $26 billion is not the end of the world. But it is an enormous waste, and Summers made it worse by billions. That money has not been made back. And Washington power players are now seriously talking about putting this man in charge of our national bank. Really.
[UPDATE: Here's a piece from Bloomberg setting all of this out in greater detail.]
But that's not all. Back in the heady days of the bubble, Larry Summers decided to bend one of Harvard's oldest fiscal rules. Harvard, which is rich in part because it has traditionally been cautious with its money, has a long-standing rule about not starting construction on any new buildings until after it has raised the cash. First you get the money, then you build the building. It's not complicated, and it works. (As I've said elsewhere, one of the biggest differences between a fiscally sane university and a university headed for financial trouble is that a healthy university raises the capital for new buildings and an unhealthy university borrows it.) Larry Summers was impatient with that rule. And he wanted to build a huge new science building across the river from Cambridge, in Boston's Allston neighborhood. So he broke Harvard's money-in-the-bank rule for new construction. He had the pledges for the money he needed, so he gave the go-ahead. Then the 2008 bust hit, and the donors who had promised money no longer had the money they promised.
Harvard's contractors had dug the hole for the foundation of that big, ambitious new building when the money dried up. So they stopped work. Harvard (and the neighborhood) was left with nothing but a five-acre hole in the ground. That hole is still there. It's been there longer than it takes to get a Harvard degree; the students who graduated last month have never known a Harvard that did not own a massive hole in the ground. Harvard hopes to do something about that hole next year, maybe.
Is the five acre hole in the middle of a major city going unused? Of course not. Rats are using it.
That's what Larry Summers's fiscal mind brought to the richest university on earth: a gaping five-acre pit. That is the genius being proposed as leader of the Fed. Because here's the truth: the American economy is another huge hole, even bigger than the one in Allston, dug in 2008 and still, all these years later, not filled in. The work has not even begun. Larry Summers is not the man to get us out of that hole. He's one of the men who dug it.
cross-posted from Dagblog
Larry Summers is also responsible for doing major financial damage to America's largest educational non-profit. People mainly remember Summers's stint at Harvard for the way it ended, with Summers making stupid and self-destructive remarks that cost him the job. That's a real problem; without wading into everything problematic about that speech, it displays a lack of discipline that may be disqualifying. But people generally don't focus on the dire financial consequences of Summers's leadership. Summers's bad economic decisions cost Harvard a staggering amount of money. His main legacy at Harvard is an enormous hole in the ground.
During the bubble/boom years, Summers decided to put billions of dollars of Harvard's endowment into complex financial derivatives, mainly interest rate swaps. He got his way. After all, wasn't he an economist? Hadn't be been Treasury Secretary? Surely, he knew what he was doing. But Summers put three and a half billion dollars into some of the most toxic and illiquid investments possible. When the crash happened in 2008, those investments got hammered: a billion dollar loss for starters, followed by hundreds and hundreds of millions more in interest and bankers' fees as the school had to borrow money at a disadvantage to meet margin calls on all those toxic securities. All told, Harvard lost nearly $11 billion dollars of its endowment in the crash. It survived; going from $37 billion to $26 billion is not the end of the world. But it is an enormous waste, and Summers made it worse by billions. That money has not been made back. And Washington power players are now seriously talking about putting this man in charge of our national bank. Really.
[UPDATE: Here's a piece from Bloomberg setting all of this out in greater detail.]
But that's not all. Back in the heady days of the bubble, Larry Summers decided to bend one of Harvard's oldest fiscal rules. Harvard, which is rich in part because it has traditionally been cautious with its money, has a long-standing rule about not starting construction on any new buildings until after it has raised the cash. First you get the money, then you build the building. It's not complicated, and it works. (As I've said elsewhere, one of the biggest differences between a fiscally sane university and a university headed for financial trouble is that a healthy university raises the capital for new buildings and an unhealthy university borrows it.) Larry Summers was impatient with that rule. And he wanted to build a huge new science building across the river from Cambridge, in Boston's Allston neighborhood. So he broke Harvard's money-in-the-bank rule for new construction. He had the pledges for the money he needed, so he gave the go-ahead. Then the 2008 bust hit, and the donors who had promised money no longer had the money they promised.
Harvard's contractors had dug the hole for the foundation of that big, ambitious new building when the money dried up. So they stopped work. Harvard (and the neighborhood) was left with nothing but a five-acre hole in the ground. That hole is still there. It's been there longer than it takes to get a Harvard degree; the students who graduated last month have never known a Harvard that did not own a massive hole in the ground. Harvard hopes to do something about that hole next year, maybe.
Is the five acre hole in the middle of a major city going unused? Of course not. Rats are using it.
