A relatively historic occasion

David Milliband had the soundbite of the hour. “It wasn’t tears and huge emotion but you felt you were there at a relatively historic occasion.” In the hours before the announcement, Westminster was swept with rumours that Blair was planning something dramatic: hara-kiri on the steps of Downing Street; a descent into central Baghdad strapped to a cruise missile; a suicide bombing in the war against terror. But in the event, he gave an emotional and dignified speech. Typical Blair. Spinning to the end.

“Go back to 1997. Think back. No, really, think back.” Christ. I can hardly bear to. It really did seem like a new dawn. I was seventeen. I’d never known a Labour government. I remembered the euphoria in my primary school when Thatcher fell from power. Classes stopped completely. Adults I’d scarcely seen smile before were suddenly overcome with childlike ebullience and joy. Our teacher wheeled a television into the classroom and sat entranced, while we fidgeted and tried to figure out what was going on. The adults’ faces expressed a deep wonder and happiness; something had been released inside them. Thatcher’s tearful exit was an objective correlative to Hope.

1997 was like that. Only with Blair. For years I was terribly snappy when people complained about spin. If you were up against the Sun and the Daily Mail, I felt, any degree of media manipulation was justified. The people who complained about Alistair Campbell were (often) the very people who would turn their backs on even the mildest progressive politics if they weren’t spoon-fed treacle. Let the treacle flow. Roy Jenkins said that Blair’s historic role was to carry a priceless vase along a crowded, polished corridor. Yes! I thought. Don’t let the bastards knock you down.

What can I say? I feel embarrassed writing it. Like Rick, who came to Casablanca for the waters, I was misinformed. Blair got the vase to Downing street. But the vase was empty. The vase carried residues of hemlock. Oh, I don’t know enough, I haven’t thought enough, to say anything worthwhile about Blair’s achievements. A few dumb thoughts, in lieu of a careful consideration of all those things I still don’t understand.

1) Of course those early critics of spin were right. When Labour got to power, Blair simply didn’t have any policies. He hadn’t given any thought to how to govern – he believed his decency, of which he was confident, would see him through. But government bureaucracies can’t run on good intentions, or on their corporeal instantiation, performance targets. As early as 1999 Philip Gould, of all people, was warning Blair that it wasn’t enough to be in power: he had to actually do something. (“We have got our political strategy wrong… We were too late with the NHS… a whole raft of often confusing and abstract third way messages…”) But Blair didn’t know he wasn’t doing anything. One winces when reading of the ‘Third Way’ seminars he held with Clinton and his entourage. Blair had only one properly thought through long term goal: to win elections. Well, he managed that. But he also wanted to make Labour the natural party of government. The first of Blair’s broken promises was his deal with Paddy Ashdown to reform the voting system. The most immediate consequence of Blair’s landside was that it removed all incentive for him to seek to change Britain’s electoral arithmetic.

2) Then, of course, when Blair did formulate some concrete policies, they left something to be desired. We now know that Blair’s doctrine of liberal interventionism, articulated in his rapturously received address at the Chicago Economic Club, was knocked out in a couple of days by the academic Lawrence Freedman. And, of course, its easy to see Kosovo in the light of what came afterward. I know fuck all. I should have read the papers. I should have read my history. (I feel like the character in the Dan Rhodes novel, who “knew all there was to know about the terrible things that were happening in what had once been Yugoslavia… except, now he came to think of it, who had been fighting whom, who was on which side, what the sides were, which ethnicities were being cleansed, and what the various wars had all been about.”) I have nothing to contribute. Except gossip, of course. The other day I was flicking through Christopher Meyer’s memoirs. He recounts how shaken Blair was by Clinton’s uncertainty; as if, Meyer says, Blair hadn’t thought through the possibility that his persuasive powers could fail.

3) It may be monstrous to focus on the domestic implications of Iraq, and not the conflict itself. But from that limited perspective alone, the tragedy is that Blair shredded his and his party’s popularity for a cause that did not even demand his support. (America would have gone to war anyway, come what may.) Possessing more political capital than any other British leader in memory, for the first years of his premiership Blair refused to spend it, rejecting any policy that carried even a whiff of unpopularity. Then he gambled it all – on Iraq. Think of the opportunity-cost of that choice. Think of what Blair could have achieved, if he had been willing to be hated for something worthwhile.

