I lack the imagination of the rich — or, rather, if I were rich I’d use my imagination to burn through $200,000, and not blow it strapped to a rocket for a couple of hours in space. My hominid brain can’t fathom the draw of going into space: who cares? And at cocktail parties, sure, you might be able to wow a couple of oil barons with an anecdote about how your bowels feel when you leave the atmosphere, but hell, I’d rather eat through $200,ooo. I guess that makes me philistine.
But in fact a whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale, has studied the impact of recessions on the lifetime earnings of young workers. In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.
But what’s truly remarkable is the persistence of the earnings gap. Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.
The rest of the piece reads in a similar, heartwarming manner.
In other news, maybe I will write up something on Aristotle and friendship.
I’ve been busy. For almost a year. Full-time work, a valueless and debased graduate education, drink — these things eat up my time. And all the moments I have left I spend frittering away thinking about the poetry I ought have been writing. But the rent must be paid. And the utilities — which aren’t that much, considering what some people seem to be paying. The article behind the link really made me smile like a wrongfully convicted inmate. To think! There are people spending more per month on their datastreams than I make in a year. That is,
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.
Of course, I spend no where near $1997.01 on dining out and I don’t have a car, so I guess I fail to make it into the statistically meaningful sample group.
Anyway, I fail to update this blog. I wonder if it serves a purpose. It needs a conceit: all things that continue rely on conceit. Perhaps I’ll come up with one.
News on the street is that Hugo Chavez has done it again: the Venezuelan president has made the wild claim, this time, that the United States was behind the earth’s recent attack on Haiti. In English, the source of these claims seems to be the TV channel Russia Today, especially this clip, which has been bandied about the Internet:
A dinner with friends and friends’ acquaintances: we are sitting around a table, on chairs or stools or each other’s laps. The food has come and gone, and now we are speaking. “What we do” comes up, and with it the various gripes that come with work. One of the guests, a well-groomed professor, complains that a university where he teaches makes him join a union. “You don’t like unions?” I ask, curious. “No,” he says, “I am an anarchist.” I press him, asking him his opinion on the fact that, statistically, union workers are more likely to have health care and higher wages than non-union workers. “That’s just it, ‘statistically’,” he responds. I remark that I’d go with statistics as long as my health and well-being are concerned; after all, the plague doesn’t kill everyone, just the statistical majority of those who are left untreated. He furrows his brow and asks “Where is this coming from?” Conversation moves elsewhere.
I gave a version of the following paper on Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power in a seminar on political judgment this semester. Enjoy, dislike, ignore.
In Rationality and Power, Bent Flyvbjerg takes a close look at the effort Aalborg, a small Danish town, makes to design and implement a comprehensive renewal plan for its downtown. In providing the account of Aalborg, Flyvbjerg wants also to offer an analysis of “how knowledge, rationality, and power work in real life” (3). This emphasis on the “real” will at time put Flyvbjerg at odds with protagonists of the “Enlightenment tradition” (Flyvbjerg makes it a point several times to contrast himself with Habermas, for instance), yet also begs a question to which I will return: given his effort to outline “real” politics, what are we to make of Flyvbjerg’s repetitive remarks about how power defines “reality?”
How do knowledge, rationality, and power work in real life? Flyvbjerg believes their working out demonstrates, as he says in his oft repeated paraphrase of Pascal, “that power has a rationality that rationality does not know. Rationality, on the other hand, does not have a power that power does not know” (234). On the one hand, there is the rationality of power, power’s ability to form a “reality” according to various strategies and tactics and have that reality be upheld on account of its force. On the other hand, there is the power of rationality, the power of reason to discern the nature of things, which Flyvbjerg paints as weak in a fight and only partially capable out of one. This asymmetrical relation between rationality and power could be said to be the center of Flyvbjerg’s understanding of politics; using his understanding to judge the judgment of political actors, we would have to take into account their sensitivity to power-relations, to how the force of arguments gains purchase.
When, after 2004, the notion of a “troop surge” started to become something of a cliché, and the verb surge began to appear in more and more places, I had a shadowy, antagonistic response every time I came across it. But, like an itch that needs scratching but isn’t intense enough to force its way into your consciousness, troop surges remained at the periphery of my attention. And, until this morning, I never investigated if the prickly intuition I had about the phrase — that its unthinking repetition and proliferation in the media masks something more significant than just another shift in news-cycle language — were true. But, since I am somewhat without anything to do today — no announcements to copyedit, no desire to pound out several more pages on Arendt — I went to LexisNexis and looked into the use of “troop surge.”
From 1999 to 2003, a search for the phrase turns up nothing. The first article in the last 10 years to contain both “surge” and “troop,” “Relax, It’s Only a Surge,” occurs on February 05, 2004, in Washington Outlook. In it, the then chief of Central Command, John Abizaid, discusses the novel way that troops will be deployed in conflicts of the future:
“I would prefer [that a commander] should feel free to go to the secretary of Defense and say, ‘Look, we’re going to need a brigade here for probably 60 days for a certain operation.’ I think this concept of [employing] a combination of a base force in the region plus surge forces — to use things as you need them, and for all of the combatant commanders to have less ownership — is pretty important. You [can then] use surge forces to deal with specific military problems.”
Ceux qui aspirent à la disparition des conflits dans la société ne savent pas qu’ils s’opposent à la vie. Le sort qu’ils réservent à la démocratie en est l’illustration criante. — André Bellon, Pas de démocratie sans conflit
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