That's what Larry Summers's fiscal mind brought to the richest university on earth: a gaping five-acre pit. That is the genius being proposed as leader of the Fed. Because here's the truth: the American economy is another huge hole, even bigger than the one in Allston, dug in 2008 and still, all these years later, not filled in. The work has not even begun. Larry Summers is not the man to get us out of that hole. He's one of the men who dug it.
cross-posted from Dagblog
Sunday, July 07, 2013
Stockpiling Books
I've been buying a lot of books this summer. That's not "a lot of books" by the usual standards, because I've always been a better-than-average bookstore customer. Lately I've been buying a lot of books even for me. But I haven't been buying them to read. I've been buying books to write.
Over the last two years, I have been steadily squirreling away books I need for the book I'm writing. Every scholarly book is built out of earlier books, in pretty visible ways. If you want your book to say something new, rather than just parroting what has gone before, you're actually going to need to build it from more books, not fewer. If you read shallowly, you'll end up saying what everyone else said. If you have a question that someone else hasn't asked, you'll have to dig for hints and clues and small pieces of evidence through dozens-to-hundreds of other books that were after different questions. If people don't already know (or think they know) the answer to your question, there's going to be a lot of research.
(Fiction is also built out of earlier books, but less obviously. A novelist or short story writer can only create something that seems fresh after she's read and digested hundreds and hundreds of other works of fiction. If you've only read a dozen novels in your whole life and then try to write one yourself, what you come up with will sound appallingly close to one of those dozen. You will sound like someone trying to imitate your favorite writer, and it will basically be fanfic. You probably won't even realize how close you are to outright plagiarism. It takes a lot of reading to get a sense of all the possible moves you can make in a story and to digest a bunch of different influences before you stop trying to sound like someone else and start trying to sound like yourself.)
Now, you can't research an academic book without an academic library and inter-library loan. But writing requires keeping a bunch of other books handy for a long stretch of time. You'll have to root back through those books repeatedly to check one thing or another, and won't necessarily foresee exactly what you'll need to look for day to day. So after a certain point, depending on the library for those books becomes either inefficient or anti-social. You need to be able to check facts as you write. You can't always be stopping short and making out a list of things to look up on Monday. On the other hand, the more useful a book is, the less fair it is to hog the library copy while writing something that takes years to finish. You don't want to be the guy who's had the standard biography of Milton out of the college library since 2008.
So, I've spent the last two years buying a book here and a book there, as I happened to find things on used-book shelves, building up a small collection of books I knew I would need for the project I've been researching. Over the years I spent writing my dissertation and then turning it into my first book, I collected a bunch of specialized monographs and reference works I needed for that project. Because my second book takes a different methodological approach, I have to accumulate a new section of my personal working library.
But over the last six weeks, the buying has picked up intensity. Instead of buying a couple of books every month, I've purchased a couple of dozen since May. Part of that was opportunity, the result of visits to used-book stores while traveling with my spouse or of finally seeing things at a good price on abebooks.com. Every individual book was a good or excellent bargain, at least five or ten times cheaper than a new book from a university press. But I bought a lot of them, including multi-volume sets, more than enough to make me reorganize the shelves in my study. I've walked into bookstores and walked out with a box, more than once.
This newly serious book-buying feels like part of a new intensity in the writing process. The work is picking up steam, and so the reading and fact-checking have to keep pace. The preliminary phase of research and drafting is done, and now I'm starting the first really serious push. If I can sustain it, that push will take the next two years or so. During that time, I will have to work on lots of other things beside the book, but it will be the central project and there should be periods of fairly intense and sustained writing. I need a solid core of particular reference material in my writing space in order to keep momentum, need to be able to put my hand on exactly the volume I want at a specific moment in order to keep from slowing down. Assembling the books I need is like stockpiling supplies and equipment for the long push. I'm tooling up.
How this big push actually turns out won't be clear until it's done. At the moment I feel like the next two years will be the central and crucial part of the writing process. But I might be further from the end than I think. It's hard to know exactly where you are in the process of your second academic book, because the experience of writing your first book doesn't give you a clear road map. Writing that original, started-out-as-a-dissertation book is a torturous and often backward process. You start out with a few seminar papers and some ideas, and try to bootstrap them into a dissertation; because you've never written a dissertation before, you have to figure out the rules of that genre as you go, and often piece out the actual, workable structure for that document fairly late in the game. Then you've got a book-like object called a dissertation which you have to reverse-engineer into another, very different piece of writing, an actual publishable book. That process frequently demands more unexpected and sometimes radical restructuring, even very late in the game. The final version of my book was written almost exactly backwards: most of chapter four had been written first, followed in order by chapters five, three, two, one, and the introduction. While I would always recommend writing the intro last, and while I do plan some late tweaks to chapter one so that it sets up the rest of the book smoothly, that's not generally a writing process I want to reproduce.