4) And then, of course, inevitably, Iraq itself. Blair’s chief legacy. It’s all been said before; but still more words. This week’s Economist reports on a survey conducted by the Pentagon’s mental-health advisory team last September. 36% of American soldiers and 39% of Marines believe that torture should be allowed to extract important information about insurgents. “Less than half (47% of soldiers and 38% of marines) felt that con-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect, as required by the Geneva Conventions.” And this is from Blair’s Sedgefield speech: “Removing Saddam and his sons from power, as with removing the Taleban, was over with relative ease. But the blowback [sic] since, from global terrorism and those elements that support it, has been fierce and unrelenting and costly. For many, it simply isn’t and can’t be worth it. For me, I think we must see it through. They, the terrorists, who threaten us here and round the world, will never give up if we give up.”

Yes, one more time: as if the war in Iraq was ever about terrorism. As if the terrorism in Iraq now (so much created by coalition incompetence and brutality) can be understood in the terms of Blair’s ‘war on terror’. Coalition forces are not fighting ‘terror’ there; they are aggressors participating in a civil war that we ourselves ignited. How can Blair – who has, elsewhere, done as much as anyone to draw the violence from a historical conflict, making power sharing possible for two religious communities bitterly at odds, one the other’s historical oppressor – how can Blair commit such blunders? How can he commit such crimes?

I know fuck all. (As is clear). I don’t know what to make of Blair – beyond the obvious failures and stupidities, weaknesses and evils. But (god help me) I think back (“no, really, think back”) to 1997; I look forward to the inevitable Cameron government. (Top hats in every city centre; a tax on children born to single mothers.) And (oh christ) I think that, though Blair was and is in thrall to money – though Blairism was, as much as anything, about the consolidation of the Thatcherite ethos of greed is good… for all that, Blair’s government was more redistributive than any conceivable conservative alternative.

If only things could get better.

Limited Inc

Well, I was planning to post about Blair’s resignation today. But a catalogue of disasters: I seem to have lost all my books on New Labour (possibly thrown in shreds from Westminster bridge, in a forgotten late night frenzy of alcohol and despair.) And then, believe it or not, I don’t actually have a phone line in my home. I haunt internet cafes, clutching 3.5″ disks; but today they are suffering power failures, or unresposive disk-drives, or are closed, or are a very long way away, in the dwindling light. So (since I’ve paid my 50p and taken my choice) I thought I’d point you in the direction of Limited Inc instead. Roger Gathman is the godfather of all leftist deconstructionist literary theorist crank economist auto-didact bloggers. He seems to do nothing but read and blog and rage against injustice. Today, you can check out his discussion of atheistic polemic. “One man’s jovial Hume is another man’s lukewarm countenancer of religion’s many and varied oppressions.”
Then perhaps a proper post tomorrow.

Affluent, noun (archaic)

We’re all Heideggerians now; we’re all willing to see, in far-fetched and under-informed philological analysis, the excavation of our concepts’ hidden meanings. So: here’s my New Oxford Dictionary of English.

Affluent adjective 1 (especially of a group or area) having a great deal of money; wealthy: the affluent societies of the western world / (as plural noun the affluent) only the affluent could afford to travel abroad. 2 archaic (of water) flowing freely or in great quantity. Noun archaic a tributary stream. ORIGIN late Middle English (in sense 2): via Old French from Latin affluent- ‘flowing towards, flowing freely’, from the verb affluere, from ad- ‘to’ + fluere ‘to flow’.

Let us, then, see the affluent as a tributary stream, through which something (money, say) flows freely and in great quantity. Let’s notice that this imagines affluence (in accordance with economic theory) not as a state but as a process. To be affluent is not, principally, to possess money, but to act as a conduit for it. Money’s meaning is movement: affluence must be maintained through expenditure. If the stream stops flowing, it’s not a stream any more. Where does it flow? To firms, institutions, financial centres, the great sea of the banking industry. Evaporation; condensation; precipitation. If we’re lucky, after the downpour, we can stand close enough to the stream to slake our thirst. Only the affluent can save us.

What’s aught but as ’tis valued?

Perhaps now is the time to take a first step into very deep waters indeed: the question of ‘intrinsic value’ in economics. Here is the definition of Intrinsic Value in dear Tony Cleaver’s glossary.

“The value of something in terms of the direct utility it provides to the consumer, as opposed to its officially declared value or administered price.”

That is to say: a commodity’s intrinsic value is defined in terms of the satisfaction or pleasure it brings. (‘Utility’ is defined bluntly as ‘level of satisfaction’.) But satisfaction and pleasure are – are they not? – subjective qualities. What could be less ‘intrinsic’ to an object than how much pleasure it brings us? Since you can take pleasure in something that I despise, this value is pretty much non-intrinsic, it would seem.

But that, of course, is to assume that we know what we mean by ‘intrinsic’ here; by ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. Everything in economics comes down to desire and pleasure. This is the whole point of the concept of utility, or welfare, to which everything else is referred. Economic value is created by the intersection of desire and reality; it does not reside in reality alone. But if value itself is in this sense non-intrinsic, what does it mean to distinguish between different levels of reality in value? Different levels of the intrinsic?

At times, in the stock markets, various shares are said to be over-valued or under-valued. What does this mean? Most obviously, it means that they are not valued by the market at what they are ‘really’ worth. But what is the force of this ‘really’? The entire system of valuation within which we are operating here is arbitrary – a human invention, spun out of air and words. To say that a certain company ‘really’ has a certain value, independent of our financial and social needs, independent of the wealth or pleasure it might bring us, seems the wildest fantasy. We are not, after all, guessing at these companies’ value in God’s eyes; we are guessing at their value for us, here, now. Well then: if this is what we judge their value to be, who is to say we are wrong? If it is in our power to grant value, how can we grant it incorrectly? But then, of course, the question becomes one of ignorance, of time, of changing circumstances and changing temperaments. We may value a company at such-and-such a price today, and yet value it at such-and-such another price tomorrow. And if we foresee that such a change in valuation is inevitable, or at least likely, we may say: this company is not valued at its true worth. There will be a correction in the markets. This valuation, now, is a blip; the company’s real, intrinsic value will sooner or later reassert itself. And when it does, we will say – this stock has returned to its intrinsic value.

There is nothing wrong in this; so long as we do not believe that we have distinguished between two types of value, different in essence. There is not a surface, illusory value (the product of a bubble or a slump) and then, beneath this superficial value, the true, intrinsic, ungainsayable value which it is our job to uncover. There are, rather, two different versions of the same kind of value: a value that we choose; or, rather, that our minds discover in the utility, welfare, pleasure or desire that our bodies and hearts choose for us. Divided against ourselves, we may see that what we choose now will not be what we choose tomorrow, or on any other day of our lives. But this is not a movement from the intrinsic; it is a movement of our souls.

To say that a stock is over-valued or under-valued, then, is to say its value has departed from some mean; from some equilibrium point to which, we believe, in the long run it must return. And yet (already the same difficulties crowd in) what exactly do we mean here by the long run? As Keynes famously said – in the long run we’re all dead. This remark is of the greatest profundity. Its implications are: that there is no final equilibrium to which we may refer our valuations, even in our imaginations. Human history will have been an agglomeration of longer and shorter short runs; the scale may differ, the phenomena are the same. To treat a stock market bubble as a deviation from stocks’ true values is correct as far as it goes; but our choice of tomorrow’s real values over today’s inflated values is always going to be dependent on our choice of scale, which is itself dependent on our needs and desires – or on the utility our choice will bring us. If we try to refer ourselves to the limit case of all time (the longest run of all), we find that our economic judgements lose all meaning – for in the long run, our entire economy is a bubble. One day it will burst, and all the value that we so proudly display on the financial pages of our newspapers will turn back into ink and paper, ashes and air. This isn’t to say that economic value is unreal; it derives its reality from the world that grants its worth; and this is the world we inhabit. But when the bubble of the human race bursts, and the insects or algae turn their senses toward our remains, they will not uncover the intrinsic value that, all the while, underlay our civilisation. They will discover their own strange objects of attention, unthinkable to us; and our bones will form the basis of altogether different bubbles and speculations.