This time I started with a clearer structure and a clearer plan. Putting a book together the hard way will teach you to appreciate how they're put together. So the sequence of writing might be more straightforward this time around. But writing a book in such a necessarily chaotic and haphazard way doesn't give you a feel for how a more normal version of the process goes, or where you might be in the process. You learn how to do it, and you learn that you never want to do it this way again. Writing the first book is about getting across the finish line alive. Writing the second book is about learning how writing one is actually supposed to work. Or at least that's my story right now; I'm sticking to it as long as I can.
cross-posted from Dagblog
Over the last two years, I have been steadily squirreling away books I need for the book I'm writing. Every scholarly book is built out of earlier books, in pretty visible ways. If you want your book to say something new, rather than just parroting what has gone before, you're actually going to need to build it from more books, not fewer. If you read shallowly, you'll end up saying what everyone else said. If you have a question that someone else hasn't asked, you'll have to dig for hints and clues and small pieces of evidence through dozens-to-hundreds of other books that were after different questions. If people don't already know (or think they know) the answer to your question, there's going to be a lot of research.
(Fiction is also built out of earlier books, but less obviously. A novelist or short story writer can only create something that seems fresh after she's read and digested hundreds and hundreds of other works of fiction. If you've only read a dozen novels in your whole life and then try to write one yourself, what you come up with will sound appallingly close to one of those dozen. You will sound like someone trying to imitate your favorite writer, and it will basically be fanfic. You probably won't even realize how close you are to outright plagiarism. It takes a lot of reading to get a sense of all the possible moves you can make in a story and to digest a bunch of different influences before you stop trying to sound like someone else and start trying to sound like yourself.)
Now, you can't research an academic book without an academic library and inter-library loan. But writing requires keeping a bunch of other books handy for a long stretch of time. You'll have to root back through those books repeatedly to check one thing or another, and won't necessarily foresee exactly what you'll need to look for day to day. So after a certain point, depending on the library for those books becomes either inefficient or anti-social. You need to be able to check facts as you write. You can't always be stopping short and making out a list of things to look up on Monday. On the other hand, the more useful a book is, the less fair it is to hog the library copy while writing something that takes years to finish. You don't want to be the guy who's had the standard biography of Milton out of the college library since 2008.
So, I've spent the last two years buying a book here and a book there, as I happened to find things on used-book shelves, building up a small collection of books I knew I would need for the project I've been researching. Over the years I spent writing my dissertation and then turning it into my first book, I collected a bunch of specialized monographs and reference works I needed for that project. Because my second book takes a different methodological approach, I have to accumulate a new section of my personal working library.
But over the last six weeks, the buying has picked up intensity. Instead of buying a couple of books every month, I've purchased a couple of dozen since May. Part of that was opportunity, the result of visits to used-book stores while traveling with my spouse or of finally seeing things at a good price on abebooks.com. Every individual book was a good or excellent bargain, at least five or ten times cheaper than a new book from a university press. But I bought a lot of them, including multi-volume sets, more than enough to make me reorganize the shelves in my study. I've walked into bookstores and walked out with a box, more than once.
This newly serious book-buying feels like part of a new intensity in the writing process. The work is picking up steam, and so the reading and fact-checking have to keep pace. The preliminary phase of research and drafting is done, and now I'm starting the first really serious push. If I can sustain it, that push will take the next two years or so. During that time, I will have to work on lots of other things beside the book, but it will be the central project and there should be periods of fairly intense and sustained writing. I need a solid core of particular reference material in my writing space in order to keep momentum, need to be able to put my hand on exactly the volume I want at a specific moment in order to keep from slowing down. Assembling the books I need is like stockpiling supplies and equipment for the long push. I'm tooling up.
How this big push actually turns out won't be clear until it's done. At the moment I feel like the next two years will be the central and crucial part of the writing process. But I might be further from the end than I think. It's hard to know exactly where you are in the process of your second academic book, because the experience of writing your first book doesn't give you a clear road map. Writing that original, started-out-as-a-dissertation book is a torturous and often backward process. You start out with a few seminar papers and some ideas, and try to bootstrap them into a dissertation; because you've never written a dissertation before, you have to figure out the rules of that genre as you go, and often piece out the actual, workable structure for that document fairly late in the game. Then you've got a book-like object called a dissertation which you have to reverse-engineer into another, very different piece of writing, an actual publishable book. That process frequently demands more unexpected and sometimes radical restructuring, even very late in the game. The final version of my book was written almost exactly backwards: most of chapter four had been written first, followed in order by chapters five, three, two, one, and the introduction. While I would always recommend writing the intro last, and while I do plan some late tweaks to chapter one so that it sets up the rest of the book smoothly, that's not generally a writing process I want to reproduce.
This time I started with a clearer structure and a clearer plan. Putting a book together the hard way will teach you to appreciate how they're put together. So the sequence of writing might be more straightforward this time around. But writing a book in such a necessarily chaotic and haphazard way doesn't give you a feel for how a more normal version of the process goes, or where you might be in the process. You learn how to do it, and you learn that you never want to do it this way again. Writing the first book is about getting across the finish line alive. Writing the second book is about learning how writing one is actually supposed to work. Or at least that's my story right now; I'm sticking to it as long as I can.
cross-posted from Dagblog
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