Am I sounding relativist? Do I seem to say that economic value is illusory? I don’t think you should think so. Our commodity’s prices may be nothing but the product of love and suffering; but love and suffering are real. This is one of the strange paradoxes of economics: it insists on referring everything back to utility; yet it scarcely speaks of the real meaning of this concept. Having declared the overwhelming influence that desire, joy, pain, hunger and all the other human emotions and drives play in the construction of our economies, these drives are then relegated to the back rooms of the discipline; locked away in filing cabinets where they need not disturb the construction of economic models. Economics is based on the subordination of value to desire; yet the entire thrust of the discipline is the subordination of desire to (economic) value.

Well, all this is more than a little simplistic. But these are themes to which we’ll have to return. Sooner or later. In the short long run.

Stating the bloody obvious.

There’s going to be a lot of this: saying things that everybody already knows. Today: Demand.

Here’s my formula:

In economics, Demand equals Desire plus Ability to Pay.

Picture a rudimentary economy, involving just three people: you, me and Dupree. Dupree has thousands of dollars, and if he could, he’d spend most of them on Arcade Fire albums. If I’m a smart entrepreneur, I’ll immediately go into a recording studio, become Arcade Fire, produce a slightly disappointing second album, and rake in the readies.

In this same economy you have not a cent to your name. You live in utter destitution. Because you are destitute, you starve.

But if I were to produce food, you wouldn’t be able to pay for it. Dupree and I are already bloated – our larders are stuffed to bursting. So in this economy there is, at present, no demand for food. If we let the market do its thing, allocating supply to demand, no food will be allocated till Dupree or I feel peckish. And then, of course, the food will be for us.

You are going to die.

Perhaps this is too obvious to even be worth mentioning. Those without money or goods or services to exchange for commodities simply do not enter the economy. Any economy. The maximally destitute cannot, in the economic sense of the word, demand anything at all.

But we need to remember this. The economic meaning of the word ‘demand’ differs massively from the ordinary-language meaning. Economists know this, of course. But there can be slippery vacillations; there can be crude equivocations. Certain reassuring formulas are much less reassuring when we keep this fact in mind.

“These are the workings of the price mechanism – an automatic device that operates to balance supplies and demand for all goods and services marketed.” But how exactly are demand and supplies balanced? If there is too little of a certain commodity to satisfy people’s demand for it, the price mechanism operates to ensure that the poor can’t get any. Thus is demand balanced with supply! The excess demand has vanished!

But… um… the demand is still there. It’s just not economic demand any more. It’s real demand, real need – often fearsome need, a matter of life and death.

Or take this, also from Tony Cleaver’s ‘Economics: the basics’.

“A market society thus automatically responds to consumers’ wishes…”

Of course the operative word is ‘consumers’. Those with the most desperate needs will always and necessarily be those who are not consumers at all – this is precisely why their needs are so desperate. The market does not respond to them; except to allocate the resources they need to those with money.

All obvious, I’d say. I just wish it were more prominently mentioned in economics textbooks.

Show me the mathematics.

So I’m reading a dummies guide to economics (“a bridge between the transitions from high school to college”) by Tony Cleaver, lecturer at the University of Durham. On page four, he scolds us thus:

“It is always easy to ask important questions in economics. It is easy also to make colourful and outrageous claims about the nature and conduct of economic affairs. (Have certain people really squandered the riches of Earth?) It is not always easy, however, to give balanced, objective and accurate responses to such questions and assertions. That is nonetheless the challenge of positive economics.”

Soon he’s bringing in Milton Friedman:

“One comment on theorising before we begin: Milton Friedman, probably the most famous economist entering the twenty-first century, has said that no matter how abstract and seemingly unreal the assumptions on which a theory is based, ‘the only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience’. As you will see, though many assumptions in economics make perfect sense (e.g. we assume consumers and producers behave rationally) they are not necessarily true for all time. These assumptions do not matter so much, however. In positive economics we are most of all concerned about whether or not a theory’s predictions are confirmed by hard evidence. So long as it produces workable results, even the most unrealistic hypothesis must be taken seriously.”

His example is, to put it mildly, curious. Surely the assumption that consumers and producers behave rationally is itself barking mad. (Let’s mention the cigarette industry, as just one example among infinite others.) (Although, of course, the question of what constitutes rationality is central here; and we can take nothing for granted). But the broader point is compelling. It reminds me of a passage from Keynes’s General Theory.

“To say that net output to-day is greater, but the price-level lower, than ten years ago or one year ago, is a proposition of a similar character to the statement that Queen Victoria was a better queen but not a happier woman than Queen Elizabeth – a proposition not without meaning and not without interest, but unsuitable as material for the differential calculus. Our precision will be a mock precision if we try to use such partly vague and non-quantitative concepts as the basis of a quantitative analysis.”

I wonder whether Keynes had Lytton Strachey in mind when choosing his Queen Victoria example. But obviously it’s the general point that’s of interest. Put these three quotes together in a blender, and I think you have a pretty coherent attack on the project I’m pursuing here, or that I’m hoping to try to pursue. My sound and fury about the false premises of mainstream economics is all very well. But what concrete results could it possibly have? Economics is a quantitative science, or pseudo-science, but quantitative nonetheless. The false premises I rage against may be less than ideal, but they have one inestimable advantage: they produce results. And in economics, unlike literature or philosophy, if you don’t have results, you don’t have nothing.

I wouldn’t want for a moment to deny the force of this argument. But I want to make a few moves to defend my little economically and mathematically illiterate corner of the blogosphere; or at least to try to stop my project being killed before it’s learnt to walk. All I’m saying is: the things I’m pursuing are worthy of pursuit.

1) Okay, so these lines of enquiry may not produce material suitable for quantitative analysis. But truth does not, after all, have to be suitable for quantitative analysis. Assuming we recognise the substantial limits of my enquiry, this need not diminish its relevance to economics proper. For if we choose an unrealistic assumption as the basis for our economic predictions, it is of the greatest interest and relevance to know just how it is unrealistic. Even if that assumption remains the only useful one, we have, if we fully understand its failings, expanded the scope of our predictive powers – because we know more about the reasons why our predictions are likely, under certain circumstances, to fail.

2) But who’s saying that such enquiries will not result in material suitable for quantitative analysis? After all – the only way to really be sure of that is to see where we end up. I hate the analogy, but I’ll use it anyway, out of foolishness and haste. When Bolyai, Gauss and Lobachevsky were creating non-Euclidian geometry, no one thought for a moment that their work would have any practical applications. But, of course, it did. Similarly, for all we know economists who reject economic investigations that do not result in quantitative analysis may be sensible in the short term; but the last laugh could be on them.

3) And, finally, are the assumptions we’re talking about really just geared towards results? This is, perhaps, the most important question. For consider again the example Cleaver gave to illustrate a useful economic assumption: rational consumers and producers. Cleaver says: this assumption makes sense; it turns out to sometimes be wrong; but that doesn’t matter, because results are what count. But, of course, the assumption doesn’t make sense – not to me, anyway. We’re not rational at all, are we, brothers and sisters? I would argue that far from being assumptions that are meaningless apart from the results they generate, all too many economic claims have conceptual and (yes – I’ll say it) ideological functions wholly separate from whatever quantitative analyses they produce.

All obvious, sure, but let me expand anyway. Friedman says ‘the only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience’. But, of course, that’s not all that economic hypotheses do. Economics cannot be separated from politics. Economic hypotheses are used to justify political action – by Friedman as much as by anyone. If we’re not attentive, a dishonest conceptual manoeuvre can be perpetrated. A claim that is supposedly only justified by the predictions it generates can be used to justify political choices and values that are utterly devoid of predictive power. This might even have happened, once or twice.

Economics. Philosophy at Peterhouse.

So one of the reasons I’m doing this blog is I want to teach myself economics. And I want to inflict on you, dear reader (dear James McGowan), my ill formed thoughts on the subject.

Why?

Because I need some outlet for the rage and frustration I feel every time I pick up an economics textbook. I need some outlet for the thoughts – all obvious and straightforward – that don’t seem to be included in the discipline’s cramped world.

Every time I look at an indifference curve, or read a discussion of marginal utility, I feel an deep, itchy fog seep through my brain. I want to throw the book I’m reading across the room. I want to write an incoherent blog entry denouncing the discipline. (And I will).

Perhaps economics isn’t the subject for me.

But I know this feeling. I remember it from my first year of undergraduate study.

I went up to Cambridge in 1998, to study philosophy. I went to Peterhouse college. Peterhouse, of all places! Home of Thatcher’s “prophet” Edward Norman; alma mater of Portillo and Howard; chilly hotbed of the New Right. The very stones oozed reaction.

The subject I’d chosen wasn’t as bad as that, but it was bad enough. I didn’t know it then (I didn’t know the first thing about philosophy), but Cambridge was one of the most vocal combatants in the culture wars that have split the modern discipline in two. In 1992 the philosophy department had led the campaign to refuse Derrida an honorary doctorate. D. H. Mellor – holder of the chair once held by Wittgenstein! – had explained his reasoning to Cogito magazine: there is “a permanent running battle in some arts subjects between those who think straight about their subjects and those whom Mrs Thatcher described, all too accurately, as ‘the chattering classes’.”

That first year we were drilled in formal logic. The modern discipline – we were told – had been formed by Bertrand Russell, with a little help from Frege, in the early years of the twentieth century. The introduction of logical analysis had cleared the cobwebs of metaphysical mystification; now all would be empiricist lucidity and reasoned pragmatism. These claims weren’t argued for – they were presented as self-evident. And – Catch 22 – their self-evidence could only be understood once we had mastered logical analysis. So we read, again and again, Russell’s article on the Theory of Descriptions. We spent many weeks considering the dilemma of the present King of France. (He’s bald, the poor man) And any question of urgency or meaning was postponed or derided. But what is time? I wailed to one tutor, naively supposing that this was the sort of question philosophers asked. “That’s a meaningless question”, he explained. “It’s like asking why there is something rather than nothing.” (Not a question philosophers have always disregarded). Or: why aren’t we studying any non-Western thinkers? “You should read Schopenhauer. He was very influenced by non-Western thinkers.”

I read Schopenhauer. I found him more compelling than Bertrand Russell. And I found him illuminating when, all but dropping out of the philosophy syllabus, I turned in part to literature. Proust was full of Schopenhauer, as was Beckett, as was Borges. (“Time is the fire that consumes me; but I am the fire. Time is the tiger that devours me; but I am the tiger.”) I practically stopped reading philosophy. In my second year at Cambridge, I got lower grades than any other student in the subject.

But I still had to spend some time on it. And when I did, I felt the same fog. As I sat in lectures and tutorials, being asked to, respectively, swallow and regurgitate the subtleties of the type/token or use/mention distinctions, I felt in my bones that something was wrong. I felt what I can only articulate now: that the philosophical tools we were being trained to use, so as to be able to tackle more difficult or profound problems, already contained, in microcosm, an entire metaphysics; that far from being given the resources we needed to ask the right questions, we were being given answers: the wrong answers.

Easy to say now. But then I thought it was the discipline itself I hated. It was only when I left the University, and began reading outside the analytic tradition, that I began to be able to articulate the frustration I’d felt back then. Now I can tell you – using the resources of Derridean deconstruction – why a heavy emphasis on the use/mention distinction (such as that deployed in Quine’s theory of meaning) can be part and parcel of a questionable metaphysics. And now I know that studying the great philosophers’ treatment of the question of time would reveal Mellor’s Real Time II as the provincial irrelevance it is.

So much for philosophy. But when I now turn to economics, and feel the same fog descend, I feel I have learnt how to respond. When I pick up an introduction to the discipline, and even its most basic propositions throw me into a turmoil of inchoate dissent, I know: however self-evident we are told certain propositions are, if we believe them to be wrong, we should follow that intuition. And: there is no limit to the intellectual bullying and deceit that institutions or traditions will deploy to protect false claims that are central to their continued existence.

But, of course, the situation is not the same.
Part of the reason for Cambridge philosophy’s reactionary defensiveness was the sheer contingency and fragility of its existence. Whatever analytic philosophy may like to believe, it is still a sideshow in the long history of the discipline: it has yet to prove its enduring value. Analytic philosophers’ refusal to even acknowledge the existence of rival schools of thought reveals their insecurity: cultural isolationism the product of fear.

Economics is different. Economists may be frightened of challenges to their beliefs: but if so they are frightened of reality, not rival schools of thought. In the young discipline of economics, the questionable propositions that drive me up the wall really are pervasive. Everyone who has spent even one or two seconds thinking about it knows that the idea of rational self-interested individuals is a preposterous myth. But the idea remains one of the corner-stones of economic thought. And… but the list is endless. (This blog will try to be that list).

It was, all things considered, fairly easy for me to turn away from analytic philosophy. All I had to do was read some non-analytic philosophers. It’s not clear to me that things are so straightforward in economics. Of course, like any other discipline, economics is cacophonous echo-chamber of debate. And there must be countless important dissenting thinkers whose names I’ve never even heard. I know next to nothing, after all. Still next to nothing.
But I’ve a nasty feeling that I’m going to have to rely far more on my own resources than I did when trying to escape the dead hand of analytic philosophy.

This is, perhaps, why I feel the need to get my thoughts down on paper; or get them up on line. I need to make some solid ground, along which I can advance. Hi there! It’s me! How you doing? Want to talk economics? Always eager for information; always eager for insight. Please get in touch.

Or, this could be a flash-in-the pan enthusiasm, here today, gone tomorrow.

Did I ever tell you about the time I wanted to be a comedian?

They’re not laughing now.

James McGowan is a hero

Already, this blog’s revealing more about me than I wanted to know. It turns out that I’m not only mindlessly cruel to poor James McGowan, who has done nothing to me. I also read the Guardian too much. This week’s Jon Ronson article is about the mindless cruelty of blogs. “Blogs are bringing out the worst in people.” “We sit alone in our rooms, becoming more and more isolated from society. And, inevitably, this turns us into mad, yelling, wild-eyed loons.”

I wrote the other day that James McGowan is a moron. But of course James McGowan isn’t a moron! He’s translated Baudelaire! He’s very nearly a genius! I can’t even speak French!

While I’m at it, I seem to remember mindlessly insulting David McDuff as well. A poet and a scholar! A hard-working man of letters! Labouring to bring us the best of Russian literature (not just Bely but Babel too!). For, no doubt, less money than he deserves!

How could I be so cruel to these talented men? What if they Google this page? James McGowan; David McDuff: I’m sorry. If you get in touch, I’ll send you each twenty pounds, as an apology. You’d better send some proof of identity. A photocopied passport or driving license, perhaps. We can work it out when you contact me.

And what about John Browne? Didn’t I imply that he was some sort of servant of the devil?

But I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need money. And there’s a letter of support in Saturday’s Guardian signed by 67 names. (Virginia Bottomley; Philip Gould; Nicholas Serota). So I guess he doesn’t need support either.

Still, I’ll try not to be so rude in the future.

James McGowan is a moron

Just started re-reading (or tried to) my Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Flowers of Evil. The English text is defaced by asterisks the size of boulders. Turning to the endnotes to find what comments elucidate the last line of The Albatross (“He cannot walk, his wings are in the way”), one discovers this:

“an albatross is a large sea bird with exceptionally long, narrow wings, which enable it to soar at great heights, but which are virtually useless on the ground.”

Good grief. Thanks for that, James McGowan. Unfortunately I still find the poem obscure: I don’t know what a “bird” is. More endnotes needed.

But what am I doing?

But what am I doing?
What am I thinking?

Here I am writing about Andrei Bely – holding forth on Andrei Bely – and I’ve only ever read one book by him! One book, out of his life’s work, and not even in the language of its composition. Still worse: what do I know of the culture and tradition of early twentieth century Russia? I could at least have re-read Petersburg with care and thoughtfulness before descanting on it. But I merely flicked through it! Casually! Hastily! Oh such laxness!

But then my defence: care has no limits. I think I will do justice to Petersburg and Bely; I plan to write with authority and rigour. But what would this mean? Months spent tracking down Bely’s corpus; months spent reading it. Months spent on his influences, his ideas, his biography. And then his language! Learn Russian; for this it is essential to move to Russia. Get a job there, make a life there, perhaps raise a family. Already one is seventy years old, staring out over the steppes, pen in hand, laptop on knee – one’s researches are almost complete, the judicious phrase is approaching the tip of one’s tongue. But then one is dead, and buried, and forgotten, like poor Andrei Bely and us all.

Crippling obligations. Impossible demands. No: carelessness and injustice must be chosen. For we aspire to truth! But we aspire to action! We act in ignorance, or, awaiting knowledge, fail to act.

Certain things are being evaded. Certain things are being approached. Tacking away from honesty, in order to take it by surprise. Or at least…